As Sabon’s kind of Nativism spread throughout the Southern cities by way of her books and essays, it infected the tourists who subjected themselves to my tours. Over time, I no longer needed Bonmot to give me updates on Mary’s progress. Instead, her flock of black crows feasting on the carcasses of Duncan’s investigations could be clearly seen in the eyes of the visitors I guided from one banal site to another.

I can’t say I minded these intrusions into rote routine at first. As I told Sybel when he accompanied me on these jaunts—and he was always there in some form—each recital of the same information became more stale than the last, until I was like some crippled, half-senile goat or sheep, chewing and rechewing the same yellowing stalks of grass. It was a relief when the replies to my jaded bleatings began to change from polite nods or the obvious questions or the occasional attempt at wit, to observations such as “Mary Sabon wrote about this place in her book on Nativism. You should mention that next time.”

“What a good suggestion!” I would reply. “I’ll be sure to do that,” and try to carry on as if nothing offensive had been said, if they would let me.

Sometimes they also came seeking wish fulfillment: “Do you think we might see Sabon on this tour?”

To which I would reply in a clipped but neutral tone, “Not on this tour.” Not even if we stood for a week in the shade of the large oak tree outside her ancestral home.

Even more jarring, though, were the questions out of nowhere—broadsides I was in no position to absorb, meant to torment me—that opened a door where no door should exist.

“Are you any relation to the Duncan Shriek mentioned in Sabon’s books?”

Most of the time, my interrogator exuded a naive good humor as natural as sweat when asking the question—wanted only to know that I was not just an expert but intimately involved with the information I imparted, whether we stood inside the old post office or outside of some tavern with “Spore” in the title.

I had no problem providing graceful answers in such cases, although each time it did surprise me—and more than surprise me, it changed the world so that I saw my brother’s influence in everything.

“Nativists are like Manziists or Menites or any other religion,” Duncan said once. “Just as righteous, just as right.” No wonder their questions changed my worldview.

As Nativism conquered the city and the entire South, I found the door to my misery widening and darkening, so that a belligerent quality entered the voices of those asking the questions.

One particularly grueling and hot summer afternoon a few years before the Shift began in earnest, I heard the words, “Are you Duncan’s sister?” delivered in a tone somewhere between fervent eagerness and bloodlust.

My surroundings, which had faded to the usual blur—my mouth spewing a stream of familiar words while my mind went elsewhere—came back into sharp focus.