Daniel Bonus material · for ARC readers
The Epilogue
Five years later. Where Miles, Lucía and Elias are now. Did Miles confront his grandfather? Thank you for reading Sanctuary.
This epilogue follows the last chapter, and it gives away how the book ends. Please read it only after you have finished Sanctuary.
What readers are saying about Sanctuary
Sanctuary is beautifully crafted. Brief, impactful sentences build tension as the story progresses. This book leaves you thinking about it long after you finish reading.
Tierney, Paper Cryptid · 4.5 / 5
One of the best modern dystopias I have read. I couldn’t put it down, and I was genuinely sad when I finished it, I had become so attached to the characters.
Maddy, Goodreads
An ambitious, emotionally confronting and morally serious novel that refuses to confuse reaching one’s country with reaching safety.
Heena R. Pardeshi, The Reading Bud · 4 / 5
Profoundly touching. Deeply disturbing. A statement of what this world could come to, laced with hope for humanity. Highly recommend.
Debbie Pyette, Goodreads
The Central American sections read like the writer has walked through them himself. Immersive. Honestly, the best ARC I’ve read to date.
KJ Gurney, kjgurney.com · 4 / 5
A harrowing story about survival in a chaotic new world, and about finding family amongst the wreckage. It kept me on the edge of my seat throughout.
Veronica Phipps, Goodreads
Interviews with the author
If you are curious about how the book came together, here are a couple of conversations about the writing of Sanctuary.
- Interview: Daniel Pandiyan Paper Cryptid
- A Book Review & Q&A with Daniel Pandiyan KJ Gurney
Five years after the road
Epilogue
FIVE YEARS LATER
Miles closes the last case file of the day and slides it into the tray on Matt’s desk. He carries his coffee mug back to the kitchen, rinses it, and leaves it upside down in the sink with all the others.
The building was a Lutheran church once, on Navigation Boulevard, and the kitchen still has its church-supper stoves. The pews came out three years ago. Folding tables went in, then filing cabinets, then a coffee urn that runs from six in the morning until the last lawyer goes home. Beside the announcement board by the kitchen door hang photographs of everyone Fair Workers America has gotten out of an EAS contract. There are more than three hundred now. Miles stops in front of them the way he does most evenings, his eyes moving from face to face.
He checks his watch. Thirty minutes at least before his evening class.
In the far corner Katie is still bent over her desk, a pen behind her ear, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She doesn’t look up. Miles leaves her to it and goes out through the double doors, past the sign that reads FAIR WORKERS AMERICA and, in smaller letters under it, ALL WELCOME.
It’s a little after six, and Houston is giving up the day’s heat to the breeze coming in off the Gulf. He crosses the parking lot to the row of picnic tables along the road and climbs up onto his usual one, feet on the bench, elbows on his knees.
Out by the road the old message board stands on its two steel posts, the kind with black plastic letters that slide into grooves. Someone changes it every Monday. This week it reads:
YOUR BOSS HAS A LAWYER
NOW SO DO YOU
Miles reads it the way the drivers do, a few words at a time as they pass, and smiles.
There are drivers to read it now. Traffic comes in waves along Navigation, a city bus, a few cars, a pickup with ladders strapped to the rack. The stoplights work again. Five years ago a car on this road made people stop and watch it go by.
A few kids his age cut across the parking lot toward the side door, backpacks slung over one shoulder, still in their work clothes. One of them waves. Miles waves back. Caleb works the case files two desks down from Miles during the day, and in the evenings he runs the high school classes in the Victory Fellowship Hall.
A green-and-white EAS bus rolls past toward the ship channel, every seat taken, the faces at the windows turned toward nothing in particular.
The doors open behind him. Katie crosses the lot with the folder of intake forms under her arm and sits down beside him on the table.
“I’m done for today,” she says, and pats the folder. She holds her temples with both hands, exhausted. “These go to the Kansas office in the morning. We have to get them filed in court within the next two weeks. So how are things with you? Where are they sending you this week?”
Miles watches the bus go out of sight. “Matt’s sending me back up to Austin. Peterson Meatpacking. Somebody called the hotline Friday and said three men on the cutting line got hurt, and the plant nurse taped up their hands and sent them back to work. Matt wants statements and photos, whatever I can get before they move those men somewhere else.”
Katie sets the folder down. She puts her hand over his and presses it.
“Be careful, Miles.”
“I know what it’s like up there. I’ll be careful.” He digs in his shirt pocket and holds out a camera no bigger than a matchbox, turning it so the lens catches the light. “Matt got me this. It fits behind a shirt button, inside a cap, pretty much anywhere. Nobody looks twice.”
He can’t keep the grin off his face. “Did you see the Chronicle two weeks ago? They ran four of mine. Page six, but they ran them. And Rogers wants me to help write the next one. The whole article, not just the pictures.”
“I saw,” Katie says. “Good job.”
She bumps his shoulder with hers. “And come to dinner tomorrow. Brian keeps asking about you. He got the Ticket to Ride expansion from someone at work and he won’t even open the box until you’re there. He says you owe him a rematch.”
“I don’t owe him anything. He lost fair.”
“Tell him that tomorrow.”
She is quiet for a moment, squaring the edges of the forms against her knee.
“Grandpa messaged me,” she says. “He asked about you.”
Miles doesn’t answer.
Three years ago he and Elias reached Wisconsin. The whole drive up he carried one fear. What if his grandfather didn’t see it his way? What if he looked at the EAS and saw nothing evil in it, only something the country needed to get back on its feet? What will he become to me?
It happened exactly as he feared. His grandfather never raised his voice. He sat at the kitchen table with the same hands that had written the letter that crossed a continent to find Miles, and he explained. He fed those people. He housed them. “They’d be starving otherwise,” he said. Every farm in the county did the same. He was a farmer, not the monster Miles was making him out to be, and Miles was being dramatic about something that had always been done this way. He left without any argument. No way to argue with someone who made up their mind a long time ago.
Three months later Katie found him at his apartment.
“Elias is driving in Saturday,” Miles says. “We could all do it at your place. Make tacos, sit down and eat together as a family.”
Elias keeps the books for a car dealership in San Antonio now and keeps his head down, but most weekends he makes the drive. Some Saturdays the beer starts before the tacos do. The purple horse still rides on his dashboard.
Family. The word stays with him. He doesn’t say anything for a moment and looks at the ground.
Katie watches his face. “You’re thinking about Lucía.”
He nods.
She reaches over and rubs his back in slow circles, the way their mother used to when he couldn’t sleep. “You’ll find her one day.”
He knows he will. One day Lucía will sit at Katie’s table with the rest of them, and somebody will have to teach her Ticket to Ride, and she will sing while she does the dishes.
The side door of the church swings open. Caleb leans out with chalk dust on his sleeve.
“Miles. Let’s go, we’re starting. Human Geography tonight.”
Miles opens his bag and checks for the textbook, a thick, battered thing with somebody else’s notes in the margins.
“Don’t flunk your high school exam,” Katie says. “That’s just as important.”
He laughs. “I won’t.”
He climbs the church steps and goes in to class. Behind him the streetlights come on along Navigation, one after another, all the way down to the bridge.