4:13 p.m. EST

Colin explains that Ella Gresch, renamed Faith Matthews, married Horation in 1990 and that her daughter June became Chastity. It is Allie’s turn to choose King Sorrow’s next victim; her shortlist includes a World Trade Center plotter, a Rwandan financier, and Horation Matthews. Colin outlines the Iowa compound: a hundred followers, a white supremacist creed, and an illegal firearms business masked as agrarian piety.

Colin recounts June’s 1992 escape to her grandmother, reporting Ella’s death. After catching Ella preparing to flee, Horation confined her to the “House of Reflection,” a stifling iron box, where Ella died from heat and confinement. June was briefly punished there too and later died in a suspicious high-speed crash, leaving a statement about Horation’s abuse that was undermined by claims of her instability and family testimony.

The friends gear up to burn the Christmas tree, bantering about cell phones and spray-can flamethrowers. Colin notes that Weyland ordered Ella into the box and claimed her screams were joyous, and that First Amendment protections shielded the sect’s barbaric practices. Even after a police standoff, interviews with the remaining girls produced denials of abuse.

Moved by Donna’s anger and the risk to younger girls, Allie decides to send Sorrow after Horation. They dismiss the Rwandan financier as too diffuse a target and the WTC bomber as a failed threat. The bonfire bonds them, even as Arthur stands apart, uneasy.

Arthur questions whether Horation poses a broader threat. Colin answers with evidence of Horation’s online manifesto advocating violence against federal agents and abortion providers. He explains the Web’s permissiveness, underscoring the danger. The chapter closes with the group aligned behind Allie’s choice and the looming implication that Sorrow’s strike may engulf the whole compound.