Maya and the Rising Dark

by Rena Barron

  “Yours is too,” Eli shot back.

  “I know,” Frankie said with a shrug.

  As we walked into the wormhole, wind whipped around our feet and flung us forward. The first wormhole I made was like hanging upside down on a roller coaster. This one was like climbing into an elevator that traveled at the speed of light.

  “It’s coming to an end,” I said, feeling the Dark near. “Get ready, it’s going to be bumpy.”

  Eli squeezed my hand and must’ve done the same to Frankie because she said, “Ouch.”

  We shot out of the wormhole fast, and the velocity wrenched us apart. I hit the ground. “Ugh,” I groaned as the impact knocked the wind from my lungs. The brooding slate-blue sky of the Dark and white particles swam across my vision. It was night here again.

  “Sorry,” I said when I saw my friends lying on the ground too. They grumbled and rolled on their backs. “Looks like I still have some work to do on my speed and velocity.”

  “I don’t think we’re invisible anymore,” Frankie said, staring at her hand.

  “I lost my concentration,” Eli said as we sat up, nursing our bumps and bruises.

  We were in a field with crunchy dead grass poking our backsides.

  The wormhole roared in our ears, but my attention was on the ring of small buildings not even a hundred feet away.

  “Are we in the right place?” Eli asked, looking at the distant town too.

  “Yes,” I said, my belly twisting into knots. “He’s close.”

  “Um, Maya, what are you going to do about that wormhole?” Frankie cleared her throat and glanced over her shoulder.

  When I turned around, my mouth fell open. The wormhole was a huge ball of spinning gray dust like a tornado lying on its side. I had expected it to close by itself like my first accidental wormhole, but it didn’t. Now it was basically a neon sign saying ENTER THE HUMAN WORLD HERE.

  My father had come and gone from the Dark undetected forever, so there had to be a way for me to do it too. When I concentrated, the wormhole sparked around the edges and started to shrink. Frankie spotted a flock of darkbringers flying straight for us. Sure, blue people with horns and barbed tails were scary. But blue people with horns and barbed tails armed with battleaxes flying straight at you, that was a new kind of terror.

  Eli stretched his invisibility over us while I worked on collapsing the wormhole. I was happy to inherit my father’s ability to enter the Dark, but it wasn’t the most useful power to have in a fight. I missed the staff.

  “Can you go any faster?” Frankie nudged.

  “Going as fast as I can,” I said through gritted teeth. I was sweating buckets. Opening and closing wormholes was harder than it looked, and my powers were exhausted. “This is pretty much rocket science.”

  Frankie looked skyward again. “I’d say we have less than a minute.”

  “I count fourteen of them.” Eli grimaced. “That aziza general—the one who looks like a fairy—is leading them.”

  “You mean Commander Nulan,” Frankie said, her voice full of the same dread I felt.

  Not her again. Anyone but her. She may have been one of the beautiful aziza, but she was ruthless. I still couldn’t believe she killed one of her own soldiers. She’d almost killed Frankie too and would have no qualms about trying again. I couldn’t let her get through the gateway to hurt more people.

  Eli stood with his hands balled into fists, staring up at the darkbringers. The whooshing sound of their wingbeats rivaled the roar of the wormhole. It was a foreshadowing of the danger to come.

  Sparks danced on Frankie’s fingertips. “I’ll slow them down.”

  “I . . . just . . . need . . . a few more minutes,” I said as she raised her hands skyward. I could feel the vibrations in the wormhole, feel it close inch by inch. A few more minutes. Three at best, but we were out of time.

  Flashes of light crackling like electricity shot out of Frankie’s hands. The air around us rippled as her magic tore through the sky. The darkbringers broke their flight path to get out of the way. Most moved in time, but two of them got caught in her blast and spiraled out of control.

  Eli slapped Frankie on the back. “Nice shot! Only twelve more to go!”

  We had no time to celebrate as the darkbringers paired off into smaller groups. While the rest circled above the wormhole, one group attacked. They raised their arms and blew fireballs in our general direction. Their aim was way off because Eli’s magic still held and they couldn’t see us.

  Frankie sent another blast, knocking the fire-breathing darkbringers to the ground. “Take that, you bullies!”

  But as soon as she said it, Nulan sent a knife straight through Frankie’s shoulder. I gasped as my friend stumbled and the blade entered the wormhole. “There you are, little godlings,” came Commander Nulan’s sickly sweet voice.

  She swooped down and landed twenty feet away. We were still invisible, but she didn’t need to see us to figure out our position. She’d guessed at least one of us would cover the wormhole, and she must’ve heard us talking.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered, staring at Frankie’s wound, which looked particularly ghastly in her semitransparent state. Eli tore a piece of his T-shirt and tied it around the cut.

  “Is the wormhole closing on its own?” Frankie answered my question with a question. When I nodded, she sighed. “It looks smaller.”

  She was right. I could sense the gateway shrinking, but at a snail’s pace.

  “We need to protect it until the end so no darkbringers get through,” she said quietly so Nulan wouldn’t hear us.

  “We . . . yes,” I said, confused. “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

  “So you were foolish enough to come back?” Nulan asked, her eyebrow raised, as she crept closer. “You weak, pathetic little children.”

  I gritted my teeth and squeezed my hands into fists. Maybe I didn’t have any powers to blast her to pieces, but I could still give her a black eye.

  “I’m going to stay to protect the wormhole,” Frankie said, her face determined. “Go save your father while I keep Nulan occupied.”

  “No,” I whispered, feeling numb inside. “I can’t leave you.”

  Frankie set her jaw as the other darkbringers landed in a circle around us. “Go now before we’re all trapped here.”

  Without waiting for us to argue over it, Eli released Frankie from his invisibility magic. The last of it shimmered against her skin before she became solid again. Commander Nulan’s eyes landed on Frankie, and she curled her lips into a devious smile. “Did your friends leave you alone to defend the wormhole, little godling?” Nulan sneered. “What a horrible mistake. Like I said before, I don’t have any qualms about killing you.”

  Frankie shifted her position into a wide stance, magic sparking on her fingertips. She stood between Nulan and the wormhole. “Go,” she whispered to us, then to Nulan she said, her voice shaking, “It only takes one godling to stop you.”

  “Come on.” Eli dragged me away, tears in his eyes. “Don’t let her sacrifice be for nothing.”

  Her sacrifice—no, she couldn’t. I started to pull away, but then I stopped. Frankie was backing toward the mouth of the wormhole. She could enter it before it closed and go home if she timed it right. And Frankie would’ve already run the calculations in her head.

  Eli and I ran, and the roar of the wormhole masked our footsteps. We didn’t stop until we were clear of the darkbringers closing in on Frankie. When we stopped, my breath seized in my chest. Frankie was surrounded. There was no way she could fend off all those darkbringers. I made a step to run back, but Eli grabbed my shoulder to stop me.

  “You have to keep going, Maya”—Eli chewed on his lip—“while there’s still a chance.”

  “Then you help her,” I said. “I’ll be okay on my own from here.”

  “But . . .” Eli looked back and forth between Frankie and me. “I want to help you both.”

  “You have.” I backed away from him.
“You gave me a head start on Nulan.”

  I took off at a sprint, running straight for the epicenter. I’d only taken a few steps when I felt his magic fade against my skin. I turned back to normal.

  By the time I reached the edge of the city, Frankie yelled, “You’re going to totally regret that!”

  I pushed back tears, knowing that I had left my friends to fight for their lives alone, when they never left me behind. Not even once.

  Twenty-Six

  I find something unexpected

  I barreled through the dead grass toward the epicenter. Sweat stung my eyes, and my legs ached. I felt like a jerk for leaving my friends in trouble like that, especially after all we’d been through together. I wanted to go back, but Eli was right. Frankie and he had risked their lives so that I could get a head start on Nulan. I couldn’t waste it or my chance to save my father.

  Heat simmered under my skin when I thought about the commander. She was as bloodthirsty as the Lord of Shadows himself. The way she talked about my father like he was nothing more than a fly to swat made me even angrier. Did every single darkbringer truly understand what the Lord of Shadows was planning? I thought about the kids we saw on the edge of the cornfield and the endless farms we passed trying to find my father. There were regular people here, not in the army and not bloodthirsty like Nulan. Did they know that the Lord of Shadows wanted to kill all humans and orishas and godlings? He wanted total annihilation, and he’d stop at nothing to get it. How could anyone go along with something so vile?

  Hate was number one on Mama’s list of complicated emotions, along with envy, anger, and shame. She’d said that all emotions fell somewhere on the complicated scale. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out that hate could grow into something more dangerous. Imagine having a pet monster that you fed every day. It would grow stronger and eventually eat you alive. That was how hate worked. It was a monster that consumed you until (plot twist), you became the monster. I didn’t want to become a monster, but I was really starting to hate the Lord of Shadows. But unlike him, I didn’t want to destroy all the people in the Dark. I only wanted to stop them from destroying us.

  I could feel Papa’s presence stronger now that I was at the edge of town. My heart raced against my chest, and I wiped my sweaty hands on my pants, which were all kinds of dirty already. A dark mist shrouded the town, but I could see that nothing was moving inside. No traffic or people talking, no hum of electricity in the air, no birds chirping. No sound at all.

  I’d read enough comics to know that I was walking into a trap. The Lord of Shadows hadn’t even tried to be clever about it. I guessed that was his style, or most likely he wanted to taunt me like he’d done on the crossroads. He was dangerous then and even more dangerous now.

  When I stepped closer to the epicenter, I saw the weirdest thing. Streets ended at the edge of the dead grass like it was normal for roads to stop in the middle of nowhere. Power lines that looped from one pole to another cut off where the grass met the asphalt too. Half cords stood rigid in the air, held by something other than gravity. It looked like someone had cut out a piece of a city and plopped it down here. If the rest of the Dark was bluish in tint, this town was gray as ashes.

  A stitch caught in my side and I stopped in my tracks, finally realizing the horrible truth. This was an exact copy of my neighborhood. Only, it looked like my dream on the crossroads when the Lord of Shadows drained the color from it. I sucked in a deep breath. It wasn’t real. He made this illusion to taunt me because he knew my biggest fear was to lose my family and friends.

  Everything I loved about home, about Chicago, about my life was wrapped up in my neighborhood. Mama and Papa, the cranky Miss Ida and Miss Lucille. Frankie and Eli, even my math teacher, Ms. Vanderbilt. I balled my hands into fists at my sides and headed for school.

  “Get in, get my father, and get out,” I whispered, blinking back tears. That was the plan.

  On the way to my block, I rushed past the alley where Frankie and I had almost got eaten by werehyenas. Then I passed by the empty snow cone stand and the abandoned elotes cart. This time no sweet smell of roasted corn and butter and chili rolled up my nose. The two- and three-story greystone houses faced down each other like an old-fashioned duel. All the colors that made each house unique and the neighborhood feel alive were gone. The blue shutters on the Robinsons’ windows. The yellow birdhouse in the Lewises’ yard. The rusty red bike with the white basket Lakesha tied to the tree in front of her house and called art. Even the perfectly manicured grass that the cranky Johnston twins kept in order was dead. The purple and green Oya curtains at my window. It was all gray in this place, not a spot of color anywhere.

  I crossed Ashland Avenue at a run. Cars sat in traffic frozen in time, gray down to their rubber tires that should’ve been black. There were no people in them and no sounds. This place gave new meaning to the term ghost town.

  At Jackson Middle, a neon-green sign crackled off and on announcing that the Jaguars were regional soccer champions. The electricity left a sting in the air that smelled like hot metal. It was the only bit of color in this whole place.

  Even though there was no breeze, the Jaguars flag at the top of the pole flapped around frantically. I glanced north of the soccer field toward the cafeteria. I kept thinking that any minute now darkbringers were going to burst out of it and attack.

  My heart thundered against my chest when I crept up the steps to the gray double doors. The real Jackson Middle had red doors to the main building. I paused with my hand on the knob, listening again. The flag flapping in the wind was the only sound. There was no turning back, and I wouldn’t even if I could. I had to do this for my father. I couldn’t be the future guardian of the veil if I chickened out when something scared me.

  “For Papa,” I said aloud as I pushed open the door.

  Shadows flickered across the half-lit hallway, but I sucked in a deep breath. My sneakers squeaked against the floor, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. All the classroom doors were closed, and the shadows seemed to writhe and lash out at me. It was only a short walk before I reached Ms. Vanderbilt’s classroom. I glanced around the hallway again—expecting something to happen. When nothing did, I pressed my face up close to the glass in the door and peered inside. All the desks sat in perfect rows with a sheet of paper on each. It was just like in our world, where Ms. Vanderbilt always had pop quizzes ready at the beginning of class.

  Bracing for an ambush, I rushed into the room, holding my breath. But it was completely empty. I stood in the middle of the room, turning in circles, tears pricking my eyes. Papa wasn’t here. How could this be? I stared at the chalkboard. It had the ingredients for making candy apples, like on the day the world turned gray.

  On the crossroads, the Lord of Shadows said that my father was at the epicenter of where it all began for me.

  “But this is the epicenter,” I said, my voice weak.

  The clock on the wall ticked, and I jumped. It wasn’t my imagination either that the shadows in the corners crawled closer. A thousand thoughts went through my head, and none of them made any sense. I wanted to outright cry instead of swiping at the tears on my cheeks. But I had to figure this out for Papa.

  Again the Lord of Shadows’ words replayed in my head.

  The epicenter of where it all began for you.

  “It began here!” I screamed. “Here!”

  My voice echoed in the room.

  Here, it mocked me. Here.

  I stepped closer to the chalkboard, trying to remember the exact moment the world turned gray. Then I remembered something else. A week before that day in Ms. Vanderbilt’s class, I’d seen a crack in the ceiling in the gym. Not a regular crack. It’d looked like crooked black lightning. At the time, we’d been doing breathing exercises on the mats, and I thought I had fallen asleep.

  A tear in the veil.

  I jetted from the room and down the hall. “The gym!”

  My nerves were on edge, and my legs
shook as I ran out of the main building and across the soccer field to reach the gym. I pushed open the double doors that were as creaky as the ones at the real Jackson Middle. I hurried down the hallway of awards and trophies behind glass walls, and then as soon as I stepped in the gym, I saw him.

  “Papa!” I screamed.

  I ran without thinking. Papa sat in a chair in the middle of the basketball court with his arms tied behind his back. His head and shoulders slumped forward, his back hunched over. Shadows moved in the gym, and there was only a little light coming from the windows.

  My vision was a blur of tears as I fumbled with the rope that bound his hands. I noticed that it hadn’t been all that tight, and he could have wiggled them loose on his own. That was another detail to taunt me. It wasn’t the rope that had trapped my father here; it was something more powerful.

  When I moved in front of Papa, he finally raised his head, his locs falling over his eyes. He looked confused, like he’d just woken from a long nap, but that look soon turned to shock and horror. “No, no, no,” he whispered. “Maya, baby girl, you can’t be here. It’s a trap.”

  “I know, Papa.” I bit my lip. “I had to help.”

  Tears streamed down my father’s face too. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  My mouth fell open. His words stung. I’d gone through so much to be here, and he needed my help. On top of that, I felt really bad for leaving Frankie and Eli behind to protect the wormhole and fight Nulan. “But I had to come.”

  “He took everyone I loved before,” Papa said, his voice choked. “I couldn’t protect them.”

  “I know, Papa.” I knelt before him. In his stories, he was always the hero, but even heroes suffered. There was always a cost. Sometimes they suffered in small ways and sometimes in huge ways. Papa had made a mistake when he separated the human world from the Dark. When he created the veil, it hurt a lot of darkbringers—many died. Even though he’d fixed it, the Lord of Shadows couldn’t forgive him for the damage he’d caused. Now I saw the regret burning in Papa’s eyes. He looked smaller somehow, less heroic and more human. “We can stop him together,” I said. “You and me.”