I got it figured, Mama.

You best be safe, my girl.

For over five years, Arbuckle’s absence had remained sharp and deep. He’d left no note, no clue as to where he’d gone. The day he’d disappeared, when he hadn’t shown up for lessons like he was supposed to, she’d gone to his shack and knocked. She’d heard his father behind the door, but he didn’t open it. She stood there, aimless and plagued with grief. First her mother. Then Arbuckle. She’d been right to fear their loss all along and stumbled down the steps. It wasn’t until days later that she overheard the rest in Wilson’s store as she crouched next to the grain bin and filled her parcel.

His father gone and went mad, Wilson said. Took an axe to his own son, heard it from one end of the road to the other. Last anyone had seen Arbuckle had been running up into the hills with only the clothes on his back. Had Lady Mae seen or heard Arbuckle’s flight for herself, she would’ve gone running to him, begging him to take her, too. Seasons passed and he didn’t return; it was just as well, as the ashes that remained would’ve swallowed him up.

But earlier that day, alone at the depot, she had spent her required time reading the most recent arrival: Lessons on The Human Body and Its Health. It was a scientific book on human physiology, and though the title promised facts, Lady Mae knew there’d be more. The book itself was a message she’d have to piece together, something Arbuckle desperately would want her to know; and so she had settled in and tried her best to decode it.

The Deputies used to examine the packages—they told her as much, but they wouldn’t have read through the actual book at the border. They would have skimmed the title and shook it for contraband, waiting for a piece of paper to come loose and float to the ground like a feather. They’d inspect it hoping to find a reason to stake out after Arbuckle and do away with the last of his lineage once and for all. But Arbuckle was smart and knew Lady Mae would read intently and with purpose, so when her eyes fell upon a line at the bottom of the page toward the end of the book, she made sure to read it twice: the suffering of the patient begins at the sentence.

According to a study detailed in the chapter, it had been determined that the body reacted physiologically to any sentence given. Regardless if the criminal was sentenced to one or ten or twenty atonements, their bodies began to respond to the mere idea of it within seconds. Lady Mae read slowly, twisting her hair with her left hand, the depot silent and empty. The book said those studied became spellbound, obsessed with their sentence and convinced they could feel the hot sizzle of a branding iron long before appearing for their appointment. When she read that there was a plummeting in her stomach and a fire on her own skin; until that moment she hadn’t thought of the days or years leading up to the atonements. She hadn’t thought of anything. And when the patients arrived at the depot, she steeled herself like her mother had taught her.