“He’s not a good person,” she said. But I knew that he was. I knew from the mountains and the animals and the fineness of the edge of his ideas, the tools he’d given us to live rightly as so few people could.

I said, “What will happen to him?”

“You’ll be fine.”

“But—what if they kill him?” I imagined rifle-armed men backing Dice into a corner.

“We’ll make a new home,” Queen said. “We can build a farm somewhere else, if you like. Just get the people we like. And we could read books, if we wanted. Have children, if we wanted.”

“No,” I said.

“It’s already done,” she said. She sighed. “The helicopters are going to come up any time.”

I left her. Down the ladder, down past the cows and horses and sheep. I saw a barn cat run, then stop, then raise its back, crest its fur, and skitter sideways into the dark. It was an omen of the end.

I moved by instinct, the way animals move. I didn’t rush to put on my pants and shirt and jacket. I looked back at the hulking barn, checking for Queen. The wind arrow turned in the moonlight, muddled by the holler’s confused currents. Then I knocked on Dice’s window. The glass made a harsh clatter under my fist. Tock! Tock! Dice’s light flickered on. He peered out the window and beckoned to me.

CHAPTER 30

“The police are coming,” I said. The world felt turned on its ear. “Queen called in helicopters. She means to get you arrested.”

He paced back and forth. I’d never seen him so agitated. If a sheep fidgeted like that, it was probably near death. “All right,” he said, in a terribly restrained voice.

He slid the bookshelf to the side. The songbooks teetered and fell. He knelt and removed a piece of the floorboard. From the shadow he pulled a black iron key. He handed it to me. I was momentarily afraid to take it from him. I wondered what punishment was coming for Queen.

“It’s for an old stable that once housed our goats,” he said. He said I could find my way if I jumped into the pig enclosure and went into the door behind them, or through the black trapdoor from the hayloft. The trapdoor was under the visitor’s mattress. “You need to get in there and clear it out,” he said.

“Clear what out?” I said. I was still prepared for a scolding.

“The bone room, the bone room!” Dice said impatiently. “Go set fire to the bone room. Destroy it.”

“Why?” I said.

“Don’t make me say it. You know why.”

“Set fire—how?” I said.

“Haven’t I taught you anything?”