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I wondered if she’d be working one still.

My father and the Bishop finally finished their conversation, and we mercifully sat down to dinner. There was salad and pleasantries and wine pouring. Over the roast the Governor got down to brass tacks.

“Cas. Len,” said the Governor. “The Bishop shared some sad news before dinner. It seems Cal Turner passed on this morning.”

I nodded. “We saw.”

“As I expected,” said the Bishop. “Very well then. Deacon Turner has asked that the funeral be held immediately, so I’d like you to prepare yourselves for service tomorrow.”

“One of the town’s finest,” the Governor said.

My mother batted her eyes at her peas, as if my father were talking about hay yields or inches of rainfall instead of death and sorrow.

Len frowned. “Doesn’t he want to wait for Syd to get here?”

The Bishop wiped the corners of his mouth and glowered at us from beneath his grizzled eyebrows. “It could take weeks for word to reach her. Even then, I understand they have not heard from her in some time. Unless you know something that we don’t?”

Len kicked me under the table. “No,” we said in unison.

“Just the funeral,” I lied.

“She wasn’t there,” Len added.

The Governor shifted in his seat. He hated it when we babbled.

“If she decides to come sort through her inheritance, the Sheriff, your father, and I have agreed to allow Cressyda through the gates due to exigent circumstances.”

“That’s magnanimous of you,” said Perry, not bothering to hide the contempt in his voice. He and Syd had always butted heads, though the worst was during their last encounter—one of Perry’s rare visits home from his fancy boarding school. This one had something to do with Troy and Syd’s burgeoning preteen romance. Troy had tried hard to mend fences with Perry once Syd left, but no matter the olive branches extended to him, Perry insisted on being a miserable, grudge-holding jerk.

The Bishop smirked. “The Sheriff and I don’t quite see eye to eye on this issue. But the final say rests with your father.”

Len gave me a look that said
yeah, right
.

The Governor, though, was unsatisfied by our silence. “I thought you’d be showering me with thanks. She was your friend, was she not?”

“Of course. Thank you,” I said.

Len cleared his throat. I shook my head at him and his damn principles. He continued anyway. “She deserves to be here, regardless of our friendship.”

“She doesn’t deserve anything; she’s the enemy,” Perry said, harsh and nasal.

“Stop,” Troy said, gripping the arms of his chair. “What our father is saying is that he would like some gratitude for defending our friend. I, for one, am thankful.”

“I bet,” snorted Perry.

“She was only a child when she left. Still”—the Bishop looked to Len and me—“we must be diligent in protecting what the Spirit has blessed us with.”

“So if Syd shows up you want Cas and me to babysit her?” Len asked. “Maybe you should babysit her yourself.”

The peas rolled off my mother’s fork as everyone in the room froze. The Bishop required careful handling, and the whiskey Len had drunk in the parlor had overloosened his tongue.

“Well, now,” the Bishop said, amused by our discomfort. “If and when Cressyda responds to her uncle’s invitation, doing what I ask is your responsibility as Acolytes, as agents of the Spirit.”

Len raised his eyebrows. Acolytes were called on to be a lot of different things outside of our duties at services. We corresponded with townspeople about their worries. We attended weddings and funerals to shake hands and say nice things about the future. But standing guard hadn’t ever been a part of our job description.

“Don’t you think this puts us in a pretty awkward position?” Len asked.

“I am merely asking you to ensure her motives for returning are pure.”

“The only thing pure about Cressyda Turner is her ability to be a complete pain in the ass,” Perry said.

“Perhaps,” the Governor said, his voice sharp with that edge we all hated, “we should continue this conversation later.” We were all too big for him to use his belt, but it wasn’t as if he didn’t have other methods to remind us to stay in line.

“I think we should have the conversation now,” Perry said. His voice shook. “No one gets in who wasn’t here during the outbreak, right? Why bend the rules?”

“They let
you
in after the outbreak,” Len said. “Maybe that wasn’t the best idea, either.”

Chuckling lightly, as if to clear the air, the Bishop turned to Len. “As your father has pointed out, showing compassion will go a long ways toward proving to the Survivors that their only way forward is through the Spirit.”

“Well, now,” Mama said. “All this dander up for something that might never even come to pass. I think it’s best if we cross this particular bridge when we come to it.”

Everyone stared at her in disbelief.

She beamed, once again the center of attention. “Now who wants dessert?”

The rest of the evening was spent in surly and uncomfortable terseness. The Bishop rose and stretched expansively, and Mama tasked Len and me with walking him to the door, where Amita bustled around the coat closet, holding out his hat and riding gloves, her eyes large and reverent.

It was normal for us to walk the Bishop out. What wasn’t normal was for Len to stumble over the bootjack in the hallway.

He was trying his half-drunk best to be solemn, but we were both antsy, and anxious to get the Bishop out the door. The foyer felt smaller and smaller as the years passed. And as we’d gotten older, the Bishop had decreased the personal space with which he’d once orbited us. He spoke close and low, with breath bitter from the herbs he claimed kept him from the accelerated aging that was part and parcel of his gift of Hindsight. No one knew how old he was, but in the time since he’d arrived in New Charity, he’d aged maybe five years to our fifteen.

Despite his distaste for personal space, he never touched us without his thick gloves on. We chalked this up to his many oddities—his mercurial temper, his lack of New Charitan blood, his thin gray beard, his billowing black robes.

When we sat in his small office, passing candles and books and letters, the gloves came out. When we were in public helping to pass out hymnals, the gloves were there, too. While dishing up the casseroles the women in the Sanctuary kitchen made for the community after services. While comforting the lost. While celebrating the found. And though we brushed the gloves time and time again, they perpetually guarded us, and only us, from his mottled skin.

Len stumbled, careening into the Bishop, whose arm, seeking balance, came to rest on my shoulder, half of his exposed palm resting on the skin at my neckline. I had barely enough time to be surprised before the world went black.

It was as if a door had opened on the other side of my powers. I was in the Bishop’s own memories—they even smelled like him, juniper on top of something fetid. This was his power of Hindsight that I was somehow able to share.

I pushed through a set of heavy velvet curtains to find what felt to be the Bishop’s past. In front of me was the Turner Ranch. Footsteps in a dim room.
Who’s there? No. You don’t need to . . .
Cal’s voice. Then a gust of wind so strong it drowned out Cal’s pleading. There was no gunshot. No blood. But the Bishop had been there. He had seen or done something terrible, something I didn’t understand.

The Bishop pulled his arm off me as if I were a rattler. I tried to keep my face unchanged, like he taught us to do during visions at Sanctuary services, though my heart beat like a rabbit. I wanted to run far and fast. He couldn’t be a murderer. And yet, I’d seen what I had seen. What had Cal done to call for his own death? Surely there was a reason, something in the memory I wasn’t seeing. Some sort of self-defense, some rationale. But what?

“Are you quite all right?” the Bishop asked.

The Governor and Mama were calling us back into the dining room, no doubt to scold us for our insolence. “Until services,” I said, doing my level best to smile.

Len started down the hall, and the Bishop accepted his gloves from Amita, who, like the rest of us, had no idea I’d just witnessed New Charity’s first casualty of war.

CHAPTER THREE

Syd

I’m glad for the light drizzle on the morning of my departure. The cooler weather will be better for the car once I start climbing in elevation. I’m loaded up and ready, as prepared as I can be. The trip shouldn’t take me more than a couple of days, but then again, it might.

Standing on the roof, I look up the coastline to the muddy channel that used to empty the Basalt into the sea. If my eyes were better, I’d be able to see the edge of the power station complex, silent and empty. If I have anything to say about it, that won’t be the case for long.

The sunrise is finished, the sky lightening into pale blue, and I take one last look before heading down to the garage to meet Doc. Mina is already knee-deep in the library with Agnes, as she is most days. Tongue sticking out in concentration, she alphabetizes and catalogues to Agnes’s exact specifications. She’s smart as anything, and I’m not sure she hasn’t squirreled half of the library away in my mother’s old room.

After a week or so of trying to chase the cats, Buster has also found his place in the taxonomy of things, sharing the long rectangles of morning summer sun with the fat orange tabby perched atop his broad backside.

I have no such place in the library, no such purpose. Instead I have New Charity, the Pandora’s box open wide.

If Danny were here, he’d say, “You can’t go through with this. It’s madness.”

Over the past week, I’ve tried to pry out of Mina the story of her family. What happened to her parents. To the brother she mentioned once. It’s as if she’s still coming back to life, still getting used to the fact that there are caretakers around her almost all the time now. Sometimes she looks up when I enter a room and her face is so full of surprise it catches me right in the throat. And here I am leaving her.

But this is my chance to really do something. The City can’t have old people bumping around in the dark and children falling through floors. We need lights and power tools and doctors with sterile environments. Other places are rebuilding, yet we are standing still.

I don’t need Danny’s voice in my head to tell me how crazy I am as I walk down the stairs to the garage. I don’t need his snicker to remind me how much my behavior mimics the Shakespearean character he so often likened me to. I’ve been a dancer, a book hunter, a candle maker, and now a medic. I say I don’t want a family, took in a kid, and am now considering leaving her so I can play engineer. Patron saint of inconstancy indeed.

The original Cressida didn’t have much choice in the matter of her trajectory. And yet, she had an opportunity, and so do I. The chance to make the City stronger. For five years our diplomats have failed to reach New Charity. Maybe a grieving ballerina can.

Regardless, I can’t do it without Cress.

When I open the door to the small parking garage underneath the building, Doc is standing next to my actual namesake, my mother’s ancient Toyota. My mother liked to brag that her 1992 Cressida—Cress for short—was ironically reliable, and had never left her stranded. It was the first car she bought after college, and she had zero interest in getting something nicer.

Doc hands me a map of road hazards reported by the scouting teams and traders. He has crammed the car with supplies—some for a Survivor camp, diplomats who’ve tried for years to negotiate with New Charity—and water and food for me. A backpack in case I need to hike. “Sure this sucker isn’t going to high center all loaded down like this?” I ask.

Over the years, Doc has beefed up the suspension and added a couple of extra gas tanks, using Cress as his favorite vehicle for long-distance house calls. He has his own maintenance schedule, coming by to start her every few weeks, hauling usable tires and cases of motor oil into the garage. There are a few other cars here, including Agnes’s, but he prefers the Cressida. Maybe it’s because he and my mom were friends before she got sick.