Now

The gun isn't loaded. But my coding prevents me from harming humans anyway, so the weapon I've tucked into the back of my jeans is all for show, just like the baseball bat I charge vandals with. The gun belonged to Rita, Josh's mom, and even though Josh and I always talked about disposing of it after her death, we never got around to it.

It's three in the afternoon when I pull into Tenderloin, a little town that seems to be no more than a crossroads with a gas station, a bar, a church, and a feed store.

The day is chilly, with a vicious edge to the breeze and intermittent breaks in the clouds that bring sunlight stabbing into the gloom. I hang a right off the county highway, onto the dirt road that is Deerhead Trail. The car shudders against the uneven road as I take in my surroundings: cornfields on the right and black plastic mailboxes on the left. From the mailboxes, long unpaved driveways wind toward distant houses.

At number 442, I hang a left. The ground rises slightly, and Deborah's white farmhouse appears, standing worn and alone, momentarily lit by a slash of pale sunshine. I crawl my car forward. There are no trees that could provide me with cover, and I'm painfully aware that Deborah could shoot at me from any of the dozen windows. She seems exactly like the type of person who owns guns and knows how to use them.

Assuming I survive the walk from my car to her front door, my plan is simple: pull out my gun and use pure shock value to force her to talk. Hopefully, she'll confess straightaway. I'll turn her in to Mitchell. Then I can let myself cry for the husband I just lost.

Most people, I imagine, would call my bluff. No Harm coding isn't exactly a secret. But I'm counting on one thing: that if Deborah thinks I could somehow overcome my coding to kill Josh, which her letters seemed to imply, she'll think I can kill her, too.

My skin is clammy as I pull the car to a stop in a patch of gravel. The second I kill the engine, her door is already opening—and she has a shotgun. Fuck. I duck on instinct and open the door a crack so I can talk to her.

"Please don't shoot!" I shout.

She's wearing a loose housedress and slippers. From the porch ceiling, a mobile hangs, like you might see above a baby's crib. Its pink balls are unevenly weighted, and it makes an unsteady, bobbling circle in the breeze.

"You're trespassing!" she barks. Her voice is hoarse, like she doesn't use it a lot. "Tell me who you are! Now!"

"Julia Walden! Josh's wife. I just want to talk to you, Deborah! Please put down your gun!" Half of me wants to flee; she's already tried to kill me once. But speeding away means speeding back into Mitchell's waiting embrace.

"I—found your letters." Reaching over to the passenger seat, I grab the stack. Keeping my body mostly protected behind the car door, I reach my left arm up where she can see it, the cards held high. "Josh never read them. But I did. And I want you to know I would never hurt him, or my baby. I just want to talk."

She still has the gun pointed at me. On the other hand, she hasn't fired.

"Where is Josh?" she says.

This gives me pause. The story is all over the news. Does she truly have no idea?

"We can talk if you'll put the gun down!"

She lowers the gun slowly. I come out with both hands lifted, still holding her letters.

"Would you please put the gun all the way down?" I say as a gust of wind tosses my ponytail into my face and spins the mobile around. I think of the gun hidden in the waistband of my jeans, my only hope at the illusion of power.

I used to love my No Harm coding. It was like a seal of goodness—a guarantee to people who otherwise might have feared me that I was a safe presence. It also made Josh want to protect me. Now, it's a major liability.

Who am I kidding?It always was.

"You stay down there," Deborah orders. She leans her gun in a corner by a half-broken porch swing before returning to the edge of the porch and bracing her arms against the railing. Her thin carrot-orange hair lifts around her face, then falls, like a momentary halo. "Why are you here?"

To find out if you killed my husband, I want to say. But I can't start there.

"Why did you think Josh was going to die?"

"Because of you," she says, as if this was obvious. "Where is he now?"

"I read your cards. I know you think he was in danger from me. But that doesn't make sense. I love him, Deborah. I have a child with him. I would never hurt him. Or my baby."

"You're lying," she says in an awful, declarative monotone. "You're a Synth. A weapon. That's why they made you."

"I think you already know that Josh is dead," I say, because I don't have time to argue against her Bot-hating conspiracy theories. If this statement surprises her, I can't tell. It's like she's made of stone. "They think he was killed Saturday night. I was at home with my baby. Where were you, Deborah?"

The sunlight slips away, casting us in shadow. There's another gust of air and Deborah turns toward her gun, as if the wind is giving her motion.

"Stop or you die!" I shriek, releasing the wad of cards, yanking out my gun. It scrapes painfully against the small of my back, but it's in my hands, pointed at the woman on the porch, who has frozen in place. "Don't move!" I pound up the hollow porch steps and press the gun to her back. She's shorter than me by a head, and suddenly seems weak. Pitiable. For a second, I really feel like I could shoot her.

My eyes register a shadow of movement and stray upward, to the dangling mobile, twitching and circling. God. The hanging objects aren't pink balls, after all. It's four baby doll heads.

"Inside," I order, clenching my teeth against the sick sight of the heads with their hair shaved short, some of their eyes open, some closed. "No sudden movements or I shoot."

Deborah obeys. As soon as she opens the door, a smell rolls out, like dead cats and mothballs. I gag. Is Josh's body in here somewhere? It's dark, and my eyes take a second to understand the towering shadows that fill the space. Slowly, boxes and bins and piles of books emerge from the darkness. Deborah Reeves is a hoarder.

"To the kitchen," I say, hoping there's a chair where I can sit her down. I breathe through my mouth.

Deborah shuffles forward, through the narrow corridor between the ceiling-high stacks. I keep the gun at her back and take in our strange surroundings. Tucked into nooks between stacks, or on the flat roofs of shorter towers, are more dolls, in groups of four, always four. Four dolls sharing a meal at a small table. Four naked dolls stacked against each other in a bathtub. We pass what used to be the living room, where a dusty chandelier hangs like crystalline hair over a pile of books and clothing that looks nearly sentient, curved like someone cocking their hip.

We take a bend. Someone pops into view.

"Fuck!" I cry, instinctively pressing the gun into Deborah's back. She's wearing a blue dress—red hair—

Not a real person. Just a cardboard cutout...of me.

Devil horns adorn my head. Yellow ridged darts speckle my face, and red marker lines make it look like my eyes are bleeding.

Panic crawls its tentacles up my spine. If Deborah comes to her senses and remembers No Harm—if she somehow overcomes me in this horrible place where no one could hear me scream—

"Keep walking," I shout, even though Deborah didn't stop.

A little farther down, on a foldout table wedged between boxes, is a makeshift shrine. An electric candle flickers unnaturally under a framed photograph of a young man in a cap and gown. Fuck—it's Josh. Four Barbie-sized doll heads are stuck to the frame, two on each side of Josh. The dolls' hair is cropped short like the mobile dolls, and wallet-sized baby pictures have been taped to their faces. Four angels vigil keeping, I think with a deep shiver.

Finally in the kitchen at the very back of the house, I gesture to a chair, which is mostly clear save some clothes draped over the back. My pulse is going a million miles a minute.

"Sit," I order. I can't sound scared. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

Deborah obliges. With her hands clasped in her lap like a child, she looks up with those pale blue moon eyes. I point the gun at her chest. My hands are sweaty. The metal feels slippery. This whole situation feels slippery.

"Why did you kill my husband, and where is his body, Deborah?"

"I would never kill any of my babies."

"Josh wasn't your child."

"In my heart, he was." Deborah holds my gaze, unblinking. "Josh and my baby were the same age. Then my baby died."

Oh... God. Was Josh some kind of substitute for her own child? And were those cherubic faces taped to the Barbie heads... But there's no time to dig into the psychological squalor that is the mind of Deborah Reeves.

"Tell me where you were Saturday night," I demand.

"Here."

"Prove it."

She blinks twice. "I don't have a working car."

"I know you can get around. I saw you at Walmart."

"There's a church group. They take me shopping."

"Someone could have driven you to Josh's campsite Saturday." The muscles in my hand are hurting from holding the gun so tightly.

Deborah gestures to a TV with a warped screen. "I was watching Josh on The Proposal, like I always do on the weekend. It's on Netflix."

I readjust my grip on the gun. "Pull it up. I want to see your watch history."

She reaches for a remote, then slowly navigates it with awkward fingers until she reaches the screen that shows the dates and time stamps of what she's watched. Just like she said, she was watching The Proposal between 5:00 p.m. and midnight Saturday. From the looks of it, she watched the final episode with the proposal multiple times. In a row.

"You could have watched this from your phone."

"I don't have a cell phone." She gestures to an ancient-looking brown landline attached to the wall. "I'm on a fixed income."

I think of the line from her letter. They all died.

"You said you were cursed. What did you mean?"

Her face twists, and faster than I can react, she lurches forward, forcing her fingers around my hands, twisting the gun so it's pointed at the ceiling, pressing me with unnatural strength until the trigger clicks.

She releases a ragged cry of triumph as I wrench myself free, the useless gun falling to the floor. I spin and collide with a stool covered in magazines, which spill like a glossy river at my feet. The ruse is up.

It's a nightmare as I slip-slide out of the kitchen, into the narrow corridor through which my only exit lies. Something hits me from behind—a book. I dodge the next one. There's a mighty grunt behind me, then a crashing sound. She's collapsing a tower of bins. It hits the next tower, and the next, like giant dominoes falling, and if I'm not fast, I could be crushed.

"I had nothing! Nothing but Josh!" she screams above the noise of toppling objects. She moves sure-footed up the avalanche.

I turn in desperation, grabbing the nearest object, a doll, and launching it, but it flies right past her.

"And now he's gone!" She crests the pile, eyes wild. "And you killed him! I know you did, liar!"

"You're crazy!" I fight my way up a landslide of newspapers. Sensory input rolls over me like a tidal wave, like the volume of the world has been turned up to maximum capacity. "Stay away from me! And stay the fuck away from my baby!"

A doll hits my leg, another hits my cheek. She's launching them like grenades.

"My husband is dead," I yell as I throw whatever I can grab at her. A mug. A cluster of fake grapes. A colander, which hits her in the leg. "I'm not the villain!"

"Yes, you are! You killed him for the bad things he did!" she shrieks. She raises an arm to protect her face as I throw a candelabra at her. It nicks her arm and she falls back a step. "You're an instrument of judgment! You came with justice when he needed mercy! My babies deserved mercy!" She leaps forward like she has wings, orange hair flying.

I propel myself through the final stretch on adrenaline alone. The front door is a slice of light through the final passageway. Almost out, almost free.

Behind me, though growing fainter, Deborah is ranting, screaming, in a world of her own. "Now we're both murderers! And I promise you, they will never forget! It doesn't matter if we're guilty or innocent! Nothing matters anymore! It's too late!"

Salvation. I crash out the front door, down the porch with its hideous mobile, into my car, and slam the door.

Not a moment too soon. Deborah fires her shotgun as my car roars to life. I rev it in a wide circle, spitting gravel like teeth, my ears ringing with the boom of her gun. Then I lean toward the passenger seat and puke, right into the vinyl, as my car skids onto Deerhead Trail.