I was drunk and my head reeled backward. I reached out to touch him. He shook my hand impatiently off his face. He put two rough fingers into my mouth. Isaac had never done anything like that. Bay was certain of everything, like he could read my mind, and there was no space for shame. He held my legs down.

So this is what it’s like to be smoked, I thought. Or, more than that—this is what it’s like to be watered. I was a plant, a weed, and he was the rainstorm. How terrible when the rain won’t stop. When it begins to wash all the soil away. How helpless the weed and how terrible the rain, the big dark sky coming closer and closer until it shatters into drops. Why say stop? I lay like a thistle with its home dirt washed away, my roots out, nakeder than naked.

CHAPTER 17

I woke up with a headache. I could still taste the mead in my cheeks. I remembered the night before with a jolt of emotion; I couldn’t tell whether it was happiness or shame. The sun boiled on my eyelids, and when I finally opened my eyes the fields looked as insubstantial as air. My family lay scattered around the beetle-black spent bonfire, spread-eagled or curled up on the cow-cropped slopes. All the months I’d lived on the farm, we had never slept late like this.

The short shadows under the trees indicated that it was almost noon. Still, the animals weren’t braying—someone had milked them. I squinted, looking for Queen. I couldn’t see her, or Bay. I rose unsteadily, a whoosh in my ears as though all the liquid in me had plummeted to my feet. I walked up to the long house.

Dice stood on the porch. White light bounced off the painted wood all around him, blinding me. “Harmony,” he said. “We were just about to come find you.”

I didn’t worry I was in trouble because of what I had done with Bay. He’s like Dice’s hands, Queen had said. Instead I feared that Lindsay had come back, or sent someone to rescue me. I feared Pear and Queen had produced the antibiotics and blamed me.

Dice said nothing more. He held open the screen door to the dining room.

Sitting around the table were Bay, Sara, and Maybell, the one with teeth that were chipped into points.

“Harmony,” said Sara, “we’ve called you here because something terrible has happened.”

From her tone, which was grief-torn, my mind leapt to even worse possibilities. Maybe someone had died. I was standing up unstably and I noticed the strange grip of gravity on me, like I was a pin up on its sharp end.

“Queen has left us,” Sara continued.

“What do you mean?”