Nate had not slept again after Eli Rathbone’s visit. The night had stretched out like taffy, seconds becoming minutes becoming hours. An eternity trapped under the covers with his dad zonked out a few feet away. He felt no safety in his father’s presence. His dad wasn’t strong or especially smart. If Nate had gone with Eli—or if Eli had come into the bunkhouse and taken him by force—Nate couldn’t picture his father doing much more than crying out in horror. He didn’t picture him tackling Eli in order to rescue him. Sure, his father would search for Nate once he was gone, and he’d be weeping sorrowfully and hunting harder than anyone else. But he wouldn’t have done anything when it really mattered.
This was why Nate hadn’t bothered to tell his father about Eli’s visit. His dad wouldn’t believe him. He’d say Nate dreamed it all. And who knows? Maybe he had. When Nate inspected the bunkhouse that morning, he found no trace of Eli’s presence: no footprints in the dirt, not even the smudge of his nose on the plastic window. Nate desperately wished he had dreamed it. But the memory was full of too many perfect details—Eli’s bone-white hair, the flies with gas mask faces—to believe he’d imagined it.
He bumped into the burned woman just before noon. She was up to something in the glassworks. She emerged with her shirt dark with sweat. Nate was filling his canteen from the cistern. He had been digging marble pits out behind the dry goods shed. He used to have a sack of marbles, cat’s-eyes and oilies and king cobs, but the sack had gone missing. Nate suspected Elton Redhill, but it was un-Christian to accuse anyone of theft. Nate made the pits anyway, stabbing the heel of his boot into the dirt until he’d made a groove, then scooping out dirt with his hands. The patch of earth behind the shed looked like some crazy old coot had been digging for buried treasure without a map.
“How are you?” the woman asked.
Nate shrugged. His father had told him not to talk to the outsiders. Their thoughts were almost certainly impure.
The woman filled a cup from the cistern and drank. “Thirsty work,” she said.
She somehow reminded him of his mother, even though she did not look like her. It was just Nate’s loneliness that made her seem that way. When she smiled, the scarred skin down her face and neck stretched alarmingly, as if it might tear open. But Nate remembered hearing that scar tissue was actually stronger than normal skin, kind of like how cardboard is stronger than foolscap. It was skin that had been hurt and healed into something more durable than it had been—still, it looked pretty gross. Nate apologized inside his head for thinking that.
“I saw you doing something out behind the shed. I wasn’t spying,” she said a little too quickly, the way someone would if she really had been spying. “Qué pasa?”
“Pardon?”
“What are you doing back there?”
He shouldn’t be talking to her. But his father was cleaning up in the chapel and nobody was watching, and anyway, it would be rude to stand there like a lump.
“Digging marble pits.”
The woman’s eyebrows went up. “Oh? Marbles. What kinds do you have?”
Nate twisted the toe of his shoe into the dirt like he was crushing out a cigarette. “I used to have a sack. But I… I must have lost it.”
“Well, you’re not going to believe this, Nate—” She turned her head away, muttering something that sounded like a curse word. “Is that your name? Nate?”
Nate nodded.
“Lucky guess! You look like a Nate. I’ve been working on something that you just might like,” the woman said. “Why don’t I meet you back here?”
She returned a few minutes later. She reached into her pocket and pulled out six polished glass balls. Their insides were shot with blues and blacks and whites. They looked a lot like marbles but weren’t exactly.
“Will they do in a pinch?”
Nate took one from her palm and rolled it toward the nearest pit. It wasn’t perfectly round but close enough. They were more beautiful, more unique, than any marbles he had ever seen.
“They’re swell,” he said, picking the almost-marble up and handing it back to her.
“Keep them,” she said.
“Seriously?”
“I used the glass your father and everyone else paid for, right? They’re more yours than mine, when you think about it.”
“Yeah, but you made them.”
“It’s okay. They’re my bloopers, anyway. So take them.”
She pulled open Nate’s hip pocket and rolled them into it. They clinked against one another in a satisfying way. He could feel them in his pocket, six hard bulges against his thigh.
“Thank you.” It was the nicest thing anybody had done for him in a while.
“De nada.”
“Pardon?”
“No problem.”
The woman hung around while he shot marbles. It was nice to hold things that were his own. Back home, he’d had a few things. His bike, a shelf of books. But at Little Heaven, everyone owned everything and nothing—except the Reverend, who had permission from God to have his own special stuff. But for the rest of them, it was only their Bibles and a few personal items. Nate’s marbles had been about the only things that were his alone. Which was why they were stolen, probably. He would have to hide these new ones. There was no way he would be allowed to keep a gift from an outsider.
“You like it here?” the woman asked. She was looking somewhere else, as if it didn’t matter much to her what Nate said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s what God wants.”
She faced him. “And you feel… safe? I mean, I know you feel safe with God watching over you. That’s great. But here in Little Heaven?”
Nate nodded, but it took a while. “Sometimes I miss my old home. Miss my mom.”
“It’s natural to miss home,” she said.
“I think some of the other kids miss their homes, too.”
“Oh yeah?”
Nate swallowed. Was he actually going to talk about this to a total stranger? Sure, she gave him some marbles, but Nate and his father could get exiled for this sort of thing.
“I think… I don’t know. Just that everything feels a little weird lately. People aren’t acting like themselves.”
The woman nodded as if she understood. Maybe she did. She’d been here long enough to feel it.
“And then last night I think I saw Eli Rathbone, the kid who went missing, walking around with no shirt on in the middle of the night.”
Nate clamped his hand over his mouth. The words had spilled out crazily, without his even thinking about them. He realized just how badly he needed to tell someone, even if it was a woman he’d never met before and wasn’t sure he could trust. But maybe that was it—she was a stranger, so she would understand better than somebody who was stuck in the same monstrous machine.
She leaned forward, prompting him to speak. “What…?”
“He didn’t look too good,” said Nate. “He… uh, looked like he was almost dead. Or like he was dead, which is stupid. This one time my mom took me to the drive-in. We watched To Kill a Mockingbird. Mom gave me a dime for a Zero bar. Coming back from the concession stand, I saw the movie playing one screen over. It was called Premature Burial.” Nate shook his head. “I shouldn’t have watched it. There was this dead guy, all white and hungry, crawling out of a casket. Grave dust was puffing off his shoulders. I had nightmares for a week. Anyway, that’s kind of how…”
“How Eli looked?”
Nate swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Did you tell anyone about this?”