After two weeks—we were into September now; someone had switched the plaque in the holder—Dice and Rainer and Gemini returned, early in the morning. The dogs preceded them, beastly white.

Gemini drove Pear’s maroon car, the car Queen had taken. The sight of it set my head ringing.

Dice and Rainer exited the truck. They beckoned for help unloading their boxes of Dumpstered produce, and I grabbed a basket and followed Sara toward them to pick out fruit for the chickens. If they asked me why, I would say I was trying to volunteer more for tasks. But I was just desperate to hear news of Queen.

Dice put his hand on Sara’s neck and pulled her against him, then released.

“Where is she?” Sara asked.

He shook his head. “We followed her to Marshall, then found just the car.”

Queen was fine. She was safe. I reminded myself that this was the best outcome—Queen alive and elsewhere, no longer available to tempt me into disloyalty. But I missed her.

That night, we circled the chairs for a story. Dice said that the permafrost in Siberia was melting and around graveyards the thawing corpses were infecting people with anthrax and smallpox. And once the permafrost melted all the way, whoosh, up into the air all that carbon would go, carbon equal in quantity to another industrial revolution. People kept finding animals in the permafrost, mastodons and steppe bison and cave lion cubs, ancient horses, rhinos, mammoths, their meat fresh enough to eat, their blood still liquid in their veins.

Something terrible was lurching out there in the dark, blundering its way closer. Dread, that was the feeling of haying time. Dice said, “Siberia will melt. The rain forests will burn down. The oceans will stop mixing. And the wars will start.”

The next afternoon, Dice caught up with us in the hayfields. One by one we stopped raking. Everyone smiled closed-lipped smiles. He told us to gather what was dry, then beckoned to me. I stepped forward, immediately nervous.

“Go find the sheep, Harmony.”

I dropped my rake. Here was a chance to prove myself.

“Rainer couldn’t find them,” he warned. He picked up my rake and began tightening the windrow. He knew exactly how to roll and lift the hay for the pitchfork. He made everything look easy.

“I’ll manage,” I said.

He nodded, and I headed off to the distant pastures. I’d been walking only a few minutes, scrambling over gulches to the sheep’s little coves, when I noticed the thunderhead, dark brown and sharp at the edges, mounting in the west. I hoped the others would save all the hay we’d cut. A wind thrashed the branches. I saw the lightning like spider legs stalking over the ridge.