Pear rummaged ahead. Even though people didn’t talk much about their pasts—another rule, I reminded myself—I’d been learning in passing what lives people had led before the family. Gemini, the patrolman who handled the dogs, had worked in an industrial chicken slaughterhouse. Sara had been a runaway since high school. Pear had been a college student, like I could have been, and then she’d been a kindergarten teacher. “Found it,” she said, and I turned to see her lift a clay pot and blow the dust off its top.

“What’s that?” Queen said.

“A pot to hold the brew,” said Pear. She was smiling as though she’d forgotten its purpose. It was squat, with intricate black and red engravings.

“Is the brew safe?” Queen said.

“Gentler than anything out there,” Pear said. She waved her hand at the window, toward the fake world. Queen nodded. I didn’t believe it—there was no simple type of abortion, I thought.

We followed Pear back into the kitchen, where she began to gather dried herbs from the pantry. She disappeared into Dice’s room and returned with a velvet cushion, which she placed on a kitchen chair. “For you, my dear,” she said to Queen. I noticed the starbursts of shattered veins in Pear’s cheeks, just below the ruddy surface. She was old. Maybe sixty. The oldest in the family, by far. Queen sat on the cushion. She looked like she was waiting for a present. “Good girl,” Pear said.

She spooned pennyroyal and tansy into a glass canning jar, then covered them with boiling water. With her bread maker’s broad fingernail, she broke the wax seal on a little brown glass bottle of tincture, which, she said, was made of the dusky leaflets of blue cohosh, plucked from shady coves, and soaked in moonshine for a month in the dark.

While the tea steeped, Pear talked. She told Queen to ask for the spirit child’s permission to proceed. “And you have to finish it,” Pear said. “It’ll be another cup every six hours for a week.”

The tea smelled like a scorched and wetted forest, burnt and murky. Queen took a gulp, then paused.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Let’s sing something,” Pear said. I imagined her in the classroom, in the center of a ring of kindergartners. My heart went out to her, her clumsiness, her sympathy. “What’s your favorite song?”

We sang “Mutual Love,” and our voices sounded wan. But now I am a soldier, my captain’s gone before. He’s given me my orders, and bids me ne’er give o’er. Queen broke off halfway through.

“I’ll leave the cup for you,” Pear said, gathering her herbs. She looked us over. “I won’t tell Dice this time,” she said. “But if you keep refusing, I’ll have to, you know.”