I was at the tenant house, sitting by the fire pit outside, no one but Cass around. We’d been talking long into the night, and eventually, one by one, each of the other kids had gone inside, leaving just the two of us. It was a windy night, the clouds racing in gray blurs across the moon, all the stars fighting up there just to be seen. I was a little drunk, sipping red wine from a plastic cup. I still wasn’t very good at holding my liquor. Cass kept laughing at me.

“I feel scared,” I said. “Like maybe this is all too much for me.”

“It’s not, though,” said Cass, putting her hand on mine. “You have a kind, pure heart, Lee. You were given this gift for a reason: to help the world. You would never twist things to your own end.” She smiled her crooked-tooth smile at me, and my heart did a backflip in my chest. “You keep what’s best for the Farm, what’s best for the community, in mind. You’ll do what’s best for us—I know you will. I have faith in you.”

I have faith in you. Had anybody ever said something like that to me before? Not that I knew of. Not Mom, not Murphy, nobody. But how could I be worthy of another person’s faith?

Cass grabbed both of my hands and held them, her brown eyes flashing witchy at me in the firelight like she was casting a spell on me, like she was looking deep into my soul. I could feel my pulse throbbing, my heart beating out of my chest. Up above us the clouds whipped by, ghost ships in the sky.

“I believe in you,” she said, “because you are destined for this. We are destined for this together. It was written a long time ago. Time happens in a blink, all of it at once. A collision of things, the instant of everything. There are two worlds, the daylight and the darkness, and we are of the daylight.”

I watched the fireglow flicker across her face.

“Come inside,” she said. “I have the back room all to myself tonight.”

And I followed her into the darkened doorway of the tenant house.

Chapter 39

The next morning, Grandma and I talked over the plans for the coming months. I asked her what I was supposed to do at the Gathering to come, how I was supposed to grow a community, much less lead one.

“That’s part of why what we’re doing with Horace is so important,” she said. “It’s training for what you will do with entire crowds, with multitudes. Knowing what the crowd wants, precisely what words will break through to their hearts. Just by being in your presence they will be won over, they will come to believe in you, to believe in us. That is how our community will grow.”