“Jack said—”

“Jack was going to change things after he was in charge, Ray-Ray. He was going to remake the Thirty-Six Society for the modern world, and no one was going to be able to stop him. But that didn’t happen, did it? A Johrlac came here and killed him, and we all got so wrapped up in being sad and paranoid that we stopped thinking about being better. We should have kept thinking about being better.” Shelby’s voice broke a little on the last word. I glanced over, and saw tears gleaming on her cheeks, catching glints from the moonlight.

I didn’t say anything. Those tears weren’t mine to betray.

Raina sighed, deep and slow and pained, like the sound was coming up from the very center of her body. “I miss him so much,” she admitted.

“So do I,” said Shelby, and kept rowing.

My strokes got less ragged and more effective as we rowed through the swamp. I wasn’t ready to try out for the Olympic team, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I wasn’t actively hindering our forward motion. Creatures chirped and hissed and hooted in the dark, making me wish for a floodlight. Something that sounded almost as large as Basil splashed off to our left, and I was suddenly just as glad we didn’t have the floodlight. Seeing our neighbors wouldn’t have made them go away, but it would have forced me to admit that they really existed.

I don’t know how long it took for us to reach the bank, and the little dock where Gabby had originally launched the boat. Shelby took over both oars in order to guide us to where we actually needed to go, and Raina climbed up onto the dock to tie us down. That was a relief. We would have been there all night if they’d tried to leave things up to me.

“Come on, you,” said Shelby, pulling herself up onto the dock and then turning to offer me a hand, which I accepted gratefully. My family worked hard to give us all the skills that we would need to survive in our chosen professions, but my lessons had never involved much to do with boats. Maybe that was something to consider for the next generation.

Nothing growled or lunged out of the bushes at us as we walked into the woods and started toward the house. I drew my gun, carrying it low against my thigh as I scanned the trees and waited for something to attack. All my vigilance was for naught: either we were alone, or we were being watched by Cooper and his wolves, who we would never see coming.

The trees up ahead began to get lighter, brightened by the bleed from the house beyond them. We sped up a little, and voices began to trickle back to us. The argument was ongoing, then, and probably had been the whole time that we’d been gone. I realized I had no idea how long that had actually been. It didn’t feel like it had been more than an hour—probably more like thirty minutes—but it was hard to say. Fear and adrenaline do funny things to the body’s sense of time.

The back door was still standing slightly ajar. Raina was the first one through, followed closely by Jett, with me and Shelby on her heels. The voices got louder once we were inside, apparently coming through the open door, and we half-walked, half-trotted the rest of the way back to the porch, where all three of us stopped dead in the doorway. Jett danced a few feet farther, bouncing on the pads of her feet as she gave one ecstatic bark.

Charlotte, who had been in the process of lowering one of the Aeslin mice toward the face of a waiting Thirty-Sixer, turned to blink at us. “Oh, hello,” she said. “You decided to come back. That’s brilliant. Just let me finish this, and then we can have a nice chat about what made you think this was a good time to run off.”

I blinked at her. So did Shelby and Raina.

“Mum, are you okay?” asked Shelby slowly. “You didn’t ask about—”

“Is Gabby alive?” A note of fierce need overwhelmed the serenity in Charlotte’s tone for a moment.

Shelby nodded.

“Then I trust you to have done what needed doing. So am I.” She waved a hand, indicating the lawn, where the rest of the Society had formed itself into a long line that snaked across the grass like a bizarre conga. A few stood off to the side, not joining the conga; they seemed oddly relaxed, as if their troubles had all faded away. The reason why became apparent as Charlotte turned back to the Thirty-Sixer in front of her and finished lowering the Aeslin mouse to the level of his face.

The mouse sniffed. The mouse pushed its whiskers forward as far as they would go, forming a bristled fan that brushed the tip of the man’s nose and caused him to exhale with the effort of not sneezing. That had apparently been the goal: the mouse sniffed again, more rapidly, before squeaking proudly, “Not infected!”

“Uh . . .” I said.

“Well, it is what we told her to do,” said Shelby, as the cleared Thirty-Sixer trotted off to join the others on the side of the yard. Apparently, those were the ones who had already been cleared by the mouse jury, declared free of infection and released back into the safe haven of their human lives.

There were a lot of problems with what we were witnessing, but I decided to go straight for the big one: “Is there any way of knowing that everyone is here?” I asked.

Raina shook her head. “No,” she said grimly; she had looked at the yard, packed with people and not organized in any coherent fashion, and come to the same conclusion I had. “We can ask, but people have been on and off the property all day. ‘Did you see so-and-so’ is going to get a positive response no matter who we ask about, because someone will have seen virtually everyone we can think of.”

“And someone else will be right there and ready to say that so-and-so was going somewhere predictable, but was definitely going to be back before the infection checks began, so they must be clean,” said Shelby, keeping her voice low. “Someone needs to be taking names.”

“That’s not happening,” I said. I stepped forward before the next person could step onto the porch, clearing my throat. “Charlotte? Can we have a moment?”

“Sure thing,” she said, setting the mouse back on the porch rail. She clapped her hands together, eyes still on the yard, and called, “Everyone, hold tight and don’t give up your spot in line. I’ll be right back with you, all right?”

Some grumbling greeted this announcement, but not enough to be dangerous. After the rest of what we’d been through, I was willing to take that.

Charlotte dusted her hands against her thighs as she turned to face us, eyes still bright and glossy with too many shocks, packed too tightly together. I spared an instant to wonder whether she even knew what she was doing, or whether she was just going through the motions because it was easier than stopping and really thinking about what was happening to her family, to her world. I dismissed the thought just as quickly as it came. Regardless of whether Charlotte understood her actions, she was going to have to live with them. That meant we all would.