The Devil's Alphabet

before, Paxton.”

Right, the night his father baptized him. Rebaptized him. “I apologize,” Pax said. “I took an awful lot of vintage a while ago.”

“You were with the girls?” Her anger was clear. “Where? At your house? Tommy’s been looking all over for them.”

“They’re safe,” he said. “I found them in the woods outside Jo Lynn’s house. They ran away because Tommy was going to kidnap them.”

The reverend made a disgusted noise. “He’s not kidnapping them. Did the girls say that?”

“They don’t know what he’s doing. All they know is that Tommy’s going to-”

“This is not Tommy’s idea, Paxton. It’s something we all agreed to-Rhonda, Deke, and I. Rhonda called it genocide insurance.”

“Genocide? What are you talking about?”

She sighed. “We’re smuggling members of our clades out of Switchcreek, just in case the government tries to…” She made a vague gesture. “… take measures against us.”

“You think the army’s going to kill you all?”

“We all thought Rhonda was being paranoid when she raised the idea years ago. We never thought- I never thought-there’d be another quarantine, and even if there was, I didn’t think we’d be threatened with that. But after Deke was killed…” She exhaled heavily. “We can’t take the chance. We can’t let the government make us disappear. If something happens at Switchcreek, the clades need to survive. So we have to get a few of us out. The first group will have two families from our clade, a handful of charlies, and two argo couples.”

“But that’s suicide-the roads are blocked, there are soldiers everywhere-”

“This plan existed well before the quarantine, Paxton. They’ll be hiking out of Switchcreek to a rendezvous several miles away. At that point they’ll be met by six vehicles, and they’ll scatter-every car in a different direction.”

“That’s crazy! What if a helicopter-”

“We have it covered, Paxton. The National Guard will be busy with the march.”

Before he could reply a little bald girl walked into the room, face scrunched against the light. She was three or four, dressed in green footy pajamas.

“Go back to bed, pumpkin, it’s not time for breakfast yet.”

“I’m not tired,” the girl said, and started to climb into her mother’s lap. Then she saw Pax. “Who’s that?”

“I’m Paxton,” he said. Then to the reverend he said, “Your youngest?”

“Not anymore,” she said, and pushed up from the chair and took the girl’s hand. “How about some Cheerios and bananas?” She led her into the kitchen.

Pax leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He was still cold, but at least his hands weren’t shaking. Yet. He could feel the vintage buzzing in his veins, adding meaning and import to everything he saw and heard. In the kitchen the reverend murmured to her daughter and he could feel her love for the girl in each note of her voice. And when the reverend returned to the room a few minutes later he felt the air shimmer with trepidation, wariness. The woman didn’t know what Pax would say next, and Pax didn’t know either.

Then he said, “It must have been a shock when you learned you were pregnant again.”

“Pregnancy is always difficult.” She stood with one hand gripping the back of her chair. “That girl in there nearly killed me-cardiomyopathy. I couldn’t walk for a month after the birth.”

“What did they say would happen if you got pregnant again?”

She was silent for a moment. “Doctors don’t know everything,” she said. “Especially about betas. I decided to take the risk.”

“Decided?” he asked. “I thought you couldn’t choose when to get pregnant?”

She didn’t answer. Pax said, “But I suppose you could choose to not be pregnant.” He reached into his pocket and took out the orange pill bottle. “No one would blame you if you considered other options.” He showed her the label. “These have your name on them.”

The reverend froze. After a moment she said, “Where did you get that?”

He rubbed a thumb across the dried mud on its side.

“I said, where did you get that?”

“I found it at Jo’s house,” he said. Not quite lying.

“I never took those pills.”

“I guessed that,” Pax said. The woman looked at least six months pregnant-bigger than Jo had been when he left. “But you thought about it.”

“Yes, I thought about it.” Her voice was almost a hiss. “But that was a moment of weakness. Fear. Once the baby started to grow…” She slowly shook her head. One hand rested on her stomach. “It became obvious how wrong I’d been. Crystal clear.”

“The hormones kicked in,” Pax said. He tried to remember what the doctor had told him. “Oxytocin, other opiates. There are chemicals that are released during pregnancy that-”

“This has nothing to do with drugs, it’s about right and wrong. I was weak. The younger girls, they have moral clarity. I’m not so lucky. I was a human long before I was a beta. I wavered.”

“The pills couldn’t have been so evil if you were willing to give them to Jo,” he said. “She knew you had them, and she called you the night she died. She asked you to meet her up at that clearing between her house and yours.”

“I’m not going to talk about this with you. Not here.”

“Yes,” Pax said, “you are.”

The woman did not move or change expression, but her anger rolled toward him like heat.

Pax had grown up thinking of empathy as the most Christian of feelings-loving your neighbor as yourself, indistinguishable from yourself. But it was only information, to be used or not used, for good or ill. He felt the reverend’s rage and hurt, and the knowledge drew a target around her heart. As he spoke he knew exactly where his words would strike, and how deep.

“You were handing out abortion pills, Reverend,” he said. “Tell me what happened, before I have to ask every blank in this trailer park about you and Jo Lynn.”

She stared at him.

“All right, fine.” He stood. “I’ll check back with you later.”

“Please,” she said. “Keep your voice down. My other daughters are sleeping.”

After half a minute she said, “She called me asking for the pills. She couldn’t come here, obviously, and I couldn’t just drive out of the Co-op in the middle of the night-too many people would see and ask questions. So I agreed to meet her on the mountain. We’d met in that spot before, when… when Jo helped me think about my options when I became pregnant again.”

“But I thought you were the one who ran her out of the Co-op.”

“Jo’s excommunication wasn’t my doing,” the reverend said. “I tried to keep the peace, but the white-scarf girls-”

“Right. I know how hard it is to hold on to a congregation.”

“You can’t begin to know until you’ve stood in the pulpit yourself,” she said. “But Jo understood my position here, with the younger girls. We always understood each other. Even when we didn’t agree, we were friends.” She saw his look. “I don’t care if you believe me or not.”

“All right. So you went up there to help your friend. You gave her the pills. Then what?”

“Then nothing. I walked back home.”

“That’s it? You trotted up there and then right back down-and then a few hours later she was dead.”

“It wasn’t until the next morning I heard that she’d hung herself. I was shocked. She was upset that night, but she wasn’t… I guess I didn’t realize how distraught she was.”

“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

The reverend looked away. “No.” Then she shook her head. “But I didn’t ask. I’d been in the same situation. I hugged her, and we went our separate ways. That was the last time I saw her.”

The woman was telling the truth, yet there was something measured in her words that made him think she