Dorothy supposes if you were omniscient, writing down what you knew would be as good as doing anything else.

* * *

They get to the farm at two p.m. the next day with the RV hot enough to melt around them. Elaine flags them down at the edge of her field, her driveway too narrow for the RV. She is unmistakable, tall and tawny, with a lot of curly hair knotted up in a handkerchief, sweat glittering on her face and bare arms. She whistles through her teeth at them, like a birdcall.

“You Billy McPherson?”

Dad looks like a black hat in a modern western, his jeans dragged low on his hips by the shotgun he’s shoved through his belt. Looks like he’s coming to steal cattle. “Yeah? You Elaine?”

“That I am,” and she wheels her arm in the air again, and jerks her head toward a house, dusty and small in the distance. “Come on and see it, then. I tell you, man. Some-fucking-thing.”

She falls into step with Dorothy while Dad forges ahead like it’s his house in his field. She’s pretty, up close. She smiles a lot, right away, a lot of little separate smiles like she’s laughing at something, and she only asks Dorothy’s name fifty paces after Dorothy hasn’t offered it.

Dad shouts back over his shoulder, “That’s my Dot.”

“Dot?”

Dorothy shrugs. She doesn’t feel like talking, is sore from sitting too long and now walking too far. Her flip-flops are opening old cuts on her feet. She bets soon there’ll be scars. “Dorothy.”

Elaine laughs at the sky, a soft, buoyant laugh, and tips toward Dorothy to slap a friendly hand on her shoulder. “Welcome to Kansas, honey.”

* * *

The skin is real.

It sits, the resident phenomenon, on Elaine’s kitchen table. The sunlight flutters against it, casts diamonds of light and shadow on the walls. “Don’t touch it!” Dad snaps, and Dorothy realizes that she had been about to. Standing by the table, she is nearly shorter than the skin. She could wriggle inside, make it her own. It is big enough to shut Dorothy away from the rest of the world.

Dad does touch it. Of course, he cannot do anything else. It caves, ever so slightly, beneath two of his fingers, and bends the light. Dorothy imagines her stomach dropping out of her and rolling across the floor, picking up dust.

Evidence is not an end. The path still curves out before Dorothy. They will not—Dad could not—be content to take the skin to a museum, or to a university, have it sampled, examined, and displayed, have a team of scientists take up their search. No, Dad has to find the Viper. It is his destiny, corked up in the RV, to find it.

Yet, the skin means there is an end. Dorothy breathes in and imagines flecks of it dropping off, swirling in the breeze from the air-conditioning, being pulled into her lungs. Coating the inside of her, along with dust and particles of Elaine’s skin. God knows how much of her father Dorothy has inhaled over the years. And the skin means that they will not be shut up in the RV together, forever and always, until the end of the world.