The photographer looks up, but it’s Tree-Trunk Boy who answers. “Hey now,” he says. I had expected a voice as thick as his arms, but it’s thin and boyish. “You’re giving her too much help—”
“How exactly?” I start, throwing him my most fearsome expression, in hopes of reminding him who bested him in the fight at the lighthouse. “Remember, they were giving you a ride, following us. That’s help. In what way is it a help to learn about my dead father?”
“I’m more concerned with your not-so-dead brother,” the boy sneers. “If you see his picture, couldn’t you maybe find him and ask him for help?”
I try to work this out in my mind—how I might find my brother with nothing but his face to go on—but I can’t ignore the uptick in tension. From beside me, Darius takes a step closer as the woman racer starts to climb out to join us. Her hair still stands up from her weathered face, and she’s rubbing her palms on her pants. I wonder if we’re destined for another brawl, right here on the King’s Inland Highway, and if I’ll be able to take the advice of my blocky dance partner and not make it too obvious that I have Cientia.
I have no doubt these journalists would put that in their story, maybe even make it the headline.
“No. No no no. Her brother could never help her.” The young man wags his pen back and forth, to emphasize his point. “Never,” he says again.
My insides churn and my heart races, like I’m riding downhill in a carriage with no brakes. There’s no way to stop without crashing. So I brace myself—I’m ready for the crash—but I have to wait for this pen-wagging boy to get around to crashing it. He can see how I’m waiting for it, and he seems quite pleased. “That’s the tragic detail,” he continues. “That’s the poignant detail that makes Astrid’s story so particularly compelling to our readers.”
“What’s the poignant detail?” I’m practically shouting. “Why could my brother never help me?”
I know what he’s about to say. He’s about to say, Because your brother is dead. I’m braced for it. I’m ready.
But I’m wrong. He says the only thing that could possibly be worse.
He says that my brother is in the race.
Thirteen
The wind blows hot and dry, raking over my skin like claws. I hadn’t noticed, but I notice now. I notice the way I’m standing with my hands in tight fists, my shoulders tense and raised, my breath coming in big gulps. I watch myself like I’m standing outside myself, and to be honest, I look pretty pathetic. But that stops now. I’m sick of being toyed with.
“So my brother, who you say was dragged away by the Authority—”
“Yes. After your father died.” This from the boy scribbling in his notebook, but pausing long enough to hold up a finger, like a schoolteacher correcting a child’s error. “First your father died. Then the Authority dragged your brother away—”
“I got that part!” My eyes drill into him as if to dare him to raise that finger again. “Now you’re telling me that same brother is in this profane manipulation we’re calling a race?”
“Correct,” he says.
And then the woman takes my picture.
“Give that to me!” I scream. This time I really will kick her camera across the road, or better yet, run it over with the bike. Her neck is bent at a weird angle because I’m tearing at the camera strap, and she’s shrieking, which gives me more satisfaction than it should give a good person.
But I’m not trying to be a good person. I’m trying to win a race, and this woman and her long legs and her fancy camera are getting in my way.
A hand wraps around my forearm and pulls me back. A voice comes from behind me. “Stop messing with her.” It’s Darius, and he’s not talking to me, but to the woman with the camera. I let him pull my hand away. “You’ve had your fun.”
Her wide-set eyes fill with surprise. “I was only . . .” She doesn’t finish. Instead, she takes Darius’s picture.
The wind blows its claws across my skin again, and I feel something in Darius that’s about to erupt. It’s the same rage that’s boiling up in me. But then a weird cry comes from over by the carriage, one that could come only from an animal, and we all turn. I’m sure that an injured bird has just dropped from the sky.
But it’s not an injured bird. It’s the female racer. She’s made herself small, crouching over those big shoes that stomped on Darius’s hand. The sound comes again, like a dying gull. It makes me queasy.
“Memory sickness,” mutters the photographer, and her camera has forgotten me and Darius and is now trained on the woman as she drops over and squirms on the pavement. The man-boy flips his hair from his eyes and opens his notebook to a fresh page. They both crowd the woman so that she’s blocked from my view, and I’m thankful.
“Let’s go,” I say to Darius, my voice low. His eyes are wide, but he gives a short nod. Without another word, we creep to the bike and take off.
I’m shaken, and judging by the look on Darius’s face back there, he is, too. I know he’s probably thinking of the grotesque noise coming from that racer, and whatever memory sickness is, but I’m full to the top with the thought of some brother of mine in this awful race. I try to imagine someone I love making that climb to the window of the lighthouse, and I feel even more ill than I felt going up that wall myself. I would worry about crashing this bike, if there were anything but blowing dust to crash it into.
The gauge shows the charge is almost spent. I pull to the side of the road and cut the engine.
“Is it dead?” Darius asks. His voice is flat and even, but I can sense he’s scared.
“It will be soon.”
The sun is gone, obscured by airborne dust. I know I need to figure out if we’re closer to the roadhouse or to that last charging station, but all I can think about is whether my brother could survive this long trip south without a motorbike.
While I’m sitting here thinking, a few vehicles come out of the dark cloud behind us and disappear into the even darker one ahead: a large truck, a motorized carriage, a horse-drawn cart, even a motorbike with a sidecar. So yes, maybe my brother could make it without a bike, if he found someone willing to give him a ride.
But is he even heading in the right direction? Or is he at Pope’s Lake? Or waiting for the bandleader at Poppee’s Dance Hall to call out the name of a song Darius paid him not to play?
I would love to tell Darius our deal is off, but first I have a question. “The winner of the Race of Oblivion . . . they get citizenship for their whole family, right? So why would my brother enter the race if I did?”
“They’re lying to you,” Darius says.
I really don’t want to look at him—just the thought of him paying off that bandleader makes me want to slap his face—but this statement can’t be ignored. “Who is?”
“Those two back there. Mr. and Mrs. Arrogance.”
“You mean the journalists?”
“Yes.”
“You think they were lying?”
“People like that,” he says. He’s practically spitting the words, his eyes burning, but then he reins himself in. He goes as still as a cloudless sky, but inside he’s a storm. My Cientia senses it. I really must learn to hide my emotions as well as he does. “They’re selling something. A story. A photograph. The bigger the drama, the more it sells.”
This is something I hadn’t considered. “So you think they made up the part about my brother being in the race?”
“Maybe. Or the part about your father—”
“We saw the picture.”
“We saw a picture of a girl that looks something like you, bent over a man lying on the ground. That doesn’t prove that what they said about the picture is true.”
This kind of throws me. It’s both a great relief and terrifying, because I don’t know what’s true, and I’m afraid to hope. How could I dare believe that maybe my father is alive, maybe my brother is not in this horrible race, only to learn again that those things are true?
Someti
mes it’s safer not to hope.
“We might have enough charge to reach the roadhouse,” I say. “We definitely don’t have enough charge to go back.”
“Then we keep going,” Darius says.
The wind is so full of dirt now, I can hear bits of sand spraying against the metal body of the bike. A carriage appears out of the dust, and at first, I worry it’s the journalists again, but it’s a tiny two-seater with a young woman at the wheel. Her blond hair is pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail, and she scowls at us. From here, I can’t tell if she’s an Enchanted or a citizen Outsider, since I can see her only from the chin up, but my Cientia, like her expression, tells me she’s conflicted.
“Need help?” she calls. “Is there someone I can contact for you?” She holds up a comm, but I shake my head.
“Battery’s nearly dead,” I say. “Do you know how far the roadhouse is?”
“The Girl Next Door? Too far to walk. Especially with the weather threatening.” She opens her door and puts one foot out. There’s fear in her. “Look, I can see you’re racers, but . . .” She glances back the way she came, shading her eyes with her hand, but visibility is horrible. “I’ll take you as far as the roadhouse. I can only manage one, with the room I have. So, sir, I’m sorry, but she’ll need to find a way to come back to get you.”
Definitely a citizen Outsider. No Enchanted would refer to a racer as sir.
I must stand staring at her a bit too long, because she raises her voice. “Look, there’s a storm coming. Tornadoes. When the wind pulls the sand from the ground like this, it’s a sign. They might hit, they might not, but I don’t want to read about two dead racers in the paper tomorrow, knowing I could’ve helped.”
Storm coming. Something about those words makes the hairs on my arms stand up. “Astrid, take the ride,” Darius growls into my ear.
“And give you the bike? What if the charge lasts and it makes it all the way to the roadhouse? You’ll just claim I gave it up and it’s yours—”
“That wasn’t even on my mind, and with a storm threatening, and an offer of a ride, it shouldn’t be on your mind either—”
“So you’re saying you wouldn’t keep the bike if it made it—”
“I didn’t say that.”
A rumble rolls across the sky from back toward Hedge, and we all look up. But still, I don’t move. The woman closes the carriage door. “If you’re not coming—”
“She’s coming,” Darius says. He folds his arms across his chest and takes a step back from me. “Astrid, go.”
“Promise me you won’t keep the bike if it makes it there.”
“Promise you? I should be making you promise me to come back for me if it doesn’t make it.”
I hesitate. “I’ll promise if you’ll promise.”
Darius shakes his head. “Whatever your life was before this race, it’s made you tough.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It is.”
“Well, save it. I’m looking for a promise, not a compliment.”
Thunder rolls down from the north again. The woman calls from her carriage, “Are you coming or not?”
“One second!” I call over my shoulder to her. I open my bag and pull out the canteen.
“Here’s my promise,” says Darius. “You take the ride, and I’ll bring the bike. If it makes it, it’s still yours. But if it doesn’t make it, you need to promise to come back for me somehow.”
“All right. I promise,” I say. I hand him the canteen and he takes a drink.
“Then let me keep this for now,” he says. “That way I’ll know you really mean to come back for me.”
“Thanks for the trust,” I say. I take a long drink from the canteen, but I put it back in his hands before I stomp off to the passenger side of the carriage and climb in. I look out the window at him, though I’m not sure what I’m hoping for. A wave goodbye? He’s already straddling the bike, and then the carriage pulls away. But before we’re even a half a mile down the road Darius speeds past, disappearing into the dust.
This little carriage doesn’t have much power, and the ride to the roadhouse drags on and on. My driver doesn’t seem to recognize me, and I’m relieved. She talks about her dog, telling me some long-winded story of how it once saved her life, but I don’t hear a word. Instead, I run through a million scenarios in my mind.
Darius tampered with the gauge, and the bike wasn’t even low on charge.
The roadhouse was never the checkpoint at all, but he led me here to ditch me and take the bike.
I even have a conspiracy theory: he’s doubled back to meet up with the journalists and the other racers, and they are all long gone, drinking from my canteen and laughing at me as they go.
But then my driver points at something ahead. “There it is, on the left,” she says.
A sign swings on a hinge above the road, and behind it, a low brick building—probably originally red but soot black now—squats against the dust. Beside the building, I spot a row of charging pods.
As we come closer, I manage to make out the lettering on the sign through the grit the wind lifts from the road. The Girl Next Door.
She pulls the carriage to a stop beside the bike, which is parked near the front door. Darius stands next to it, tossing and catching the key, waiting for me.
Fourteen
My first thought when we walk through the door of the roadhouse is how difficult it will be to find the clue in here, it’s so dark. I can’t make out a single feature in the room except the scattered pulsing red lights of embeds, so I know there are Outsiders in here, if I know nothing else. And a band, because I can hear the music.
This band could not be more different from the band at the dance hall. They sound neither hot nor cool, but warm. The darkness in this room wraps around me, and it makes me homesick, even though I can’t remember home. I want to remember, and I try to let one familiar thing float to the top of the dark lake in my mind’s eye, but then a barwoman calls out, “What can I get you?” and I’m reminded again of the one thing I know: I’m a racer.
I stiffen. Behind me, Darius says into my ear, “Answer the woman.”
“Money isn’t one of the things I have going for me,” I say under my breath.
Darius leans forward and speaks over my shoulder. “Two corn vodkas, please.” She responds with a crisp nod, but she doesn’t move. The blood seeping through the shoulders of my dress has caught her attention.
Dirty, blood-soaked dress. Tangled, dust-caked hair. I must be a sight. Her mouth tenses at the corners, and I think she’s about to tell me I’ll need to leave—maybe tell us both we need to leave since we don’t even have shoes—but instead she asks my name.
My heart hiccups in my chest. “Who’s asking?” I say, sweeping the room with my gaze. “Are there Authority guards here?”
“No,” she says with a quiet laugh, as if the question is silly. “And I’m the one asking.” Her smile is warm, but not enough to put me at ease. I take in her floral tunic, her clean, strawberry blond hair, the delicate outlines of three tiny stars tattooed in black ink across her left cheekbone. She leans toward me, the craning of her neck distorting the scar at the base of her throat where an embed once was—a scar that declares that she’s a citizen Outsider. She asks her next question in a conspiratorial tone. “Are you Astrid?”
I nod.
“I’ve seen your picture. People are talking about you.” Then, when she sees me flinch, she adds, “Just people, not Authority guards. Not yet, at least.”
A young Enchanted woman, with bloodred hair piled up on her head and a look of disdain on her face, steps up to the bar. The barwoman cuts off the conversation and turns to wait on her.
“I’ll take the key to the bike now,” I say, and even in this dim light, I can see Darius roll his eyes.
“Fine.” He drops the key into my hand.
“And the canteen,” I add.
“Just you remember,” he murmurs as he hands me the canteen
, “you stole this water. You stole that bike. They do not belong to you. I could’ve thrown you off the bike and taken it from you at any time.”
“So why didn’t you?”
He pauses before answering. “Sometimes it’s more effective to work as a team.”
“Careful,” I say, smirking. “There’s only one winner.” I try to force a laugh, but I can’t, not even as I throw Darius’s words back in his face. After all, it’s true that only one person wins, and there’s no guarantee it will be one of us.
I glance around, torn between the need to find the clue and the need to do it without Darius finding it, too. My eyes land on a trio—two men and a woman—in the corner. Like us, their embeds have been cut out. Also like us, they’re dirty from head to foot. “Do you recognize them?” Darius asks.
“Two of them, I do,” I say. “The woman . . . I remember her from the lighthouse.” My eyes shift to the two males, and my mouth goes dry. Inside my chest, there’s a buzzing instead of a beating, like there’s a knot of frantic bees where my heart should be. “The ginger-haired man you should know yourself—he was one of the trio who jumped you,” I say. My eyes work over the other man—a boy, really, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. This is the boy who blocked my way in the middle of the street in Hedge. “I don’t know the third one—the boy. He’s a stranger.”
This is all I say. But this is not all I’m thinking.
What I’m thinking is: Could it be true that my brother is in the race? And if it is true, could one of those two boys be my brother?
If I believe the picture of the wavy-haired girl on the photographer’s camera is me, then the ginger-haired racer is a paler version of me.
So. Possibly my brother.
The other boy reminds me of a cornered animal—black-haired and slump-shouldered, his eyes never leave the door. I can’t quite decide if he’s cowering or if he’s ready to bolt. Maybe he can’t decide, either. “The boy seems nervous,” I say. “Maybe the other two threatened him—forced him to take them this far.”
The barwoman returns. “See if these fit,” she says, handing a pair of thong sandals to Darius. He slides them onto his dirty feet. His heels hang over the edge of the soles a bit, but they’ll do.
Crown of Oblivion Page 11