Everyone In
Saturday morning, the hayloft holds twenty-three children, one harmonica, a drum kit (partial), and a level of noise that makes the barn swallows file out in protest.
You tell them the truth — most of it. The grey is real, it eats whistling and marigolds and the reasons for things, and it can be fought with brightness. You do not mention unicorns. You demonstrate instead: the whole Brigade marches to the meadow's edge, and Priya tells the joke about the duck and the revolving door, and eleven kids laugh at once, and a stretch of grey fence rail blushes back to honest brown while they watch.
The sound twenty-three children make when a fence un-greys is a weapon in itself. Somewhere under the hill, you'd swear the grey flinches.
By Sunday the Brigade has squads, a signal (three whistles), a wall map with pins, and — inevitably, because twenty-three kids cannot all keep their boots quiet — questions. “Why's it worst near your farm, Madison?” asks Tilly, pin in hand, eyes sharp over the map. Questions are a tide too. You can feel this secret getting heavier by the hour.