I wanted her back, for selfish reasons. But I wasn’t sure if I wanted them to find her. If she was alive, I wasn’t sure what they would do to her. If she was dead . . . I didn’t want Queen to die out there, because she was maladapted for that environment or because—but surely Dice didn’t kill fugitives. If they never found her, at least I could imagine she’d found a life she liked. “I heard,” I said, testing, “that people who leave often die out there.”

Sunny gave me no sign. “The fake world is dangerous,” he said.

“Sunny,” I said, “what happened to Pear? I mean, after . . .” I didn’t want to say after I attacked her.

“You know.”

“Gathering herbs,” I said, “I heard.”

He was silent a long while. I worried I’d pushed too hard. I worried he wouldn’t respond at all. I kept reminding myself to stop caring so much about outcomes. Get relativity.

“She died, Harmony.”

I felt sweat prickle all my skin at once.

Sunny said, “She was bleeding in her head, we didn’t realize.” I imagined her in Dice’s room after the rebirth, gasping. “It was an accident, Harmony.” He stopped the wheelbarrow, took my shoulders, and turned me toward him. “Dice said it was an accident.”

I hadn’t intended to cry, but he spoke so softly that now I felt I had to. He reached out his arms to me. We embraced, and I was crying so hard I worried I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I was a weeping wound.

I’d meant to attack her, but I hadn’t meant to kill her. She could have been saved at the hospital, but I tried to forget that. Maybe she had known all along what would happen, but I tried to forget that too.

Gently, so gently I barely noticed, like when your arms wrap around you before you even notice that you’re cold, another thought came to my mind. I wondered if I’d been trapped. I imagined darting back to the road, leaping in front of a car, pinwheeling my arms, begging for a ride—but I couldn’t go. I’d killed someone in front of twenty-three witnesses. If I stayed with the family, then Pear’s death would always be an accident. Dice called it an accident, and so it would be true. I laughed once—“Ha!” Sunny turned to me as though he knew exactly why.

fall

CHAPTER 19

The cold blew in that night. We gathered on the porch in the crystalline early-fall morning. The little pool of water where the kitchen sink drained was so blue it looked like paint. Bay’s car was gone now, too—Bay’s car was gone, Pear’s car was gone, Dice’s truck was gone.