The roads Henry walks are not meant for people, not at this hour, not in this season. Long, frozen arteries of asphalt wind through the night like veins of black ice, empty except for her lone figure moving through the void. Sometimes, she stops. Sometimes, she lays her body down on the frozen surface, as if inviting the darkness to take her. In these moments, she is neither prey nor predator—just a shadow lying still beneath a sky that has forgotten her name.
The dreams are worse. They drag her into places her waking mind would never tread—naked except for her underwear, sprawled on winter pavement in the middle of nowhere, breathing frost while the world spins indifferently. They don’t feel like dreams; they feel like commands, whispered by something old and patient. Each morning, she wakes carrying the residue of these visions, as if the frost clings to her bones long after she’s left the dream behind.
The Boone family, too, begins to split open under the weight of buried truths. Their secrets are not whispered confessions but loaded weapons, left in closets for decades, each one waiting for a careless hand to open the wrong door. Some of those secrets will rot unseen—sealed forever when their keepers die, taking entire histories with them into the ground.
Henry’s nights are not restful. Sleep delivers seizures—violent storms behind closed eyes. She wakes as if her body has been hijacked, her throat raw from screams she doesn’t remember making. In the chaos of these episodes, she teleports—blinking across space without knowing it—her unconscious mind dragging her body through impossible distances.
Meanwhile, the federal agents circle. Deputy Anna meets with them, their words as cold as the steel in their voices: build the case against Lucas Boone. No discussion of jurisdiction, no talk of prosecutors—just the command to make it happen. The agents know what they want, and the deputy is too green to see the trap closing around her.
Far away, the Mennonites prepare for war, their doctrine bending under the weight of vengeance. Thou shall not kill becomes a forgotten verse. Love your enemies rots in the shadow of gunmetal. The dead are no longer mourned—they are simply counted.
And over it all looms the silent threat: if the government, or worse, the military, catches Henry, she will vanish into a lab. She will not be a person anymore, only a subject—a rare specimen under fluorescent lights, poked and prodded until she is broken. Like Flight of the Navigator, but stripped of wonder, replaced with scalpels and restraints.
Outside her body, the world moves against her. Inside, she drifts through a coma, fighting the tangled vines of her own memories. Beyond the veil of her unconsciousness, people hunt her. They might as well be from another universe—voices and faces she cannot reach, people she cannot save. And if she were dead, it would be the same: the living still moving, still scheming, while she lies in a place beyond light and sound.
Henry is alive. But the world, both inside her mind and outside her door, is sharpening its knives.