And now she couldn’t say that, the illusion of a family was gone, and the emptiness was just there, no longer hidden.

All that she could feel was a kind of flat, gray despair, that everything, everything, was so horribly falling apart. Ma and Pa, dead. Billie McDaran bound and determined to get her for some reason of his own. Jolene—with her sights set on Josh.

As she sat on a stool in the kitchen, feeling too numb and too overwhelmed to move, she finally picked one tiny incomprehensible bit out of both of those letters and looked up at her aunt, who was hovering over her anxiously, as if she expected Anna to swoon or have hysterics. “What’d thet letter mean, thet the Company was a-gonna try an’ find me?”

Jinny straightened up, her mouth a hard, thin line. “Yer Ma an’ Pa left a debt, an’ their near kin—thet’s y’all—is responsible fer thet debt.”

“But—how?” she gasped. “I didn’ go git thangs from th’ Company store!”

“No, but y’all lived in th’ Company house an’ et what yore Ma got from th’ Company store,” Jinny pointed out, scowling at the injustice of it. “Thet’s what they’ll tell a judge. By their reckonin’, y’all inherit debt jest like y’all inherit anythin’ else. Iffen y’all cain’t pay it, they c’n make y’all work it off, or go to jail.”

She blinked, shocked. “Go to—but—thet cain’t be legal, c’n it? There ain’t no indenture no more, is there?”

Jinny shrugged helplessly, as Anna’s stomach turned into icy knots, and her knees went weak. “Oh, they ain’t a-gonna send y’all t’jail, not when they c’n sell yore debt t’ some’un else. Folks’ll do thet, buy a debt, t’git a free sarvant outen it. An’ thet’s what they’ll do.”

Anna whimpered a little in the back of her throat. “They’ll—take me? Away?” Hauled away—where? Away from Aunt Jinny, away from Josh, to be someone’s unpaid slavey—

“An’ whoever gits yore debt’ll jest keep a-pilin’ more y’all owes fer yore room an’ board,” Jinny continued. “Lincoln was s’pposed t’ hev got rid’a thet, but—” She shrugged. “It’s th’ Companies. They own th’ judge, an’ th’ judge’ll say y’all owe th’ debt, work it off or go t’jail. They say it ain’t ‘indentured servitude’ on account’a there ain’t no contract, so it’s all legal.” She shook her head. “But thet ain’t the wust thang I c’n think of. Iffen Billie McDaran finds out ’bout this, he’ll go buy your debt, sure as sure, an’ come a-lookin’ fer y’all with sheriffs an’ bailiffs. He’ll take y’all, legal, an’ with the sheriff t’ he’p him.”

By this point she was in so much of a panic that she could not move. She could only sit there, frozen, looking up at her aunt with horror.

Jinny stood beside Anna, looking into nothing for a long time. Finally, she seemed to make up her mind. “I’m a-gonna talk to Old Raven. I’ll git him t’pass y’all along t’ Oklahoma. He c’n do it ’long the secret ways he got, where no sheriff’s gonna git wind of y’all. From there, y’all c’n git inter Kansas without no one knowin’ there’s collectors huntin’ y’all. I got a brother in Kansas; y’all c’n stay with him till all this blows over.”