“She’s telling the truth, Syd. She told me before the Bishop—”
I stand up and wheel around on Len. “You. You better watch your moral high ground, buddy. Drunken prattle. Baiting the Bishop when you know full well he’ll take it out on your sister. I’m not leaving New Charity until I figure out what happened here, and how the hell Nelle Harris Mangold knows more about my dad’s last days than I do.”
Len hiccups and shakes his head. “Hell, Syd. This is your fairy tale. We’re just living in it.”
I let myself back into the ballroom through the tapestry, Cas begging me to wait. Inside, the Governor’s bodyguards have instructed the waiters to help with the logistics of moving a hundred agitated people. Some are streaming toward the door, others to the bar, the rest rooted firmly in place to watch the proceedings. Perry is fighting his way through the crowd to get to Nelle, who is now in the corner, being held by Cedar. I make my way toward Perry, thinking we might be able to beat our way toward her better as a team. But when I tug on his jacket, he wheels around with a defensive haymaker that slugs me in the eye. Stars swim through my eyes as I stumble backwards. I hear the Governor say, “Goddamn it, Perry. Cedar, round up Turner, too.” I’m almost sure he doesn’t mean Uncle Pi, but I don’t wait around to see if he means me.
I duck back through the tapestry and run down the long, deserted wing of the mansion until I finally find an open window large enough to crawl through. I crash-land into a topiary, shredding my beautiful blue dress and losing my shoes. My eye throbs, but so far my nose isn’t bleeding. I feel a million emotions at once. None of them good.
I stumble to the edge of the garden, where a clear sky has started to surrender its stars. I spend a few minutes trying to find a gate that will let me out before I sit down on a marble bench, fishing my flask from my garter. I take a long draught and a deep breath.
“Save any for me?” Troy Willis stands over me with Cas’s silver pashmina and a hanky.
I trade the flask for the wrap. He stuffs the hanky in his pocket. “Guess it’s a good thing I gave you earrings instead of a dress.” He chuckles lightly. I’m just glad all of the important parts are still covered.
“Did anyone follow you?” I ask.
“The rest of my siblings are being corralled by my parents. Being the middle child has its benefits.”
“I bet,” I say, but I don’t laugh, not knowing if he’s hurt or relieved.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I honestly don’t know.”
“You can tell me, you know,” he says, sitting down. I can feel his earnest gray eyes when they finally leave my face. “Or you can not tell me. Whatever makes it easier.”
I don’t know why I start talking. But it’s like it has all been building so long that I can’t stop myself. I don’t know if Troy is safe or if I’m just talking because he’s there. At this very moment, I don’t want to think about how my dad died. I do want to understand why his death is so important to me, despite how hard I’ve tried not to care.
“He’s been gone from my life for so long, he might as well have always been dead. I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. I’ve been thinking maybe his journal would give me some sort of clue, but it’s full of inches of rainfall and regret and torn-out pages. I need to come to grips with the fact that I don’t have anyone here but Pi. And he’s likely better off without me around.” I sound pathetic. I am pathetic.
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Troy says, putting his hand over mine. I look at him—I mean, really study him. His face is sincere concern. I’ve been so focused on getting out of New Charity, I’ve never asked him what he wants out of life, out of New Charity, out of me.
“Troy.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He takes his hand off mine. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
“No,” I say, putting his hand back. I don’t know why this moment feels sheltered enough to sustain. If I were smart, I’d keep running. But I don’t. “I want you to tell me what your life is here. What do you want from this place, from your future?”
He looks down at our hands. “You mean besides this?” The tops of his ears turn red.
“Be serious.”
“I want things to go back the way they were before the plague. I want our family back. I want a campfire lit by my mother’s two hands, sitting around together laughing. I want my father back—not the Governor, but the man who loved the land. Loved racing his horses against your father’s, no matter how many times he lost. I miss the days when he wasn’t running from the Bishop, at his beck and call. He’s still in there, I know it.”
“I hope so, for your sake.”
The young man holding my hand is a little boy lost, straddling the fence of then and now. How I understood that feeling. I’d spent my life pushing it away. “But what do you want for yourself?”
“When you left, I was so angry. And I know we were young. And you had your dreams. But I . . . I was the only one who wasn’t special. To anyone. Cas and Len with their gift. Perry off at school, being smarter than everyone else. I wanted someone to see something special in me. I kept hoping you’d come back, choose us. And now . . .”
He doesn’t have time to finish. The crunch of hedges becomes a harbinger of doom. A large moon shadow falls over us.
“I’d like a moment alone with Ms. Turner, if you please,” says the Bishop.
Troy squeezes my hand but doesn’t get up. I don’t know why this quiet bravery surprises me, but it does. “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m okay.” He squeezes my hand again, but this time he gets up, brushing past the Bishop without greeting.
“I’m sorry if I’m interrupting your . . . interlude.”
I force myself to look up at him. “I don’t see how my interludes are any of your business.” I hope Troy hears me, but he doesn’t turn.
“I wanted to speak with you, personally. Len’s unfounded accusation is quite a surprise.”
“I’ll bet. It has to be a rare breed who calls you out on your bullshit, founded or not.”
“I want to again offer my most sincere condolences,” the Bishop says solemnly.
I have to play it cool, act like I don’t care. Act like I am me three days ago. “Then you should share them with someone who knew him.”
He makes a soft clap with his huge hands. “So, do explain, Ms. Turner, if you don’t care, why all the theatrics?”
Running out was a mistake. I push the urge to panic again down deep. “As someone trained to offer counsel to the distraught, I’m sure you’re familiar with people assuming grief over things that have far less of an impact on them. It’s frightening to hear something like that, whether or not it has any foundation.”
“Ah, but you’re not afraid of anything, are you, young woman?” He runs one hand down my arm and, with the other, turns my chin toward him. I feel the wine rising up from my stomach.
“Go to hell.” I stand up, but this is a mistake. He steps closer to me and I’m pinned between him and the bench. His breath is foul and I turn my head to try and find some fresh air. My mom’s pocketknife is still in my garter where I stashed it next to my flask. I try to shift my arm down my leg without him noticing.
His voice drops low. “You think you know everything. But you don’t. You may reject the Spirit and the Blessing, but that doesn’t give you the right to rip it away from the people of New Charity.” If he moves any closer, I have the knife in my hand. I just need to open the blade.
“What I’m saying, Cressyda Turner, is if I see you near the reservoir again, I’ll drown you myself.”
The longer he keeps hold of me, the more the buzzing in my ears lessens. I shake his hand off, but he leans in and pins me again. The realization hits me like his breath: Cas is telling the truth. This man has my dad’s blood on his hands. I can feel it over the interference. Maybe I wasn’t ready to hear it; maybe he really cursed Cas. Either way, she’s right.
“It’s not a matter of if I open the reservoir,” I say.
“It’s a matter of when.”
The Bishop smiles. “You’ll do so over my dead body.”
A walkie-talkie breaks the silence as Sheriff Jayne rounds the corner. “Everything okay here?” she asks. I try to answer her but I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I’m pinned until the Bishop takes a step back and I stumble toward her, knife in hand.
It’s only then I register the look on her face, angrier than I’ve ever seen her, her mouth drawn into a scowl. “With me, Turner.” There’s an open gate behind her, one she must have come through, one I’d missed. I put together what she’s just seen and what she thinks I’m doing, or am about to do.
It’s then I decide to run.
I don’t get far before I run into the Willises’ imposing garden fence. I scan for a way out, Sheriff Jayne’s and the Bishop’s voices clashing behind me like blunt weapons.
“Syd, over here,” says what appears to be a rosebush. Behind it, another gate, flush and camouflaged by the pattern of the fence, swings open onto the sagebrush-filled hillside.
“I can’t see you.”
“Just hurry.” Troy stands up from the bush, his arms scratched and bitten from the rose stems. “They won’t fight forever, you know.”
I am euphoric at being able to breathe again. I sprint past him and wait while he eases the latch closed.
We start up the hill behind the mansion. When we reach the crest I turn to look. On the way down the ravine on the other side, the adrenaline wears off and I begin to feel my feet. “Can we go slower?” I ask, picking cactus prickles from my heel.
“It’s just a little further.”
It seems like a trick of the eye when Troy disappears into a tall clot of juniper. The leftovers of the weak sunset combined with some ambient light from the mansion are rapidly becoming insufficient, and I stop, confused. In the distance, the fires from the camp beyond the wall dot the plains to the west like orange constellations.
“In here.” Troy’s arm beckons from the juniper—this time unmistakably—and I follow, wrapping my hand around his and letting him pull me through the soft branches.
Inside, the trees have created a large natural shelter hidden from the wind. Troy points to a roughly fashioned chair, made of sturdy twisted branches. I sit and begin pulling debris from my feet.
“It’s juniper,” he says of the chair. “My first one.”
“Comfy,” I say. My task becomes easier as he moves around the edges of the shelter, lighting low candles. The glow reveals a workbench, a large table, more chairs, and a bed.
“Water? Wine?”
“Both,” I say, realizing I left my flask in the garden. It’s probably better this way. I’d down the whole thing if I had it.
He brings me two cold silver cups. One full of icy creek water run through a crude filter, the other to the brim with a cold, white wine. “I’m sorry I left you with him.”
I down the water, then take a deep sip of wine. “Protecting me isn’t your job.”
“Then whose job is it?” He doesn’t ask this unkindly, but there’s an edge to his voice.
“Mine. It’s my own job.” I try to match his edge, but I don’t know if I can manage in my current state. “A job I did quite well until Sheriff Jayne happened upon the scene to witness my attempted assault.”
His face twists in the candlelight. “What happened? Do you want to talk about it?”
My head is too jumbled. I need time and quiet to sort this all out. I take another draught of wine. “No.”
“Do you want to talk at all?”
I take a deep breath. “Who else knows about this place?”
“Cas and Len, of course.” He shrugs. “No sense hiding anything from them.”
“I suppose not.” My wine is gone and I hold out my cup for more.
“Sure you shouldn’t slow down there, Ace?”
The air has changed between us. At the mansion it was tender and soft, and here it’s charged, tense. “Why, do you have a supply problem?”
After rummaging in the corner on the other side of the bed, he returns to hand me the open bottle. He pries the cork off another and takes a drink. “Guess there’s no sense in cups.”
“Will someone see the candlelight?”
“When I started staying here, I tested all the lines of sight from the house and the ridge. They’d have to be right up on us to see.”
I don’t know who I am afraid of coming after me—the Bishop, the Sheriff, Uncle Pi. The only person I want to talk to is Nelle. I want to know when she’s making her move, when I have to stop her. She’ll destroy the people of New Charity over my dead body.
I close my eyes. Over my dead body. The Bishop.
Of course. If I’d only finished the job. I should have put things together when Cas had talked about the transfer of the gifts. The Bishop held all of the gifts, bound to the reservoir. Kill the Bishop, nullify the Ward. Set New Charity free, and the City follows.
I’ll only have one shot. If Nelle will cooperate with me, coordinate, instead of insisting on her own martyrdom, we can save New Charity and the City all at once.
“What?” Troy presses. “I can see that look on your face. What just happened there?”
I’m not ready to share this plan. To put him in this kind of danger. It’s one thing to try and defend myself. It’s quite another to sink to the Bishop’s level, to plot his murder. I take another glug of wine, and redirect. “Do you think Cas and Len are okay?”
“They’re pretty spry.” Troy takes a long draw from his own bottle. “Len almost always lands on his feet.”
I stare at him, wondering how he can be so perpetually calm. “I’m not sure. Everything feels so urgent. The people in the City are waiting for me, Troy. Agnes and Doc. Mina, too. She would love this place. Buster, too. I hope, in the end, this will all be worth it.”
Troy looks at me, incredulous. “You can’t still be planning on going back to them? With everything you’ve got here?”
The wine has unraveled some part of him I’ve never seen before. Something more desperate. “It’s not that I don’t care about all of you. It’s just, I have a life there. People who need me. I made promises, Troy.”
“What if the Spirit brought you here because we need you, Syd? Don’t take this the wrong way, but they’re probably fine without you. People live every day without your personal assistance. Why not stay with people who love you? In a place with a future?”
“Do you want to rephrase that?” I drain my wine again.
“You can’t really plan to stay out there forever, can you? Just because you love a few Survivors doesn’t mean you have to spend the rest of your life with animals.”
I stand up. “You can’t call other people animals. They’re just people who want to put their City back together.”
“Did you hear what that man, that ‘doctor’ called you? They’ve been out there a long time and they’re desperate and they don’t trust anyone. Especially you. Who knows what you’ll be going back to?”
All Troy has are stories. To him the Survivors are clichés like Mangold. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew Mina. She’s only a girl. She’s my . . . I found her. And she needs antibiotics.”
“Well, hell, Syd. Send her some. Bring her here. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
“Troy, I wish I wanted to be here. I do. But I don’t. I want to rebuild the City. And I’d like New Charity’s help. Why can’t anyone understand that? Why can’t you? Why can’t your father?”
“He doesn’t have a choice, Syd. He has to keep the Bishop happy. Without the Bishop, the Governor isn’t the governor anymore. The Sanctuary’s support is all the support anyone needs these days.”
“But is it worth all this? Worth all the lives lost outside the gates?”
“That’s not fair. We were his responsibility, not the rest of the world. He’s kept us safe.”
“Until he lets Nelle into the power station. Why is he parading her around like this?”
>
“He wants to keep Perry happy, too. Thinks Perry might leave or maybe go off the deep end. But if he gets to keep Nelle—”
“Keep her? She’s not a goddamned puppy.”
Troy gets in my face. His passion is like static building, and while I’m angry that we aren’t having the same conversation, circling around each other, at least this feels true, honest.
“You could rebuild right here, Syd. We could make you a studio, you could dance, you could teach. Bring your City people inside the gates. Start over again. Here with us.”
A part of me envisions this. And in my brief daydream, I’m happy. I marry Troy and have two kids, teach all day and drink wine with Pi all night. And hope to hell the wine would drown out my guilt and shame at abandoning the rest of the City and its people. My memories of Danny and my mother. The life I’d only had nascent dreams of. “It’s not that I don’t think it could be done—”
“You talk promises, but didn’t you make any to yourself?”
This isn’t getting us anywhere. “Look, I need to see Nelle, no matter what happens next.”
“The Governor says you’re planning something. That you’re using me. That you’re going to love me and leave me.”
“Well, what are you still doing here, then?”
“I’m following my heart.”
He’s telling me the truth. And maybe I owe him some in return. “I am planning something, Troy. I’m not going to tell you what, but the end goal is to keep everyone safe. That’s all. Trust me or don’t. I’m never going to be your father’s choice for you. Or Perry’s. It’s up to you to choose what you want.”
“I want you, Syd. I want to help you.”
“Even if it means burning your bridges?”
“I know you have promises, but can you make one to me?”
I nod, even though I should be doing no such thing.
“Don’t leave without telling me.” He offers his hand and I shake it. I’m looking at him; he’s looking at the ground.
But his hand slides up my arm. And something like lightning runs behind it. “Syd.”
“Hm?”
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