I watched a sheep run from the stable, its wool alight. Then another and another. They couldn’t all get out. The fire roared like the ocean. Up went the chestnut planks, the sheep, the cows, the horses, the pigs, the chickens. I could hear the animals screaming and I still hear them.

The dogs barked and howled; so did the wolves and owls. All the predators, the woods themselves, were rising up in protest because they loved us, and the propellers were thudding, chock chock chock, I could hear them now.

I began to run toward the road. I sprinted down and down and down, fell and fell and fell. And over me flew two enormous blinking beasts, for a moment they were those ancient birds, their wing beats whipsawing the forest and sending the earth into the sky like the rapture’s answer to rain.

* * *

The sun hadn’t even started to rise when I collapsed onto the asphalt road. My white nightgown was scorched and filthy. Perhaps two hours had passed since Dice had handed me the key.

A white hatchback stopped. An old mountain woman rolled down her window, with her hair whitely falling to the base of her spine.

“Asheville?” I said.

“I can help you,” she said in a quavering antebellum voice. She had warts on the water lines of her eyes. “Are you a runaway from that cult?” The word was so unfamiliar to me I thought at first she’d said from that cold.

“It’s a family, a co-op,” I said. “A homestead.”

“Oh, my child.” She pointed at the sky with a trembling hand, a hand not fit for farmwork. In the moonlight, I could see the dull cloud of smoke.

I entered her car, which smelled like cleaning fluids, the kinds we didn’t have at the farm. “Can we stop at a pay phone?”

“A pay phone? I’ve got a cell.” The phone was as big and flat as an index card, with a spiderweb fracture, under which the display was as clear as water, with no pixels to be seen. I dialed Isaac. His number was rooted as deep in my head as my mother’s address. His phone rang through to his voicemail, his gently crackling voice. I left a message and then dialed again and he answered. Relief pumped into me like helium—I felt I was rising into the air. I told him there was a fire and the family had scattered. I didn’t explain much—the woman was listening. We would meet in a park. The woman drove in silence on the empty road. I didn’t wonder till later why I heard no helicopters or sirens.