I look at my laptop as though I’m checking important data, but I’m not really seeing the screen. It’s only the desert compound and my earliest recollections of my mother, her quiet, detached demeanor little more than a shadow in my memories.

“They told me she was advanced. ‘Gifted by God,’ they used to say,” Sara says without prompting. “Ava learned to talk young. She could read and solve math problems long before the other kids. And she could remember anything she wanted and never forget it. One day, when she was just four or five, she was walking with Grace and stopped next to the metal gate of the garden. She closed her eyes and recited a passage we’d read at the last prayer service. When Grace asked her how she remembered it, Ava told her she memorized things by imagining them around the commune, and she’d put the whole passage right there at the gate.”

The air around me changes. I don’t look away from Sara, but I catch Eli’s movement in my periphery as his hand covers his mouth. Agent Langille whispers something inaudible to him and Eli replies that he’s fine, but leans forward in his chair and rests his arms on his knees.

I swallow and clear my throat. “When did they start thinking she was…evil? What changed?”

“I think it started with the questions. If something didn’t make sense to Ava, like in the scriptures, she’d say as much. She’d challenge the teachings. No one did that, and she quickly found out why,” Sara says as she dabs her damp skin with fresh tissues. “But beating her didn’t deter her. It just made her…darker. She became even more defiant.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’d fight with the other kids. She’d destroy things. She had a fit of rage once when she was seven and ripped up all but two of the tomato plants before anyone caught her. She got thrown in the Sinner’s Box for a whole night for that,” Sara says as she twists her knuckles and one of her joints cracks.

I can still feel the cold steel against my bloody hands. I can taste the dust, smell the piss when I’d had no choice but to go in the metal box. No one was there to let me out or check on me. They just left me in darkness. Screaming. Screaming until I couldn’t scream anymore.

I glance at Eli. There’s so much sorrow in his eyes that I nearly get up and cross the room to sink into his embrace. But I know his sorrow will only last as long as it takes him to figure out the rest of me, and then it will be gone. He mouths my name but I look away.

I refocus on Sara, determined to exhume the child I left behind in the sand. “Is this why they thought you brought the Devil among the community? Because of a defiant child?”

Sara shakes her head. “No, no. I know it sounds crazy when I describe it like that, but other things started happening. Strange things they could never prove Ava did, but she was never affected by them. She sometimes seemed to enjoy them.”

“Like what?”

“One day, Xantheus was going to do a reading for the weekly praise service, but the pages in his bible were in the wrong order. It’s not that they were loose, they were still bound in the book, but not in sequence,” she says. I have to catch myself from smiling at that memory. I’d made glue from bitumen and spent all night carefully detaching pages of Xantheus’s bible and gluing them back out of order. “There were strange smells of rotting flesh in some of the houses but no one could find the source. People would find symbols drawn beneath their beds in chalk or strange packages of herbs and sticks. One night, several members of the community hallucinated and saw dark figures and phantoms.”

It was always me, of course. Me, finding dead lizards or rotting meat or eggs to hide in walls or beneath floorboards. Me breaking in to draw random, meaningless symbols under beds. Me who found drugs among the books in Xantheus’s library and spiked their ritual tea. I tried everything I could to make them think they were going crazy. They thought I was the devil, so their devil is who I became.

If only I had known then how it would culminate in the life I have now. Everything I’ve gained. Everything I’m about to lose.

My voice is barely more than a whisper when I ask, “What happened to Ava? Why did you leave the desert?”

“Ava was supposed to marry Xantheus’s son, Xanus. As soon as the ceremony was over, the storage barn caught fire. Just out of nowhere. It was suddenly this raging inferno. We all ran to put it out but it burned to the ground. When we got back to the temple, Ava…she killed Xanus. She had an ax. And she…she…”

I remember the horror on my mother’s face when she pushed through the doorway with the others. It was just a glance as I swung the ax. And then I looked away, consumed by rage as Xanus’s blood sprayed from the blade, spattering across my face.

“They beat Ava until she passed out, and then they dumped her far from the compound. They wanted her to suffer a long death out there in the desert. I tried to tell them no. I begged them not to do it but they threw me in the Sinner’s Box and didn’t let me out until the next morning when they’d already done it. Hannah convinced Xantheus that morning to make sure Ava was dead. She made him believe Ava could find her way back and kill us all. He sent Zara to do it. Hannah and Grace went with her to make sure she got rid of the evil once and for all.”

“And did she? Did Zara kill Ava?”

“No,” Sara says, wringing her damp tissue with trembling fingers. “It took them a while to find Ava. She’d walked and crawled some distance and must have passed out trying to reach an old mine shaft that was several yards away from where they found her. Hannah and Grace said they told Zara they would leave and come back that evening, but they wanted to be sure she’d keep her word to get it done, so they hid behind a rocky outcrop to watch. Zara had struggled, they said. She cried. She didn’t want to kill anyone, even after what Ava had done. Ava was still just a child, after all. She was only fourteen.”

God, the searing heat. The delirium. The pain. I remember finding that mine shaft, unsure if it was an illusion in the distance, a well of darkness that would save me from the sun. I tried so hard, but I just couldn’t make it there.

“They said Zara picked up a rock. She was standing over Ava, trying to make herself do it when a man showed up out of nowhere. They said he walked over the rise with a bag in his hand. Well-dressed, like he’d been plopped down from the city. When Zara saw him, she just lost it, they said. She started begging this man to help her. She told him everything, that Ava had killed someone, that she was the devil, that she needed to get rid of Ava’s evil. They said he seemed caring at first. He approached and laid a hand on Zara’s shoulder. But suddenly he struck her in the back of the head and knocked her out. They said he tossed her to the side and hovered over Ava, checking her wounds. Then he said, “I hope for your sake that what she said is true, young one”. He picked Ava up and carried her away. Hannah and Grace ran before they could find out what happened to Zara. They came back to the commune hysterical, saying the devil had found his daughter and we needed to leave before they killed the rest of us. Within twenty-four hours, we were gone.”

“Zara never rejoined your group?” I ask. I still feel the pull of satisfaction in my chest as I remember sitting in the dome structure with a glass of cool water, watching as Samuel wrapped Zara’s lifeless body in the plastic from the floor.

“No,” Sara replies. “We took what supplies we could and left. Xantheus had money hidden away from those of the community who’d come with some and given it all to him. When we left the desert, we bought an old bus and a van, and we started heading south. For a while, we were all bound together with the fear of this man and Ava finding us. But eventually, it gave way to resentment and anger. I was the next one in line to blame whenever anything went wrong.”