That evening, Rex was feeling feelings. As they tossed the few belongings they’d be taking with them into their messenger bag, they thought back to earlier that morning with Ronan, and the conversation that neither of them had realized would be their final one.

Ronan had revealed to Rex that they could climb out a third-floor bedroom window to an ideal view of the sunrise, and the two had sat on the sloping roof of the house gazing out over the stripped fields. In the distance a farmer had been burning stubble, and a strong wind wafted the smoke eastward, like a stoner thoughtfully aiming the exhalation from his bong rip away from his girlfriend’s face.

“I feel like you understand what it’s like to be different,” said Ronan.

“I am different,” Rex agreed.

A magpie soared overhead, chattering about how lonely and sad it was that all its usual victims for murder and child-abduction had migrated south.

"It's like, there're certain things you're way smarter about than anyone I've ever met, like music and the arts scene in the city, which is really cool, and then other things you're, like, kind of innocent about—I don't mean in a bad way, though!" His cheeks reddened.

“Being different means your life doesn’t progress in the same order as the teens on Riverdale. Like, you start high school and then you have exciting tv sex for four years and then the show is over, unless you died in an earlier season,” said Rex. They’d thought about this more than once.

“Thank god for that. That you didn’t die, I mean.”

“Being different is alright. Still, I think I’d like to stop being a virgin at some point.”

“Oh. Like… today?”

“No,” said Rex. “Sorry, I didn’t mean... Not quite yet. I do like you, though. I think I’d just like to wait until I’m in a situation where I’m not… captive.”

“I understand—you don’t have to apologize,” said Ronan quickly. “I was kind of nervous about it anyway. I mean, I’ve tried it before because, you know, there’s not a lot to do in my town. But I get worried…my parents had my sisters when they were teenagers—not that that’s what I’m nervous about. I just want it to be the right… What I mean is, I really like you too.”

Rex smiled and felt a shiver of happiness run through them, even though they still felt conflicted about how far they wanted things to go with Ronan, and they were still a bit frightened about being stuck there forever, and they weren’t sure Ronan actually did understand, and a part of them couldn’t help wondering if all of their romantic relationships for the rest of their life were going to be some version of this.

Rex found themself oddly excited to discover that so many different attitudes could exist within them at once.

“Do you ever contact them? Your parents and sisters?” they asked.

“Not really. I couldn’t really tell them about the collective, because people have heard about this place—from all the great work that comes out of here—and it’d be easy to come find me. I decided I couldn’t risk it.”

“You decided—what a nice privilege.” Rex couldn’t hide their resentment.

“I’m sorry. I’m sure they’ll let you send a message at some point.” Ronan looked away. Rex knew he felt guilty for the circumstances.

“But you won’t even tell them that you’re safe somewhere?”

“My dad will just make me come home and tell me I’m a failure for not being on the volleyball team. As if that’s more important than this.”

“I haven’t gotten to know my dad all that well. My parents split six or seven years before I was born,” said Rex.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“Sometimes I wonder which annoying hobbies he’d force me to have if he were around more. Cadets, probably.”

“Ugh. You’d probably have run away here too, and then you’d have met me a lot sooner,” said Ronan. He winked in a way that wasn’t creepy—a skill that Rex had thought only Jaymie, out of all the men in the world, had mastered.

“I sort of wish that I had,” said Rex. "I've had so little chance to rebel..."

“I wish that you had too.”

"We'll just have to make up for lost time,”,” said Rex. They weren’t used to saying romantic things. It felt unnatural and contrived, but fun at the same time, like they were a dashing and confident actor playing a part in a movie. They embraced the role, grasping Ronan’s fall jacket by the fur of the hood and pulling him in for one last, long kiss as the magpie above practiced kill strikes on its shadow-prey against the backdrop of billowing smoke.

***

In keeping with the tradition of desperate escapes, the four captives waited until the dead of night and made use of a conveniently placed wooden trellis in order to avoid the assiduously guarded front and back doors.

“We’re artists escaping!” Jaymie whispered up to Aaron as he climbed. “Does that make us escape artists?”

“Shut up, I’m concentrating,” said Aaron from a few feet above, shakily navigating a vine-coated tread. He’d just had a near miss when his boot slid on the damp leaves and he’d lurched down a few rungs, catching himself just short of Jaymie’s head.

“Escape, artists! They’re after you!” Jaymie murmured, before obeying his brother and focusing on the lattice at hand.

It was a moonless, silent night, and Jaymie had the impression of descending into a vast inkwell. Someone was about to scoop him up on a giant calligraphy pen and use him to compose a poetic masterpiece. He shuddered, hoping fervently that none of his loyal new followers were… following.

The thing about being a highly influential figure was that it could be hard to establish boundaries between yourself and the people who'd been moved by your work. The more fans the better, of course, but what about the ones who were in it for the wrong reasons? There was a very fine line between developing a following who'd defend you and spread your music and share your values, and having to make a swift midnight getaway in fear for your life. But it was all a learning experience, and if you weren't ready for it then you might as well not go into music in the first place.

Rex, their skinny form as good as invisible in their black jeans and hoodie, dropped nimbly to the grass where Jo waited, picking at splinters that had penetrated through the fabric of her gloves. She’d offered to go first, since she would cause the most calamity if she fell.

They’d slung on their backs only their most valuable and lightweight carry-ons: Jo’s guitar, a shopping bag containing the smaller of their two synthesizers, and Rex’s laptop, upon which they hoped to access the internet as soon as they were free.

They picked their way over lawn to the driveway, where their van still squatted invisibly, black vehicle against black night. If all went well, they’d return for it and the rest of their gear in the morning with backup from the Regina Police Department. A shadow moved in the drive. Rex hissed a warning and they all froze. Of course the van was being watched—Jaymie mentally kicked himself for not thinking about it.

The band passed a tense minute, then another, crouched in a huddle in the yard. A second form moved under a poplar tree close to the sidewalk in front of the house. Jaymie felt a rush of adrenaline. It was just like in those videogames where you had to avoid the guards’ flashlights or a whistle blew and you got sent back to the start of the level!

“Other way,” whispered Jo. They turned around and skirted the house, hidden against the dark bulk of the building. A red ember floated like a tiny wicked fairy in the middle of the backyard; the silhouette of a small woman—Evelyn, the writer, Jaymie guessed—tilted her head skyward and exhaled a fog of cigarette smoke into the night. They held still until she turned and directed her dragon breath toward the fields behind the house.

Jaymie longingly mouthed the consonants of “A cigarette,” into Aaron’s ear and sensed rather than saw Aaron rolling his eyes. They crept the remaining few meters to the sparse hedge and picked their way through one by one, praying the snapping twigs wouldn’t alert the sentinels. They stopped again on the other side and listened attentively, ears that were trained to fix intonation and to mix volume levels now straining for the sound of footsteps in the quiet. Jaymie heard nothing.

“Ok, this is actually really effing scary,” he breathed. There was no point denying it. Rex pressed against his side for a moment, shivering. He squeezed them around the shoulders and made a mental note that for future tours he would hire and pay musicians he didn’t know or care very much about.

Then they set off again, past the last two houses on the block, into the fields outside the city. A cloud shifted and a smattering of stars appeared and vanished again, like a group of strangers who’d come across your show by accident, looking for a place to drink, but decided to look elsewhere once they realized there was a cover charge.

Aaron looked up, the brief starlight brightening his features. He was strangely calm—or perhaps not so strangely, if you knew the cocktail he’d partaken in earlier that night.

Jaymie, in his explorations of the house, had located the community’s stash of Pentobarbital—the short-acting barbiturate they’d been sedated with on the night of the show, although Jaymie didn’t know this. The drug, in controlled doses, dulls one’s senses and slows the nervous system, and has been found to be effective at calming rapid, anxious thoughts and curing insomnia. No longer widely available in North America, it is, however, still marketed to veterinarians for its usefulness, in greater quantities, in euthanizing animals.

One member of the collective had worked as a vet technician before leaving their former life to join the group, and they’d developed a mild addiction to the stuff while using it to self-medicate for a bad case of compassion fatigue. This cult member passed away whilst composing a collection of poetry personifying rodents, which first became Instagram-famous and was then taken up by a publishing company and widely distributed across Canada and the United States. They’d illegally amassed quite a supply before their passing, and the group had held onto the hoard for situations like that first night.

It’s worth mentioning that the substance is not safe to mix with liquor, and it just speaks to luck and the alcohol tolerances of the elder three Bukowskis that none of them suffered serious health repercussions. Tonight, Jaymie had offered his brother a mug of chamomile tea to calm his nerves, laced with what he felt was a reasonable amount of the stuff. Fortunately, the tea mixture had the desired calming effect, rather than throwing him into a paranoid funk the way it had when mixed with marijuana and copious amounts of Crown Royal.

They began the trek across the barren field, four dark and hooded figures cloaked by the smothering black sky.

***

Ronan hadn’t met many people his age who were interested in the same sorts of things he was; most of the other residents of the house were well past their teens, with the exception of a few young children who’d been born into the cult in the years since its inception. So, having Rex around was like a breath of fresh air. Not only did Rex see things much more deeply than his peers back home, they were also, at least in his opinion, quite pretty.

He was fairly sure Rex looked like a teenage girl, if you got past the crazy hair and a few tasteful eyebrow and nose piercings, but Ronan understood that a person’s appearance does not dictate their gender, and that Rex was not a girl, and he was fine with that. He just wasn’t sure what that made him.

He was from a small prairie town, where people didn’t comfortably ease between orientations like some city folks seemed, to him, to be able to do. Though his town had made strides in the right direction over the past decade or so, many of the citizens still preferred definitive labels, and they especially preferred if you carried the labels they were most comfortable with.

Ronan was not sure if liking Rex made him gay or what. Not that there would be anything wrong with that. Sometimes you just wanted to know what you were.

Either way, he sure did like cuddling with the pixie-faced little punk. So he was confused and alarmed when he went to Rex’s room that night to ask them if they’d be up to some rooftop wine and friendly political debate and found it vacated.

Respecting people’s desire to identify with whichever gender or non-gender they liked was a given—it was 2019, after all—but respecting their inclination to depart the shady consortium you’ve trapped them in for their own good and the good of everyone around them was another thing entirely.

He did the only thing he could think of, which was to alert Miranda, awaken the others, and make pursuit.

***

The exhausted little family traversed the farmland, barely speaking except to occasionally confirm that there were still four of them. A breeze stirred as dawn approached, clearing away the cloud cover. The sky began to glow in the east.

And in the pale half light of the early autumn morning, the unfortunate bandmates saw figures keeping pace with them in the surrounding fields, calm drudges walking with their heads bent, laborers resigned and ready to begin their early morning duties reaping the fields, scything the fruits of their enterprise, slowly, slowly closing in.