TWO
Morning sunlight flashes through the trees, and for a half second I don’t know where I am. My eyes search for the walls of the cabin, the low log ceiling, but instead find the border of trees surrounding our campsite, and the copper sun clawing its way above the oaks. I rub at my dry eyes, wince, and think I hear awhooshsound—like air escaping, like the horizon is being sucked away into a void—but when I blink, the sky has settled into a soft blue and the noise is gone.
Beyond the smoldering campfire, Pa is already harnessing Odie, a web of buckles and straps securing her to the wagon. “Ready?” Pa asks. His voice lighter than yesterday—the promise of a town ahead, of tonic to sell and coins to be made.
Quickly I roll up my quilt and kick dirt onto the last of the campfire coals, then climb onto the front bench of the wagon, old metal springs releasing a soft whine. Pa snaps the leather reins and Odie jerks forward, pulling the wagon and us away from our campsite.
The little town draws near, the wagon rattling down the ridgeline. “When we enter the town,” Pa says flatly, “you can help me withthe jars. Can you count?” He looks over at me, as if for a moment he’s forgotten my age, like I might be much younger than my seventeen years and not yet know the basics of arithmetic.
“Of course,” I answer, offended that he would think otherwise.
“Good. And keep your hair down.” He clicks his tongue, Odie hesitating around a fallen tree, thrashing her head briefly before finally leading us around the upturned oak, roots like fingers sprung free from the soil. “Don’t want anyone seeing those marks.”
My fingers touch the back of my neck.
“Best to keep it hidden,” he adds sternly, nodding at me.
A ripple of unease slips down my spine, and I know he’s right—out here, I can’t let my mark be seen. By anyone. I unbraid my hair and let it fall in dark, tightly coiled waves over my shoulders, hiding who I am. A girl inked with riddles. A truth that Mom said made me dangerous.
Ahead, the road finally flattens out, and we enter a wide, sweeping grassland—the stalks tall and wavy, licking at the wagon wheels, evenly spaced in long rows—planted by human hands. Crops. “What kind of grass is this?”
“Wheat,” Pa answers, as if the expanse of golden-green fields stretching for miles all around us, stalks churning in the wind, is nothing new. But I’ve only ever known our small garden in the valley, and the rows of potatoes that the Horaces plant every spring. This is something else entirely, though—a crop large enough to feed a whole town. “This town trades in wheat; it’s how they survive.” Pa briefly presses a hand to his left ear, as if there is a pain there, before he pulls his hat lower over his eyes to shield the morning sun.
I lean forward on the seat, anxious, an indescribable thrilltugging at my chest as the road takes us straight into the center of town. I’m entering a place unlike anything I’ve ever known. Small, single-story structures line the main street, homes mostly, dust collected in doorways, roofs sagging and sloped from storms or heavy winds. But after several blocks, I notice a wooden sign swinging from the doorway of a squat, low building.POST OFFICE,it reads. A block farther, another sign nailed above a barn with wide double doors advertises a blacksmith.
Dust curls up from the wagon wheels, and I watch as curtains peel back from windows, curious, thirsty eyes staring out at us. I wonder if the people of this town will know of the Architect, if they’ll have heard the stories. But as townsfolk appear in doorways, hands over their eyes to block the sun, skin dust-darkened and bodies bent with the hard labor of farming, I feel a growing unease. Mom warned not to trust anyone beyond the valley walls—they’re suspicious, desperate, and most are willing to kill to survive.Finding the Architect would be a tenuous thing, she’d say. For if he is in hiding, as we have been, then he will not be known by the people in the towns. And if heisknown, then even saying his name would put my life at risk.
Her words fester inside me as we reach the far end of town, where a corral of horses stand with heads bowed away from the slanted western sun, and Pa pulls Odie to a stop. Ahead of us stands a tall, narrow building, windows shuttered, as if no one has been inside for some time. But it’s not the windows or the paint peeling from the walls that catch my eye—it’s the long rope suspended from the roof, swaying in the breeze in front of the doorway, with a loop tied at the end.
My throat tightens, and I nod toward it. “What’s it for?” I ask.
Pa barely glances at it, like he already knows what I’m asking, like he’s seen it before. “For hanging,” he answers simply, positioning his hat atop his head and tucking his dark, ruddy hair back behind his ears.
“They hung somebody from that rope?”
“More than a few.”
“Why?”
Pa shoots me a look. “Easier than wasting bullets.” When I keep staring at him, he adds, “The world is dangerous, Vega,” as if to prove what’s he’s been saying all along:that I’m better off in the valley. “You stay in the wagon,” he instructs now, securing the reins and swinging himself down to the ground. “You can count the jars we sell, and the money as it comes in, understand?”
I can tell he’s anxious—maybe because of me, because I shouldn’t be here. So I nod, my legs aching to get down and feel the ground beneath me, but my wariness of the gathering townspeople, the empty rope swinging in the dry air—and the need to keep my tattoo out of sight—outweighs my desire to be free of the wagon. I climb into the back, stepping over the wood crates filled with glass jars, and position myself at the rear opening of the wagon, peering out at the dusty, one-road town.
“Hand me five jars,” Pa says, keeping his gaze fixed on the street. I do as he says, pulling out five jars of his tonic, each filled with a golden, syrupy mixture that fills the air with an ever-present sweetness, like the nectar from a lilac flower. He places them on the back edge of the wagon, the golden color gleaming in the morning sunlight.
It doesn’t take long for the first customer to make their way up to the wagon.
“Madge.” Pa greets the woman, whose right cheek and forehead are marred by a series of scars and pockmarks, as if she was sick once and these are the reminders of the illness she survived. Yet her eyes are a pearlescent green, like looking into a deep pond, and resting against her hip is a young child with ruddy brown hair, squirming to be set down.
My eyes fall to her hands, braced around the child, because Mom told me of something else: a way to identify the Architect.
A symbol.
They would wear a signet ring made of roughly forged silver, with an imprint stamped into the metal: a constellation,Circinus. A ring passed through the generations. A way for the Architect to be found.
But the woman wears nothing of the sort. Her fingers are bare. And I doubt the Architect will be so easily found, standing in the open of this out-of-the-way town.
She and Pa talk softly, pleasantries about the road down from the ridge, and if we came across any scavengers on the route, to which Pa shakes his head.
