Storm of Locusts

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  Clive’s efforts to scale the Wall are getting more frantic, his hands turning bloody as his fingernails scratch uselessly at the hard turquoise. A fine sheen of blue dust rains to the earth around his feet, but he’s not making any progress unless he intends to tear down the Wall molecule by molecule with his bare hands. Which no doubt he would attempt if he thought it would help his little brother.

  “Stay put,” I murmur to Ben. “Keep your eyes open for trouble.”

  She swallows, her face scared, her back rigid.

  My steps are steady and hushed as I approach Clive. He’s finally found a small shallow foothold in the Wall, and he’s trying to dig his toe in and push himself up through will alone. But the man is built like a wall himself. Six four and two hundred and twenty pounds on a bad day. He’s just not going to get up. His foot slips, and he crashes to his knees, his palms scraping raw against the uneven rock. He doesn’t cry out, doesn’t make a noise, but his whole body is trembling.

  I reach out and touch the Wall. The turquoise is cold and rough, jagged stone under my palm. I don’t know how the White Locust got Caleb up there, but we’re not climbing this without a ladder or a rope or something. At least Clive and I aren’t.

  “Ben,” I call calmly over my shoulder. “Come here.”

  I hear her approach, her footsteps dragging uncertainly.

  “Can you climb this?” I ask, my eyes still studying the Wall, looking for some kind of weakness, something that will help us.

  She comes up beside me and presses her own small hand to the Wall. She gulps nervously, blinks too quickly. “Maybe?”

  “I saw how you handled the trails as Lake Asááyi,” I say, willing her confidence.

  But she shakes her head, looking overcome and out of her league. Something falls from above us, blood like a raindrop. It strikes Ben on the cheek. Her hand flies to her face in horror. “It’s him!” she whispers before she turns, stumbling back to the bikes. I hear her gagging and then the sound of vomit striking the ground.

  “I can climb it,” comes another voice from behind me. Mósí.

  “Will you?” I ask, not hiding my surprise that she’s offering. “I didn’t think you were the helping kind.”

  “After your convincing lecture at the pawn shop? How could I not be? Who is this unfortunate soul?” she asks, her voice soft with wonder.

  Clive’s voice cracks as he says, “It’s Caleb, my brother.” His shoulders heave, and for the first time since we got here, he lets out a sob. Struggles to hold in more, but they escape in strangled cries.

  Mósí tilts her head, yellow eyes studying Clive, feline inscrutable.

  I think of Clive as the guy who clapped Kai on the back, laughing after we killed the monsters in Rock Springs. Teasing me about Kai dancing with him instead of me. Tormenting me with a tube of mascara. But now he is in pain, and I know I should help him. But the only way I know to help him is to hurt whoever did this to his brother. And since he’s not here, I’m useless.

  “Why did they kill him?” Ben asks quietly, coming up beside me. Tears run freely down her cheeks.

  I start to answer that I don’t know why, when Mósí says, “But he’s not dead.”

  I jerk my head around. “What did you say?”

  Clive looks up, the hope in his face frightening.

  Mósí blinks rapidly, her vertical pupils dilating, clearly startled at our response. She takes a moment to straighten her scarf and smooth her hands over her clothes before she says, “Can you not smell the blood moving through his veins? His heartbeat is sluggish, but it is there.”

  “Get him down,” Clive says, pleading. “Please. Can you get him down?”

  The Cat looks at him a long moment and nods once. We all move back a few feet to give her space. She removes her flowered scarf from her head and hands it to me absently. For once I don’t mind the implicit order. She slips her flat shoes off her feet and stretches her back, arching, and then her hands, fingers interlaced. Finally, she approaches the Wall. Bows her head, and when she raises it again, I can see the feline in her, almost like it’s interposed across her human features. Vibrissae, a button nose, and almost soft fur-like texture to her skin. And her fingers have sprouted curved claws. I expect her to scale the Wall like I’ve seen cats do to trees, but instead she crouches low, coiling like a spring, and launches herself skyward thirty feet. She lands just parallel to Caleb’s head, scrambling to some ledge we can’t see. Balancing on clawed toes, she leans in over his face. She opens her mouth and lowers her chin, panting. Like she’s breathing him in.

  “What is she doing?” Ben asks.

  “I have no idea,” I murmur.

  “Please,” Clive begs urgently. “Can you hurry?”

  Mósí looks down at him, unbothered by his pleas. “He smells . . . sweet,” she murmurs. With her small pink tongue, she leans in to lick his cheek.

  “Mósí!” I shout, worried that the Cat is losing focus. “Get the boy down.”

  Her shoulders stiffen. If she had a tail, it would be twitching. “I am only assessing his health. Your ignorance is irritating, to say the least.” But she does reach over and, with supernatural strength, rip the first stake from Caleb’s shoulder. She lets it drop, clattering to the ground, catching his body against her own and cradling him with one arm while the other holds the Wall. Caleb moans and shudders, his weight sagging.

  “Caleb!” Clive screams, relieved. “We’re here, brother. I’m here. We’re getting you down. Just hold on!”

  Shifting his weight so her hand is free, Mósí stretches across his body and grips the remaining stake. “I suspect he’ll fall when I release him, despite the lovely wings. Do be ready to catch him.”

  “Wings?” I look closer, and she is right. Just like the archer at Lake Asááyi, Caleb has delicately veined wings—two sprouting from the joints of his shoulders like shortened angel wings and two shorter ones at the top of his rib cage. Both made of some kind of shimmering gossamer.

  Mósí wrenches the other spike free, and Caleb unceremoniously drops. Clive catches his brother in his arms, taking his weight with a small grunt. He lowers him gently to the ground, murmuring insensible words of comfort.

  Mósí turns, ready to jump down. And freezes, eyes sharpening on something in the distance. My adrenaline spikes. I turn toward the road, shotgun raised.

  “Someone’s coming,” the Cat says as she drops soundlessly on bare feet. She slips on her flats and comes forward. “I can hear a motorbike.”

  “How many?”

  I assess our situation. Clive is no good right now, lost in grief and trying to care for his brother. Ben’s brought him her canteen, and he’s washing Caleb’s face and chest reverently. A quick glance reveals Caleb’s bleeding only from the places the spikes pierced his skin, and the blood loss has trickled to almost nothing now. I don’t see any other obvious wounds, if you don’t count the wings grafted to his back. I remember the archer at Lake Asááyi had them too, and they were functional. Which suggests to me that, as wild as it sounds, the wings weren’t meant to kill Caleb, but to make him fly. No severe bleeding, no wounds, so he’s most likely in shock. Dehydrated. Starved. I wonder how long he’s been up there.

  Ben’s hands are shaking slightly, and she still looks unwell. She might be in shock too. I thought maybe she’d seen this kind of bad before, but it’s starting to seem like maybe Hastiin kept her from the ugly stuff. Which might have seemed kind back then but won’t be of service to her now.

  So, it’s me and the Cat, and I’m not sure Mósí’s willing to fight. But maybe she doesn’t have to be.

  “Only one,” she says, straightening, and I relax as well. One I can take no problem.

  We wait as the bike comes over the hill and pulls into camp. Winds its way slowly through the tattered tents and past the guard station. Pulls up short not twenty feet away. The rider rolls gracefully off the bike and pulls off a black mirrored helmet, shaking out two long red braids.

  “Caleb?
” Rissa’s voice is shaky with disbelief. “Caleb!”

  Caleb opens his eyes just in time to greet his sister. And screams.

  Chapter 19

  “Is Caleb going to be okay?” Ben asks. She and I are sitting across from each other at a long table in the building that was once Lupton’s refugee mess hall. Enough room for fifty people to sit and eat at once, but it’s only me and Ben now, and her voice echoes around the place like a bat in a cave.

  “I think he’ll be okay,” I tell her, rubbing my eyes, and I’m pretty sure that’s not a lie. My nerves are so frayed it’s hard to tell. Once Rissa arrived, Caleb started screaming, and he didn’t stop for the better part of an hour. Nothing the twins did could calm their brother. Finally, Rissa found a flask of some kind of booze in the guard barracks and forced some down his throat. He seemed to calm after that, rolling in and out of consciousness, which was better than the alternative, I guess. The three Goodacres were still holed up in the infirmary, but I’d begged off, saying I needed some air and should check on Ben. Mósí had wandered off somewhere, as cats do, and I found Ben in here, listlessly picking at a can of Spam with a fork.

  I say, “Clive’s got him stabilized and he’s resting. It’s a good thing there’s a medical facility here. If we’d been out on the road, things might be a little bleaker.”

  “Is Clive a doctor? Or, I mean, was he a doctor before the Big Water?”

  “No, but I think he did some EMT training or something. He knows what he’s doing. And he’s got plenty of hands-on experience from dealing with the lot who end up staying at Grace’s. Most of us roll in with some kind of damage.”

  “He patch you up before?”

  “Not me, but Kai. Before we knew about his Medicine People clan power.”

  Ben gives me a beleaguered smile. “Why do you think they did it? To Caleb?”

  “I don’t know. As a warning? Once Caleb’s able to talk, we’ll know more. Until then . . .”

  “The White Locust is a monster,” she says, voice hard as the Wall outside. “Just like his followers. They all deserve to die.” She stabs the potted meat with her fork.

  “Ben,” I start. I consider telling her she didn’t kill the archer, but once again I decide the timing is shit. Besides, there’s nothing she can change about it now, and I’m not sure whether the truth would help her or hurt her more. “Don’t think like that. It’s not good.”

  “It’s funny,” she says. “I’ve never felt like I had a purpose. Like, I used to wonder why I survived the Little Keystone Massacre when my parents and everyone I knew at the camp died. It never felt right.”

  The Little Keystone was one of the last battles of the Energy Wars, and calling it a battle would be overly generous. The Protectors’ camp housed whole families, sitting in protest at the site of a proposed pipeline through Osage territory. The Osage and the oil companies were tied up in court, since many of the battles were fought with lawyers and legal briefs as much as they were with guns. But there was a posse of violent men who worked to support the corporations. Those men’s souls were as dark and as slick as the crude itself, so most folks just called them “Oilers.” The Oilers decided the courts weren’t moving fast enough. They took it upon themselves to clear Protector camps by any means necessary. Little Keystone had been one of those.

  “I didn’t know there were any survivors at Little Keystone,” I say.

  “I hid.” Simple words, but her voice is anguished.

  I know that shame. It’s all too familiar. And even though I don’t believe it about myself and my nalí’s death, I try to offer her something. “You were a child.” She’s still a child, but I don’t tell her that. She’s lived through the kind of thing that strips one’s childhood away.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she says, voice flat. “Other kids didn’t hide.”

  “If you hadn’t hidden, you would have died.”

  She looks up at me. “If I had died, my uncle would still be alive.”

  I could try to tell her she doesn’t know that for a fact, that a lot happens between one person’s life and another’s death to make things fall out a certain way. But what do I know about why things happen the way they do? Maybe she’s right.

  “I’m too soft,” she says, like an admission. “I thought I was tough, because of . . . stuff. But I couldn’t take seeing Caleb like that.” She pushes the fork into the flesh of her hand, the tines making little indents.

  “Ben.”

  “Don’t make excuses for me, Maggie,” she says, her voice low with anger.

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  She gives me a half smile, like she’s relived. “It’s okay. I get it now. I know what I’m supposed to do.”

  I lean forward, arms folded on the table, not sure I like the sound of that. “What exactly do you think you are supposed to do?”

  “Kill the White Locust.” Her eyes meet mine, hard and uncompromising. “I’m supposed to avenge my uncle. Caleb, too.”

  “It’s not your job to avenge anyone.”

  Her jaw tightens, fingers flexing around the fork she’s still holding. “If not me, then who? Who fights the evil in this world?”

  “I kind of thought that’s what I was doing.”

  Her mouth twists, cynical. “Did you really?”

  I blink, caught off guard. But I can’t lie. “No. Maybe. Sometimes.”

  She nods, confirmed. “My uncle told me about you.”

  “I gathered that from what you said back at Lake Asááyi.”

  “Don’t be mad at him. He only told me the truth. You can’t help what you are. None of us can. And you do have some good qualities.” She rolls the fork back and forth across the table. “You have a gift for violence. I—I don’t have that naturally, but I can find that in myself. I know I can.”

  “You don’t want that,” I say gently.

  “I do if I’m going to kill the White Locust. And I am going to kill him. I need you to understand that.”

  “I do, but—”

  “It’s my new purpose. You get that, don’t you? Having a purpose?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I just can’t do it alone. I need your help. And Clive and Rissa, probably, too.” Her face falls, like she just remembered something. “What do you think they’ll do now that they’ve got Caleb back? Do you think they’ll go home? Forget about us?”

  “I don’t know what they’ll do,” I admit.

  She straightens. “They won’t leave,” she says, sounding confident. “They know the right thing to do. They’re going to want revenge too.”

  “You know this is a rescue mission, right?”

  “Do you think Caleb can travel?” she asks like she didn’t hear me. “He’ll have to. Maybe Mósí will let him sit in her sidecar. Do you think she’ll share?”

  “Speaking of Mósí,” I say, grateful for the chance to change the topic, “do you know where she went?”

  “She said something about going back over by the gate where we found Caleb.”

  I stand up, eager to end the conversation. “Did she say why?”

  Ben looks at me a long minute, and I feel like I should say something, but I got nothing. I don’t really do platitudes, and she asked me not to lie. Finally, she nods. “It’s okay, Maggie. I appreciate you trying.” She puts a forkful of Spam in her mouth and chews. “And no. I don’t know why Mósí went back to the gate. I mean, I didn’t ask her why. I just assumed it was a cat thing.”

  * * *

  Sure enough, I find Mósí standing in front of the open gate. She’s sitting primly, legs tucked under, back straight, and hands folded in her lap. And she’s staring through the open gate into the space beyond. Into the Malpais. In the chaos of finding Caleb, I hadn’t even thought to get a look through the gate at the lands beyond Dinétah. If I’m honest, the idea of leaving still makes me queasy.

  I approach, my moccasins silent on the paved road. She turns slightly to acknowledge that she knows I’m here, and no doubt to
remind me that I can’t sneak up on a cat.

  “What do you see?” I ask, curious. I know her eyesight is better than mine. Her hearing, too. I’ve reconsidered my initial reluctance to have her along, admitting—to myself at least—my prejudice. I know full well that Caleb might still be hanging from that wall if it weren’t for her.

  “What do I see, child?” she says, her voice soft with wonder. “I see darkness. And monsters moving in the darkness.” She twists her body to face me. “A great force came through here to remove these people. When you come face-to-face with it—and you will—do not underestimate it.”

  “Was it Kai?” I ask, remembering the metal pole littering the road.

  “No,” she says, “but don’t underestimate him, either. Chaos trails him like death trails you. But no, what happened here was not his doing. The people of Lupton left here willingly.”

  “Kai could convince them.”

  “With Bit’ąą’nii? No. They would be no threat to him, and the effects of Bit’ąą’nii . . . It cannot make you a slave. It cannot convince you to do something you don’t already want to do.”

  “I don’t know much about it,” I admit, interested. “He never explained.”

  “You mean before you killed him?”

  Damn cat. “Yes.”

  She smiles in a way that makes me decidedly uncomfortable. “Bit’ąą’nii is like a lover’s whisper. It persuades, but it does not destroy the will. It is a subtle power. This”—she looks around the empty town—“was not subtle. They abandoned their home for something they wanted more than a home.”

  “I don’t understand that. A home is all I’ve ever wanted.”

  She tilts her head. “You know much of want, Battle Child. Careful it is not your undoing.”

  I step forward to stare into what feels like a solid wall of black beyond the Dinétah border. “Why is it so dark out there? The sun is still up for a few more hours. Is there no daylight on the other side of the Wall?”