Roam wasn’t built in a day. It took time for Elijah McCallister, with help from the man he kidnapped out of China, to locate what he was looking for in America: mulberry trees. It took hard work too to carve out a settlement and build a factory — a factory to produce the sheerest silks — so that Roam the town could thrive for a time — a town, who knows where (or when) it is, but it’s deep in the woods, with dark mountains and a dangerous ravine nearby and another town, Arcadia, miles away and down a road — the Silk Road — and there are miracle waters in a subterranean river and brute lumberjacks in the forest and a congenial but tiny man (don’t call him a midget) tending the town bar and a lovelorn mechanic who can fix your broken car and there’s every manner of magic to go with it, all of it.
And now, only a few generations into its brief history, Roam is reduced to a few inhabitants. Vegetation is returning to reclaim the ramshackle houses emptied of families. Animals — deer and dogs and swallows — are returning to reclaim the streets and skies, but just as mysteriously they disappear too. All to leave Roam to the ghosts of the dead (there are many) and to those who survive — and among the living, two sisters, great-granddaughters of Elijah McCallister: Helen, who is 25 and hard to face, what with her off-putting looks and lying ways, and Rachel, who is 18, beautiful, and blind.
