by Sarah Jaune
Ivy crawled off the cot and sat on the floor, placing her palms flat on the stone floor. Eli stared down, waiting quietly while she worked. After a few minutes, she nodded. “It’s off to our east about a mile. There’s a large reservoir, but I don’t want them to lose water altogether. If I move it to another spring, that’s going to take so much power that I’ll pass out.”
Eli thought about that, and tried to think up a way around it. Slowly, a plan formed in his head. He grinned. “I have an idea.”
It was simple breaking out of the jail. Eli pushed on the bars of the lone window until they popped out. He gave Ivy a leg up so she could crawl out, and he followed right behind. Then, he put the bar back in place and bent it back into shape. It had made a loud banging noise, but Ivy had covered it by having a fake coughing fit. Chief Savon hadn’t even bothered to come back to check on them.
The police chief wouldn’t know how they’d escaped unless he took a close look at the steel bars of the window and saw they were just a little bit off from what they’d been before.
The police chief had taken their backpack, but it hadn’t had anything important in it. Eli still had the gold coins, which he’d stuck in his shoe. Mercifully, they hadn’t been searched.
They’d have to get the bag on their way back.
They ran for the underground cavern that Ivy said held the water for the town. No one came after them, but that didn’t surprise Eli. If he’d been looking for them, he’d have tried in town. That’s what would have made sense.
“I miss my hat,” Ivy told him after they’d run the mile to a fence that blocked the rest of the town from the source of water.
“We’ll go back for it,” Eli promised as he climbed the fence, Ivy right behind him. “I really hope he doesn’t have dogs.”
Zhu Savon did have dogs. The second their feet touched the ground, a pack of dogs came charging after them, growling and barking at the top of their lungs. Eli flicked his hands out, sending the dogs skittering back just as he’d done with the wolves.
These weren’t wolves, though. The dogs backed off immediately, running away with their tails tucked between their legs.
“This way,” Ivy said, pointing to their right. “It’s only another thirty feet to the edge.”
They scrambled over the rocks and red dirt, arriving at a place where Ivy said millions of gallons flowed below them in a gigantic cavern. “Can’t you feel it?” she asked him in awe. “It’s amazing. Okay, let me concentrate.”
She sat again and Eli stood guard over her, watching for anyone to find them. Every so often, she’d stand and move ten feet to the right, with Eli trailing along behind her. Finally, Ivy explained what had happened as they stood over a patch of earth that didn’t look like the rest around them. “Somehow,” she told him, “and I’m not sure how, exactly, they figured out that there were two chambers. They dug down right here,” she pointed to the ground, “and blocked the water’s flow. It wants to go that way,” she told him, pointing towards the town.
Eli nodded and motioned for her to stand back. “Okay, let’s do this.”
He didn’t push himself at all once. Eli focused on a bit of the earth and moved it to their left in manageable chunks. Sometimes, he’d come up on a boulder, and he used both his strength and telekinesis to move it. It took almost an hour to dig down forty feet.
“It’s at least another forty,” Ivy sighed in exasperation as she glanced back towards the town. “They’re going to find us.”
“Let’s make a push together,” Eli suggested. “I’ll pull the rocks, you knock them out of the way with the water.”
Ivy crinkled up her nose as she examined the hole. “Okay, it’s worth a shot. Ready?”
“On three, one, two, three!” he cried out as he focused more of his magic on pulling the dirt and rock from the hole, while Ivy pushed at it with the water from the cavern. Slowly, painfully, the rocks came up, picking up speed as they went until it all shot out from the hole in a geyser of water, mud, and debris. Eli directed the falling earth away from them and sank to his knees, Ivy mimicking him with a long sigh.
“It’s working,” Ivy told him.
He nodded. There was only one last thing to do. Eli drank some water, then rose on unsteady legs to where Ivy said the edge of the old cavern was. “How much water is left?” he asked her.
“A lot,” she shook her head. “It’s going to be draining for hours.”
They didn’t have hours, but maybe they didn’t need it. Once the water was gone, there would be nothing holding up the roof of the cavern. “You’re sure it won’t cut off the water supply?”
“Positive,” Ivy promised as she pointed to the north. “The water is flowing in that way. It splits, like an upside-down ‘y’ and now goes towards a spring closer to town.” She drew the shape she was talking about in the soft earth and at the ends of the ‘y’ she made bubbles. “Those are the reservoirs, where the water can collect. What the Savon brothers did was to cut off one of the prongs on the y to stop it from flowing the way the underground river wanted to flow. We simply opened it back up again.”
“If I shift the rock above the cavern, do you think it will collapse once the water is gone?” Eli asked.
Ivy’s smile was just a little too devious. “I don’t know, but it won’t hurt to try.”
It actually did hurt to try. They waited for fifteen minutes until a good bit of the water, according to Ivy, had drained out to the lower branch that had been blocked. Then they stood back and Eli attempted to force the rocks down, exerting pressure on them.
Nothing happened, at least that Eli could see, except that he was left drained and weak. “Nothing,” he told Ivy dejectedly.
She frowned down at the ground. “Something.”
He turned to look at her and the ground gave way under them. They freefell fifteen feet into the crater, and the only thing that saved them from a painful death, crushed by mounds of rocks, was Ivy’s quick reflexes. She pulled water out from the ground and blasted them with a high pressure spray, shooting them back up onto the solid earth. They hit hard, rolling to a stop a few feet away from each other, both completely winded.
“Never,” Ivy panted in pain, “again.”
“Agreed,” Eli moaned as he rolled into a ball and tried not to throw up.
Ivy was first on her feet, and she helped Eli to stagger upright, pulling on his arms until he was mobile again. “I hurt,” he told her.
“Me, too,” she agreed with a shake of her head. “Let’s sneak back to town and see if we created enough chaos.”
They had. The town, which had been practically deserted before, was in an uproar. Everyone was running for the east side of town, where Eli could see shimmering waves of water pouring from the earth.
Absolutely no one was in the police station when they snuck in, grabbed their backpack, plus Ivy’s hat, and left. They found Rex’s garage vacated as well.
Eli pulled a golden disk from his shoe and left it in a jar under the counter. “I’m going to take the tire and run back to the jeep,” he told Ivy. “You meet me outside of town by that rock we stopped at to rest.”
She nodded and Eli took off away from town, rolling the tire and running as fast as he could without passing out from the long, fast pace. It still took him almost two hours to reach the jeep, by which point he was miserable. He was so hungry and thirsty that he couldn’t think of anything but food and water. Once he’d refueled himself, Eli changed the tire and went to pick Ivy up. She hadn’t reached the spot they’d arranged, so he kept going and picked her up a mile down the road.
“I wonder if we can drive around town,” Ivy mused as she climbed into the jeep. “We need to carry a spare from now on.”
“Yeah,” Eli agreed as he drove down the road. He didn’t bother trying to detour around the town. Eli drove straight through to find everyone celebrating at the spring which was flowing again.
He waved to Zhu and Otis Savon, amused to see their mutinous, st
unned expressions.
“The best part is they can’t reverse it,” Ivy laughed as she turned in her seat to keep staring at them as the small town faded out of sight. “They won’t be able to dig that much dirt out and reroute the water, ever again. It’s done.
Eli laughed in relief. “Now we need to get to New Orleans.” They’d spent so much time in that town that he was beginning to worry they might be too late for Thane. Only one way to find out.
CHAPTER 12
LUCK?
They drove on for hours as the terrain around them remained the same. Eli felt a shiver run over his spine as they drove past the Four Corners.
Beth…
She probably wasn’t close to him at that moment. She could be anywhere in their world. He didn’t know. Eli wanted desperately to close his eyes and picture her sunny smile when she’d take his hand to play a game. He missed his twin more than words could say.
However, he didn’t know what Beth looked like anymore. She’d have grown, just as he had. She wouldn’t be ten years old. She was sixteen, the same age as he was, and she’d have changed as much as he had.
Hopefully, he was still taller than she was.
The thought was so ludicrous that he actually chuckled out loud, causing Ivy to turn in her seat. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said honestly. “I was just thinking about Beth.”
Her brows drew together for a single moment, before her face flooded with understanding. “The Four Corners; yeah, we’re close. It’s less than two years, now, though.”
Time was a fickle master. The days were long, but the years short. Ages flew, but stood still in the moment. He wanted it to be now, so it felt like a long wait, but he’d been ten just weeks ago. That was how it felt.
He didn’t know how Naomi was doing, either, but she was a blurry memory for him. She’d been so much older. Eli tried not to think about the pain he’d seen on her face that final day. What he knew now was that Naomi hadn’t been sorry to say goodbye to him. She wasn’t going to miss him. He didn’t know what he’d done to make his older sister hate him so much. Eli was afraid to know.
“We’ll be in the Albuquerque Zone before too long,” Ivy told him as she pulled out their map. “Do you want to keep going through the night?”
“Yeah,” Eli said without hesitation. “Why don’t you get some sleep and we’ll trade off later.”
They drove through the night, swapping off drivers and stopping only to refuel the gas tank with water. Eli had finally found a history book that explained that everything used to run on gasoline, which was a product made from oil. Now engines ran on water through a system that converted it to hydrogen. As soon as he had time, Eli wanted to take an old engine apart to figure it all out. No one except his foster brother, Naim, who was a genius, seemed to understand how it worked. They just knew that it did, and how to keep the engines running.
Eli wanted to know how.
“Hey.”
Ivy’s voice jolted Eli back to the dark, deserted road that stretched between the zones. Nothing but the moon and stars shone around them, eerily lighting up the few shrubs that they were passing. “Yeah?” he asked her.
She reached out a pale, almost ghostly hand to touch his arm. “Are you okay? You look… odd.”
“Fine,” Eli said a little harsher than he meant to. He grimaced. “I was thinking about engines.”
“That makes you scowl?” Ivy almost laughed the words out.
He grinned, despite himself. “Pablo still wants me to go to college.”
“It makes sense,” she said, cottoning on to why he was in a bad mood. “I think you should do what you want to, but there’s no reason you couldn’t train to be a mechanic after college. Then if you needed it—”
“I know!” Eli bit out, trying to cut her off. He’d heard that before, too many times.
Ivy’s silence spoke loudly.
“Sorry,” he said quietly as his annoyance ebbed. “I don’t want to be the Overseer of Chicago. I’d rather eat nothing but grass for the rest of my life.”
She snorted and shook her head. “You could make the city great again, Eli. It doesn’t have to be the way it is now.”
She didn’t understand, and he didn’t know how to explain. He pulled over to switch off again, even though he knew dawn would soon be on them.
Eli climbed into the passenger seat, trading with Ivy, and turned his head away so he could pretend to sleep. Instead, he watched the miles fly by faster than time, speeding him away from the place he’d finally see Beth again.
They arrived in the Tulsa Zone shortly after lunch that day. Despite the high sun and clear skies the temperature around them was low, and a stiff, punishing breeze blew at them the moment they pulled over in a tiny grouping of houses to refuel.
Eli moved from the jeep to stretch his legs, shivering in the dry air. He turned a full circle, scanning the flat land around them. He frowned at the houses, which were all small, one-story white homes that could have used new paint several years before. “Have you seen anyone?” he called over to Ivy, who was pretending to use a water bottle to refill the jeep, while actually pulling water from the ground. She’d perfected that sleight of hand months before.
Ivy glanced around them. “No, not for a couple hundred miles at least. There hasn’t been anything between here and the Oklahoma City Zone.”
He shivered and stuck his hands in his pockets, as he continued to keep a vigilant eye on the world around them. “We shouldn’t have stopped so close to a town.”
Her green eyes darted around, but nodded reluctantly. “I kept putting it off, hoping for a better spot to find water. The area around here is incredibly dry.”
Eli had forgotten that she could sense the water, even when they were driving. “Okay,” he sighed, knowing there was no blame in this. “I was just—” his voice hitched as he saw movement in the window of the house closest to them. It was a small face, peeking out through a tattered curtain and quickly drawing away. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” Ivy asked as she closed the filler cap on the jeep.
“There was someone over there,” Eli told her as he pointed to the house. He narrowed his eyes, trying to get another glance. “Someone was in the window, watching.”
Ivy skirted around the jeep. “We should leave.”
“It was a kid,” Eli said in amazement. “I thought this place was deserted.”
“Well, it’s clearly not, so let’s go,” she urged as she pushed on his back. “You’re driving.”
Eli didn’t move. He cocked his head to the side and continued to study the window. The face came again, and he saw the dark skin on an impossibly thin, tiny face.
The little girl gasped when she realized she’d been spotted and disappeared again.
“Something is wrong,” Eli told Ivy quietly.
“I know that! We need to go, Elijah!” Ivy reminded him as she gave him a greater shove to move around the jeep.
Eli shook his head, ignoring her prodding and strode for the house. “Something is wrong,” he said again, feeling it in his gut.
Ivy hurried after him, fuming as she tried to stop him from approaching the house. “Eli!”
He sprinted up the short drive, along the pebbled path, and onto a small, dilapidated porch. He knocked at the door. “Open up,” he called out loud enough to be heard, but gently enough so as not to scare her. “I want to help. Open up.”
“You are crazy!” Ivy said as she came up to stand next to him, glaring at him. “We have somewhere to be, and we’ve already been delayed more than—” her face froze as she turned slowly towards the door, her jaw going slack as she reached out a shaking hand to touch the wood. “Oh daggers…” she said at barely above a whisper.
“What?” Eli asked as his hand went down for the doorknob, while his heart kicked in to high gear.
“Magic,” Ivy informed him as her eyes went wider. “She’s magical. Two powers, Eli!”
“Hello?�
�� Eli called out again, realizing he had to take the risk. “We know you’re there. Are you alone? We have magic, too. We can help you.”
He knew he’d won when the lock clicked. Slowly, the little girl pulled the door open. Her thin, haggard expression nearly did Eli in. The sunken eyes were honey colored, but almost lifeless. It was as though she’d given up on the world.
“She’s… she’s like us,” Ivy said in wonder. “Magnetism and Ice. They’re both very strong in her.”
Ivy knelt before the girl and took her small hand. The girl’s chocolate skin stood out against Ivy’s paleness. “Where is everyone?”