Soon Queen came to work beside me. I admired how quickly she lit the woodstove. She cored apples, filled them with butter, and baked them till they collapsed, red skins turned leathery gold. I liked her again.

“Changing weather,” Queen said, nodding at the sun on the sleet. “Sometimes here there’s a double rainbow, and there’s a third rainbow and a fourth rainbow, always in the same place if you know where to look, around the sun.”

“That can’t be true,” I said.

“I promise. I’ll show you,” she said. “Did you know Dice can change the weather with his mind?”

“Sure,” I said. Queen seemed naïve, but I couldn’t make sense of that: she’d tried out more lives than I had. “Later,” I said, “will you tell me more about your life before you got here?”

She looked surprised. She smiled at me, stroking her vertical tattoo. I wondered if it felt different from her other skin. “We’re not supposed to talk too much about the fake world,” she said.

“Does everyone always follow the rules?” I said.

She gave me a long, probing look. “Don’t mess with me, Harmony,” she said.

“I’m not!” I said. And she surprised me by bestowing upon me a glorious sunbeam of a smile. That moment set the pattern for what would become the center of our friendship: we recognized in each other the person who might lead us astray.

Breakfast was quiet. We knew our brothers and sisters were planning a hunger strike, sitting on the cold ashy mountaintop all chained together, in frost, in sleet. I turned at little sounds, like that wind arrow caught in the holler bluster. No, it was just the dogs on the porch; no, it was just the pine branch scraping at the window; no, it was just the wind.

Queen milked. I collected eggs. We fed the pigs. “Did you know these pigs are guarding something?” Queen said.

I shook my head.

“See that door behind them?” There was a door in the back wall of their stall—I hadn’t noticed it.

“There’s a room back there. That’s where Dice buries departed friends,” Queen said. “I mean, his faithful dogs, the good rams.”

“Oh,” I said. “For a moment, I almost thought you meant people.”

She laughed. “You don’t think dogs and sheep are as worthwhile as people?”

I shook my head uncertainly. “Have you been in there?”

“No,” Queen said. “It’s locked.” She snaked her arm around me. “Last year, when the room got full, we milled up some old bones and used them in the garden, for phosphorus. He’s thoughtful about everything,” she said. “I like thinking that nothing gets forgotten.”

* * *