“ ‘The Culvers,’ ” she read.

The house wasn’t a trailer, in that it had a foundation that locked into the earth. But the shape was the same: a brick home without any brick. Paneling, meant to look like wood but warped and collapsed in places real wood never would be, wasn’t organic enough to rot. A screen drooped in its window.

“What do you want?” a man said from the doorway. I took him in, unwashed, uncombed, and bloodshot. Just our kind of guy.

“Mr. Culver?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Can we come inside? We got a message from you.”

This guy would be thanking us soon enough, full-on snot-in-the-beard-crying kind of thanking us, just like the rest of them. But for now, we were the same as people selling knives or cookies or God. Useless at best.

He nodded and stood aside.

It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. It was that red kind of darkness—like when the sun is so bright you have to close your eyes, but you can still see the burn. The kind of darkness that comes not from a lack of light but rather in rebellion against it. But the light bled in anyway, rushing through the cracks between the window frames and the pieces of cardboard held there with duct tape, seeping into the piles that cluttered the tattered couch and around the circular table. It was the same light that I had relished so deeply many times before, but now it felt like a predator, claws and tongues curling under the door.

Cal elbowed me as I rubbed my eyes.

“I know I haven’t memorized the whole book,” she whispered. “But this has to be breaking some kind of rule.”

I squinted in the gloom, my hand on my tablet. That’s when I saw the piles of clutter weren’t piles at all. They were people. The tiny living room was damn near bursting with men.

“All right, boys,” Culver said. “Let’s make ourselves a deal.”

SILAS

SILAS COULDN’T REMEMBER THE last time he saw Sean read anything besides the Internet, and certainly not for pleasure. But there he sat on the porch, watching the girls as they dashed for the water, an open book on his lap. Sean had always been a quiet kid, like Philip. But unlike a lot of the quiet ones, Sean was never much of a reader. He didn’t like escaping into other people’s prefabricated worlds, preferring to build his own. As a child, he spent countless hours sprawled on the floor of his bedroom, lining plastic soldiers along his bed frame, making war sounds with his mouth. One time, Silas opened Sean’s door and was met with a downpour of green men from a pillowcase rigged above his head.

“Guerrilla warfare,” Sean had said, grinning.