He said nothing more. Instead, he guided me toward the long house with his hand at the base of my spine. Even through my shirt, his fingers shocked me like the electric fence. We walked through the many bedrooms, all filled with dust-solid sunlight, and reached his room.

His room smelled a little like the yellow pine-needle soap Isaac used. But that was impossible; the family never used store supplies, fake perfumes. We made loamy white soap from animal fat. We washed to get rid of not the smell but the itchiness.

“Look,” Dice said. He scooted a wooden box toward me with his foot. There was a gray ball inside, shaking—a little screech owl. “Injured,” he said, “probably concussed by a car. His wing is broken, so he might not last. But we’re going to go buy him some nightcrawlers, and try.” The owl looked like a kitten, with fluffy gray ears and huge yellow staring eyes that looked goofy, he held them so wide. The owl’s feathers reminded me of the fine chevron pattern of hair down Queen’s spine.

I said, “Wouldn’t he be better off in the forest?”

“I feel a sense of responsibility,” Dice said, “because he’s an animal injured by a human.” Dice picked the owl up around his narrow shoulders. The owl looked back and forth, wary and resigned. Dice showed me how to feel the owl’s narrow ridge of breast, his downy sides, his regimented feathers. I held him and he was light as a bubble of glass.

“If he were a human injured by an animal,” Dice said, “well, you know what I think.” I knew. No fake-world treatments, no antibiotics, the most selfish and apocalyptic of human medicine. Dice watched me set the owl back in the box. “You want to care for Queen, but Queen doesn’t deserve so much attention,” Dice said. “She needs to work some things out on her own.”

My face warmed. He knew, I thought. He knew everything. Suddenly, I remembered my bruises from that first night. Again, I wondered what Dice would do to a family member who broke the rules. People die every second, Pear had said.

We took his truck. I sank into the front seat, holding the box with the little owl in my lap. Dice was so good at telling me what I wanted—to let my hand infect, to come to an action, to heal the owl—so I might come to a point where I wanted all kinds of things without knowing why and still feel perfectly free. Dice guided the truck to the mouth of the dirt road, and I braced myself for a few miles of jostling. It was my second time leaving the family land in eight months.

“Queen seems much better now,” I said, groping around to see if he was angry.