“Let me see your watch,” Bay said.

I held out my arm. He unbound the watch from my wrist and slipped it into his pocket. I liked the feathery feeling of his fingers on my arm. Then he pulled away from me. “Stay,” he said as he walked into the house. At first I thought he was talking to the dog.

I stood alone in the courtyard, under the shedding yellow tree. I could hear a whip-poor-will and the creaking trunks of trees. Across from the house, the L-shaped barn filled up my vision from end to end, dim against the glare of the sky so its detail only gradually appeared, a dusky bronze color with a tiny tower on one end, topped with a tin wind arrow, slowly turning. Between house and barn, there was a storage house on crooked slate stilts, with a triangle roof like a child’s drawing. Mountain slopes rose on two sides, holding the buildings like a folded palm: what I would come to know as the holler. It was all tidier than I’d imagined, and older. I’d expected tarped buses and pelt teepees leaning in the woods, but this was a quiet old-fashioned farm tucked into standard pastures.

The wind streamed down the slopes, eddying and rumpling in the longleaf pines and on the weather vane, so that it turned this way and that, not indicating anything.

* * *

Bay stood on the porch. I started when I noticed him there, a tall broad shadow, like a black bear—I’d heard there were many bears in these mountains. I wondered how long he’d been watching me.

“We’re ready for you,” he said. “Just remember, don’t tell anyone your fake-world name.” He led me across the threshold. I noticed the dirt on the floor. The walls were milky yellow. I followed him through a meeting room filled with chairs, and then into the dining room.

And here was the family, two dozen young people. They all wore dun sweaters or canvas jackets; they all had the same short sloppy haircut, the same broad hands, the same rawboned faces and vivid eyes. They seemed to be moving slowly, their gestures drifting through the air; they reminded me of astronauts who had to strap themselves down to rest in space.

“A sister!” Bay said. They looked up at him and smiled. Every face was beautiful.

“Who’s this?” a black-haired man said.

“Berie,” I said. Then I remembered I wasn’t supposed to say.

“She’s fake world, through and through,” Bay said. He laughed. My heart lurched and seemed to budge the splinter in my hand that I’d gotten yesterday, during our trip here. “Sit here,” he said to me. He turned to the others. “I found her by the bus stop. I thought she was Cassie for a second, didn’t you?”

“Who is that?” I said.

“Very curious,” said the black-haired man.