The voices grew louder. Stella thought she heard three or four. They were speaking in a way she could not understand—low, guttural, with piping high exclamations. Someone coughed.

“They're inside,” Trinket said. He unlocked the wire door with a brass key tied to a dirty length of twine. “They just finished eating. We'll fetch the trays for Mother.” He pulled the mesh door open.

Stella did not move. Not even the promise of the voices, the promise that had brought her this far, could persuade her to take another step.

“There are four inside, just like you. They need your help. I'll go in with you.”

“Why the lock?” Stella asked.

“People drive around, sometimes they have guns . . . take potshots. Just not safe,” Trinket said. “It's not safe for your kind. Since my wife's death, I've made it one of my jobs, my duty, to protect those I come across on the road. Youngsters like you.”

“Where's your daughter?” Stella asked.

“She's in Idaho.”

“I don't believe you,” Stella said.

“Oh, it's true. They took her away last year. I've never been to visit her.”

“They let parents visit sometimes.”

“I just can't bear the thought of going.” His expression had changed, and his smell, too.

“You're lying,” Stella said. She could feel her glands working, itching. Stella could not smell it herself, could not in fact smell anything her nose was so dry, but she knew the room was thick with her persuasion scent.

Trinket seemed to deflate, arms dropping, hands relaxing. He pointed to the wire mesh door. He was thinking, or waiting. Stella moved away. The key dangled from the rope in his hand. “Your people,” he said, and scratched his nose.

“Let us go,” Stella said. It was more than a suggestion.

Trinket shook his head slowly, then lifted his eyes. She thought she might be having an effect on him, despite his nose plugs and the mints.

“Let us all go,” Stella said.

The old woman came in so quietly Stella did not hear her. She was surprisingly strong. She grabbed Stella around the ribs, pinning her arms and making her squeak like a mouse, and shoved her through the door. Her book fell to the floor. Trinket swung up and caught the key on its string, then slammed and locked the gate before Stella could turn around.

“They're lonely in there,” Trinket's mother told Stella. She wore a clothespin on her nose and her eyes were watering. “Let my son do his work. Fred, maybe now she'd like some lunch.”

Trinket took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, expelling the plugs. He looked at them in disgust, then pushed a button mounted on the wall. A lock clicked and buzzed and another wire door behind her popped open. Stella faced them through the mesh of the first door. She could not make a sound at first, she was so startled and so angry.

Trinket rubbed his eyes and shook his head. He gave a little kick and spun her book into the far corner. “Damn,” he said. “She's good. She almost had me. Hellish little skunk.”

She stood shivering in the little cubicle. Trinket turned out the fluorescent lights. That left only the reflected glow from the rooms behind her.

A hand touched her elbow.

Stella screamed.

“What?”

She backed up against the mesh and stared at a boy. He was ten or eleven, taller than her by a couple of inches, and, if anything, skinnier. He had scratches on his face and his hair was unkempt and tufty.

“I didn't mean to scare you,” the boy said. His cheeks flushed in little spots of pink and brown. His gold-flecked eyes followed her as she sidled to the left, into the corner, and held up her fists.

The boy's nose wrinkled. “Wow,” he said. “You're really shook.”

“What's your name?” she asked, her voice high.

“What sort of name?” he asked. He leaned over, twisted his head, inhaled the air in front of her, and made a sour face.

“They scared me,” she explained, embarrassed.

“Yeah, I can tell.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Look,” he said, leaning forward, and his cheeks freckled again.

“So?”

He looked disappointed. “Some can do it.”

“What do your parents call you?”

“I don't know. Kids call me Kevin. We live out in the woods. Mixed group. Not anymore. Trinket got me. I was stupid.”

Stella straightened and lowered her fists. “How many are in here?”

“Four, including me. Now, five.”

She heard the coughing again. “Somebody sick?”

“Yeah.”

“I've never been sick,” Stella said.

“Neither have I. Free Shape is sick.”

“Who?”

“I call her Free Shape. It's not her name, probably. She's almost as old as me.”

“Is Strong Will still here?”

“He doesn't like that name. They call us names like that because they say we stink. Come on back. Nobody's going anywhere soon, right? They sent me out here to see who else old Fred snared.”

Stella followed Kevin to the back of the long building. They passed four empty rooms equipped with cots and folding chairs and cheap old dressers.

At the very back, three young people sat around a small portable television. Stella hated television, never watched it. She saw that the television's control panel had been covered with a metal plate. Two—an older boy, Will, Stella guessed, and a younger girl, no more than seven—sat on a battered gray couch. The third, a girl of nine or ten, curled up on a blanket on the floor.

The girl smelled bad. She smelled sick. She coughed into her palm and wiped it on her T-shirt without taking her eyes away from the television.

Will pushed off the couch and stood. He looked Stella over cautiously, then stuck his hands in his pockets. “This is Mabel,” he said, introducing the younger girl. “Or Maybelle. She doesn't know. Girl on the floor doesn't say much. I'm Will. I'm the oldest. I'm always the oldest. I may be the oldest alive.”

“Hello,” Stella said.

“New girl,” Kevin explained. “She smells really shook.”

“You do,” Mabel said and lifted her upper lip, then pinched the end of her nose.

Will looked back at Stella. “I can see your freckle name. But what's your other name?”

“I think maybe her name is Rose or Daisy,” Kevin said.

“My parents call me Stella,” she said, her tone implying she wasn't stuck with it; she could change the name anytime. She knelt beside the sick girl. “What's wrong with her?”

“It isn't a cold and it isn't flu,” Will said. “I wouldn't get too close. We don't know where she comes from.”

“She needs a doctor,” Stella said.

“Tell that to the old mother when she brings your food,” Kevin suggested. “Just kidding. She won't do anything. I think they're going to turn us in, all at once, together.”

“That's the way Fred makes his moochie,” Will said, rubbing his fingers together. “Bounty.”

Stella touched the sick girl's shoulder. She looked up at Stella and closed her eyes. “Don't look. Nothing to see,” the girl said. Her cheeks formed simple patterns, shapeless. Free Shape. Stella pushed harder on the girl's arm. The arm went limp and she rolled onto her back. Stella shook her again and her eyes opened halfway, unfocused. “Mommy?”

“What's your name?” Stella asked.

“Mommy?”

“What does Mommy call you?”

“Elvira,” the girl said, and coughed again.

“Ha ha,” Will said without humor. That was a cruel joke name.

“You have parents?” Kevin asked the girl, following Stella's lead and kneeling.

Stella touched Elvira's face. The skin was dry and hot and there was a bloody crust under her nose and also behind her ears. Stella felt beneath her jaw and then lifted her arms and felt there. “She has an infection,” Stella said. “Like mumps, maybe.”

“How do you know?”

“My mother is a doctor. Sort of.”

“Is it Shiver?” Will asked.

“I don't think so. We don't get that.” She looked up at Will and felt her cheeks signal a message, she did not know what: embarrassment, maybe.