• Maynard Griner, 35, an outlaw

• Michaela Morgan nee Coates, 26, National Reporter, NewsAmerica

• Kinsman Brightleaf (Scott David Winstead Jr.), 60, Pastor-General, the Bright Ones

• A common fox, between 4 and 6 years of age

SLEEPING BEAUTIES

The moth makes Evie laugh. It lands on her bare forearm and she brushes her index finger lightly across the brown and gray waves that color its wings. “Hello, gorgeous,” she tells the moth. It lifts away. Upward, upward, and upward the moth goes, and is swallowed by a slice of the sun tangled amid the glossy green leaves twenty feet above Evie’s place among the roots on the ground.

A coppery red rope leaks from a black socket at the center of the trunk and twists between plates of bark. Evie doesn’t trust the snake, obviously. She’s had trouble with him before.

Her moth and ten thousand others surge from the treetop in a crackling, dun-colored cloud. The swarm rolls across the sky in the direction of the sickly second-growth pines on the other side of the meadow. She rises to follow. Stalks crunch under her steps and the waist-high grass scrapes her bare skin. As she approaches the sad, mostly logged-over wood, she detects the first chemical smells—ammonia, benzene, petroleum, so many others, ten thousand nicks on a single patch of flesh—and relinquishes the hope she had not realized she harbored.

Webs spill from her footprints and sparkle in the morning light.

PART ONE

THE AULD TRIANGLE

In the female prison

There are seventy women

I wish it was with them that I did dwell,

Then that old triangle

Could jingle jangle

Along the banks of the Royal Canal.

—Brendan Behan

CHAPTER 1

1

Ree asked Jeanette if she ever watched the square of light from the window. Jeanette said she didn’t. Ree was in the top bunk, Jeanette in the bottom. They were both waiting for the cells to unlock for breakfast. It was another morning.

It seemed that Jeanette’s cellmate had made a study of the square. Ree explained that the square started on the wall opposite the window, slid down, down, down, then slopped over the surface of their desk, and finally made it out onto the floor. As Jeanette could now see, it was right there in the middle of the floor, bright as anything.

“Ree,” Jeanette said. “I just can’t be bothered with a square of light.”

“I say you can’t not be bothered by a square of light!” Ree made the honking noise that was how she expressed amusement.

Jeanette said, “Okay. Whatever the fuck that means,” and her cellmate just honked some more.

Ree was okay, but she was like a toddler, how silence made her anxious. Ree was in for credit fraud, forgery, and drug possession with intent to sell. She hadn’t been much good at any of them, which had brought her here.

Jeanette was in for manslaughter; on a winter night in 2005 she had stabbed her husband, Damian, in the groin with a clutch head screwdriver and because he was high he’d just sat in an armchair and let himself bleed to death. She had been high, too, of course.