“They’re dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Were you spying on me in St. Deborah?” Kirsten asked.
The girl shook her head.
“No one told you to watch us?”
“No,” she said.
“Did you know Charlie and the sixth guitar?”
Eleanor frowned. “Charlie and Jeremy?”
“Yes. Do you know where they went?”
“They went to the—to the Museum of Civilization.” Eleanor said museum very carefully, the way people sound out foreign words of whose pronunciation they’re uncertain.
“The what?”
August whistled softly. “They told you that’s where they were going?”
“Charlie said if I could ever get away, that’s where I could find them.”
“I thought the Museum of Civilization was a rumor,” August said.
“What is it?” Kirsten had never heard of it.
“I heard it was a museum someone set up in an airport.” Gil was unrolling his map, blinking shortsightedly. “I remember a trader telling me about it, years back.”
“We’re headed there anyway, aren’t we? It’s supposed to be outside Severn City.” The conductor was peering over his shoulder. She touched a point on the map, far to the south along the lakeshore.
“What do we know about it?” the tuba asked. “Do people still live there?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“It could be a trap,” the tuba murmured. “The girl could be leading us there.”
“I know,” the conductor said.
What to do with Eleanor? They knew they risked accusations of kidnapping and they had long adhered to a strict policy of non-intervention in the politics of the towns through which they passed, but no one could imagine delivering a child bride back to the prophet. Had a grave marker with her name on it already been driven into the earth? Would a grave be dug if she returned? Nothing for it but to take the girl and press on into the unknown south, farther down the eastern shore of Lake Michigan than they’d ever been.
They tried to engage Eleanor in conversation over dinner. She’d settled into a wary stillness, the watchfulness of orphans. She rode in the back of the first caravan, so that she’d be at least momentarily out of sight if anyone approached the Symphony from the rear. She was polite and unsmiling.
“What do you know about the Museum of Civilization?” they asked.
“Not very much,” she said. “I just heard people talk about it sometimes.”
“So Charlie and Jeremy had heard about it from traders?”
“Also the prophet’s from there,” she said.
“Does he have family there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell us about the prophet,” the conductor said.
He’d come to St. Deborah by the Water not long after the Symphony had left Charlie and Jeremy there, the head of a sect of religious wanderers. The sect had moved into the Walmart at first, a communal encampment in what had once been the Lawn and Garden Department. They told the townspeople they’d come in peace. A few people were uneasy about them, this new population with vague stories about travel in the south, in the territory once known as Virginia and beyond—rumors held that the south was exceptionally dangerous, bristling with guns, and what might they have done to survive down there?—but the new arrivals were friendly and self-sufficient. They shared their meat when they hunted. They helped with chores and seemed harmless. There were nineteen of them, and they mostly kept to themselves; some time passed before the townspeople realized that the tall man with blond hair who seemed to be their leader was known only as the prophet and had three wives. “I am a messenger,” he said, when introduced to people. No one knew his real name. He said he was guided by visions and signs. He said he had prophetic dreams. His followers said he was from a place called the Museum of Civilization, that he’d taken to the road in childhood to spread his message of light. They had a story about setting out in the early morning and then stopping for the day only a few hours later, because the prophet had seen three ravens flying low over the road ahead. No one else had seen the ravens, but the prophet was insistent. The next morning they came upon a collapsed bridge and a riverside funeral, women singing, voices rising over three white shrouds. Three men had died when the bridge fell into the river. “Don’t you see?” the prophet’s followers said. “If not for his vision that would have been us.”
