Sara reappeared and handed me a tin cup of hot milk and honey. She sat with me on the mattress, which, under the stains, was lustrous with blue jacquard roses. The mattress half lay over a shut black trapdoor. “Where does that little door go?” I asked Sara. “To a stable?”

“It’s locked,” she said, as though that was an answer.

We could hear someone ringing the big bell in front of the long house. “Breakfast,” Sara said, and we descended. We lined up in the meeting room. I was last. Someone near me smelled like artificial butter. Someone else like freshly sharpened Ticonderoga pencils. Like new plastic bags. Like molasses. The smells came from clefts, places where the body folded. You could smell people across the room. I wanted a smell, too.

The family members prepared quickly for breakfast, a long centipede row of arms tidying, arranging, setting. I was still trying to guess the right ways to help. The mood in the room was excited—everyone talked quickly. About pipes? About chains? About mountains? Through the window I watched three men haul roadkill deer back to the house, pulling them over the gravel as though they didn’t know about wheels and carts.

Two other men with shaved heads unlidded large portions of sheep cheese, quinoa, late pawpaws with chestnuts, salted sheep’s ribs, and candy roaster squash pies with deer tallow scraped from hides. I tried to select vegetarian items, though I didn’t know if I even was a vegetarian anymore. I would learn that our food was mostly preserved or Dumpstered or foraged.

Bay was there, joking and smiling and expounding on something, but Dice wasn’t. I noticed one woman with a frightening tattoo, a straight line that fell from her chin down her neck and past the collar of her shirt. I averted my eyes. I sat between Gemini and Sara. They both called me Harmony and smiled strong happy smiles with their lips, no teeth. I would find out later that teeth-smiling scares sheep.

I listened to Bay. “You wrap a chain around your wrist,” he was saying, “and a chain around your neighbor’s wrist.” He gestured with a bitten-down bone. “You put your arms into a pipe and lock the chains together. So the police are helpless. They can’t reach the carabiner and they can’t cut through the pipe because then they might slice through your wrists.”

I remembered the PVC pipe in the barn—thousands of pieces. I met Bay’s eyes and smiled. He seemed not to see me. I sat there, stupidly blushing. Well, couples weren’t allowed, but he’d kissed me. If he didn’t want to be kind to me in public, then I would pretend it didn’t matter.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Gemini.