“Cover me,” I say.
Granddad pauses, but Dahy tugs at the sheet and puts it in motion. Granddad’s hesitancy could cost me.
Once the sheet is over me, they start adding the wood and moss that I gathered from the forest this morning. Never mind digging my own grave: I prepared the coffin, too.
The footsteps draw near.
“We need to get to Carrick immediately,” Granddad says quietly, and I agree silently.
I hear the crunching of boots on soil.
“Cornelius,” Mary May says suddenly, and my heart pounds. Everything about her terrifies me, a woman so heartless she reported her entire family to the Guild for immoral practices in their family business, in retaliation for her sister stealing her boyfriend. She has always been present for the searches of the farmhouse, but now it seems she has returned with an army. Or at least twelve others.
“Mary May,” Granddad says gruffly. “Siren run out of batteries today?”
Another stick lands on top of me, hard. Thrown into the pit casually to throw her off the scent, no doubt. It lands right on my stomach and I fight the urge to groan and move.
Mary May doesn’t do banter, or humor, or conversation. What she says goes. “What’s that?”
“A food pit,” Granddad says.
The two of them are standing over me, on my left-hand side. I feel logs land on me from the other side, which means Dahy is still here.
“Which is?”
“Have you never heard of a food pit? I thought a country girl from the yellow meadows like you would know all about it.”
“No. I don’t.” Her words are clipped. She doesn’t like that he knows where she’s from. Granddad enjoys doing that, putting her off, showing her he knows things about her. It’s subtle, and it’s jolly in tone, but the undertones are threatening.
“Well, I dig a hole, put a sheet on the base. Cover it with logs. Light them. Then when it’s smoldering, I add the food and cover it with soil. Twenty-four hours later the food is cooked in the ground it grew from. Absolutely delicious. No food like it. Learned it from my pops, who learned it from his.”
“That’s a coincidence,” Mary May says. “Digging a hole just before we arrive. You wouldn’t be hiding anything in there, would you?”
“No coincidence when I wasn’t expecting you today. And it’s an annual ritual—ask anyone on the farm. Isn’t that right, Dahy?” Another bunch of logs and moss land on my body.
Ow.
“That’s right, boss,” Dahy says.
“You expect me to believe a Flawed?” The disgust at even being spoken to by one is clear in her voice.
There’s a long silence. I concentrate on my breathing. The sheet hasn’t been flattened on all sides, so air creeps in, but not enough. This hiding place was a ridiculous idea, but it was my ridiculous idea. I’m regretting it now. I could have taken my chances hiding in the forest—maybe Mary May could have gotten lost in there forever, too, the two of us hunting and hiding from each other for the rest of our lives.
I hear Mary May slowly walking around the pit; perhaps she can see my body shape, perhaps not. Perhaps she is about to pull it all off me and reveal me right now. I concentrate on my breathing, everything is too heavy on me, I wish they’d stop piling on the wood.
“That wood’s for burning, then?” she asks.
“Yes,” says Granddad.
“So set it on fire,” she says.
SIX
“WHAT?” SAYS GRANDDAD.
“You heard me.”
On top of me is the white sheet. Above it, firewood and moss. Suddenly, something shifts and the sheet, which has been rucked up, giving me space to breathe, collapses to my skin. I try to blow it away but I can’t move it. And now Mary May wants to set me on fire. She knows I’m here. I’m the mouse caught in the trap.
Granddad tries to talk her out of it. He wasn’t intending to light it quite yet. The food isn’t ready, it needs to be wrapped up. It will all take time. She tells him she has time. She tells Dahy to prepare the food, but she doesn’t care about the food: She is more intent on setting me alight. She tells Granddad to concentrate on the fire. She’s not asking him—she’s telling him. She knows there’s nobody on this farm to share the food other than a bunch of Flawed, and she has no respect for their plans.
It’s happening now.
I feel another bundle land on my legs. Granddad is taking his time, chatting, dillydallying, doing his old-man-persona trick.
“Put one there,” she says.
It lands on my chest.
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I close my eyes, try to return to the yacht. My eighteenth birthday, the chocolate fountain, the music, the breeze, the person I should be, not the person I am. I try to go far away, but I can’t disappear. I’m here and now. The logs are heavy on my body, the air is close.
Mary May wants him to hurry. If I’m discovered, then Granddad will be punished, too. I take deep breaths, not wanting my chest to visibly rise and fall beneath the sheet and logs.
“I have a lighter,” Mary May says.
Granddad laughs at that. A big hearty boom. “Well, that won’t do. My tools are in the barn. You stay here with Dahy, watch how he prepares the food. I’ll be back.”
It’s the way he says it. So untrustworthy, it’s obvious that he’s lying. He’s so clever. She thinks he’s trying to get away from her, that there’s something or someone in the barn that he needs to hide from her. He’s so insistent on her staying here with Dahy that, of course, her attention leaves the pit and she insists on going to the barn with him. Dahy can help me out of here, lift some of the wood off.
But of course she then contacts her fellow Whistleblowers and tells them to accompany Dahy, to help him gather all the Flawed workers and line them up at the cooking pit.
She’s going to burn me out for everyone to see.
SEVEN
AS SOON AS I hear their footsteps die away and their voices fade, I try to come up for air. Terrified it’s a trick and that Mary May will be standing beside me with a swarm of Whistleblowers, I fight my way out from under the sheet and timber. It’s more difficult than I thought; it’s heavy—Granddad has really piled on the wood.