Store

They put her and Henry in the back, in the warehouse where the trucks had once backed up to unload, a high cold space of bare steel racks where the Lost were kept between their labors, and there in the first day and the days after Laura learned the workings of the child-town the way she learned everything, by watching, by holding still and letting the thing show her its shape.

It had a shape. That was the thing that unsettled her most, once she saw it. She had imagined, out on the road, a chaos, a pack of feral children tearing at each other and at the world. What she found instead was an order, a cruel and rickety and altogether functioning order, and the order was somehow worse than chaos would have been, because chaos was only the world falling and order was a thing that had to be built and held, on purpose, by a mind, and the mind was Carla's.