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But not here.
The chains on her mind were loosening. The men had made the mistake of giving her a reason to live. They’d made the mistake of going after her son.
Miriam smiled at the scenery. “Pretty.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” the Shadow Man said.
In answer, Miriam presented her shackled hands. The Shadow Man smirked. Miriam turned back to the fading sun. Her smile disappeared. The experiments performed on her during the war had yielded interesting results. When the Shadow Man had asked for locations of Diviners, he hadn’t said they had to be living. Miriam appealed to them now, to the dead. Help me.
The slate, the trees, the mountains beyond, and the dead: Their combined power thrummed softly inside her. And then, something like a great switchboard lit up in her mind. Like that infernal radio that played through the floor grate, she was transmitting, sending out a mental SOS in the hope it would reach some Diviner out there.
In the dark of the Underground Railroad tunnel, Bill and Memphis slept. Isaiah woke, trembling with visions. His hand reached for the charcoal in his pocket. “Yes. Yes, I see you,” he said softly as he drew what he saw on a patch of flat earthen wall.
In her sleep, Theta stood on the edge of that forest. An eagle soared overhead. A brave emerged from a redwood hollow. But Theta couldn’t understand what he said. “West,” Ling said, suddenly beside her. “He’s saying, ‘Go west.’”
“Did you feel that?” Henry asked David. They lay together in Henry’s single bed, their bodies still slick with sweat.
“What?” David said, still half dreaming.
Henry sat up, rubbing sleep from his eyes. The room was still. “Like somebody calling for help.”
Under a moon waxing toward full, roustabouts hammered posts into spring-soft ground and raised the tents for the next day’s show. Full-bellied and exhausted, the animals gentled onto their hay and went to sleep. In a bright red-and-white-striped circus wagon warmed by the glow of a lantern, the Great Zarilda, Seer of Fortunes, shuffled her tarot deck and laid down her cards, frowning.
Johnny the Wolf Boy brought her a cup of tea. He scratched at the dark, downy hair along his neck. “What is it, Zarilda?”
The Great Zarilda turned over another card. Three of Swords. Betrayal, lies, turmoil. “I believe our old friend Sam Lloyd is in terrible danger.”
In a pale yellow bedroom on a farm in the Heartland, the girl shook violently.
“Jim, get the strap!” her mother cried, and the girl’s father wedged the thin belt between her molars seconds before the edges of her teeth bit hard into the soft leather, adding to the constellation of puncture wounds already there. After a moment, the trembling subsided. The girl lay still.
“Just lie back easy now, Sarah Beth,” the girl’s father said.
The farmer closed the door. In the small kitchen, his wife went back to scrubbing out the cast-iron pot. On the table, the Sears, Roebuck catalog lay open to a page of shiny new Singer sewing machines they couldn’t afford. The farmer lit the lantern. “Gonna see to the cows,” he said, not expecting an answer.
In the soft evening light, the farmer looked out at the long, flat line of the horizon, broken only by a lone telephone pole in the distance, the future edging closer. He surveyed the yellowing acres of failing corn, the gnarled hickory tree, the pigs rooting for scraps in a pen bordered by a rotting split-rail fence, and the sagging porch of the old house that had been built by his grandfather’s hands as a legacy to his children. Promising black soil had gone to scrub and dust in places now that the farmer and his wife had been forced to let the hired hands go. And anyway, most of them were wary of Sarah Beth, who stared into space and babbled about strange visions that frightened the farmer and his wife.
Sometimes those visions came true.
That scared them more.
From his pocket, the farmer took out the sheriff’s notice: foreclosure on the family farm at 144 Benedict Road, Bountiful, Nebraska. Without some miracle, the little that was left would all be lost. And where would they go then? How would they care for Sarah Beth?
“The land is old, the land is vast, he has no future, he has no past, his coat is sewn with many woes, he’ll bring the dead, the King of Crows.”
The farmer startled. A moment ago, his daughter had been lying on her bed, eyes closed. Now she was a few feet away.
“Sarah Beth. What are you doing out here?”
The girl had that icy stare. The one her mother feared might belong to demons.
“They’re coming.”
“Who’s coming, honey? Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Roscoe are over to Omaha this week.”
The girl rocked back and forth. “The Diviners.”
Sudden anger rose in the farmer. “Sarah Beth. Go on back to your mama now. Hey-oh! Ada!”
