She silently reads ahead the next few handwritten lines. “This is interesting,” she says. “Sick people at a compound in Ohio, knowing they were going to die, volunteered to test out theories of how to look at the creatures.”

“Wow,” Tom says. “That’s brave.”

“Totally. One man went mad watching videotape of the outside world.”

“Like Mom’s story.”

“Yep. One man went mad looking at photographs taken of the outside world. Another went mad looking at the negatives. What are negatives?”

“I don’t know,” Tom says.

“A terminal woman went mad walking the outside world with two prisms, former paperweights, held to her eyes.”

Olympia shudders. These Ohio stories describe a sad group of sick people in hospital gowns, wandering otherwise empty streets, willing to die for answers.

“Willing to die for progress,” Tom says. “Terminal or not, that’s noble.”

Olympia agrees.

“There are fifty pages of this kind of stuff.”

“And I wanna hear every one of them.”

“Are you—”

But before she can finish her question, Tom points a finger at her.

“Go on,” he says.

“A woman walked the streets of Branson, Missouri, wearing blinders, the type once used for horses, testing the idea that it’s the peripheral vision that drives one mad.”

“This isn’t going to end well.”

“Nope. She went mad and broke into a theater. Killed a family hiding out there.”

A crack of a stick outside, and both teens close their eyes. They do not speak; they hardly breathe. Both listen as far as they can.

Olympia thinks she knows what it is, but Tom says so first.

“A deer.”

They both open their eyes.

“Sane,” Olympia says.

Tom shrugs. “I would have to know for certain how a sane deer behaves first.”

“Could be a moose. Could be a lion.”

Tom opens his mouth to refute her, but Olympia smiles as he thinks it over. She flips through the pages.

“Locations,” she says. “Towns that are…”

But she goes quiet.

“Towns that are what?” Tom asks.

As Olympia begins to flip the page, he hurries across the cabin and sits beside her on the bed.

“Don’t skip over anything,” he says. “Come on.”

Olympia shows him.

“The cities are arranged by how ‘modern’ they are.”

“Modern?” Tom asks.

“I think they mean to say…how forward-thinking.”

She sees the lights turn on in her brother’s eyes, and she feels almost mean for having showed him. She suddenly wishes the man hadn’t come to the door at all.

“Are these places where people have tried capturing one?”

He’s excited now. Olympia makes to keep the pages from him, but to what end? She hands them over.