When he said this, a few dozen people outside the circle, far enough back I hadn’t noticed them, erupted into a cheer. A party sounded good to me too, though morning seemed a strange time for it. But what happened next made me squirm. They sang songs mocking the King and the GuideBook. They began to look at each other and dance in ways I had seen on the dead-end roads. A surge of memories assailed me.

I felt a pronounced drop in temperature and watched dark red clouds swirl and gather. Quon, seemingly oblivious to everything but his conversation, continued to talk with a small group of villagers. Fistface marched up to him and yelled, “Didn’t you hear what I said? It’s time to party. That means, stop talking that nonsense.”

“If we’re in your way, we can move,” Quon said. “If anyone wants to talk more, let’s go where it’s quieter.”

“You think you’re better than us, don’t you?” asked a petite blonde next to Fistface. “Hypocrites, that’s what you are.”

Quon opened his GuideBook and flipped the pages, then started to read. “The Woodsman says—”

“We don’t care what the Woodsman says.” Fistface slapped the book from Quon’s hand. He screamed and cursed and held up his hand, limp, as if he’d hit hard metal. “You hurt me!”

“It’s you who hit the book,” Quon said. “If you’d listen to it instead of striking it, you’d learn that the book gives the guardrails to guide us and protect us from veering off the road. They aren’t there to hurt us, but to keep us safe.”

“Maybe we don’t want to be ‘safe.’ Maybe we just want to have some fun. The girls would like that, wouldn’t you?” He leered at Malaiki and Victoria. “Think you’re too good to party with us, is that it?”

“We have our parties,” Quon said, “celebrations full of joy. We sing songs of the King, of his sovereignty and grace, and our hearts overflow. The meaning and pleasure that elude you, that you try to find in all the wrong places, we have found in the King.”

“You presume to judge us, you self-righteous bigot?”

“The only righteousness I have is a gift from my King. It’s his righteousness that consumes me, not mine.”

“So you do claim to be better than us.” Fistface spit on the ground, and his bloodshot eyes bulged as he stared us down. “Ever since you bigots arrived, people have stopped coming to the parties. Everything was fine until you came. Your poison is spreading. And you’re bad for business.”

“Is your business darkness?” Shad asked. “Light is always bad for darkness.”

“Why are you here?” asked a heavy, muscular woman with pouchy chipmunk cheeks, her hair a wild red tangle. “We didn’t invite you.”