by Libba Bray
Light punctured his hands.
His skin glowed like a Blake painting.
Jericho saw the land. And he saw the dead underneath the land. He saw them decomposing, their flesh sinking into the ground. The dead became the land. Nutrients for crops, which the living harvested and ate. The dead became the living until the living became the dead. An eternal recurrence. A circle. This was the oldest and most important story humankind told itself: that it could transcend death. All religion, all stories boiled down to this: We are born. We live. We struggle. We love. We search for meaning. We die. Again and again and again.
Sergeant Leonard took hold of Jericho’s dissolving hand until they, too, were joined. Even at this last moment, Jericho was not alone.
There had been Sam and Will. Memphis and Isaiah, Ling and Henry and Theta. Lupe and Evie. There had been someone named Jericho, but none of that mattered now.
“Ready, kid?” Sergeant Leonard asked. He was coming apart and blowing into the wind.
Jericho opened his mouth, laughing, and the light came pouring out.
ANOTHER WAY
Under the moonless sky, Isaiah stirred in his mother’s winged arms. “Mama, did you hear that?”
Viola hadn’t heard anything but the constant murmurations of the dead. The night-song of the desiccated cicadas still chirped in the tall, brittle reeds sheltering Viola and her son.
“What did you hear, baby?”
“I heard somebody calling my name, Mama. I heard Memphis calling me.” Isaiah pulled away and lifted his head, listening.
Viola tensed, listening, hearing nothing. What if it was some new trick cooked up by the King of Crows to hurt her baby all over again? With him here in her arms, maybe she had a chance to protect him. To ease him into this world of the dead with as little harm as possible. She would keep him hidden for as long as possible.
“Come here, baby. Rest,” she said.
“Okay,” Isaiah said, and lay back down in his mother’s soft arms, just like a baby bird in a nest.
He was getting sleepy lying here. And it was getting harder to remember things from before. One by one, the memories were being plucked from inside him and carried away. Isaiah didn’t like not remembering. He wanted to fight it. So he tried to fix just one memory hard in his head. He was thinking about the kittens under Sarah Beth’s porch. There had been… how many? Isaiah thought and thought. Seven. There had been seven. He had a favorite among them. Ma… Mo… Mopsy! All at once, he saw Mopsy’s sleepy little furred head. With that detail came the pain. Mr. Olson had drowned them. He had drowned them because he couldn’t see another way.
“But there’s always another way,” Isaiah murmured, an idea fighting to come alive inside him.
“Shhh, baby,” his mother soothed. “Rest.”
“There’s always another way,” Isaiah said, a little louder.
Something else was coming back to him now. It traveled along his nerve endings and made his eyes roll back in their sockets.
“Isaiah!” his mother whispered urgently. “You can’t use your power here. They’ll find you if you do. Isaiah, please!”
Isaiah barely heard his mother’s voice. The vision had also found another way. It had him now. For one brief moment, he could see his own future: Isaiah saw himself speaking from a great height, his voice echoing through a microphone to massive crowds. There was change in the air. And song. And the people lifted that song and carried it into the streets, arm in arm, and it was all possible. This future rippled through Isaiah’s body, warm and hopeful, like bright sun on the longest day of summer. It felt like a beginning, of what, he could not say. But he saw it. He saw it. He had a future, and it needed him.
“I have to go back. I want to go back. I’m not done yet, Mama.”
His mother looked sad. “Baby. There are some things you just can’t change. You can’t go back. Those are the rules, son.”
Isaiah looked down at his hand in his mother’s. How he’d missed her. How he’d missed that hand on his back, that arm around his shoulders. Missed her nightly tuck-ins and glasses of water and gentle scoldings to Get to sleep and I better not hear a peep from this room. He was not asleep but awake now. Truth was shining through the windows of his soul, keeping him up.
Isaiah let go of his mother’s hand. “Then I’m gonna change the rules, Mama. Watch me.”
Isaiah began by walking, but soon enough, he was running. When the dead saw him moving among them like some new hope they had not been able to imagine, they parted to let him pass.
“Thank you,” Isaiah said to them. Because he could feel them.
Some among them began to weep. When we go, will we go to nothing? Will we become nothing forever? they asked. And Isaiah knew that this frightened them. It had frightened him sometimes, too.
“My friend Ling says there’s no such thing as nothing,” Isaiah answered.
What will become of us, then?
“You’ll become stories we tell,” Isaiah said. He looked behind him, over his shoulder. At the end of the row was his mother, and for one moment, he faltered. More than anything, he wanted to run back to the safety and warmth of her arms. She was the story he did not want to leave.
“Go, Isaiah,” she said. “Change the future. I will be with you.”
The whisper became a noise and then a chant, echoing through the land of the dead: Isaiah. Isaiah. Isaiah.
He ran forward.
Isaiah knew where to find the King of Crows, because he’d seen it before, with Sarah Beth. The King sat sprawled across his throne of skulls with one long, skinny leg hitched over the bony arm the way Isaiah’s mother would’ve fussed at him for doing, along with an admonishment to Sit up straight and act right. The King of Crows watched a patch of gray sky above his throne, where events of the nation’s past played out like at a picture show. They were scary pictures of people doing terrible things to one another. Blood seeped into the land. Isaiah could feel it dripping down, being sucked up into the crops that the people ate, over and over. There has to be another way, Isaiah thought. He wanted to see his friends and his brother. He wanted that future he saw in his vision. The one that showed another way.
The King closed his hand into a fist, sat up straight at last, and faced Isaiah. “Ah. The little visionary come to visit. Our own Diviner Cassandra. Tell me. Have you come to make a bargain?”
Isaiah didn’t know what the King of Crows meant by that, but he knew that the man in the hat wasn’t to be trusted, so he said only, “I’m going back.”
The King of Crows clapped his hands together and laughed as if Isaiah had told a good joke. He laughed the way his aunt Octavia used to do when she said she was “delighted.” But Isaiah didn’t think the King of Crows was delighted. Just a liar.
“I see,” the King of Crows said in a tone of voice that made Isaiah mad. “And why should I let you live?”
“Because my story’s not finished yet,” Isaiah said.
“Is that so? Very well, then. But first, we’ll need to play a game. Do you like games, Isaiah?”
“Some games.”
“If you want to leave, you’ll need to play a game with me. You’ll need to make a bargain.”
Isaiah was uncomfortable. He didn’t know what the King of Crows was up to, but he also knew there was no chance of leaving without agreeing to his game. He was going to have to be brave. He was going to have to be smart. “Okay,” Isaiah said. “I accept.”
The King of Crows smiled and rose from his throne. His shadow fell across Isaiah as he strode toward him. The moon was yellow and leaking drips of sickly light. The diseased trees bore no fruit. Isaiah was afraid.
The King of Crows opened one side of his coat, and Isaiah saw that it was a blank gray slate of the sort they had in school. With his other hand, he gave Isaiah a piece of chalk. “Go on, then. Write yourself a new ending, and I’ll let you go.”
Isaiah bit his lip and stared at the slate. He did not trust the man in the hat.
&nb
sp; “Wait! I want a condition of my own,” Isaiah said.
“My. Making conditions now, are we? We are feeling our oats.”
“You don’t get to make all the rules,” Isaiah shot back.
The King of Crows put his face right up to Isaiah’s so that Isaiah could see the hatred swirling in those enormous dark pupils. And for a moment, Isaiah forgot everything except his fear. Because those were eyes that said, Struggle, but you will never win, and it made Isaiah feel so tired. “I made myself king. Never forget.”
The King stepped back. From behind his throne he produced an hourglass. In one swift motion, he turned it over. Isaiah watched the sand pour down. It was going fast.
“Your time is now,” the King of Crows said and opened his coat once more.
Isaiah tried to write on the slate, but no sooner would he get a few words down than the slate would erase them. New words would appear in their place. Words he had not written.
“That’s no fair. You’re cheating!” Isaiah yelled. He kept trying. Again and again, his words were erased and replaced. The sand rushed through. He was running out of time, and that made him panicky. But then he saw the look on the King of Crows’s mottled face. Smug. Angry. He expected to win. It pricked at Isaiah. He couldn’t beat him by these rules.
There’s always another way.
Isaiah stared at the moving lining of the King’s coat. Always moving. It was all happening inside the coat. That’s what the man did; he would rewrite it until you couldn’t find a way out. Until you were trapped in the story he wanted to tell. How did you unravel such a story? The same way you did a coat. You picked it apart, thread by thread.
Look inside. See what’s really there.
“That’s it. Look inside. What do you see? Do you see yourself in there, Little Man?”
Sarah Beth had said that the King of Crows’s story was in there, too. And if you knew it, you could reveal the truth of him. But you had to be able to see through it all to what was really there. Isaiah frowned and touched his head. Sarah Beth had been a big liar. She’d stolen his magic.
Look beyond it. See what’s really there. But the inside of the coat was so bright and blinding. And the sound! Like a million voices talking at once, with no space to think. It made him weak. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep for a long, long time. Fierce blue electricity sparked in an arc around the King of Crows, and Isaiah knew that Jake Marlowe’s machine was working to join the worlds. They were connected, each side thinking it was winning. The King of Crows grew taller. Wider. He opened the other side of his coat, and it took on the appearance of a demon’s wings, spreading out like a night that would never end. Isaiah had to think! What was it that Theta told them Miss Addie had said? The King of Crows could only take. He could not create. See beyond to what’s really there. A memory fought against Isaiah’s fear. He had plucked a feather from the King’s fantastical coat once. Yes, he remembered that now! He’d given it to Evie to read. But she’d found nothing. No memories. No history. No family or friends. Just emptiness. Isaiah’s heart sank at another dead end.
“Isaiah. My patience is growing short.” The King of Crows’s voice had deepened. It was everywhere. How could you fight against something that was everywhere? The coat was whispering to him, wrapping its lies around his neck like a heavy weight. It would not let him in. Isaiah’s knees buckled. He wanted to lie down. Just lie down. Mama had said she would keep him safe. But that was as much of a lie as the song on the Victrola the soldiers had been listening to. No mama could keep you safe from this.
The sand was down to a thin coating of grains. He was losing. He would be trapped here forever, and the King of Crows would continue to bring misery and strife to the world.
See what’s really there.
The King of Crows’s voice boomed like cannon fire. It whistled past Isaiah’s ears and made him tremble. “Tell me, Isaiah Campbell, Seer of Visions, Teller of Truths, Diviner. What do you see written here? If you can truly see it, you’re free to go.”
Isaiah squinted against the glare and stared into the great abyss of the ever-changing coat. The feather he’d taken. The reading. The strange feeling he’d gotten from his visions about the man in the hat. As the last few grains slipped through the hourglass, it came to Isaiah. He stood tall and tilted his head back, looking up at the King of Crows looming over him like an eternal predator.
“Nothing,” Isaiah said firmly. “There’s nothing there but what you steal and make your own. You’re just an empty coat.”
The King of Crows’s rictus smile twitched. His soulless eyes blinked. A single feather loosened itself from the outstretched wings. It drifted slowly down, and when it hit the ground, it shriveled into itself and blew away like dust. All the feathers fell then, like a rain of ash. Inside, the vein-like threads unstitched themselves. The coat was unraveling, thread by thread, feather by feather, lie by lie. The lining fell away, gone in a puff of smoke.
“No!” the King of Crows screamed. He tried desperately to hold the coat together, but it was hopeless. It was unwinding, twisting and tangling him up in its threads. The King of Crows screamed and cursed and cawed as his lies consumed him, until he was a scrabble of lines and squawking. Until, at last, he dissolved into nothingness. All that remained was a pile of feathers and, on the throne of skulls, the blank gray slate.
Isaiah stepped over the pile of feathers and approached the slate. He raised his chalk, scraping out the sentence he’d tried to write:
“Hello. My name is Isaiah Campbell.”
The sentence remained. It thrilled Isaiah to see his words recorded there, like they were looking back at him, waiting for more.
“Isaiah.”
Isaiah’s mother stood among the dead. She wasn’t covered in feathers anymore. Instead, she wore her favorite dress, the one she used to wear out dancing with his daddy. It was a royal purple, and it made her look like a queen.
“Mama?”
She waved to him. “Time to go, baby.”
“Time to go!” This time, it was Memphis’s clear, strong voice Isaiah heard.
Up ahead, Isaiah saw the breach between the worlds. But it was closing. Memphis had managed to heal it, just as he’d promised he would! This made Isaiah happy—until he realized he still had to get out of the land of the dead. Something else was happening, too. The trees were changing. The land was moving. Isaiah felt Jericho’s presence. He was holding something back for Isaiah, but he couldn’t hold it for long. There was a light getting brighter, like a star being born.
“Wait!” Isaiah called. He started moving toward the portal.
Around him, the dead called: “Go quickly. Don’t look back.”
Isaiah started running. As he ran, he felt within him the stirrings of his ancestors. As if he had drunk a powerful potion stirred with generations of dreams. He was bare-chested and barefooted, running across a fertile land, feet slapping against the rich earth of another continent. His soles hitting the ground with the same rhythm: Free. Free. Free. Free.
His feet showed him the way.
The stories his mother had carried here, the music of his father, they lived inside him.
They showed him the way.
The grandmothers were singing. The grandfathers, too.
They showed him the way.
He was from princes and kings.
They showed him the way.
He was from François Mackandal and his Maroons.
They showed him the way.
He was from the slaves who survived.
They showed him the way.
He was from Harlem. He was from Floyd’s barbershop and the old men arguing. He was from Mother AME Zion Church on hot summer-Sunday mornings and the soft, cool breeze from Aunt Octavia’s round straw fan. He was from his parents, Viola and Marvin, and a house that had been filled once upon a time with laughter and love. He was from the numbers runners taking dimes near the 125th Street subway stop. From jazz burbling out along Lenox Avenue with all the
swells. From baseball played in the streets and the double-Dutch girls chanting over the rhythm of their one-two feet and neighbors on their stoops talking late into summer nights. He was from Harlem’s great heart.
It showed him the way.
He was from his brother, Memphis, whom he missed more than anybody, and he was from the Diviners, the family he’d made along the way. He, Isaiah Campbell, was from the future that needed him. He was tomorrow.
He would show them the way.
Up ahead, at the edge of the nightmare, the portal between worlds was shrinking to a narrow doorway of blue. Within seconds, it would close, trapping him here in the land of the dead forever. But Isaiah was no longer afraid. He was carried by the hands of so many spirits, so many stories pushing him forward. He could hear their voices like a song getting louder and louder, letting him know there was a story and a song and a way. He opened his mouth and swallowed it down. It pierced the broken shell of his body. Came out in swords of light shining everywhere.
Isaiah smiled.
And then he leaped.
Silence.
Shadow.
And light.
HOPE ON THE ROAD
Where am I?
Am I alive?
Silence.
Then:
“Evil, that you?”
Theta! Yes, yes, it’s me!
“Hiya.”
Hiya.
“Princess, you okay?” Memphis’s voice. Stronger than it had sounded before.
“Oh, Poet, I am now.”
Sam? Where’s Sam?
Silence.
Evie saw nothing yet. It was as if her atoms were still forming. Becoming something new.
“Henry, you better not have done something stupid like die.” Ling being Ling.
And Henry’s answer: “Miss Chan, looks like you’re stuck with me for a while longer.”
Sam. Where are you?
Evie’s eyes fluttered open. The pale light hurt, and she had to blink several times. With each blink, a strange, alien landscape greeted her. It had no form she could discern just yet.