It started to rain. Izabel didn’t know if that would affect Paz’s plan, or if it would affect how well the Elm tree could see the killer. But they’d already done it. They’d set everything in motion. And now the sun was going down.

Inside their old house, their home, Izabel expected to see swirling pollen, as if they’d deserted it and it had become untended—a wasteland of sorts. But it hadn’t. Scheduled maintenance of their house had taken place as it did to every building in every thriving town of the new world.

Izabel got into the suit they’d left her. She tried the mask on over her face, then pushed it up and left it on top of her head. She walked around her house pretending she was walking on the moon. It felt as strange as that, to be home again.

She got a beer out from the fridge and sat on the floor. She loosened the straps on the oxygen tank so it could rest on the ground to the right of her, and then she leaned back on the fridge.

As she got near the bottom of the beer, as she had to tilt her head back more, she kept knocking the mask on the fridge. Ding. Ding. Izabel laughed to herself. She turned, pulled the straps, and the oxygen tank climbed up her back.

She went to her bathroom and took out a bag of makeup. She spilled it out on the counter and leaned her tablet up against the mirror. She pulled up an old makeup tutorial video called “Perfect No Makeup Makeup.” She put a drop of foundation on the back of her hand, and then, dabbing her finger into it, made spots on her cheeks and forehead. She took a sponge and pushed it softly into her face. She sat on the toilet, closed her eyes, finished her beer, and pushed and pushed the sponge.

When she opened her eyes, the color was almost consistent over her face. Not around her eyes, or her hairline, and she’d forgotten to go over her neck at all. The video had gone past the foundation now, past the bronzer and blush. The woman in the video was rubbing her finger into something white and then rubbing it under the ends of her eyebrows. Izabel didn’t have anything white.

She was tired of the video anyway. She wiped off the foundation with wet cotton pads.

    Chapter Thirty-One

“A car is approaching from the east,” Cami said, asleep in the hospital, Kaito and Jana awake beside her.

“Do we tell them that?” Jana asked.

Officer Evans radioed it to Paz.

“Approaching where?” Cami asked.

“That’s not important. Only that it approaches.”

“Is it him?” Jana whispered in Cami’s ear.

“I don’t think Elm can hear you,” Kaito said.

“Raisin, raisin, raisin.

“Why are you saying that?