“An offering,” she says, laboriously dragging the poor guy. “We need to find Paige so we need an offering.”

“You’re creeping me out, Mom.” A waste of breath.

As if she knows better than to ask for my help, she heaves the man up against a fence pole. He slides back down in a heap.

I want to stop her, but when she gets a crazy project in her head, nothing on earth will stop her.

Night is starting to fall. The cloud of scorpions is getting farther away, and there’s not a single stray one in the sky.

The thought of wandering around the grove in the dark looking for my low-demon sister is not my idea of a good time. But she can’t be left roaming by herself, for all kinds of reasons. And it’ll be much better if I find her than if the frightened Resistance people find her.

So I leave my mother to do whatever she is doing and return to the shadows of the grove.

20

IT’S ALMOST full night by the time I get back to the carnage by the fence. There are people walking in a daze around the victims. Some are hunched over a fallen loved one, others are wandering about crying and looking terrified. A few are digging shallow graves.

My mother has finished her project, although she’s nowhere in sight. The man she dragged now sits on a stack of bodies with his arms stretched out over the fence like a terrified and terrifying scarecrow. She has tied him in place with bits of rope that she probably found on one of the guys who lassoed Paige.

His contorted, screaming lips are emphasized by ruby red lipstick. His button-down shirt is ripped open, exposing his nearly hairless chest. On it, a message written in lipstick says:

The creep factor of my mother’s project is pretty high. Everyone goes out of their way to walk far around it.

As I walk past the bodies, a man bends down to check for the pulse of a woman lying beside me.

“Listen,” I say. “These people might not be dead.”

“This one is.” He moves on to the next one.

“They may seem like they’re dead but they could just be paralyzed. That’s what the stingers do. They paralyze and make you seem dead in every way.”

“Yes, well, not having a heartbeat will do that to you, too.” He shakes his head, drops the wrist of the guy he was checking, and moves to the next victim.

I follow him while soldiers point their rifles up to the sky on the lookout for any signs of another attack. “But you might not be able to feel their heartbeats. I think it slows everything down. I think—”

“Are you a doctor?” he asks without pausing in his work.

“No, but—”