“We don’t have guns,” Mica said. “Those men do. A lot of guns. Just spread the word about the meeting,” she said to Blue Mohawk.

He nodded. It was only when he rose off his knees that I saw what was at his side, what he had reached for when the men came into the clearing: it was a knife, half as long as Starla.

11

The meeting was for everyone in the camp but us. We were banished to the truck to wait, led back to the spot by the man with the blue hair.

I should have felt relieved to be returning to my house and my things, but I didn’t. The men were out there. The women were missing. We had seemed far away from the main road, from other houses or camps—but the men from Skate State had found us. I could see smoke through the trees. Was it theirs?

Just before the fence, Blue Mohawk tapped the hood of the truck, sweeping off a pile of leaves. He said, “I have to get to the meeting. Can I trust you to wait here?”

“Of course,” Dance said.

“Someone will come for you afterward.”

He turned back. For a time, his blue fin stuck out, vibrant in the brown and white hills, then it, too, dipped from view. I thought of blue jays. What I wouldn’t give to see one now.

“Why don’t we just go,” Jamey said.

“They still have our keys,” I said.

Jamey looked flat and pale. Her eyeliner had smeared. There was a fresh scratch on her face, and her hair was straggling out of its mermaid tail. She had lost her friends. The men had come for her and taken away her friends instead, her sisters: the ones who had waited with her in the meat house. The ones who had braided her hair.

At least the tiny house was unlocked. I held open the door for Jamey, and she slumped inside onto the couch with Starla, and immediately opened up her shirt. The sudden vulnerability: her skin appearing. Starla ducked her little head to nurse. I closed the door.

Grayson sat on the truck hood, his hurt leg dangling like an anchor. “What do you think this meeting is about?”

“Us,” Dance said. “Whether we can stay.”

“Not going after the women?” I asked.

“The women are gone.”

“We don’t want to stay,” Grayson said.

“They’re not gonna let us, anyway,” Dance said. “We’re strangers. We brought strangers in.”

The world had changed so swiftly into something from Lobo’s worst paranoias: everyone suspicious, fearful and armed, and out for themselves. It was no wonder the Pumpkin King had been killed. And for what? For nothing.