Chapter 7: Pryce Watches the Voss Girl Walk Past His Window

The girl came into view at seven minutes past nine, moving along the county road on a bicycle too large for her, her dark hair pulled back with a rubber band, wearing a gray t-shirt that had been washed so many times the cotton had gone translucent at the shoulders. She did not look at the Institute. That was the thing Pryce noticed first, standing at his second-floor window with a cup of coffee cooling in his hand. Most people who passed looked. The building had that quality — institutional white against the treeline, too large for its context, the kind of structure that demanded explanation. Even people who had lived in Harlow's Creek their entire lives glanced over when they passed, a vestigial wariness they couldn't have named if asked.

Mara Voss rode with her eyes on the road ahead. Not studiously forward, not the deliberate non-looking of someone suppressing an impulse. Simply elsewhere. She had a destination and the Institute was not it, and the distinction, in a twelve-year-old, looked to Pryce like a very particular kind of discipline.

He watched her until the road curved south and the kudzu ate the last of her.