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Authors: Camille Griep

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“Great,” Len said flatly. “Company.”

“Maybe it’s Sheriff Jayne, and we can watch that vein pop out on Mama’s forehead. That hat, those pants—
how plain, how vulgar
,” I said, imitating Mama’s voice. I gathered my reins, but Len was already headed toward the barn, a black cloud descending between him and whatever plans he’d slated for the night.

After locating a jar of whiskey hidden between bales of hay, Len set to currying both horses, and I came behind with a brush, thankful it wasn’t hot enough for fly spray, Windy’s favorite time to kick anything within a ten-foot radius.

I looked out the half-height stall door leading to the pasture and squinted into the late afternoon sun to the west. Down the hill, past the little cluster of shops and the big Sanctuary building, a collection of folks and horses—even the medical clinic truck—milled about in front of the Turner Ranch house.

“Hey, Len,” I said, “that look right to you?”

Len set his jar of whiskey on top of the stall divider. “Wonder what’s going on?”

Cal Turner had been raising horses on his ranch alone since his wife and daughter had moved to the City so Syd could train professionally as a dancer. The plan had been for Cal to hand off the ranch to some hired men part-time so he could join them. But he never left. I can’t say I don’t understand his reticence—mountains of concrete over the velveteen hills of New Charity? Never in a million years.

Someone was leaving the Turner Ranch in a hurry, sending a line of dust up the soft dirt of the main road, and turning up the two track toward our house.

“Can you tell who that is?” I asked.

“It’s not Cal. The horse is too dark.” He offered me his jar of whiskey. “I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.”

I considered taking a sip, but I couldn’t get past the burning smell. I closed it up and returned it to his hiding place, rechecking the hasps on the doors as I passed.

The sun was just starting to set over the ridge, giving the clouds the pink color of the underbellies of piglets. I opened my mouth to share my observation, but realized for the hundredth time in half as many days that we were way too old for that sort of thing.

“You know, those clouds look exactly like that birthday dress you had when you were little,” Len said.

I threw my arms around him in a smothering hug. Glad that he’d noticed the sky. Glad there was a sunset. And we laughed all the way back to the house until we recognized the Bishop’s giant, sable gelding being led to the guest stables out front.

Len grimaced. “There goes our night off.”

“Don’t be like that,” I said. “He means well.”

He gave me a look—one I was starting to get used to. Len wasn’t adjusting well to being an adult Acolyte. He had started to disappear, more and more often nowhere to be found. I knew he was spending his time with Al Truax—not a serious relationship, Len said, just figuring some things out. When they weren’t making whiskey, they played poker in the Truaxes’ abandoned barn far to the other side of the Basalt River, drinking up all the liquor they made. Len said things were better with the whiskey, said his terrible nightmares went away, and if he drank enough, he could sleep through to morning.

I figured our nightmares were part and parcel of the visions the Spirit had given us. The power to see what was to be, and the grace to accept our fate. Who was I to balk at the darker images within our dreams?

There was only one dream that really bothered me, one that I hadn’t told anyone—not even Len. One where the Bishop came to ask for my gift. I told myself that particular night terror was a recurring mistake: wine burning in my stomach from dinner, the pickled beets from the cellar.

On the surface of things, I understood Len’s searching for what he truly wanted. It was a natural progression of growing up. But still I hated it. It was strange, involuntarily learning to be my own complete person instead of the half I’d always been. Losing Len was like losing my own personal moon.

“It will all be okay,” I said, more to myself than him.

“If you say so.”

I left Len at his bedroom and was almost to mine when Mama appeared, seemingly from nowhere.

“Casandra Willis, please tell me you are not wearing your boots on my clean carpet?”

I stepped on the heel of my right boot and then hopped up and down while I pried the left boot off, not pointing out that it had been years since anyone besides Amita had cleaned the carpets. “I was just trying to hurry. Sorry, Mama.”

“What did you get yourself into today? I have half a mind to keep you out of that damn barn until you can learn to stay on your horse.” She thumbed my chin and her finger came away dirty. I glanced over my shoulder to see Len’s head bobbing out his door.

“I left some dresses on your bed.” Mama shooed me toward my door. “Len, your new shirt will look real nice. You two get along, now. The Bishop is waiting, so don’t dawdle.”

“I can pick my own dinner outfit,” I said under my breath.

“I heard that,” she said, her heels clumping down the hall.

Len slumped in his doorway, still laughing. “Well, pretty princess,” he managed. “Better go see what she left you.”

I let the door slam hard behind me, feeling like I was about to explode. Soon I’d have a vein like Mama’s in my forehead, I was sure of it, pulsing ugly like an alarm clock.

On my bed, three new black dresses were laid out. I placed my hand on the one closest to me, and a vision knocked me back against my dresser. A funeral. Rocky ground shoveled on top of a pine box casket. I pried my hand away before I could see whose. I’d never hear the end of it if I walked in to dinner all red-eyed from crying.

I ran a washcloth over my face and under my armpits and twisted my hair into something resembling an updo. I was pulling the third dress on the bed over my head when Len started pounding on the door.

“Did you see something?” he stage-whispered through the door. When one of us had a vision, the other usually felt it if we were nearby.

I yanked the door open, and he stumbled inside. “What’s with your hair? Is that like rooster-chic?”

“Have I ever told you how helpful you are?” I asked, pitching the bobby pins across the room.

“So, what was it?”

“Go ahead,” I said, pointing to the dress. “A funeral.”

“Who?”

I was midshrug when Len grabbed my hand and placed his other on the dress. Together we could see things more in depth, and he hadn’t drank enough whiskey yet that evening to nullify his Foresight.

This time it was easier to slide into the vision, but the tone was darker, too. We were quiet as we searched out the crowd. It was a silent service, devoid of the usual sweet song—instead, the Deacon, Cal’s brother, who would have been leading the music, was doubled over in tears, their best friend, Sheriff Jayne, stony at his side. I swallowed back a sob, not having considered the casket could have belonged to Cal. Len squeezed my hand and the vision shifted forward in time—maybe a couple of weeks—with a sickening jolt.

A small woman, her back to us, sat white-knuckled in the driver’s seat of a modified sedan as the vehicle climbed rough sections of pavement and scree. Over the sound of the motor, she was belting out a song I’d never heard in a voice akin to that of a raccoon caught in a trap. The vision jolted forward again and she was sleeping, circled by the wild animals of the night, and guarded by starlight. And again: the woman exiting the off-ramp of the interstate—a highway Len and I had never been more than twenty miles down in either direction—and her car belched a cloud of something gray and crept to a halt. This time, we could see her face. I gasped.

“Syd,” Len said. “Poor, poor Syd.”

Syd had loved us back when we were children, but we were different even then. When we’d talk about the Spirit, she’d screw up her face and wave us off. Once, when still the best of friends, I asked her to tell me where she thought our visions came from. I think maybe I wanted her to come right out and call me a liar. But she only said she didn’t know. She said it like she wanted to believe me. What would she say now, all these years later, when I told her I’d seen her coming from miles and days away?

“I can’t believe she’s coming back,” I said. “Do you think we should ride out for her?”

Len nodded. “Probably not a bad idea.”

“We have to. What if that Survivor camp finds her?”

“Cas, she
is
a Survivor.”

I was silent for a minute. “It won’t be the same, will it?”

“They say you can never go home again,” Len said, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“Guess it’s a good thing we never left.”

Mama’s lips pursed at our arrival into the parlor. She looked me up and down and sighed. On the other side of the room, the Governor and the Bishop had their heads bent together. Our oldest brother, Perry, had his nose buried in a musty-looking copy of
The Art of War
, while Troy bobbed, aimless, between the two sides of the room. Len turned traitor and left me to Mama.

I tried to sail past her, but her hand shot out around my wrist, and yanked me to her side. “Land sakes, child, did you even think to brush your hair?” She pulled a bobby pin from her own chignon, and after a few yanks and twists had made my ponytail into something more flattering. I let out a whimper as she jabbed a last pin into my head.

She sighed. “You may be the baby in this family, Casandra, but you needn’t act like one.”

When I was younger, I tried and tried to explain my love of the dirt and the sun and Windy and all the rest of it. She had said, “A lady can still be a lady on a ranch.” Being a real lady wasn’t in the cards for me, but it didn’t matter much, because there we all were, shoved up on this shelf where the mountain meets the prairie, and me, shoved up on the shelf where a girl met what her mother wants her to be.

“When are the services?” I asked her softly.

“Honestly, Casandra. Patience. That is what the Bishop is here to tell us.” She groped the mantel for her cordial glass. “My goodness, what a shame. Deacon Pious must be a confounded wreck.”

“Mmm,” I said. I had already seen how the Deacon was taking things, though I wasn’t about to share that with my mother, who felt that men who cried were about as useful as flat shoes.

Unsurprisingly, my mother with all her ladylikeness had adapted well to being the First Lady after my father declared New Charity its own entity. Before the troubles, there were rules about that sort of thing, but everything was different now. Our history books had been packed away for a good long while. We were supposed to be proud in our roles as “new pioneers.”

I didn’t understand why that meant we had to forget about the years things didn’t grow and the winters we survived by working together before the Spirit poured its blessing through the Bishop and our collective gifts.

“The dress looks nice, though,” Mama said, adjusting the neckline. “You can wear one of the others to the funeral.”

“I’ll have my robes on.” I could be plain and pure in the service of the Spirit. It wouldn’t matter what I wore beneath, and I’d be far more comfortable in my old jeans.

“I want you at the social hall afterwards. I’m tired of everyone thinking something’s wrong with you.”

“No one thinks that,” I protested, although if I was honest, I had no idea. What I did know was that my being at the social hall wouldn’t magically fulfill Mama’s hopes that I’d be snapped up by one of the available men in town.

I remember thinking way back when that Mama might have loved me more if I were a little more like Syd. She was lithe where I was strong. Dark-haired instead of washed-out blonde. Fine features and dark eyes where I was blunt-nosed and freckled and gray-eyed, collecting all the most mundane features of the Willis clan.

Mama hadn’t seen the other parts of our friend. The strange, odd parts. Syd was always early, always pacing. Studying things. Opening drawers, lids, doors. Talking to herself. Biting her nails. She was as sharp as the electric fence for the stallion’s pen—the one we kept on with the generator. On our fourteenth birthday, the last before Syd left for the City, Len made us all hold hands and touch the fence. I was the last in line, and the current was so painful I almost wet my pants. I called him a name so loud and so terrible the adults heard it and blanched. Mama sent me to spend the rest of the night in my room. Syd was the one to talk Mama into releasing me from banishment. Chalk it up to countless favors owed. Syd was always working an angle.

BOOK: 1503951200
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