There were the notebooks, full of casual jottings, plans for her nerdy war games, dreams, scribbles of ideas big and small, field notes from garden and town, plans for real war, or at least direct action. All of them treated by their discoverers as presumptive profundities, even the entries detailing when she had composted her rooftop garden. Or the List, the one with her Nine Rules.

And then there was the book.

WE THE CREATURES was the title, which they always wrote in all caps, the way she had pounded it out on the typewriter she used, just like the ones at the archive.

They called it a novel, but Donny had read it, and didn’t think so. It was something new, something that mixed fiction and nonfiction, fact and fantasia. Manual for a new alchemy, green Anthropocene brujería, a utopian conjuring. The chapters were almost like meditations, but they had story, anecdotes that started to accrete into an even bigger story as you read them. One that, when it settled in and took root in your brain, started to spin another story, a story about the whole world.

Donny thought it was all pretty crazy. He was pretty sure his cynicism about it was part of the reason they had banished him. Pretty soon he started seeing people hawking self-published copies on the street corners. Friends started asking him if he’d read it. The way he remembered friends in the old days asked him if he had asked the lord for forgiveness. Then he remembered how Joyce used to say the only way you can really change people’s behavior is with a new religion or an old cult.

There was a picture of Maxine Price on the wall of the shed where they were letting Heather stay. The photo presented her at her most charismatic, backlit by the sun in a way that almost gave her a halo. Below the photo was a plaque, with one of her rules:

5. You can take from nature, but you must give back in equal measure.

This was not the only reason the shed reminded Donny of a chapel. From the outside, it just looked like a garden shed, albeit with a kind of high roof. Inside, it opened up and filled with light from the windows. No stained glass, just a view of the water on one side and the prairie on the other. On the wall hung relics of things that had died. The bones of animals, the wood of ancient trees, dried flowers, a giant shell washed in from the deep sea.

Below the wall, it was more like a florist’s shop—a wide wooden table with metal instruments, test kits, and cuttings of plants. On a plastic cutting board in the center was a section of green stalk from which extruded a crown of red tendrils coated with some snotty film.

“What kind of mutant is that?” said Donny.