June, 1882
“I DREAMED THE SUN WAS OUT,” I MURMURED, PERCHING on the edge of Patricia’s cot. There were no windows in our room but we were allowed to roam once a day in the small patch of garden allotted for us to take the air, where we came into contact with no one but Sister Beatrice and, very occasionally, Sister Marguerite. Though, Marguerite had taken studious care to avoid us since our last conversation; her kindness did not extend beyond her fear of the Mother Superior. The rest of the nuns seemed to prefer keeping watch from a slight distance, rarely condescending to speak to us. It was after dawn and Sister Beatrice was due any second to escort us to the chapel.
Patricia lay on her right side, the only position she could comfortably manage these days; her belly was so bulky in contrast to her small frame it had become a struggle for her to walk during the last two months. Without opening her eyes, she murmured, “Good morning, Ruthie.”
Months ago we’d named the unborn baby Cole Montgomery Spicer, after his father, but referred to him almost exclusively as Junior. Or Monty, if I was trying to coax a smile from Patricia. He was past due, as best we figured with our less-than-scientific way of keeping track of passing time. Patricia felt from the first she was carrying a boy, undoubtedly conceived the evening of the last day she’d seen Cole, when they made love in the empty bunkhouse after his marriage proposal. I knew the intent of the nuns here at the Immaculate Heart of Mary was to separate Patricia and her child the moment the boy emerged from her womb. Of course I would die before letting that happen. Just how I would prevent this from happening plagued me on a nightly basis, ever-increasing now that his birth was imminent.
“He could use a little sunshine and so could you, Mama,” I said. Patricia wagged her head side to side but I insisted, “Come on. Sister Bitch-face will be here any minute. I’ll help you walk.”
And I earned the smile, however small, I’d been hoping for, using our nickname for the grim-faced, stubbornly silent woman who walked us without fail to our morning and evening prayers, and had since day one in this hellhole of a convent where we existed in only slightly better conditions than convicts.
Patricia wore a loose, bulky black dress, the only color the nuns allowed us to wear. All of the clothes we’d arrived with had been disposed of; to be fair, and I tried my best to be fair so I would not go entirely insane, the majority of the nuns treated us with a sort of bland apathy. Pity and slight revulsion at our sinful ways, sure, but no one was outright hostile; we’d not been physically abused. When we first arrived at the convent, just after Thanksgiving, when Patricia had no longer been able to hide her pregnancy from Dredd, the nuns were stricter, more uncompromising. They’d forced Patricia to kneel and pray almost without end, which she had endured even with her incapacitating morning sickness.
Posing as her lady’s maid, I’d knelt dutifully at her side, spreading my shawl beneath her knees to provide a layer between her and the stone floor of the small chapel, doing our best to help each other’s mental state from complete unraveling; when we did pray, it was always for Axton. Eventually the nuns grew accustomed to our presence, or at least learned to tolerate us, and the rigor of endless prayer decreased to twice daily, morning and evening. In what was surely a case of Stockholm Syndrome, in addition to the balm of advancing springtime, I’d even grown fond of the adjacent chapel where we were escorted to repent, a narrow, vine-covered stone building located away from the main structure of the convent, its own separate, peaceful place.
By this point in our friendship Patricia knew everything about me, and vice versa. Without television, radio, or cell phones, magazines, books, or board games, not so much as an ink pen, we’d spent the weeks and then months – hidden away far more effectively than we would have been in a maximum-security prison – talking, singing, and dancing. I’d taught her every song and dance move I could remember, and until growing too large and cumbersome, she danced every single one with me, including the Macarena, the Grapevine, and the Electric Slide. I told her about airplanes, cars, television, the Internet, and refrigeration. She entertained me with stories of her childhood, in turn teaching me how to waltz and dance the Mazurka.
She knew all about Landon, Flickertail Lake, and Shore Leave, Jalesville and The Spoke, and could have named each and every person in my family tree, including grandparents, nieces, nephews, and the entire Rawley and Spicer families. She knew my theory about souls remaining in family groups, and how I thought she and Tish shared a soul, as well as Marshall and Miles; the verdict was still out on whether Case was Axton or Cole. We talked to stave off the horror of what lay ahead, for both of us. We spoke nightly of our plan to escape this place, a small Catholic convent we assumed was somewhere in Illinois; it had taken us, along with our armed escorts, roughly half a night to reach it after leaving the Yancy estate in Chicago.
There seemed limited hope of making contact with the outside world; there was no paper trail, no hint of where we’d been taken, and even if Cole or Axton – we chose to believe he was still alive – dared to breach the security of the Yancys’ home, they would find zero trace of us. The past winter proved long and harsh, punctuated by endless blizzards. Oddly, Patricia and I remained together due to the efforts of none other than Dredd Yancy. He’d arranged for Patricia, whom he believed to be the victim of rape, to spend the duration of her pregnancy at the convent where his mother’s younger sister had once been sent to serve as a nun; later, while a resident, the poor girl grew ill and died. Once delivered, Patricia’s illegitimate child would “disappear” into an orphanage and Patricia, miraculously recovered from an unspecified ailment, would return to Chicago to reclaim her status as Mrs. Dredd Yancy.
Fallon’s words, spoken back in Howardsville, made more sense the longer I was acquainted with the younger Yancy brother. Dredd – slim and dark-haired, with a delicate, almost pretty, facial structure – wasn’t exactly useless, but he held no actual job and rarely ventured from the luxury of the family estate on Lake Michigan. The sprawling mansion was located just outside Chicago, which even in 1881 seemed to me like a huge and teeming city. Thomas Yancy maintained a second home in Boston, where he resided during the winter months, only returning to the lakefront estate to escape the broiling summer heat. As far as everyone knew, Fallon traveled extensively, both in the States and abroad, orchestrating the family’s business interests while Dredd was a compliant rule-follower.
We had further learned that even when Fallon was absent he was everywhere, at least as far as Dredd was concerned; Fallon’s orders were not to be questioned, let alone disobeyed.
Patricia and I were separated within an hour that night on the train, when we’d been forced to flee Howardsville along with Fallon; he recognized his blunder in allowing us the chance to speak privately. The train had slowed in the empty darkness, alerting us to danger as it ground to a halt. Peering out the single window in the sitting compartment we beheld nothing but featureless black night pressing against the windowpane. Patricia’s breathing grew shallow; I tried to comfort her even though my heart felt about thirty seconds from a full-blown attack. We heard boots clanging on the steel steps. Clutching each other’s hands we could do nothing but wait as bolts were unlocked from the outside and the heavy door swung open.
I was pulled from the train by a man who led me along the tracks to the passenger car directly behind the engine. I was dirty, reeking, and blood-smeared; my wrists were raw beneath the rope binding and hindered my ascent into what could only be Fallon’s personal chamber. He sat smoking a cigar, the scent of which brought Miles to mind and offered fleeting comfort. The red tip of the ember glowed as Fallon inhaled; his order emerged along with a lungful of smoke. “Leave her and go.”
I stood as far from him as the length of the room permitted. Behind me the door thumped shut, leaving us in smoky dimness. Fallon sat in a wingback chair with one ankle atop the opposite knee, shirt collar undone and sleeves rolled back. A bandage had been tied around his upper arm on the left side; I saw traces of blood. I hoped the wound beneath it hurt. I hoped he felt it with every breath. Try as I might to keep a neutral expression, hatred welled in my eyes. My knuckles became ridges of peaks as I fisted both hands. I’d never been so close to someone I despised so desperately. He’d killed countless people, including perhaps Axton.
“Tell me how you got here,” he said.
“Tell me the way back,” I whispered.
“How long have you been in the nineteenth century?” he continued, as though I hadn’t asked a question of my own. “How much did you tell that little whore of my brother’s?”
“I won’t tell you anything unless you promise to keep Patricia safe.” I squared my shoulders. I had everything to lose but it was no time for weakness.
Fallon moved so swiftly the muted cry barely cleared my lips. He fisted a hand around my hair, bending my head to an unnatural angle, and poised his cigar an inch from my right pupil. Ashes dusted my cheek. His eyes were so frightening, reflecting the red ember-point in twin bursts of burning color, I could almost believe he was less a human than the embodiment of a true monster, the one right behind you, the one hiding in your closet, keeping silent watch until it’s too late.
“You will tell me whatever I want to know or I will blind you. You think you’re at liberty to fuck with me, is that it?” He spoke softly but I knew he meant every word.
No. My lips moved but only a whimper emerged.
He released my hair and retreated one pace. My knees were so limp I folded straight to the carpet, listing sideways because my hands remained bound together. Fallon crouched beside my prone body and drew again on his cigar. He smiled as I struggled to one elbow, bending my knees toward my chest.
“Miles Rawley was a shitless coward. I knew him from boyhood, did you know?” His voice now conveyed a conversational tone. He flicked ash on my waist and resettled his forearms on his narrow thighs. “Dredd and I lived with the Rawleys after our mother’s death in 1864. I buried her alongside the hired hand she was fucking at the time. My father was away fighting the Rebels that summer. I figured he would have done the same, had he been home.”
I blinked, fighting off waves of intense panic, seeking anything in the vicinity I could use as a weapon – not that there was much. I spied a long iron poker, the sort Branch had used to poke at his cookfire, propped near a small brazier, but its current distance from me might as well have been a thousand miles. I would have been forced to belly-crawl at least a dozen feet to grasp it; Fallon would be on top of me long before I could get my hands around its iron length. He went on talking; despite everything, I had the odd sense he wanted to impress me.
“The first time I leaped it was utterly inadvertent, only a week into the future. It took me some time to realize when I was, of course. The why of it I did not attempt to understand, at least not back then. Over time I came to realize it was a gift, the universe’s way of acknowledging my superiority. It was 1869 and I was a month shy of sixteen. Father and Dredd and me, poor as shit, panning for ore in the miserable foothills behind us. And then one night I leaped over a week and discovered a thick silver vein had been unearthed in the foothills a few minutes’ ride from our shanty. I was allowed roughly four hours during that first leap, just enough time to ensure the location of the silver vein. When I returned to the past, the present as Father and Dredd knew it, I said I’d had a dream.
“Father demanded to know where I’d vanished to earlier in the afternoon, told me I’d scared him half to death. But wasn’t he surprised when my ‘dream’ proved fruitful. Eventually, once we began to accumulate wealth, I learned to better manage the explanations for my disappearances. To this day, Father and Dredd aren’t entirely aware of all the details. But I’ve made us unimaginably rich and so they don’t question. They allow me a wide berth.”
Momentarily abandoning thoughts of reaching the iron poker, I stared at his angular face as if transfixed – and in a way, I truly was. He was detailing for me the story of his abilities, studying the air a few feet above my head, witnessing things I could not begin to imagine. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized this outpouring of information, a confessional of sorts, would only be made before someone who would never live to tell another soul.
Keep him talking, I thought.
It took willpower to dredge up my voice. “Do you always…go forward?”
His head twitched as his eyes sought mine, reminding me of a snake. “My full potential is restrained because my leaps are arbitrary. I’ve tried for over a decade to manage them, all without success. Often I’m allowed only a few hours before being returned here, to what I perceive as my original timeline. Thus far I have only been allowed to leap into the future from a fixed point. Never the past.” He paused for a terrifying beat, holding my gaze. “Which brings me to you. The only thing keeping you alive is this fact. I want to know how you travel backward rather than forward.”
My next words must be chosen with extreme care; I debated lying but recognized the futility.
“I came here accidentally,” I whispered through a dry, rasping throat. “I don’t have…any control over it.”
“You’ve never been displaced prior?”
I shook my head.
“How did you know I was Franklin?”
“There was a text…saying Franklin didn’t exist.”
“Explain.”
“Someone texted my sister’s friend, Robbie Benson, with those words.”
Franklin leaned back to direct a huff of laughter at the ceiling. “How poetic. I saw your sister and her dirt-grubber husband at Benson’s funeral on my last leap.”
“Robbie’s dead?” I gaped at him, unable to restrain my shock. Oh dear God, what else had I missed? What had happened in my absence?
Fallon shrugged. “He saw me leap. I appeared in Christina’s bed-chamber and he was there, rooting through her things. I knew he was fucking that high-priced whore, along with a truckload of others including myself, but it wasn’t about that. He saw me.” He shrugged, reflectively. “It was almost the last thing he saw.”
I squeezed my thighs with both hands, seeking my center. I could not allow him to drag me down this dark, warped path. A dozen questions surged to existence in my head, swirling like laundry in a boiling kettle, sheets streaked with the bodily fluids of dozens of male customers…
Bile surged in my esophagus; I choked it back. “It was you in the barn that night.”
He cocked his head, again reptilian-like. “What do you mean?”
“In Case’s barn that night. It was you. You disappeared because the dogs were about to attack.”
He didn’t respond and in a flash I realized it hadn’t yet happened to him. He hadn’t yet been there.
“Your…leaps aren’t chronological?” I whispered. My jaws felt wooden but I was dying to pry answers from him. It’s probably how you will die, something in my head whispered.
“They are not. Derrick wouldn’t admit to it, but he set fire to that barn in hopes of scaring your sister away from Jalesville for good. Ron Turnbull wanted her dead, too smart for her own good he said, and I can’t say I wouldn’t have enjoyed hearing about a Spicer roasted like a hog in the hearth, but Derrick wouldn’t burn their home. I haven’t the same control over him as I do Dredd, you see. I am only a tentative figure in that timeline, despite my existence as Franklin.”
“Why Jalesville?”
“It’s simple, really. It’s where I first leaped from, my own personal lightning rod. I’m drawn to the land there and exercise a modicum of control over my leaps from that starting point. That’s the main reason for buying up the otherwise useless town. Very few people in the twenty-first century know of my abilities. Ron Turnbull, Derrick, and Derrick’s father, T.K. They’ve maintained a façade for me, an identity as T.K.s elder son, Franklin.” He took a moment to puff his cigar. “It’s quite fascinating that those I know in this time have counterparts in later centuries. The Yancys are my blood, of course. They keep my secret because I increase their wealth.” He smiled, exhaling a thin stream of bluish smoke. “And because I know things they couldn’t imagine. Take Miles Rawley’s damnable mother, for instance. Or rather her future counterpart, Faye Rawley.”
Ice water seemed to replace my internal organs.
“What…”
Fallon knew he’d struck a nerve, had flayed open every fucking nerve in my body. His smile widened. “In 2004 she suspected the power plant near her home of illegal waste dumping. T.K. Yancy owned the plant at that time and wasn’t complying with environmental regulations. It was a trifling thing, easily dealt with, but a local law-dog teamed up with her and the investigation got out of hand. Stirred up national media attention. T.K. was on track to end up in federal prison. This little shit town, everyone so proud of taking down a wealthy outsider whose business holdings trickled into their turf. The goddamn public loved Faye Rawley. She was a fucking folk hero.”
“What did…” I couldn’t bear to finish the question, pressing my folded hands as hard as I could against my heart.
“She was a dead woman, as far as I was concerned. I killed her the very next time I leaped to a timeframe before the investigation had happened. Small cars are no match for trailer-trucks, especially on highways. Problem solved, for a time. No threat of federal prison for T.K on my next leap to 2004, and Faye Rawley was buried beneath a tree in her backyard.”
Hot, vicious fury seared away any trace of logic. I lunged with no other thought than causing Fallon Yancy as much harm as I was able.
“You fucker, you fucking son of a bitch…”
He was in a crouch and ill-prepared to dodge. I crashed against his front side, taking him to the carpet, the cigar flying from his grasp. I scrabbled over his body, seizing what little advantage I could, gripping his hair with both hands. I would have bitten and torn free any part of him I could reach if he hadn’t jabbed a closed fist and connected with my solar plexus. Wheezing, gasping, I rolled to the side and he was on me at once, pinning me flat to the carpet. His face was red, teeth bared. My breath was too short to struggle; I smelled his sweat with each attempt at an inhalation, so scared of him my sense of reality zizzed in and out like a lightbulb in its dying flickers.
Focus, Ruthann!
The iron poker was now less than three feet from my right side.
He stretched one leg across my thighs and put his mouth against my ear. “I should kill you right here. I want to kill you. But I also want to fuck you.”
“I’ll rip off your…fucking testicles…”
“I will do whatever I want with you, you stubborn little bitch. You think you’re brave but you’re not. I know what you love. I know you loved Miles Rawley and that you love his family in the twenty-first century.” Confidence was so dense in Fallon’s voice it spread over my skin like syrup. Keeping me pinned, he promised, “And I will kill them all the next time I leap, I swear this to you, do you hear me?”
Rage burst through my blood, gurgling in my ear canals. It took only a slight shift to knee his balls with every ounce of strength I possessed; I was still wearing trousers and hit him so squarely he collapsed to the side, wheezing too hard to groan. Crying and gasping I scrambled across the floor like an injured beetle – my fingers closed around the solid hardness of the poker. Gripping it like a baseball bat I surged to my feet, remembering Blythe teaching Tish and me how to place a hit in order to best disable an attacker.
Fallon hunched on hands and knees and I swung for his head. He lifted an arm either in an attempt to shield his face or catch the weapon mid-swing and his forearm took the blow. He yelped like an animal – I heard a horrible, sickening crunch – but I swung again, determined to take him out, raising the poker above my head like an executioner’s axe. It whistled through the air and then, before my eyes, Fallon vanished. I fell forward with my enraged momentum and the poker gouged a big chunk from the plush carpet, instead.
Patricia and I sat together on our favorite bench, one of lichen-covered stone beneath an intricately-carved grape arbor. Even in the dark heart of winter we’d found time to sit on it, scraping aside snow and speculating what the garden would look like in warmer weather. The mid-morning June sun bloomed brightly over us for the first time in what seemed like years, dusting our eyelids with pale gold. Other than her bulging pregnancy, Patricia was so slim that she appeared waifish, as though every nutrient she absorbed went straight to the baby. Violet-gray shadows decorated the fragile skin beneath her eyes.
I told her, “You look beautiful.”
She shook her head. “Did I not ask you to cut the shit?”
In the span of months we’d been imprisoned together Patricia had adopted many of my expressions. I smiled at these words paired with her naturally formal tone and admitted, “You did, yes. But you really do look beautiful.”
And she did, I was not just attempting to keep her spirits up.
“Well, then I suppose I should thank you,” she whispered, but no sooner had she spoken than she uttered a soft groan. She grabbed my hand and directed it to the tiny foot or elbow pressing outward.
I thought of touching Celia’s belly in a similar fashion as I whispered, “Hi, Monty.”
Patricia murmured, “That’s your Aunt Ruthann, love.”
I wondered constantly about Miles’s son, praying multiple times a day that Celia had reached Grant and Birdie, and remained with them. Her baby would have been born over five months ago and I prayed just as often that he’d arrived in the world under Birdie’s care. What had Celia named him? Had Celia kept him, or trusted him to Birdie and returned to Howardsville? Not knowing was yet another sharp shovel carving holes in my soul. What if I never discovered the baby’s fate? It seemed as though Patricia and I had been prisoners at the convent for decades; at times, I felt certain we would die here.
Fear was a constant force at the back of my mind, strung like a sticky spider web; I’d forgotten a time when I was without its presence. Despite the fact that he’d not reappeared since the night in the train car when I’d tried to kill him, Fallon’s words trailed me like demons – he’d kill them all, he said of my family, and I did not doubt his capability to do just that – but were the words truth, or threats calculated to force my hand? And where the hell had he gone? Was Fallon in the twenty-first century even now, preying on them? My helplessness was infuriating; how could I hope to get a message to my sisters or the Rawleys, to any of them, when I remained trapped in both the convent and 1882? I couldn’t even get a message to anyone in this goddamn century.
And I thought, as I did in various versions every hour or so, Please hear me, Marshall. Aunt Jilly, Tish, please hear me. Please be careful. You have to recognize the danger. He’s more dangerous than anything I’ve ever known.
Of course I told no one other than Patricia what actually happened in Fallon’s train car that night, but according to Dredd his elder brother often left for weeks at a time, and always quite suddenly. Dredd was clueless regarding most of his family’s activities; fortunately for Patricia and me, he was also reasonable, soft-spoken, and kind. For a brief span of time last autumn, before Patricia realized her period was late, she and I lived in relative peace in our small corner of the Lake Michigan mansion; Dredd allowed us to remain in the same bedroom, only requesting Patricia dine with him in the evenings. I’d tried twice to escape the grounds but both times was escorted back inside by male servants, less kindly the second time, to our second-floor suite.
Mr. Yancy’s orders, ma’am, I was informed, underscoring yet again that Fallon’s directives were not to be disobeyed. And here, stashed away at the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Patricia and I were trapped even more completely than we’d been in Chicago. I joked that the nuns seemed to be expecting a full-scale assault, as their garden walls were constructed of stacked stones, easily six feet high and tipped with wrought-iron spikes. Even if the nuns weren’t lurking everywhere, insidious spies wearing wimples, Patricia was in no condition to be shimmying over walls and traversing the prairie on foot to reach the nearest city, especially not during the winter months.
Sister Marguerite, who appeared younger than the other nuns and wore a differently-styled wimple, had dared to speak with us a handful of occasions. Once she’d actually touched Patricia instead of shying away from her like the rest of the sisters; I wanted to tell them they weren’t in any jeopardy of getting pregnant by association. Marguerite had whispered, “May I?” and at Patricia’s nod, reverently rested her palms on the firm curve of Patricia’s belly. It was during our second conversation with Sister Marguerite we’d finally learned exactly where we were; Illinois, but only two miles east of the Iowa border, on the outskirts of a little town called Beaufort. Later that same night, Patricia had been wild with the knowledge we were so close to Iowa, where the Rawley and Spicer families both homesteaded.
“Cole could be only miles away,” she’d moaned, overcome with sobbing. “But he doesn’t know we’re here!”
“His parents intend to head west in the spring,” I’d reminded her. “Remember, Cole said that? And so did Una’s letters.”
I had tried my best to recall every line of Una Spicer’s letters, scouring for clues; I was certain the Spicers had been in Montana Territory by 1882. And then there was the letter written by Malcolm Carter which had once fallen from a Jalesville High yearbook and into my hands. In this letter, Cole was missing and Malcolm wrote of Miles’s death. They are yet unhealed at Miles’s passing Malcolm had written, referring to Miles’s parents sometime in May of this year, 1882. Had Grant taken Miles’s body home to Iowa? Was Malcolm Carter searching even now for Cole, while Cole searched for Patricia and me? And what of Axton? Lying in the narrow bed, huddled against Patricia’s warmth through the long winter, I found my thoughts often turning to Miles. I am yet unhealed, too. I know you loved me, Miles Rawley, and I will never forget that.
Patricia tipped her wan face to the June sunlight and whispered, “I’m so scared.”
Usually we only spoke of these things at night, in the dark of our tomblike little room.
As I had many times before, I vowed, “I won’t leave your side.”
“It’s soon, Ruthie, the baby is coming soon. I can feel it.” New desperation colored her voice.
“Are you having contractions?” I demanded in a whisper, half-rising from the bench.
“I have been since early this morning,” she confessed breathlessly, catching at my wrist, and my heart contracted. She closed her eyes, exhaling through her nose. “I didn’t want to say anything yet, but they’re getting stronger. Oh Jesus, Ruthie, they’ll take him from me.”
I cupped her belly, as much to keep my own fears in line as to alleviate hers. Only too well could I picture the nuns with their vulture-like black robes, crowded around the bed, hunched and ready to snatch the baby the second he emerged. I opened my mouth to respond when something drew our gazes abruptly to the left, in pure disbelief, as it was a sound neither of us had heard in a very long time. Other than creepy, beak-nosed Father Doherty, who preached on Sunday mornings, there was a decided lack of men at the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
But this voice was most certainly male.
Low and urgent, he called a second time, “Ruthie! Patricia!”
I froze. Then I blinked.
It was Axton.
He was alive. Alive and standing near the lilac border only twenty feet from us, wearing a gray wool jacket and a battered straw hat, carrying a hedge clipper. I thought maybe I was hallucinating – maybe I’d lost my mind at last. Patricia whimpered, every bit as disbelieving, her face suffused with shocked heat as she stared. She tried to stand but I caught her wrist, terrified she would run to him and ruin his cover.
Axton lifted one hand, indicating not to advance. I read the caution on his face as plainly as the extremity of his relief. He advanced casually closer, boots crunching over the crushed rock of the garden path; I couldn’t take my eyes from him, terrified he would disappear in the fashion of a mirage. Once he was no more than ten feet away, he whispered fervently, “Holy Christ, am I glad to see you two.”
“Axton,” I breathed, gripping the stone bench with one hand and Patricia’s wrist with the other, hanging on for dear life. It was all I could do to remain sitting when I wanted to tackle him and cover his familiar face with kisses.
“Listen,” he said, speaking quickly. “The nuns think I’m a gardener sent to replace their old one. I been sleeping in the little shed, yonder. I got in here two days ago but I haven’t been able to get close to you until now. Where do they keep you? What part of this place?”
I indicated by pointing. “We’re in a small chamber room at the back of the main building. North side, last door on the right. They lock us in and there are no windows.”
Axton declared, with quiet vehemence, “We’re getting you out of here, this evening when they take you to pray. Can you be ready?”
“How?” I demanded. “Who’s ‘we?’”
Axton looked hard into my eyes and I could sense his blazing desire to tell me something, but his self-control was extremely admirable. He only insisted, “Just be ready. This evening, at prayer, you hear me?” His gaze clung to Patricia, caressing and holding her just as his hands and arms would have; he vowed, “I’ll get you out of here, I swear to you.”
“Axton,” Patricia whispered, and at the sound of his name on her lips, determined fire burned anew in his eyes. She said as though caught in a dream, “You’re here.”
I repeated, “But how?”
There came the soft rise and fall of other voices, serene and female. Ax said only, “Be ready,” and then walked away, out toward the brick courtyard where Patricia and I weren’t allowed to venture.
“Did I just…did we just…” I pressed a hand to my thudding heart.
Patricia’s skin was mottled with a brilliant flush that suddenly, alarmingly, drained away. I was afraid she was about to faint and hooked my arms around her shoulders. Tears washed over her cheeks.
“It’s all right, it’s all right.” I cupped the back of her head. “Did you hear Axton? Did you see him? He’s alive!”
She clenched the material of my shawl and struggled to draw a full breath.
I repeated, “It’s all right. Shhh, honey, it’s all right.”
At last Patricia nodded, to my great relief, swiping at her running nose with her knuckles. She whispered, “We shall be ready.”
My heart was already ticking like a time bomb. I just prayed it wouldn’t go off before this evening and give us away.