Page 37 of Blood Hymn

"Then I finish anyway."

I climb out and find a place in the cedars where the ground rises and I can see both the gravel road behind us and the whole of the basin below. He cuts the padlock with bolt cutters, drags the welding leads down the slope from the truck, and disappears inside. A minute later the engine-driven welder on the truck bed coughs, catches, and settles into a steady rattling growl, and through the gatehouse's one small window a blue-white light begins to flicker and jump.

I put the rifle to my shoulder and look down into the bowl.

The cemetery lies in the low ground where the old channel used to run, perhaps two hundred yards across, ringed on three sides by slope and on the fourth by the church. From up here the graves look like teeth. Old ones, leaning, whitewashed tombs with iron fences around them, stone angels furred green with lichen, and in the middle the long flat stretch of newer plots where the ground is lowest. The church sits on the high side, the far rim of the bowl, white clapboard with a squat steeple, older and smaller than the kit-built one out on the highway. Harlowe Chapel. The family's own church, used for weddings and funerals and one night a year.

They're getting ready. I can see them even in the dusk. Men stacking wood in three enormous pyramids along the upper rim for the bonfires. Long folding tables being set up on the grass beside the church, somebody snapping white paper tablecloths over them and weighting the corners with rocks. A pickup backed down to the edge of the graves with hay bales in the bed. Tiny figures, moving the way people move when they've done a thing so many times they don't have to think about it.

One of them stands on the church steps with his hands in his pockets, watching the others work.

He's too far away to see his face. I don't need to. It's the way he stands, back on his heels, belly out, like a man who owns the ground under his feet and expects it to hold him up. I've watched him do it from the back of a church a hundred Sundays of my childhood.

Judah Harlowe.

I lay my cheek against the rifle stock and put the crosshairs on him. At this range, with this rifle, I couldn't hit him in a dream. I know that. I hold him there anyway for a long minute while the welder snarls behind me, and I breathe slow, and I imagine it.

Then I take the scope off him and let him be. Tomorrow.

The welder cuts out a little after seven. In the silence afterward my ears ring. Silas comes up the slope coiling the leads, and his coveralls are scorched at the cuffs, and he smells like hot metal and ozone. He doesn't have to tell me it's done. I can see it in the set of his shoulders.

"He can open it," he confirms. "He'll never close it. I welded the chain through the spokes and put a second bead across the gear teeth. It'd take a cutting torch and an hour, and nobody's going to be thinking about a torch."

"Can they see it?"

"Not in the dark, and not from the crank side. He'll feel it when he tries to turn the wheel back."

We leave the welding truck behind the cedars with the keys in it and go back down the far side of the ridge on foot, through the woods and then through water, the long way, the way he knows. By the time we reach the gauge house it's past nine, and full dark, and my legs are shaking with cold from the wade.

I turn my phone on for the first time since Wednesday. We agreed to it: five minutes a night, no more, in case Nellie needed us. It takes forever to find a signal out here, one bar that comes and goes. Then it buzzes three times in my hand.

All from the same number. The number I wrote on a napkin behind the Pecan House.

8:42. They came and got me and Lacey out of the retreat. Tyler Guidry and his brother. They said Brother Judah wants us for a special blessing tonight.

8:44. Ms Charlotte let them. She said what an honor.

8:51. We're in a truck. I don't know where. I hid my stepdaddy's old phone in my sock. Lacey's crying. I'm scared. Please.

Nothing after that. I call. It rings and rings and goes to a voicemail box that isn't set up. I call again. I text her: Where are you. Tell me anything you can see.

Nothing comes back.

I look up. Silas is standing in the doorway with the lantern in his hand, and he's already read it on my face.

"He's hedging," he mutters. "Charlotte told him you had the plan. He doesn't know what you'll do with it, so he's pulled two of them out of the building. Leverage. If something goes wrong tomorrow, he's still got two girls nobody else knows where to find."

"We have to go."

"Go where?"

"I don't care where. Anywhere. We have to⁠—"

"Evie." He sets the lantern on the shelf. "Where would they take them?"

I make myself think. I make myself stop shaking long enough to think.

"The barn's burned out," I work it through. "Marcus is gone. They wouldn't take them to a house. Too many people, too many phones." I look at him. "Front Street."