Page 14 of Fated, Allegedly

She's got dark curls and a teacher's voice and a way of introducing me as "Erin, she's the biologist, she's the one who found the drill cores" — as though I've come with credentials rather than as a problem. The old woman with the pruning shears turns out to be Hazel, who eyes me over her glasses and says, "You're the state girl. You've got sensible boots. That's a start," and goes back to her currants.

I enter a kitchen with nine people in it and a griddle going. I get pushed onto a bench between a teenager doing chemistry homework and a woman braiding her daughter's hair. Somebody puts a plate down for me to eat. The conversation is about the tractor, about whether the culvert on the east road is going to wash out again, about a wedding in July and whether the tent can be borrowed. Twice somebody asks me a question about the lake and listens to the whole answer.

Caleb comes in, kisses Isla on the temple, steals bacon off her plate, and gets his hand slapped. He glances at me with those amber eyes and says, entirely deadpan, "Morning. Sorry about the screaming dogs."

"You were the pony."

"I've been called worse."

I laugh. It comes out cracked and startles me, because I haven't laughed in a while.

Here's what nobody warned me about. I have spent eleven years in field camps and faculty lounges and I have never once been in a room like this. Not a militia. Not a cult. A neighborhood, with grudges about culverts and a shared tent, where people have kept a secret for four generations by simply loving each other more than they wanted to be known.

I have never belonged to anything like that. I didn't know it was on the menu. Nash finds me down by the water in the afternoon.

He moves stiffly. The shirt collar shows a line of pink where a hole was twelve hours ago, and I make myself not stare at it.

"You slept," I say.

"Under duress." He lowers himself beside me, careful with the shoulder. "You've been talking to my parents for six hours."

"Your mother told me your calorie intake and your father offered me a cheek swab. Your family has no operational security whatsoever."

"None. It's a miracle we're not in a zoo." He watches the water. "There's something I need to say before you hear it from anyone else, and I need you to actually hear it. You're not a prisoner here."

"Nash…"

"Let me get it out." He turns to face me. "The road out is that one. There's a truck with keys in it. The minute I can put you somewhere safe that isn't this valley, a different state, a different name if you want one, I'll arrange it and I'll drive you myself. Nobody here gets a vote on that. Not the elders, not Caleb, not me."

"You've just handed a stranger the location of every person you love."

"Yes."

"That's insane."

"Probably." His mouth does something rueful. "But the alternative is keeping you, and for weeks I've been deciding what you're allowed to know. I'm done making choices on your behalf. If you stay, it's because you chose it with the whole picture. That's the only version I want."

The breeze comes off the water. Behind us somebody's kid is shrieking about the soccer ball again, and it's the most ordinary sound in the world.

"Okay," I say. "Then I'm choosing to stay. Because there's a steel door in a hillside with a dead wolf's collar hanging on a nail beside it, and all I think about is what's behind it, and I'll need to borrow your microscope situation and possibly your father."

Nash exhales like he's been holding it since the ridge. "He'll be unbearable."

"I'm counting on it."

10

NASH

Sunday morning I take her out on the boat, because there's no explaining what we actually do here from a kitchen table.

The pack boat is an old aluminum sixteen-footer my father repowered twice, and Erin steps into it with the automatic weight-shift of somebody raised around boats. She's got her hair pulled back, a borrowed jacket of Isla's, and a notebook already open on her knee before I've untied the bowline.

"North first," I tell her. "There's a colony I want you to see."

"A colony of what?"

"I can't say and have you believe me without showing you."