“Jesse?” Reluctantly, Mira opened her eyes and saw Jesse on the ground beside her. She was no longer in the barn. Roman and his torture devices were gone, gone was Jeffrey’s bleeding body. Mira was outside on the grass. The air smelled like the height of summer, the sweet mix of alcohol and pollen. She breathed in the grass below her, the odor of her own sweat, almost choking on the smell of it. It’s over, she thought, relaxing for just a moment.

Mira’s shovel was only a few feet away. Somehow, she had ended up where she’d started. Maybe she had run back to this spot without realizing. It was not far and she could barely see anything in the dark. The Woodsman Plantation was behind her, the back door closed shut. The window, the one that earlier had beckoned her inside, was dark now. The entire house was dark. Empty and abandoned. Remembering the terror inside, what she’d seen, she backed away on the grass.

“What’s wrong?” Jesse kept asking her.

“The light was on,” Mira answered, keeping her gaze at the house. “I heard screaming and I—I ran inside, and I saw—”

“You saw what?”

“Did you hear it?” Mira asked instead. “What about Roman? Did you see him?”

“Roman? Mira, what are you talking about?” It took Jesse a couple of seconds to understand, but when he did, he turned solemn. “Tell me what you saw.”

“I saw what Roman did,” Mira said in a rush. “Oh, it’s horrible. All of it is so horrible. I also saw Lucy. They kept her in a cage. I saw one of the parties Roman had where he rented out the women to men of the area. Anyone who could pay. They wore these masks. Oh god, the masks. I know why the slaves tried to fight back, and I saw what happened to the ones Roman caught.”

Mira abruptly put the rest together. The graves were empty. Nothing had been there. The slaves had dug those holes for the white men’s fun, and those in the sacks were the ones who’d started the revolt. Roman hadn’t buried them, instead skinned their bodies and used the flesh as leather. The soft inner thighs and arms used for shoes. The knotted marks of the lash on their backs a decoration for wallets. The masks the men had worn—they’d been made from the slaves he’d wanted punish.

“Did you not see any of it?” Mira asked with a pleading.

“No, I didn’t.”

They sat there on the grass, both of them exhausted, their bodies hunched over, defeated. “You believe me though. Right? Someone has to believe me.”

“I believe you,” Jesse said, and relief washed over her.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Jesse helped her to stand. She wiped what dirt she could from her clothes, a futile effort but she did it anyway.