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Cas throws up her hands and starts up the steps.

Len lifts his chin at me, his gaze too intent. “This week is power station infrastructure. Fascinating, right? Meet us at the diner at seven for breakfast. Sheriff Jayne says she might take a group of us out to the station on Wednesday. These little tattoos really light up there right next to the reservoir.”

Is this my opening? It’s way too good to be true. “Fine,” I say, but Len is already bounding after Cas, halfway inside.

“Want me to walk you home?” Troy asks.

I take a deep breath. “Any other night, yes. But I need a little time to clear my head. Would you do me a favor, instead, and make sure Pi doesn’t overdo it on the sherry?”

“Of course, Syd. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow after you guys are done with class.”

“Yeah. Sure,” I say, though at this point I’m almost tired enough to wonder if another sunrise is worth the hassle.

I’m halfway down the hill when Perry steps out from behind a big ponderosa, and I stumble backwards. I’m trying to regain my balance when he grabs me by the shoulder and spins me to face him. My heart is racing with two parts relief and three parts rage.

“You scared me half to death, you . . . maniac.”

“What did she say?”

“Get your hands off me. What did who say?” My pocketknife is at my hip, and I make a note to keep it there, no matter what. I’ve only been in New Charity a day and I’ve been manhandled more times than in partnering class at the Company.

He backs up, arms in the air. Tears are streaming down his face. Perry is
crying
? His sharp features are ugly in the half-light, twisted in desperation.

“You’ve made your feelings about me pretty clear, Perry. Find someone else to help you.”

“Syd. Just, please?”

I should have forgotten her name as soon as she told it to me. “Is this about Nelle?”

He sinks to his knees.

CHAPTER FIVE

Cas

It was hard to sleep, replaying in a loop through my head: “After all she’s been through,” Mama had said at dinner. “Still so poised and confident.” The Deacon had nodded proudly, mouth full of mashed potato. “Such a beautiful young woman.” Mama had droned on and on, giving my hair her relentless side eye.

I’d had nebulous misgivings about Syd’s return. Now those were muddled with the thrill of having a true friend at my side and my outright resentment of that same friend.

I straggled in to Tess’s diner late the next morning, having taken a detour to check a cut on Windy’s foreleg. Len had gone on ahead to Vocational Retraining, no doubt stopping at Al Truax’s place to smoke a cigarette and lament the injustice of Al having aged out of the class the year before.

Syd was still waiting for me, having cobbled together a striking black tunic and white jeans from her mother’s things. She looked like a fashion model stranded in an old western movie. I glanced down at my cargo pants, which had already collected something brown at the hem from the paddock. Her jeans were, of course, immaculate.

Tess stopped at our table to collect my thermos. “The usual?”

I nodded.

Syd’s water appeared untouched, and she was studying a small blue journal with a lock on the side. “Wasn’t sure you’d show,” she said, glancing up.

I wanted to say something authoritative. This was my town, my diner, my Vocational Retraining, and she had no business acting like I was the one inconveniencing her. I already had Len to watch out for—his wanderings, his drunken benders, his refusal to take retraining, his future, his life seriously; it wasn’t as if I needed another charge. “My mother wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She gave an amused huff. “You’re old enough to make your own choices.”

“Easy for you to say.”

There was a change in her face. Her smile didn’t so much fall as harden into a glare. “Quite. I don’t know why anyone bothers having parents at all.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Look,” Syd said, “what do you want, Casandra? Do you want to be my friend, my ally, my acquaintance, someone I used to know? Those are all fine. But the choice is yours, okay? We’re way past the age of playdates.”

“I have duties, Syd. You asked me to listen to what your life was like, but you’ve never even asked about mine.”

“Fine,” she said. “Tell me all about the arduous life of a Sanctuary Acolyte.”

Tess completed another loop around the restaurant, dropping off my thermos and two pastries. “I know you said you weren’t hungry, Miss Turner, but I reckon your father’d want me to make sure his girl was well fed.” Syd smiled with genuine gratitude, but when Tess turned away, she just stared at the warm turnover in her hand.

“What?” I asked.

She shook herself from her daydream. “I just wish . . . never mind.”

“Let’s get going.” I scooted out of the booth, tapping the face of my watch. She followed, eyes drifting over the empty cafe and out onto the deserted sidewalk of Main Street.

I kept my voice soft. “Being an Acolyte is different now that my father is in office.”

She nodded. “That makes sense. Everyone watching you grow up.”

“It was easy when we were kids. Like a performance. But it’s different now.” The vision of Cal calling out as the Bishop wandered the halls of the Turner Ranch swooped unbidden into my mind. Part of me wanted to blurt everything right there, but I couldn’t possibly tell her until I was sure. How could I even explain what I’d seen?

“Well, it’s not like I don’t understand what being on stage is like,” Syd said.

“You and your mother wanted the same things, though, didn’t you?” I asked, my mouth half full of pastry. “I don’t know what my mother wants. She already has everything. And I mean everything. And still, I can’t do anything right.”

“Why don’t you get out of there, then? Aren’t there quarters for Acolytes over the Sanctuary? Didn’t we have grand plans for that place back when we were fourteen? Repainting everything aquamarine and having slumber parties every night.”

“After the gates closed, Perry came home and Troy stayed, so Len and I just never left. I mean, at first the Bishop encouraged families to stick together—you know, with the unrest and travel bans and the defectors. And after that, I suppose it was simple inertia.”

“I know all about inertia,” Syd said. “I think I had a case of that myself.”

“With Mama, I just do my best to try not to rock the boat.”

“God, Cas, she’s a piece of work. The way she treats you is really not okay.”

“She does the best she can,” I said, surprised at my own surliness. But it wasn’t fair. My mother would praise Syd till the cows came home, and Syd could care less. “Besides, she’s
your
number one fan.”

“Then she’s definitely an idiot,” Syd said, with a half laugh. “You know that’s bullshit, right? She doesn’t approve of me any more than anyone else. It’s an act for Pi. For the Bishop. For herself.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. We walked the rest of the block in silence, Syd returning to her uneaten pastry meditation until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’d consumed my own in about three bites. “Those are best when they’re still warm, you know.”

“I wish I could give it to Mina. Or Agnes, maybe.”

“So you are going back.”

She nodded. “I made promises.”

“When do they expect you?”

“Soon. But I don’t have an exact number of days or anything. I have no idea how long whatever this is will take.”

“Settling Cal’s affairs? We said we’d help and we will. I promise.”

Syd stopped and turned to face me. “There’s one more thing I want to understand while I’m here, but you’re not going to like it.”

“You don’t have to—” I began.

“I want to—I have to—find a way to help the City,” she said.

My heart dropped into my shoes, and I prayed to the Spirit she wouldn’t finish her sentence. The Bishop rarely used his Hindsight, but if he was wasting his powers on anyone, it would be Syd. Whatever she wanted to confide in me wasn’t guaranteed to stay our secret.

“Mina and Agnes and Doc,” she rambled. “They need electricity. I have to find a way to get it to them. Your reservoir is killing us.”

I could see how much she loved them, these imaginary City people who she carried with her in her heart. These people who had no idea what they had sent her to do. “The Bishop closed the reservoir for a reason.”

“Which is?”

The mantra had been drilled into us for years. “The safety of the citizens downstream.”

“The water is safe for you but not for us?”

“It’s not that simple,” I said, not knowing how to explain. “There’s the Blessing, too.”

“It’s just a nice side benefit that the extra water irrigates all your crops, tobacco to beans, and keeps the creeks and gullies full?”

We started walking again. I knew how the change in the land must look to her, how it would look to anyone prepared to be angry.

I took a deep breath, weighing whether or not to explain the way the Wards protected the reservoir and that opening the floodgates would cause more problems than it would solve. “I know it’s hard to believe, but the Spirit smiled on us, Syd. Maybe it would be better to find a way for your friends to come here. Spirit willing, the Bishop will listen.”

“Enough with your Spirit nonsense. You can’t really believe all this crap?” She stopped again. “This isn’t lullabies and rose-colored visions and green hills. Your land isn’t meant to look like this and neither is ours. There are real people out there who need help.”

“Aren’t we people here in New Charity?” I asked, more pitifully than I meant to.

“I thought so once. But now I’m not so sure.”

I reeled from her succinct rejection of the Spirit and New Charity itself. How could she dismiss it all out of hand? I couldn’t understand how she would rather go hungry than eat the pastry she still held in front of her. The one she still held when I opened the door to our classroom in the basement of the courthouse.

Sheriff Jayne, tall, broad shouldered, and sun browned, beamed at her. “Apple turnover for the teacher? You shouldn’t have.”

Despite the promising beginning, the amity between Syd and Sheriff Jayne didn’t last more than a few minutes. Syd surveyed the room, resting on her back foot, arms crossed in front of her, as whispers crescendoed to full-blown discord.

“Would you like to introduce yourself?” the Sheriff asked.

Syd faced the room, cheeks still cool and pale while the blush bloomed over my own face just standing beside her. She held the pastry out to the Sheriff, and said, “I don’t think we need to pretend if we don’t have to. Is there anyone here who doesn’t know who I am?”

Two hands shot up. The Fenton brothers, who moved here just after Syd and her mother left town.

She didn’t do a very good job of hiding her annoyance, her fight to keep from scowling turning her mouth into an uneven grimace. “I’m Syd Turner. My father is, was, Cal Turner. He bred horses, as you probably know. I’m here because, well.”

The Fentons mumbled their condolences.

“Is that sufficient?” Syd asked. The Sheriff nodded.

But before we could sit down, a voice started cackling. “So that ballerina nonsense you moved away for, how’s that working out for you?”

To Syd’s credit, she tried to ignore Becky Purcell. But Becky wasn’t so easily dismissed.

“Empty auditoriums getting you down? Or do you even have auditoriums anymore? I heard all you Survivor folk are like animals, fighting over food and burning all your furniture and your books and all that artsy shit that was so important to be
cultured.
”

“Yup. Once a week we trade fingers for tennis shoes. But look,” she said, cocking her head, “I still have one left.” She flipped Becky off with a flourish.

“Okay, okay,” said Sheriff Jayne. “Put it away.”

“Thought you were better than all of us,” Becky mumbled. “Gonna show all us backward hicks what success looks like. Looks like a tired-assed has-been to me.” Snickers and snorts made their way through the room.

“At least I tried to make something of myself,” Syd said.

It was an unexpectedly halfhearted comeback. Things might have ended there if Becky and her friends had given up their whispering. If Syd had let their pettiness go. If I had come to her defense.

I’d been standing there guppy mouthed, so Len stood up and pushed me into a seat. He grabbed Syd’s shoulder, whispering, “They aren’t worth your time. Come sit.” But Syd’s expression shifted, hurt to anger. The cheek she’d attempted to turn flushed deeply.

When the plague came, we did lose a handful of people. Becky’s father and uncle were among those who, for various reasons, had skipped out on the Bishop’s bird flu vaccine—the one that ended up protecting us from the sickness that decimated the rest of the world.

The Purcells’ original refusal deepened a divide running between the ramshackle cabins on the east side of New Charity and the rest of town. Unlike Syd’s mom, who missed the vaccine for a business trip, the Purcell men flat refused to trust the Bishop. The resulting scandal was less about the health decision and more about the snub to the Sanctuary. By the time the Bishop asked for the sacrifice of the townspeople’s gifts, that seam was pulled into an outright rift. The cabins had more to lose without their magic to help with farming and fishing, and they didn’t trust my father’s promises or the Bishop’s.