She shook her head.

“You’re not one of us,” she said.

“I’m new.”

“No, you’re not.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“

How

do you know?”

The girl looked at me with eyes that were a lot older than eighteen. Very bright lights in those eyes. It made me want to smile for real.

“Mind if I sit down?”

“Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“No, I mean… what’s your name?”

“Oh. John Poe.”

“Poe? Like the writer.”

“Like that.”

“Nice. I read some of his stuff in school. The one about the cat, and the one about the guy’s heart under the floorboards.”

“Scary stuff.”

“I thought they were sad. Those poor people were so lost.”

I said nothing.

She nodded to the empty end of the bench. “It’s okay for you to sit down.”

I sat, making sure that I didn’t sit too close. Invading her little envelope of subjective distance was not a good opening move. But I also didn’t sit too far away. I didn’t want to give her a wall of distance either. You have to know how to play it.

We watched a couple of mourning doves waddle around poking at the grass.

“My parents sent you,” she said, making it a statement rather than a question.

“They care about you.”

Her reply to that was a small, thin smile.

“They want to know you’re okay,” I said.

“Do you really believe that?”

“Of course. They’re your parents.”

She studied my face. “You don’t look that naïve, Mr. Poe.”

And you don’t sound like an eighteen-year-old

, I thought.

Aloud I said, “If that’s something you’d like to talk about, we can. But is here the best place?”

“It’s safer.”

“Safer for whom?”

“For me,” she said. “Look, I understand how this is supposed to work. You come on very passive and friendly and helpful and you find a way to talk me into leaving the grounds with you. To have a chat at a diner or something like that. Then once we’re off the church grounds, you grab me and take me to my parents.”

“You make it sound like an abduction. All I want to do is bring you home.”

“No. You want to

take

me to where my parents live.” She patted the bench. “

This

is home, Mr. Poe.” She gestured to the lush foliage around us. “And this.” And finally she touched her chest over her heart. “And this.”

“Okay, I get that. Our home is where we are. Our home is our skin and our perceptions. That’s nice in the abstract, but it isn’t where your family is. They’re at your

family

home, and they’re waiting for you.”

Her smile was constant and patient. I wanted to break through that level of calm control because that’s where the levers are. Fear is one level. Insecurity, which is a specific kind of fear, is another. There are a lot of them.

“Mr. Poe,” she said before I could reach for one of those levers, “do we have to do this? I mean, I understand that you’re being paid to be here, and maybe there’s a bonus for you to bring me back. I know how Daddy works, and he likes his incentives. I think it’s easier if we can just be honest. You want to earn your paycheck. Daddy and Mommy want me back so they can put me in a hospital, which would make them legal guardians of me

and

my money. They think I’m nuts and you think I’ve been brainwashed. Is that it? Did I cover all the bases?”

I had to smile. “You’re a sharp kid.”

“I’m almost nineteen, Mr. Poe. I stopped being a kid a while ago.”

“Nineteen is pretty young.”

She shook her head. “Nineteen is as old as I’m ever going to get.”

We sat with that for a moment.

“Go on,” she encouraged, “say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say anything. I just said that I wasn’t going to get any older. That probably sounds suicidal to you. Or fatalistic. Maybe it’s a sign of deep-seated depression. Go on. Make a comment.”

What I said was, “You’re an interesting girl.”

“Person. If you don’t want to call me a ‘woman,’ then call me a person. I’m not a girl.”

“Sorry. But, yes, you’re a very interesting person.”

“Which goes against the ‘type,’ doesn’t it?”

“Which type?”

“Well, if I was political, or if this was some kind of radical militant group, then you’d expect me to be more educated. You’d expect me to rattle off a lot of Marxist or pseudo-Marxist tripe. But the Church isn’t radical. Not in that way. We don’t care at all about politics. I know I don’t. We’re what people like you would call a ‘doomsday cult.’”

“If that’s the wrong phrase, tell me which one to use.”

She laughed. “No, it’s fine. It’s pretty much true.”

“What’s true?”

“The world’s going to end.”

“Because of Nibiru?”

“Sure.”

“And—what is it, exactly? People can’t seem to agree.”

“Well,” she said with a laugh, “it’s not a dwarf brown star.”

“It’s not?”

“You think I don’t know about this. You think I’m a confused little girl in a weirdo cult thinking we’re all going to hitch a ride on a passing planet. You think this is Heaven’s Gate and Nibiru is another Hale-Bopp. That’s what you think.”

Again, she wasn’t framing it as a question.

“Well, let me tell you,” she continued, “what they tell us here in the church. One of the first things they did was to explain how it couldn’t possibly be a brown dwarf because that would mean it was an object bigger than Jupiter. Even in the most extreme orbit, it would have been spotted, and its gravitational pull would have affected every other planet in our solar system.”

I said, “Okay.”

“And if it was a giant planet four times larger than the Earth, which is what a lot of people are saying on the news and on the Net, then if it was coming toward the Earth it would be visible to the naked eye. And that would also warp the orbits of the outer planets. And it can’t have been a planet concealed behind the sun all this time because that would be geometrically impossible.”

“You know your science.”

“They

teach

us the science here.”

“Oh.”

“That surprises you, doesn’t it.”

“I suppose it does. Why do you think they do that?”

“No,” she said, “why do

you

think they do it? Why teach us about the science?”

“If you want me to be straight with you, then it’s because using the truth is the easiest way to sell a lie. It’s a conman’s trick. It’s no different than a magician letting you look in his hat and up his sleeve before he pulls a rabbit out. They don’t let you look at where he’s keeping the rabbit.”

“That might be true if the church was trying to sell us something. Or sell us on something.”

“You’re saying they’re not?”

“They’re not.”

“So, they have no interest at all in your trust fund?”

“A year ago, maybe,” she said offhand. “Two years ago, definitely. Not anymore.”

“What makes you believe that?”

“Because Nibiru is coming.”

“You said that it wasn’t.”

“No,” she said, “I said that it wasn’t a brown dwarf or a rogue planet.”

“You’re group’s called the Church of the Nomad World. Emphasis on ‘world.’”

“I know. When they started, they were using the rogue world thing in exactly the way you think they still are.”

“Uh huh. And there are YouTube videos of your deacons talking about how the gravity of Nibiru is going to cause the Earth to stop spinning, and that after it leaves the Earth’s rotation will somehow restart.”

“Those videos are old.”

“Six years isn’t that old.”