“Is Dice mad?” I said to Pear, asking for Queen’s sake.

I’d never asked Dice what happened when a family member broke a rule. I wondered whether his displeasure was deterrent enough, so no punishment ever occurred. The rules were built for us, like a passive-solar house is built to stay cool in summer and warm in winter; we were oriented correctly, so it was not hard for us to function as the builder intended.

“You were helping the family,” Pear said. “Accidents happen. What matters more is what you do next.”

“You don’t think Queen should go to the doctor?” I said. I didn’t dare ask about health insurance. I doubted Dice even paid taxes.

“We can’t be numbered,” said Pear. Dice had explained that people are scarier when the size and structure of their cooperation is unknown: worse than a thousand at midday is a small group coming at you in the dark.

“So what would you do if someone got very sick?” I said.

“We cure ourselves,” said Pear. “Or if our time has come, we die.”

“Has anyone died?” I said.

“People die every second, Harmony,” Pear said. “Come on, now.”

We followed her into the second bedroom of the long house. Pear opened up a trapdoor in the thickly painted ceiling. From a top bunk, we hoisted ourselves through, me behind Pear and Queen behind me. I didn’t want to look back at Queen; I feared she would change her mind.

We searched the attic with flashlights. The unfamiliar space felt magical after months, and anticipated years, of the same few rooms. I found old cowbells, some as large as my head, as though made for prehistorically large animals. A butter churn from a century ago, a blue-painted horizontal wooden box that could be spun with a crank. Inside it still smelled sweetly of cream. Old skins, a collection of blue and speckled eggs. A broken primitive audio recording—a cylinder, curved black waxy shards, layered like a beetle shell. A bonnet filled with flies. Bearskin boots with pointed toes.

My mother would have loved this space. She loved all kinds of things, the gifts in her shop, the trinkets in my bedroom, the diamonds. She would have loved the bells and the butter churn. With so many old things sticking up from the floor or hanging from the ceiling, and our flashlights beaming through the motes, sweeping tidily past the cluttered walls, I felt momentarily weightless, as though the long house were barrel-rolling in deep space.