was worried about her brother. Drew was enough older than me that we’d barely ever lived in the same house, and I’d still be worried about him if he’d been in a car accident. “If I couldn’t, if I can’t, then Evie will be able to figure it out. He’s going to be okay.”
Elsie didn’t say anything.
The woods unrolled around us, dark and tangled and so crowded that they became featureless, a solid wall of black wood pressing in from all sides. I tensed every time we passed another road, waiting for the truck to make a second appearance. It never came. We were driving on a virtually deserted road, deep into the middle of nowhere, and while we might not be safe, we weren’t in active danger.
Artie stirred in his sleep, mumbling something that was almost, if not quite, a word. I stroked his forehead again, stealing glimpses of his tangled half-thoughts. Were they getting stronger, or was that just wishful thinking on my part? I wanted him to wake up so badly that I could be imagining signs of improvement.
We were moving too fast for me to have any good sense of the minds in the woods around us. I would have known if there’d been a large gathering of humans—campers are surprisingly psychically noisy—or anything like that, but the smaller, individual thoughts of the night were slipping through my mental fingers before I could really clamp down on them.
Then we turned a corner onto a half-concealed private road, and a new set of thoughts washed over me, strong and bright and terribly familiar, now that we were past the charms buried at the borderline.
My family.
Evie was there, as fierce and quick and eager to help as always. She was the best big sister I could have asked for, unjudgmental and constantly willing to take the time to make sure I understood what was going on. Her husband, Kevin, was with her, and while he had more of a core of worry than she did, he was still ready for us. There were two more minds in the house, both male, both unfamiliar enough that I couldn’t pick up anything more than the most superficial of impressions—I needed to meet them before I’d be able to get more than that without pushing. And I didn’t want to push. After the day I’d had so far, pushing seemed like a terrible idea.
“Almost there,” said Elsie, and she sped up, taking us around the curves of the long road to the front gate like she thought she was being timed. It would have felt unsafe if I hadn’t known that she’d done this hundreds of times over the years, speeding up a little more with every trip, sometimes while actually being timed.
The Oregon compound started out as Kevin’s idea. His mother, my Grandma Alice, hadn’t really been there when he’d been growing up; he and his sister, Aunt Jane, had both been raised by the Campbell Family Carnival, which was sort of like growing up with family, and sort of not at the same time. He’d been dreaming of real roots, a home he could design and defend, since he was a little boy. After he met Evie and realized it was time to settle down, he’d set about making his dreams a reality. A house, isolated from the nearest human communities, big enough to host not only his immediate family, but every other living relative and maybe a dozen extras. Outbuildings and barns and fences and floodlights. Everything your average small militia needs to feel like they’re not going to be crushed under the heel of “the Man,” only in this case the militia was more like a wildlife conservation convention, and “the Man” was the Covenant of St. George.
Elsie screeched to a stop at the front gate, which was towering, solid, and very locked. Annie hopped out of the car to enter the code. Elsie looked over her shoulder at me.
“Everything all right back there?” she asked. Is my brother alive? her thoughts asked.
When I was a kid, I couldn’t always tell the difference between the questions people asked out loud and wanted you to answer and the questions they thought so loudly that I couldn’t avoid overhearing them. There is a difference. Thoughts can be soft or loud, but they always sound exactly like the person they belong to. There’s no distortion, no getting drowned out by the sounds around them, no getting lost.