While they’re gone, I take a pair of shears out of the woodshed, and I walk out across the fields to the old war monument. I prune back the weeds, just like I promised I would, until the names of my country’s enemies are once again visible on the stone.
And as I prune…I worry. I worry that Dennis is right. That this has all come too easy.
I keep thinking about the instructional videos they made us watch in training. ‘Renegades Gone Wrong.’ Slide after slide of swollen, eyeless faces. Imploded flesh. The consequences of illegal experimentation in the divine. Perhaps we’re only kidding ourselves that there’s really something out here for us to find.
And then, on the way back to the farm, I almost trip over something that makes me change my mind.
There’s a hare in the grass, half-buried and bloodied. A barn owl has latched onto its back, its talons driving deep into the flesh of the hare. Both animals are dead. Familiar black stone veins protrude from the carcass of the victim, twisting like branches, driving upwards into the predator’s skin. Hare and owl are locked together, inseparably. The god must have struck just as the prey died. White crocus is flowering up from the two entwined bodies.
And suddenly I begin to feel deeply afraid. It all makes me think of a dormouse, dead in the dirt, its ribs showing. Of rabbits, teeth chattering, hungering from their cages.
I kick dust up over the corpses. Nudge them aside into the long grass so they can’t be seen from the path.
Paige doesn’t need to know about this, I tell myself.
There’s no sense in worrying her. Not yet.
— Chapter 26: My Song, My Sorrow and I.
