When the car came into view, I wasn’t surprised, or even scared. What I felt was the bittersweet triumph of being proven right. The maroon sedan, its color muted with dust. Finally catching up with us. Here we were, unafraid. After so many weeks of being chased down, it was gratifying to be the ones who’d shown up uninvited. We’d found this place, whether they’d wanted us to or not.
The sedan stopped a few feet from us, the dust drifting to us and temporarily engulfing us too. A grit rose against the back of my throat, stinging at my eyes. The creak and thud of a car door opening, closing.
When I opened my eyes, the man had emerged. Tall, a lanky, uncomfortable height, like he’d outgrown his own boundaries accidentally. His hair was sandy brown, bleached now in the sunlight. The last time I’d seen him this clearly, he’d just been a silhouette outside Cate’s burning home, that dark, humid night in Arkansas. He moved toward us, not surprised but wary. Something was off, a little incongruity even in the middle of this huge incongruity. I realized that he was meeting my eyes openly. His look wasn’t friendly, but his eyes were bare and exposed. He wasn’t trying to protect himself from me.
I filed this away: this stranger didn’t know what we were capable of. In all his time trailing us from town to town, it was possible he hadn’t seen enough to realize what we were capable of.
“I’m looking for my mother,” I said, not turning it into a command, falling back onto my old way of gathering information from the world. “Is she here?”
At the mention of my mother, the stranger’s expression shifted. He swallowed quickly, the muscles in his face contracting, his gaze dropping. He knew where my mother was. I was sure of it. He glanced backward for a second, as if considering what to do next, and then he began to unlock the gate. The four of us were silent under the heavy glare of the sun.
The gate swung open and the stranger walked inside. He looked back at us, a wordless question: Were we going to follow? Isabelle started forward at once. I almost ran in my eagerness to get closer to my mother, then paused, not sure Cate was behind me. Her fingers slipped into mine, and we walked into the compound.
He fastened the gate behind us. I felt an unease clamping down around me. Watching him lock the gate again—that camera mounted on top swiveling to take us in—I was in the dark wilderness of a fairy tale, the enchanted door vanishing, no way back out.
The stranger led us on a path through the houses, which looked even weirder up close. These fully formed homes perched out here in the middle of nowhere. I noticed another camera balanced on the edge of a roof, its silent black eye facing us. The Homestead had been isolated too, but I didn’t remember it feeling this way when I was little. The Homestead had been wild, alive, surrounded by the murmur of the trees, loud with voices and laughter, crawling with animals. Here, there was no warmth. Just a silent watchfulness that stuck to my skin. I noticed Cate rubbing hard at the back of her neck.
The stranger stopped in front of an unassuming building. He pulled open the door and gestured for us to enter, his expression betraying nothing. The interior was dark, the shadows rough with candlelight, a glow of heat emanating from the front of a chapel. I paused for a moment, hit bluntly with the memories that the candles brought along. The Homestead, my mother’s burned house, the fire at Cate’s. Then I followed Cate and Isabelle inside, and the door swung shut behind us. The heat of the candles was a thousand tiny pinpricks on my skin.
We weren’t alone. Rows and rows of benches, bodies lined on them, a rustling and silent congregation, maybe twenty or thirty people. I had the impression they were mostly women: long hair brushed down their backs, wound into intricate braids. My eyes slowly adjusted and more details rose out of the candlelight. Their old-fashioned clothing, rough-hewn, with high necks and long sleeves. They were facing the front of this chapel, not looking at us.
I searched for my mother, automatically scanning for her familiar figure. Nothing.
There was an altar at the front of the room, and over to one side, a simple door. The altar’s surface was scattered with flowers. Spiky pink blooms next to long-dried husks, dissolving into dust. A drawing stood in the center of the altar. A pencil sketch, black-and-white. The lines were simple, the shading brusque and impressionistic. Flowing hair, wide, high cheekbones. Her eyes were the only detail that looked wrong. They were blank, no pupil, no iris—nothing behind them. It was Lily-Anne, I thought. No: Fiona.
Beside me, Isabelle’s expression was open with wonder, a child waiting for a magic show to start. A man rose from the front row, moving toward the altar. His deliberate self-assurance contrasted with the deference of the people around him. Even the softest noises in the room, the rustling, the coughs, were suppressed, one by one. The man faced the altar for a minute, apparently lost in thought as he looked at the picture of eyeless Fiona.