The burning hymn still vibrates in her eardrums as Alison's truck breaks through the morning fog, and in the rearview mirror hangs not a mirror but a gilded communion plate salvaged from the confessional. In the reflection of the plate, twelve black smoke trails emerge from the ground in the town of Greystone, twisting and turning in the air to form a falcon's predatory stance.
At the abandoned gas station along the national highway, the rusted fuel gun drips a cloudy liquid. Alison pried open a steel cabinet in the employee's break room and found a duty log from 1978 in a rat's nest. Half a photo clings to the yellowed page - Sarah in a white dress from the Miner's Daughter's Day, her falcon ring, the same model as Ethan's, on a silver chain around her wrist. Scrawled in the margin of the journal: "They inject the girls with cinders and morphine, saying it purifies the curse of early death."
Three knocks on the hood of the truck. The one-eyed old woman pokes at the tires with her clutches, a test tube filled with black sand hanging from her neck. "The cremation smoke in the confessional is a good fuse," she said, placing the Mason jar of ashes in front of the windshield, the steel seal 0472 embossed on the canister, "Your father used this canister of gunpowder to blow through the mayor's safe during the vein riots."
Allison's hand froze in mid-air. The old woman lifted her left eyepatch, a miniature plastic cylinder embedded in her shriveled eye socket, "Ethan's father sewed the last piece of evidence into my pupil before he died, at the cost of the tibia of his right leg becoming an ivory paperweight in Jackson's study." She cracked open the Mason jar, and the black powder drifted in the wind, spelling out a map of Greystone's underground water veins on the hood of the truck - a blood-red mark glowing directly beneath the church basement.
The moment the GPS locator slipped from the old woman's sleeve, Allison heard the drone buzzing in the distance. As she slammed her car door into the drain, the Mason jar exploded into an indigo ball of flame, igniting the wild mugwort across the moor.
At the end of the burning wilderness, the rust-red ambulance glowed with an eerie blue light. Inside the ambulance, a chilled left ring finger, with Sarah's initials engraved on the inside of the ring, lay on the operating table. The woman in the nurse's uniform hands over a cooler full of placenta specimens: "A gift from Mr. Jackson, he said you'd need these for ...." Amniotic fluid and formalin splash across the mirror of the car as the bullet penetrates the box, revealing the driver behind Allison holding an anesthetic needle.
The moment she leaps into the irrigation canal, the silt at the bottom suddenly boils. Hundreds of glass jars of babies and corpses emerge from the undercurrent, their left ring fingers pointing northwest. Alison walks against the drifting babies until her fingertips touch the family crest of the concrete culvert - the falcon's left eye is a rotary lock, and the right claw is recessed to fit Sarah's wedding ring.
The underground chamber is filled with gold-rimmed urns, each lid branded with the date of the mine. The LCD screen in the center altar shows the latest image of Jackson standing in the burning ruins of the confessional, with Ethan's concrete-sealed half-body at his feet. "Witnesses are needed for the reckoning of the bloodline," he said, lifting his emerald-encrusted mining log, the tip dripping black blood mixed with shards of silver ring, "when you come back to put the falcon's yoke on our heir."
Alison smashed all the ashes and found a welded steel box at the bottom of the 1947 urn. Hidden in the gas mask were bluish fetal hairs that matched the hair samples in Sarah's diary folders. When she pressed her ring finger to the scanner, the entire cellar began to fill with methane gas mixed with hallucinogens, and a requiem for the first cries of the babies in the maternity ward and the cries of the mining families was played over the PA system.
The twilight was coloring the wilderness black and blue as we escaped the exhaust shaft. Alison spread her palm, Sarah's wedding ring had fused with Ethan's silver chain to form a monstrous crown. The scarlet glow of police lights flashes at the end of the highway, and the fetal hair report is bouncing off the screen of her cell phone-genetic sequences show that her bone marrow is encoded with the Jacksons' curse.