Storm of Locusts

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  “The Diyin Dine’e are sacred beings. More powerful than anything you can imagine. You can’t defeat them.”

  “Didn’t you?” he asks. “Haven’t you, more than once? It’s remarkable what you’ve done, really. I don’t even think you appreciate it.”

  “And I don’t think you appreciate how certifiable you sound.”

  His mouth twists, amusement flickering back to anger just like that. He picks up his glass of whiskey and drinks it down in one swallow. Slams the delicate crystal onto the wood table so hard it fractures. He squeezes, and it shatters, sending shards flying from the table. Something strikes me above my eye, and I wince. Blood trickles through his fingers, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  “No more, Godslayer,” he grinds out between clenched teeth. “No more will I be a victim. I am going to do what should have been done a long time ago. I’m going to destroy Dinétah, and you are going to help me do it.”

  * * *

  He leaves me there, chained in the metal chair. Disappears down a hallway without another word. I try to put the pieces of information together in my head, but a headache is starting to build and I can’t focus. Something brushes my eyelashes, and I try to blink it away, my hands still chained to my sides. Drops of blood fleck the table. I must have gotten cut when he broke the whiskey glass. I lean my head back to try to keep the blood from getting in my eyes. Rattle the chains a little, checking to see how loose they are. Not loose enough to get free.

  I look around the dimly lit room for something to help me. Some kind of weapon besides wasted bullets and cooling pie filling.

  I brace my feet against the floor and rock the chair. It tips up on one thin leg and then swings back to the other. Again, with more force, and I’m falling to the floor. I hit the tile, my shoulder and hip taking the brunt of the impact. I feel shards of glass dig into my thigh through my leggings. I ignore it, using my weight to shift the chair closer to the spot where I can see my Böker against the wall.

  My heart is pounding. I can feel the seconds ticking by, knowing Gideon could come back any moment. I wriggle awkwardly, pulling myself across the tiles, feeling the blood flowing faster from the cut on my head, glass grinding as it rolls under my hip and shreds holes in my leggings. The metal wiring cuts into my arms, pinching the skin. But I’m almost there. I almost have my knife.

  I’m inches away when I hear Gideon’s footsteps. Feel him pause in the doorway, the same one I first saw him in, taking in the scene.

  “Remarkable,” he says, wonder in his voice, and I think he means it. I make one last awkward attempt for my knife before he reaches with his power and drags the chair, and me, across the room. I slam into the wall of windows with a scream. The glass above me shakes and sways, rippling in its frame.

  The chair settles, and I realize that not only is my head throbbing, but my vision is hazy with blood and I’m twice the distance from my weapons as I was before I started.

  “This was all so unnecessary,” he says, gesturing around the room, at me in the chair. “Do you still not understand that we’re on the same side?”

  He’s wearing white pants and an elaborate metal vest, layers of overlapping steel creating armor. The kitchen light surrounds him, a nimbus of gold. Giant locust wings made of flexible metal flare open, as delicate and beautiful as lace, like some sort of insectoid angel.

  I spit a mouthful of blood on the ground, and the small movement makes me dizzy. I struggle to focus. “Let me go,” I say, sounding slightly drunk.

  His eyes linger on the place where I’ve defiled his high-end flooring. “Neither of us is stupid, Godslayer. Once today’s business is done and Dinétah is no more, I will be back for you. We will try this conversation again. But until then, I think it’s best you sleep.” He draws a small leather book from the inside pocket of his suit. Unzips it and pulls out a needle. A memory of Knifetown shivers down my spine as he tests the plunger.

  “You disapprove of Bishop, but you don’t mind his methods.”

  He fills the needle, unconcerned. “His methods are humane, even if he is not.”

  “Convenient morality.”

  A flash of irritation crosses his features but passes quickly. He walks forward and leans in close to me. Not close enough for me to reach him, my arms chained by my sides. But close enough for him to brush my hair from my face. Study the place the glass sliced open my forehead. His breath smells of whiskey and rotted pork. I turn my head, but he grips my jaw and holds it tightly. He pushes against my face with his thumb, as if searching for something under my skin. It’s horrific, and too intimate, and I toss my head violently to shake his hand off. He lets me go, some emotion I can’t read coloring his face.

  “Stay still, please,” he says, lifting the needle to my neck. “I will chain your head to the wall if I have to, but I would rather not. This is thiopental. Do you know what that is?” I flinch as the needle pierces my skin. “It will make you sleep until I can return.”

  He steps back from me. Pulls his black case out and stows away the needle.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, voice slurring. The drug, combined with my injuries, is too much, and my world is quickly sliding into darkness. I blink, try to force my eyes to remain open.

  As he stands there, he begins to vibrate. His wings open wider. The lace-like lattice ripples, begins to shimmer and flow, and a thousand locusts drop free, plopping thickly to the floor. They mill over one another before lifting into the air. He opens his mouth, and more pour out from his throat, crawling over his cheeks, his eyes. He raises his arms, and they rise from his hands. Locust song fills the room. Thick and warm and bilious, a physical thing. Like drowning in a vat of molasses. The steel beams in the wall of glass behind me rattle in their foundations. The glass shifts under the weight of the mass of insects that have settled on the windows. Cracks in the glass split the air like the shrieks of giants. Gideon hovers feet off the floor, arms extended, and locusts swarm to him, encircling him, lifting him higher.

  “I go forth to devour,” he says, and his voice is the buzz of a thousand insects speaking as one. “I go forth to remake the known world and bring the very gods to account for their atrocities. I go forth to bring a reckoning.”

  The last thing I hear besides the deafening drone of locusts is the groan of the steel beams ripping apart as the glass wall behind me shatters.

  Chapter 38

  “Is she dead?”

  “No. With the right dosage of the counteragent, I should be able to . . . Will you move back, Ben? I need room to work.”

  Someone grabs my eyelid and pries it open. I see bright lights, faces. I try to pull away, but Rissa’s thumb digs into my eyeball. “Let me the fuck go,” I mumble, my tongue thick as wool. I work my jaw, trying to draw moisture to my mouth, but all I produce is a groan of pain.

  “She lives,” Rissa says, grinning and mercifully letting go of my eyelid.

  “It’s already working,” Ben says excitedly.

  “Of course it’s working,” Aaron says. “Gideon was never very good in the Reaping Room. No subtlety. The man would choose a cleaver when a scalpel would do. The dose he gave her must have been twice the recommended—”

  “Water,” I croak, cutting Aaron off. I hear someone hurry away, probably Ben and hopefully to the kitchen. I manage to get both my eyes open on my own, eyelids scraping like sandpaper. “You came back,” I manage to wheeze out.

  “We weren’t going to leave you to do this alone,” Rissa says. “Good thing, too, because clearly Gideon kicked your—”

  Ben’s back. She holds a cup of water to my mouth. I gulp it down, grateful. Blink to try to clear the crust from my eyes. Rissa uses a white napkin to wipe blood from my head and then starts to work on loosening the metal wires still coiled around my chest. I wait until they fall to the floor around the chair in a puddle of steel loops. I shake my arms out to get the blood flow to return. Try to ignore the deep gashes in my arms where the metal dug through flesh, the hundreds of
tiny stinging cuts all over my skin.

  “I’m just glad you’re here,” I say, feeling something like a sob wanting to break free.

  Rissa softens. “Friends, right? Just because you’re a solid bitch sometimes doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon you.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Ben says, head down. “I know I promised not to argue with you, and a deal’s a deal, so . . .”

  “I shouldn’t have treated you like a child, Ben. I was trying to do what was best for you, but all I did was deny you the right to make your own choices.”

  Ben looks up, teary-eyed, and before I can tell her no, she rushes forward and throws her arms around me. Pain flares across my chest, and I whimper. Rissa laughs and pulls Ben away. “Leave her alone. She’s injured. Plus, I’ve heard she melts if you hug her too much.”

  “What time is it?” I ask. “How long was I out?”

  “It’s a few hours before dawn. Ben made it all the way back to Page before we caught up with her.” Rissa shoots her a look. “It took some time to get back. And then when we found the Amangiri empty, we thought you’d probably gone with them.”

  “Wait, what? It’s empty?”

  “Like a big concrete crypt,” Ben offers. “Furniture’s there. Everything looks lived in. But no people.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Don’t know,” Rissa says. “But Ben still had a beat on you from Knifetown, and she tracked you here.” She sniffs the air. “Does it smell like apples in here to anyone else?”

  “Gideon’s planning to flood Dinétah,” I say. “There were maps on Kai’s walls. And he had books, lots of books. Different versions of the end of the world.”

  “Come again?” Rissa asks.

  “Accounts of the Big Water, but also all kinds of apocalyptic stories. From different cultures and different times. He has Kai studying them.”

  “So you did find Kai?” Rissa puts her hands on her hips, looks around. “But, funny, he’s not here with you.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Rissa’s jaw sets in a hard line, and her hazel eyes darken to a swirl of deep green. “He’s helping him,” she says, her voice flat. An accusation.

  I nod again, slower this time. I want to defend him, tell her that I believe he’s lying to Gideon, using his clan powers to trick all of them into thinking he’s on their side, but I don’t want to explain to Rissa what I saw—the blonde, him seated at Gideon’s side, the things he said about Gideon helping him get over the trauma of dying. And all I have for proof is my blind trust. Trust that’s been wrong about Kai before. So I just hold her gaze. Ask her to trust me if she can’t trust him.

  “Why would he be reading those?” Ben asks, oblivious to the tension between Rissa and me. “And helping Gideon with what? I thought Kai was on our side.”

  “He is,” I answer Ben, but I mean it for Rissa.

  “Maybe your Kai has his own plans,” Aaron cuts in. “Rissa said he was an accomplished liar. Maybe he’s a spy on the inside.”

  I have no idea where that came from, and I’m not sure if it’s meant as an insult or a compliment to Kai, but it’s close enough to what I was thinking that I’m grateful to Aaron for saying it.

  “It’s good for a man to have his own agenda,” he says.

  Rissa glances at Aaron, probably wondering if a man having his own agenda applies to him, too. But Aaron’s turned away from us, drifting over to examine Gideon’s metal sculptures, which line the walls. He runs a hand over the curving wing of an angel, clearly admiring his brother’s work. Rissa’s gaze lingers, her lips pursed in thought, before she turns back to me. “You said Kai had maps on his walls. Maps of what?”

  “The Glen Canyon Dam, for one.”

  “Just the Glen Canyon?” Aaron asks, his attention coming back to us. “What about Hoover downstream? Grand Valley upstream? If that’s what he’s planning, then he’ll bring them all down.”

  “Wait, wait, are we accepting that this is real?” Rissa asks. “He’s actually going to try to flood Dinétah? Is there even enough water for that?”

  “Before the Big Water, Hoover held thirty-two million acre feet alone,” Aaron says, falling into his tour-guide demeanor a bit. “Glen Canyon another twenty-seven million. After the Big Water, that’s probably doubled.”

  “What is an acre foot?” Ben asks.

  “Enough water to cover an acre of land with a foot deep of water. So enough to cover twenty-seven million acres under a foot of water. Dinétah is only seventeen thousand acres. Lake Powell at capacity holds more than eight billion gallons, if it helps to think of it that way.”

  “He’s going to create his own natural disaster,” I say.

  Ben shivers. “Which could destroy Dinétah.”

  “Even if he did release the water,” Rissa says. “Even if he did break those dams, wouldn’t it just return the water to where it is supposed to be naturally? Down the Colorado River?”

  “It’s too late for that,” Aaron says. “Landscape’s been permanently changed. Add the destructive force of flowing water.” He pats at his shirt as if looking for a pen in a pocket. “I could calculate it quickly if—”

  “No need,” I say. “We get the point.”

  “That’s a lot of water,” Aaron says. “My brother can do many things, but he can’t just move billions of gallons of water to where he wants to on command.”

  “Yes,” I say, “he can.”

  “What do you mean?” Aaron asks.

  “Oh shit,” Rissa says, dropping into the chair next to me. The whiskey bottle is still there. She takes a pull straight from the bottle.

  “That could have been poisoned,” I observe as she swallows it down.

  She lifts one shoulder in dismissal. “Does it matter if we’re all about to die?”

  “What do you mean, Maggie?” Aaron asks again. “It’s physically impossible. Tankers, pipelines. Even if he had them all in place and ready to go, it still wouldn’t be sufficient.”

  “He doesn’t need any of those things.”

  He snorts. “The water’s not going to go somewhere just because he wants it to.”

  “Want to bet?” Rissa quips.

  Aaron wrinkles his forehead in confusion.

  Rissa tips the bottle up again.

  “I’m not following,” Aaron says.

  “Me neither,” Ben adds.

  Rissa looks at me. “It’s Kai,” Rissa says. “His power. I saw it myself. He can control the wind. Why not the water?”

  I nod in agreement. “Kai’s going to redirect that water wherever Gideon needs it.”

  “How?” asks Aaron.

  “Why?” Ben demands.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say to both of them. “We have to stop him.”

  “Uh, this is the guy who can heal himself, right?” Ben says. “How are you going to stop him?”

  “You can shoot him again,” Rissa suggests. “That put him out of commission for a while last time.”

  “I’m not shooting him,” I say, thinking of the way he looked at me, the haunted eyes, the unspoken accusations. “I don’t know why he’s doing this, but I’ll find a way to talk to him. Besides, the bigger problem is how to stop Gideon. Weapons don’t work against him.” I look at Aaron. “You could have mentioned that your brother has clan powers.”

  Aaron’s breath hitches. “I . . . I didn’t know. He didn’t before. When I knew him.”

  “Well, he does now. He can control metal. He plucked my knife out of my hand like it was nothing. Stopped the bullets from my gun in midair.”

  Aaron blinks. “He . . .” He sighs, small and sad. “That makes sense.”

  “What are you saying, Maggie?” Rissa asks. “That guns and knives don’t work on him? He’s just as invincible as Kai? If that’s the case, then we’re all going for a nice long swim.”

  “Not invincible. I’ve just got to figure out how to get to him.”

  “If you’re right, and you think he’s planning to blow th
ose dams today, you better figure it out quick.”

  I stand on shaky legs. Ben jumps forward, reaching for my elbow to catch me as I stumble, but I waive her off. I’m going to have to be able to stand on my own two feet if I’m going to do this. I give her as close to a smile as I can manage. “I’m fine. Maybe another glass of water?”

  She nods and hurries off.

  “Are you fine?” Rissa asks, concerned.

  “I have to be.”

  I collect my weapons, moving like a wounded turtle. The sword is still strapped to my back, and I unbuckle it and lay it on the table. Set it down with a kind of reverence that doesn’t seem to fade. It’s still sheathed in the scabbard Tah had made for it, but its presence seems to fill the room. Gingerly, I place a hand on the hilt. The air crackles around us, suddenly alive. Aaron wipes at his brow, sweating. Rissa whistles in awe, low and impressed.

  “When did it start doing that?” Rissa asks.

  “Tó showed me how to . . . talk to it.”

  Her eyes get big, but she doesn’t say anything.

  One deep breath and I pull the sword free in one smooth motion. Lightning curls around the blade, sending tiny sparks in the darkness. Lightning wraps around my hand where I grip the leather hilt and lightning dances up my wrist all the way to my elbow. It doesn’t burn. It just . . . waits. It feels like contained energy, eager for me to direct it. Just like Tó said it would. I straighten and breathe deep as the energy flows through my body. I can feel my wounds knitting closed, my headache clearing, Gideon’s drugs melting out of my bloodstream.

  “Damn,” Rissa whispers, her voice full of awe.

  “You’re glowing,” Aaron murmurs.

  “Not just glowing,” Ben adds. “You’re on fire.”

  “Your skin,” Rissa says. I raise an arm and see that my skin has in fact taken on a deep blue glow. “And all the cuts are gone. Even your head.”

  I run a hand across the cut on my forehead. Smooth skin. “Holy shit.”