The girl squinted. Her face was small, already old-looking, and covered with grime. She’d bitten off her nails. Izzy remembered how she’d bitten her own nails as a child, bitten her nails down to the quick. Maybe as a way to let people know things weren’t okay at home. But no one seemed to notice.

“What are you doing?” the girl asked.

“We’re tending the garden,” Izzy said.

The child took it all in: the wooden beds, the damp patch of earth, the seedlings, the four strangers. Two women, both with long black hair, one curvy, one thin. Two men, one dark, one fair and burned. “Flowers?” the girl asked. “Will there be flowers?”

“Next spring. Beans flower, so do pumpkins.”

She seemed to find this satisfactory and began riding her bike in circles in the dust. “Hartebeest, monk seal. Great auk, ibex. Javan tiger,” she said in what Izzy heard as an almost iambic singsong.

“What’s that?” Izzy asked.

“Passenger pigeon, Pyrenean ibex, quagga, sea mink, Tasmanian tiger, Tecopa pupfish, West African black rhino.”

What was she talking about? Izzy wondered. “I don’t—”

“African elephant, Asian elephant, bald eagle, giant panda, orangutan, polar bear, rhinoceros.” The girl stopped riding.

Okay. Extinct or endangered. Izzy wanted to cover her ears. Instead, she knelt down. “That’s sad about those animals, huh?”

The girl peered up through red eyelashes, almost transparent in the sun, her eyes starting to water. Not tears, exactly. Izzy’s eyes used to water like that when her father, Larry, told her ghost stories to scare her. The little girl swiped a hand across her face, and the dirt there smeared. “We are all sharing the earth’s pain.” Her voice had a slightly robotic tone, as if she were repeating something she’d been told.

Izzy shivered with the kind of cold that comes from within, and a shade lowered down in her mind. That was the only way she could describe it. Some kind of foreshadowing or just anxiety, she still wasn’t sure. Though the first darkness had come when she was just a kid, sleeping on the scratchy trailer cot, not knowing that her new black kitten writhed and mewled on the clothesline outside, its sounds sucked away by a succubus wind.

“What’d you say, honey?” Izzy asked.

The girl set her gaze on Cyrus now. “We will stand around the glass box and cry, and our tears will turn into flowers,” she said.

Then she turned and pedaled away, across the road toward a house painted a salt-corroded blue, with a roughhewn windmill fastened to the front. The windmill didn’t move in the hot, still air. Did it ever move? Stopping her bicycle in the weeds that grew in front of the house, the child got off the bike and ran inside. Watching her go, Izzy had the strangely distinct feeling that somehow, impossibly, this was the child she and Cyrus had lost. The child that had been only blood.

“Freaky,” said Nephy, and Seth laughed. Cyrus’s face remained unchanged.