by Leah Bobet
Tyler’s mouth closed so fast I heard his jaw click shut.
Alone, I realized: dying alone in the loneliest place in the world. I’d withstood mere minutes in that green and silent world, locked in with my doubts, my fears, myself. Jones and Thom had been there for months on end. Jones agreed to our deal, I realized, because Heron threatened to put him back.
There was a deferential tap on the door. I turned, and Heron scuffed his worn blue socks on the threshold. “Hallie, I sent for Ada Chandler. She’s ready downstairs when you are.”
Tyler was suddenly absorbed in gathering up the soiled, bloody sheets. Heron watched him set them in the washbasket with a new anxiety. Tyler was proud of the war, proud of his part in it. But he’d wanted to be John Balsam, and that was a different kind of love: one that could turn right into resentment.
“Right,” I said, and Thom pushed himself up to his elbows.
“And what are you doing on my farm?” he asked coolly.
“Chopping wood. Fixing fences. Right now, guarding Asphodel Jones,” Heron answered. “He’s a sad man, that one. He’ll say anything so I don’t leave, even to the horrible bastard who killed his God.”
“But if he knows it wasn’t a god . . . ” I trailed off.
Heron’s eyebrows rose.
“He doesn’t want to know anything about his god,” Thom said quietly. “It would mean he staked it all on something and was wrong, and some people just don’t deal well with the thought that they tried and failed.”
I turned away. I didn’t want any of them to see me flinch.
“You know, Thomas, you could have stopped him,” Heron went on. “He’s pitiful. But he still killed all those soldiers. He doesn’t feel a speck of remorse.”
Thom’s humorless grin surfaced and then drowned. “I should have cut his throat in the dark, like an irregular?”
Heron shrugged.
Thom shook his head. “Maybe if I was a hero.”
“Nobody’s a hero here,” Heron said softly.
Thom ran a finger over the long train of his bandages, wrapped like soft leather over a twist-forged knife. “I’m just a barley farmer. I wanted to go home and see my daughter born.” He swallowed. “I didn’t want to be left alone.”
Heron looked down at my Thom with contempt—and pity. “Well, none of us do,” he said evenly, and stumped back down the stairs.
twenty-five
I FOUND HERON IN THE KITCHEN, FILLING THE KETTLE FOR TEA. Ada Chandler tapped her toes impatiently on the floorboards, raccoon-eyed with exhaustion and inexplicably cheerful. “There you are,” she said, and sprang to her feet as I rounded the corner. “That intelligence about the hole at John’s Creek is perfect. Everything makes sense now. Okay, not everything. But it’s good. It might just work.”
“What might work?” I asked.
“Jerome’s measurements were right,” she said, all enthusiasm. She was a totally different person on the trail of a mystery: all the restless grumpiness fell away. “The Twisted Things’ bodies will block the portal without decaying, like the stones did on the riverbank, if we can brick it up with them—just like that wall of leaves Heron mentioned in John’s Creek. And I figured out why. The matter they’re made of is just slightly chemically different from what we are, and from our air. We’re alkaline to them. It all makes sense now.”
I stared. She huffed impatiently.
Tyler came down the stairs with the full washbasket pressed against his chest. “Tyler,” Ada said. “Did you catch that?”
“Don’t start again,” he said, and she relaxed. “I won’t follow it.”
“The point is, we’re alkaline to them, like—baking soda or lye. For the Twisted Things, being here is like walking through a world of lye fumes,” she explained. “Breathing lye. Eating lye. Running through it. Your brother could walk in their world and come out a bit burnt, because the acid levels there—they’re like vinegar on a cut. But for the Twisted Things, this place is deadly. That’s why they burn here, inside and out.”
“Oh,” I said, eyes wide. “That’s horrible.”
“Isn’t it?” Ada said, and grinned. “But that’s the key. We’ve had a Twisted Thing in that portal, on a string, for hours now. And it’s not breaking down at all. It’s blocked the portal, just like we need.”
Tyler’s head came up. “We could plug it. Stuff it full of Twisted Things, and then it’ll close. Just like Jones said.”
“Exactly,” Ada crowed. “All we need is a mortar to bind them together. A mortar that’s chemically acidic enough that it won’t burn up on the other side. And then we build a wall, and this is over. It’s brilliant.”
It, I thought, admiringly, is mad. Mad enough that it could just work.
“Problem is, we burned them all,” Tyler said from the corner. “Getting enough Twisted Things to fill that hole will take weeks. And they don’t stay in one piece for weeks.”
“So stop burning them,” Ada said impatiently. “I’ll be ready with my jars. It’s either that or we go through that portal and bring down something huge, and I’m no big-game hunter.”
Heron and I exchanged a tense look. “There’s no time to just save them up,” I said. “The regiment’s still coming.”
Ada scowled. “Then hold them off somehow. Keep them off my site.”
“Hold off an entire regiment?” Tyler said from the corner.
“Your uncle’s a full sergeant,” Ada shot back, and slid her boots on. “Figure it out. We’re too close to back out now.” She waved, an imperious flip of her hand, and strode out the door.
Heron looked down at his hands and shook his head. “It was just a knife,” he murmured to himself. It fell flat into the silence festering across the room. “Say it,” he said finally.
Tyler set the washbasket down. “The poster didn’t look like you,” he said, defeated.
Heron smirked. “Of course it didn’t. They drew a God-killer. They drew a hero.”
Tyler’s eyes went bright with humiliation. I fought the urge to throw Heron out of my kitchen and just hold Ty ’til it stopped, to joke about chickens and the bedroom ceiling for the rest of the afternoon. “Stop it,” I said, and flung a handful of carrots on the table to chop for supper. “I will not watch you two trade potshots until Ada invents her evil glue.”
“We can’t hold off a regiment,” Heron said, sobered now. “Miss Chandler’s confidence is inspiring, but they’ll come here torches blazing. Like it or not, we are harboring Jones now. That’s a hanging offense.”
“Jones,” Tyler said, and pulled a knife from the block for the carrots. “Do you think they’ll believe us? That we’re going to turn him over to the generals?”
“After how Lieutenant Jackson reacted, I don’t know,” I said. The problem of Asphodel Jones just kept getting more complicated. I lifted the lid of our soap pot and loosed a stink of crushed mint, lye, and flowers: more of Marthe’s normalcy, left on the stove to simmer. The regiment was coming, and we were harborers, but Hazel Mae needed soap. “Do you think when we hand him over they’ll give him a trial? Use the law?”
“No,” Heron said with the discomfited expression he got whenever Jones came up. “You saw him. He’s not the Asphodel Jones they want. They want a raving madman, spitting sand and death and slitting throats by the dozen. He’s”—he stopped, with an awful look at both of us—“selfish. Broken. Pitiful.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Tyler muttered.
“He is. He’s been baiting me,” Heron said uncomfortably, and dropped his hands into his lap. “He picks fights because otherwise I don’t talk, and the silence drives him mad. And the rest of the afternoon all he’s talked about is his daughter: how much he loves her. Every brilliant thing she does—because he knows he won’t see her again. I marched into the Great Dust to slaughter Asphodel Jones. I never imagined he would be so sad.”
I lowered the soap spoon. “The regiment won’t like the real Jones.”
Heron ca
ught my eye, caught what I left unspoken: Just like they’d hate the cheesemaker John Balsam. “I don’t know,” he said carefully, “if he will be enough to keep them satisfied until Miss Chandler reinvents mortar. But I don’t have any better ideas.”
“Big-game hunting,” Tyler muttered, decimating the carrots into round, bright coins. There was a hitch in his voice, a broken, hip-twist hitch that I hadn’t heard since he’d asked to court me. He’d rolled his sleeves up, and the glint of his army buttons was no longer visible at his wrists. He is, I thought, and I could recognize it now, heartbroken.
“We just need something bigger,” I fumbled. “Thom said the god’s body was big.” Think, Hallie, I ordered myself, a mere maker of malt and herder of goats. Don’t just give up. Think. The grease shimmered at the top of the soap pot, casting rainbows across the surface. They shifted under my spoon like patterned skin. Like the hide that was rotting in the river—
The spoon stopped.
“There is something big enough to plug that hole,” I said quietly. “Beast Island.”
Heron whistled, low. Tyler’s head rose, slowly and then faster. His eyes were like hazel stars. “Beast Island—it came from there, too. It’s—what’s her word?”
“Acidic,” I said.
“Oh, God, we’d need help,” he fretted gleefully. “Boats, rope, a trestle. Lots of boats.”
“We need,” Heron said, “Windstown.”
I put the soap spoon down. If I’d been told the air was lye now, that I could never breathe deep again, in that instant I would have believed it. “We can’t. Windstown won’t come. The things we said to Pitts the last time we were there—”
“They have to,” Tyler said.
“I can’t. Pitts won’t listen; he just puts on his sash and chain and plays God—”
“He has to,” Tyler repeated, simple, stubborn. “They’re our neighbors, and it’s the end of the world.”
I swallowed and thought of all the worst fears that had come to pass this week: Marthe’s face contorted with pain at my lies; Thom, frightened and embittered, bloodying the sheets of his wedding bed; Asphodel Jones in my smokehouse, knowing my name, my face, what made me flinch. My little niece, fists raised and mouth seeking, looking for warmth and light as monsters strode across the land that should, one day, be hers.
“What’s one more?” I said, a little hysterical, and Tyler cast me a worried glance. I shook my head. It was a thought for that silent green world, so far outside the humble day to day of living; so far from seed, or plow, or goat. If I was going to live up to the vow I’d made there, I had to not act like my uncle, not act like I was in this alone. I had, I thought with a flicker of sheer panic, to try.
“I need a water bottle,” I said. “And I need a torch. The light’s going to go soon.”
Heron nodded. “I’ll get them.”
“How are we going to get there?” Tyler asked. “The hole’s right near the river dock. I haven’t seen your dock in a few days.”
I swallowed. “I’ll take the bridge.”
Tyler put down the kitchen knife. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s falling apart. They blocked it off for a reason, Hal.”
“I’ll run,” I promised. My heart was already pounding. “Because if I don’t, we’ll die anyway, and this guy I know told me it was better to try.”
“That Tiger guy,” he said with just a hint of warmth.
“That one,” I agreed, and took his hand in mine.
I didn’t have to say the rest. Hope, he registered, his eyes alight. Tyler’s fingers laced and relaced between mine, seeking restless new combinations. You’re a fidget, I thought warmly, and leaned into his arm. Tyler took both my hands in his and kissed them firmly, knuckle by knuckle. “Pack your kit. I’ll get the cart and drive you to the edge.”
“Thank you,” I whispered, and Heron came downstairs, water bottle in hand.
I looked up the stairs, at the boards and buttresses of the house we’d kept by never, ever taking a thing Alonso Pitts had sneeringly offered. I swallowed hard. “Tell Marthe,” I asked him. “Tell her I’ll be back soon.”
THE DUST
twenty-six
IT WAS TEN MILES TO THE FOOT OF THE BRIDGE, EVERY ONE OF them charred and pockmarked with the signs of war. Tyler drove me along the old road in the Blakely family cart as the sun set behind us, tingeing everything red: the fallen trees, the scorched-out hedges, the barns that listed to one side like wounded men. The Twisted Things had desolated the land by the river shore. Ash choked the cold air. The snow heaped, and it was black.
By the time the bridge loomed on the horizon, a sleeping giant, we were silent. Its cords and cables drifted, creaking, in the wind.
“Here,” Tyler said, and reined the ponies in. “I’ll help with your pack.”
I stepped down from the cart and faced the arching road before me with trepidation. I hadn’t remembered the bridge running so narrow or so high: a steep hill of metal and asphalt that crested in the middle of the river before it fell away into the dead streets of Old Windstown.
“You’re sure about this?” Tyler asked.
“No,” I said, and shouldered my pack.
Tyler’s forehead crinkled with resignation. “Come home safe to me,” he said, and squeezed my hand one last time.
I nodded. There was nothing else to say.
The bridge was wild land: weed-eaten concrete. They had only cleared one lane of it when the old cities withered. Its sides were littered with the rusted skeletons of ancient machines, their workings outside all modern comprehension. They hulked and crumbled in the wind, as inscrutable as the hills: a silent monument to whatever ended our great-grandparents’ world.
I swallowed bile and started quickly down the cleared lane, through the high wind that rose over the river, thick with ash.
The bridge was slippery underfoot, the black asphalt slicked with frozen river spray and fragments of powdered rust. I climbed carefully, testing each step against its persistent upward curve. I wasn’t yet to the bridge’s apex when the sharp howl split the sky.
Dogs, I thought, and turned sharply. Caught in the glare of the setting sun, I saw them pacing, edge-tailed, behind me on the shore. “Oh, great,” I muttered, and looked around for a stick, a log, something: the ferals were wild, but they didn’t pick a fight unless it was mid-February and they were starving. There was nothing to hand; the bones of the bridge had been picked dry decades ago. Nothing here was anything anyone wanted.
“Well, I did say I’d run,” I muttered, and picked up speed. The bridge swayed beneath me like a boat on the water; the roadway under my boot was spidered with cracks. I strode faster. The pavement shuddered, a howl of metal and cord that sent the ferals behind me squealing for the trees. The whole bridge, sinuous, rocked in the too-hot otherworldly wind.
My foot slid. I didn’t care.
I ran.
I bent double and scrambled across the endlessly arching bridge, my legs burning, my lungs burning. If it came down, there was nowhere to go. There was nothing to either side but killing winter water. I put my head down and pushed, forced myself faster.
Over the bridge’s shuddering beams, against the sunset, the deer-horned trees walked through the river, calling weird and fluting hunting calls. Their leaves brushed the cables one by one, and the metal blackened in their monstrous wake. I heard a creak. A soft ping.
A metal bridge cable as thick as my arm whipped low over my head and crashed into dead metal and glass.
I shrieked, staggered into a rusting, frozen hulk as the bridge shook itself like a wet dog. The wind howled through its ruins, churned the river into roaring waves. The asphalt shook again beneath me, and shards flew everywhere as the second huge cable frayed above me and let go.
I tripped and tumbled, bruising, rolling down the bridge as the cables sang overhead. The roadway shuddered beneath me, vibrating with the endless snap! snap! snap! of metal, stronger than anything we’d ever know to make again. The d
eer-horned trees tossed the bridge to and fro, and I fell between those ancient machines, down the other side. I scrabbled for a handhold on the bucking, disintegrating bridge. It reared up, and I landed in something softer, colder. Snow, I thought. Weeds prickled my palms. I’m on the other side.
Inching and wriggling into the darkness, I lifted my head to the riverside.
The bridge was falling, finally falling. Its broken back arched and split, the girders screaming as the road ripped away. The ground boomed, once, twice, as each piece tumbled into the river. I clung to the soil with my bleeding, aching fingers and shut my eyes as tight as I could.
When I opened them, the river was a disaster of metal. The disintegrated vehicles of our ancestors bobbed through the river, whispering their steel farewells. Around them, the dead bridge ribboned through the water, its concrete flaking slowly. The deer-horned trees called, almost lost, to each other and waded through the river, to the north.
I pulled myself up, breath heaving, and scrabbled to my feet. My knee twinged furiously. I ignored it. Still alive, I thought, delirious. I did it, and I stumbled into the ruins of Old Windstown.
The dead city behind the Windstown barricade was a maze. The Chandlers had mapped and tamed their home in the ruins on our side of the river, but Old Windstown had been abandoned for a full century, left derelict to the dogs and raccoons while men and women kept to the safe township on the other side of the walls. Trees grew riot through the concrete, buckling up pavement, knocking roof tiles to the dirt. I steered through them, limping carefully, blinded by the scattershot flares of light on the horizon and the scent of distant flames. The Twisted Things had been to Old Windstown. High above me, gutted concrete buildings smoked from their awful wings.
I ducked down and stumbled through the alleys, leaned panting against an ancient redbrick wall. Three raccoons squealed, frightened, and ran out of a door across the street, and the roof behind them creaked and fell in. A flock of spinner birds fled, startled, from its ruins in the other direction: looking for another place to light, another thing to destroy.