“You never told me.” I was breathing heavily, concerned she’d vanish before I got all my answers. “Do you think they’ll manage to kick us off the land?”

“They won’t have to,” Queen said. I shook my head, confused. “Listen,” she said. “I’m here to save you. I’ve been out there long enough to realize that this community is really messed up. Dice lets people die from negligence. Cassie. Where’s Pear? She wasn’t at the singing.”

I didn’t answer that. Rainer too, I thought. Osha and Cuke. I shook my head. “Queen,” I said. I thought about our jelly jars of napalm. “Things have changed since you left.”

She peered into my eyes, puzzled. “Speak up,” she said.

I spoke slowly. “We have been preparing for a war.”

She sighed. She gave me a hug—the line on her neck crushed against my face. She was a big girl, I’d forgotten, or maybe I’d shrunk. In low tones, she said, “The police are coming up.”

My mind was stuck on police.

“I want Dice to come to justice,” she said. “He’s killed people. I showed them where we are on the map. The rangers will find us with helicopters. They will arrest Dice.”

I shook my head. What about how saying things makes them true? “Dice told me that you ran over your mother,” I said. All along, I’d thought Queen was the honest one. But I wanted to push her, to catch her in something. I had a feeling Dice was right. She’d denied it before she left, but I’d wondered. “Did you kill your mother?”

“What difference does it make?” she said.

“Tell me,” I said. I had that same feeling as when I’d held the knife to Rainer’s neck, when I’d talked to Annie about pills. A feeling of power. A feeling of being Dice.

“I was on drugs,” she said. “But yes. I hit her with the car. I didn’t mean to.” She shook her head. She’d told me Dice had worked miracles—he’d gotten her off drugs. I looked at her round face, her dark line tattoo, and wondered whether the faithful Queen was still there somewhere, waiting to be called.

“He didn’t abandon you,” I said. “So why would you abandon him?” I imagined the helicopter landing in our kitchen garden, crushing all our winter seedlings. Heavy-booted men breaking down the long house door, finding our narrow father in his iron bed. I felt white-hot panic. “Aren’t we doing the right thing for the Earth?” This was indisputable. Get relativity, stability is an illusion, there’s no such thing as the definite self—in the Ash Family, we shared everything, we were all complicit, or all innocent.