“Shh!” Rose hissed. “Come on, sweet. It’ll be good for you.”

Before she knew it, she was on her feet.

“Right,” Rose said from behind Lily, locking her elbows. “Like that. Straight back, squared shoulders. It would help if you had a little more meat on you, but this will do.”

“If they’d rather shoot, I really don’t mind just watching.”

“You know that worried feeling?” Rose responded straight into Lily’s ear—not a whisper, but not loud enough for anyone else. “That feeling in your gut all the time, no matter the quality or intention of your company, like your safety is a gift from the men around you, not a right?”

It was the first time a woman had ever spoken to Lily like that. As though the play they were all in allowed intermissions.

“This right here,” Rose said, patting the gun affectionately. “For a minute, this will make that feeling go away.”

—

LILY TOOK A STEP toward Silas and ran her finger along the slick wood of the rifle’s stock. Up until that moment with Rose all those years ago, Lily had spent her young life assuming that her fear was a defect. She thought if she could just be wanted right, by the right man, that she herself would be righted, and the fear would go away. But even the best man comes with the strength and stature to remind a woman that every time he doesn’t hurt her is a favor.

And Rose was right. Lily had never found anything else to relieve the pressure of inferiority quite like a gun.

—

“SURE,” SHE SAID, AND threw back the last of her drink. “Let’s do it.”

“Love that enthusiasm!” Silas said. “Now you just have to tell me where you hid the damn bullets.”

PEYOTE

TREY MADE A BIG deal out of the necessary preparations for memory retrieval, which he insisted Cal watch so she could learn “what it looked like to crush skulls, mindfully.” He didn’t seem to require my presence, however, so I took the chance to check up on my marks. Granted, it was only noon, but I always went to Mickey after a long day. The tread in her—the track she alone laid, again and again—I found to be the perfect size. I could slip into her life with the least turbulence.

There was no denying it: she was my favorite.

I found her in her bedroom. Clothes were strewn everywhere, abandoned like the nonbiological remnants of a catastrophe— human shapes stretched across bedspreads and crumpled, empty, in corners. The room was an explosion of color and synthetic bass beat, shower humidity, and vanilla perfume.

“Oh shit, I left my stuff out on the beach,” Ruth said as she laid a magazine open on the bed.

“Don’t worry about it; we can get it later.”