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“Nelle!” Mangold called. “I saw the power go out, and I—”

She broke away from Cedar, and my father held up a hand to let her approach the bars. “I’m okay,” she said. “I promise.”

Perry paced, distraught, but said nothing. The Governor gave him a few strong pats on the shoulder, and Perry dropped back to wait near Len.

Nelle lowered her voice. “Perry and I are old friends, Mace. I know it’s not what we planned. Don’t do anything yet. I’ve agreed to fix the power and then I’ll work on coming home. It’ll be a few more days, but they’ll send word when you can meet me.”

The Bishop looked at my father as if he were an ant under a magnifying glass. “Handle this.”

“I think we’ve been more than cooperative,” the Governor said, “considering we’ve weathered your false accusations with good nature. Cedar, escort Nelle and Perry to the mansion. We’ll head to the station to assess things at daybreak. I think we’ve all had enough for one night.”

Mangold was looking at the candle in Nelle’s hands. “They have those in the City. How did it—”

“She brought it with her,” Nelle said, using her free hand to point to Syd.

Syd was standing a little ways apart from us. I could see the willpower it was taking not to demand answers about her father. She met Mangold’s glare. “The letter
M
,” she whispered.

“What?” I said, reaching for her. She shook me off and stepped forward to meet Mangold’s glare.

“Are you proud of yourself, Survivor?” Mangold asked. Troy started toward the gate, but Len held him fast.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Syd said.

“In there, enjoying the rich life while the rest of us starve. Cozying up to whoever you need to? Must be nice, is all.”

“Mace,” Nelle said.

“I hope you’re comfy in there,” Mangold said. “New Charitan whore.”

It was hard to say who hit who first. The Deacon rushed the gate, wild uppercuts connecting through the bars. Rocks and sticks followed back and forth. Mangold’s gun remained mercifully unfired, which revealed a bit about their ammunition situation.

The Governor had Len and Troy by the arms, trying to keep them from joining the fracas.

Syd stood, unflinching.

She was still standing there when my father ordered the gate guards to accompany Nelle, Perry, Len, and me back to the house. Troy, too, though he was the last holdout, trying to get Syd to talk to him. She pushed him away gently, her eyes never leaving the gate.

I watched her until the dark of distance overtook the scene. Syd, barefoot in her party dress, gently pulling the Deacon up from the ground, ducking her neck under his arm, and limping the long road home.

The Bishop and the Governor argued as they led the procession back to the house. The Bishop’s voice was low and firm, and at one point he pushed a finger into my father’s chest and said, “This is why you were chosen. Do it.”

I felt an exhausted sort of pity for my father, the man beneath the Governor mask. While I wasn’t sure if I liked or even respected him, I did love him. I could remember a time when we were just a family, a group of people doing our best to be happy, a time when he was just a young man trying to please his own father.

Now with all four of his children under bodyguard, and the Bishop, his political sidekick, pulling rank, the Governor had to get things back on the rails and fast. Which meant Len and I had to do our part.

“Everyone into the office,” the Governor said, as we all shuffled into the foyer. Cedar flipped up his coat to remind us about the Taser. Len let his shoulders sag and he lifted his chin for me to lead us through the chaos. I stole one last look toward the door and the darkened world beyond.

Troy gave a feeble plea in our defense. “Father, they’re tired. They had services. You can’t make them regurgitate visions like this.”

“Silence.” The Governor whispered in the ear of Troy’s escort, and the pair veered left into the bedroom wing, where Troy was no doubt reminded not to interfere. I wasn’t sure who to be angry at—the Governor, for his bullying display of power, or Syd, for the dominoes she’d brazenly set in motion: the power outage, the party.

It had been a few months since the Governor had forced us into a vision. I wasn’t sure if we could tell him anything useful about Nelle, but he wasn’t always in it for the information. Sometimes he just wanted to reassure himself, or someone else, of the sort of power he had—or rather had access to. He wasn’t pleasant or patient, and he insisted on pageantry.

In keeping, my father’s office was really more of a secret lair. It had no formal entrance, instead accessible from a hidden passageway in the library. Everyone jumbled up in the hallway so that Len and I could enter first. Cedar pushed the worn copy of Joyce’s
Ulysses
toward the wall and the shelf slid open. My mother was already waiting on a couch in the sitting area. Without exchanging greetings, Len and I stepped behind our respective screens to change back into our robes. The office wasn’t a holy place, but my father felt costumes loaned a modicum of authenticity to his forced proceedings.

Len and I had been here many times before, trying to explain that the Spirit’s blessing of Foresight couldn’t be turned off and on like a faucet. Len had taken to bolting when he was younger, but now escape was met with the use of Cedar’s slick black Taser. Somewhere along the line my father had become a weak version of his former self, hiding behind bodyguards and handshakes and living in fear of his own shadow. Or maybe just the Bishop’s shadow. I hadn’t put it together until I’d seen them walking: My father was no governor, only a puppet. And the strings stretched to us, as well.

Through a space in the screen, I watched the Governor loosen his tie, a frenetic glaze over his eyes. Cedar escorted a newly uncooperative Nelle to a chair, sat her down, and zip-tied her hands behind her.

I hadn’t had the chance to study Nelle that closely before. Her dark eyes shone with defiant tears, though she still sat straight and composed. “Please,” she was saying. “I just want to rest. Lock me in a room, okay? Whatever this is, I don’t want to see it. Are you listening to me?”

The Governor snapped his fingers. “Casandra, Len.”

I smoothed my robe and walked out to meet Len in front of the fireplace. His face was ashen. “You know before,” he whispered, “at the party?”

I nodded.

“I drank a flask. And there was beer.”

I nodded again. I was on my own.

Thankfully, my father missed the exchange. His back was turned, distracted by a very animated Perry.

“Unbind her,” he was yelling. “She’s our equal, not one of your prisoners.” He pushed Cedar away and severed Nelle’s bindings with a pocketknife. Nelle positioned herself behind Perry, clutching his arm. My father threw his hands up, and signaled Cedar to close the door.

“Go ahead,” the Governor said. “Tell me what this woman is doing here.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. At best we needed a silent room. I didn’t have silence or Len’s assistance, and the day had been so long. Our visions were clearer when we were fresh, better still when we worked together, and even then, at times, they diverged. With Len half-drunk, he would have to pull off the acting job of his life. We ran through the rituals as well as we could, fumbling words and matches.

I hung my head and waited, as Len did the same. We’d made things up before when we hadn’t had a choice. Sometimes it was easier when my father asked about a certain topic, as he had about Nelle. Sometimes it made things even murkier. And sometimes—with both of us cold sober—nothing came at all, even after we’d waited.

This vision—the question of Nelle—slammed into me like a runaway stallion. New Charity was in flames. Vivid pools of blood lay in the streets. People in tatters, begging for help that wasn’t coming. I stood inside the vision, paralyzed. If I focused on staying still, sometimes I could limit what I saw. But this vision was too strong. The scene turned, and I struggled against waves of nausea. The wall around the town was crumbling and our house had been razed. I passed the lifeless bodies of my family one by one, Troy, then Len, the Governor, then Mama. Tess and Becky. Bill from the mercantile. The Bishop was standing in the doorway of the Sanctuary with a ball of lightning in his hands. Sheriff Jayne was on her knees. Huddled together in shining white stood Perry and Nelle.

I opened my eyes. “Get her out of here. Out of New Charity,” I gasped. I couldn’t keep ahold of myself, and I began to dry heave. “Now.”

Nelle met my gaze from the other side of the room, her expression pure terror.

Perry continued to object to the proceedings at hand. “Father, why don’t we just ask her what you want to know? Have a rational, adult discussion instead of this theater.”

My father ignored Perry. “No, no, no. That’s not it, Casandra. I want to know how we can use her. Len?”

“Listen to me,” I screamed. “Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

The Governor was losing his tenuous grasp on his temper, his face the color of boiled beets. “Enough with the hysterics. And that includes you, too, Perry.” He snapped his fingers at Cedar, who reached into a drawer for a hypodermic of tranquilizer, tilting it at me in warning.

Len lifted his head, and I caught his eye, shaking my head as slightly as I could. He said, “Cas is right. She doesn’t belong here.” I knew he was trying for intentional ambiguity, but if he’d seen what I had, he’d have known how dangerous pretending was.

The Governor had gotten up to pour himself a bourbon. He opened the door of the office and lifted the glass to my mother. “Beah, will you and Cedar show Ms. Harris to her room?”

My stomach dropped. I had stopped crying, but my screams were hoarse. “No, Nelle, get out of here. Now. Run.” She looked around, wild-eyed.

The Governor snapped his fingers again and Cedar was behind me instantly, holding my hands behind my back. I expected the needle, but the third snap—the one that would have given the body man the go-ahead to dose me—didn’t come. “Governor!” I screamed. “Please.”

He wouldn’t look at me, just at his glass, already empty. “We’ll try this again in the morning,” he said. “Len, I expect you’ll be sober by then.”

So he’d known all along. The Governor had become a great many distasteful things. But stupid wasn’t one of them. I turned my back to my father and mouthed for Len to go. I hoped if he could slip out during the ensuing chaos Perry was already spooling up, it was possible one of us might avoid being locked up all night.

“Nelle can fix the power,” Perry half screamed. Though the Governor’s face was implacable, he was listening. “She can relight the town. We can have another goodwill dinner. Manage the public’s reaction after tonight. Taking away the dance and then the Deacon getting injured, it’s too much. You need to reassert control.”

The Governor’s short attention span was already stretched. “I’ll think on it. Enough of this for tonight.”

“Don’t send Nelle away!” Perry said. “Promise me. It’s the least you can do!”

A hint of a grimace passed over my father’s mouth; old guilt over Perry’s exile, a taboo subject for decades, spilled out in the face of Perry’s desperation. The Governor nodded, and Perry mercifully fell silent.

“Everybody out,” my father said. “Except you, Casandra.”

“I’ve given you everything. What more must a father do for your cooperation?”

I eased myself into an armchair across from him. So unnerved from the waking nightmare of the vision, I started to laugh. The night had gone from unlikely to ludicrous to surreal.

The Governor set a glass of bourbon down in front of me. “Get a grip, young lady.”

I took a big slug, prepared and relishing the burn. I sucked some air between my teeth. If I’d had an extra ceremony match I could’ve lit the air on fire. Either because of exhaustion or hunger, the liquor hit me hard and fast. “You think you’ve given me everything?”

“As I said, tell me what else you need.”

“How about my childhood back? Or my future? I’m not sure I want this, this gift, anymore. The only person this Foresight has been a gift to is you, and only so you can show off. I want to be my own person, not just a Willis.” It sounded strange coming from my mouth, when what I’d wanted for so long was for Len to stop wanting to be his own person. But I’d finally caught up. I wanted to be more than I was. More than an Acolyte. I wanted to be a leader, not a symbol, to make change, instead of forecasting the future. The kind of community we’d had at the party, I wanted it back. For good.