But contentment isn’t going to last, is it? Dead fish are washing up on the shores of three East Coast cities. I heard Vlad tell Tess the fish were the storm’s herald. I didn’t feel any pins and needles under my skin because of that comment. I don’t know if I should be relieved or worried.

I hope you’re doing well at the Gardners’ farm. Steve Ferryman is supposed to come by this week to show Simon—and me—plans for the new campus for the cassandra sangue. Steve says the girls are doing well, and the caretaker he hired for them is very intuitive about when to introduce something new and when to stay with the familiar.

I’m trying not to use the razor. Some days that’s easy to do. Other days it’s so hard. Maybe the younger girls will be able to escape the addiction. And if they can’t escape altogether, maybe cassandra sangue like you and me and Hope can find other ways to reveal some prophecies. I’m just not sure those other ways will veil our minds sufficiently, or if the euphoria that comes from cutting—and the likelihood of an early death because of it—is the cost of staying sane.

You always believed we could survive in the outside world. I’m doing everything I can to give at least some of us a chance of not only surviving but truly living.

Your friend,

Meg

It is not enough to say we should have food and water and timber and oil. It is time to say we will have the food and water and timber and oil to feed our children and build our cities and heat our homes and run the machines that make us greater than the creatures hiding in the so-called wild country. It is only wild because it has not felt the bite of the ax or the plow. It is only wild because we still cower from the phantasms that were the stuff of stories we heard as children. Abolish the phantasms and see the creatures for what they are—animals that have not yet been conquered. It is time to banish the stories of childhood. It is time to claim our true place in the world.

—Speech written by Nicholas Scratch, delivered at chapter meetings by HFL leaders throughout Thaisia

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 15

Moonsday, Juin 11

A few minutes after Meg opened the Liaison’s Office for morning deliveries, Steve Ferryman and Jerry Sledgeman drove into the Courtyard and up the access way, pulling into the employee parking lot. Alerted by Nathan’s howl and the Crowgard cawing a warning, Simon left Vlad to finish restocking HGR’s shelves so that they looked full when the Addirondak Wolves arrived that afternoon.