Rebel

by Rachel Manija Brown

  “I remember some things,” Ross said slowly. He was surprised that she hadn’t stomped off as she usually did, angry with him for being something other than what he was. Or someone. “They’re like the fragments you find in ruins. Pieces of all sorts of things, all scattered. You can try putting them together but nothing fits.”

  Summer rocked back and forth. “That’s funny. I remember things I wish I could forget.” Her voice was fierce again. “But not Mom. Can you remember her face?”

  He drew a breath, trying to get his heart to stop pounding. “No. Sometimes I hate myself because I can’t. And now I never will.”

  She stopped rocking. “Do you want to?”

  That’s weird, Ross thought. But it was better than arguing.

  “Of course I do,” he said, keeping his voice even. “I’d give the best find I ever prospected to get a single memory of her back.”

  Summer went so still that he thought he’d infuriated her. Then she spoke in an odd tone: low, flat, quick. “She said I should tell you.”

  Ross wanted to ask who “she” was, but managed to keep his mouth shut. Whatever was going on, speaking would ruin it for sure.

  Summer slowly unslung her backpack and dug inside it. With infinite care, she pulled out a cloth-wrapped package. She glanced up at him, her face solemn in the bright moonlight, then removed the coverings, her hands trembling.

  It was a book.

  His sister kept a book in her backpack, a book whose very existence she’d hidden, a book that was clearly her most precious possession.

  So had he. An ancient book that he couldn’t read, which had almost gotten him killed, set Voske after him, led him to Las Anclas, and changed his life forever.

  Like me, Ross thought in amazement. My sister has a book, just like I did.

  He wanted to tell her, but the words caught in his throat. Of all the things he’d imagined they might have in common, this was the last one he’d expected.

  He glanced up at her, sure that she’d noticed how dumbfounded he must look. But Summer’s attention was on the book, not on him. Ross tried to force his gaze away from her and on to it, but all he could see were her fingers, slim and brown against the white page. Then he looked down in the blue-white light, and saw the drawing.

  His breath stuttered in his chest as if someone had punched him. The woman in the sketch was Mom.

  How could he have ever forgotten that face? All the scattered memories of his mother brushing his hair, leading him by the hand, giving him a bowl of steaming acorn mush—all those memories now had her face.

  “She looked a little like you.” Ross glanced from Summer’s round cheeks to Mom’s thinner ones, from Summer’s streaming hair to Mom’s braids.

  “She looked a lot like you,” Summer said. “You got the same smile. Exactly the same.”

  “Who made that picture?”

  “I did.” Her voice was flat. “Mom taught me how to draw. She said she taught you, too.”

  Once she said it, Ross could almost feel a hand over his own, guiding his fingers holding the pencil. “She did. But I can’t do anything like that. Do you have any more?”

  Summer let out her breath, then looked upward. “I promised.” She jerked her chin down again. “Okay. Here goes.”

  That was the girl he was used to, angry and resentful. But her hands were careful as they turned to a new page; she obviously had every one memorized.

  Summer’s face looked out of the paper with a lopsided grin that Ross had never seen on the real girl. She only seemed a little younger in the drawing, but her hair was as short as Mia’s. There was no way it could have grown that long in a year, or even two.

  Ross glanced up at his sister. She stared back, unblinking. “How old were you then?”

  “That’s not me.” Her voice had flattened even more. Summer sounded as if she was daring him to react when she said, “That’s my twin sister. Spring.”

  Her tone sent a chill through him. Spring was dead. He knew it without asking. “What happened?”

  Summer slammed the book shut and pulled it against her chest, rocking back and forth in silence. Her face screwed up and her teeth clenched as if she were holding her breath underwater.

  Then an angry sob exploded out. She dashed her eyes against her shoulder. “I promised. I promised Spring. When the whales sang.”

  Ross was stunned. He’d noticed that her eyes had been red the next morning, but she’d blamed it on salt spray. He didn’t pretend to know Summer, but there was one thing he was sure of: just like him, she would hate being pitied.

  “She was there?” Ross tried to make it sound like an ordinary question.

  “Yes!” she snapped, giving him a challenging look. Then, “In a way. I could see her, sitting right beside me.” Her accusing tone didn’t quite mask the tremble in her voice. “She would have loved hearing the whales sing.”

  Ross wouldn’t give Summer pity, but he could give her the truth. “Until you came I thought I was alone, and I couldn’t reach any memories. And now you’re here, and there was another sister?” He heard his voice rise, but didn’t try to hide how unsettled he felt.

  She started rocking again, still clutching the sketchbook, then glanced down the hill. Ross could see that she was within a heartbeat of bounding away—maybe for good.

  He didn’t know what to say to make her stay, so he asked for what he wanted. “Can I see her again?”

  She let out an angry sob, then jerked her head in a nod. “I promised her. She said . . . she said me not telling you was making her never be real.”

  Ross kept quiet, letting his sister speak.

  “She is real,” Summer insisted, as if daring him to deny it. “Sometimes just before I wake up, I can feel her sleeping beside me. That school, I know she would have loved it. When Dr. Lee cooks her favorite food. She’s everywhere. Always. With me—but when I turn to see her, or talk to her, she’s gone.”

  Whatever Summer expected, Ross had no impulse to tell her she was wrong. With his own shattered memories, he was hardly in a position to say what was or wasn’t possible. And whether Spring was a ghost or a memory, she was obviously real to Summer.

  “And she wants . . . she wanted . . . you should know about her.” Without looking at him, she opened the book. “Here’s our tenth birthday. That’s her with her pet iguana. Here she is, levitating him.”

  Spring looked like a happy Summer, skinny and knock-kneed. Her hands were raised high, and a resigned-looking iguana floated above them.

  “What’s the iguana’s name?” Ross asked.

  “Fluffy.”

  Ross laughed in surprise. Then he choked it off, afraid Summer would take it wrong, but she, too, gave a shaky chuckle.

  “It’s a perfect name for an iguana,” Ross said.

  “That’s exactly what Spring said,” Summer replied. “She said if we ever got a cat, she’d name it Prickly.”

  She turned more pages, showing Ross different scenes. Mom washing clothes on a river bank. Spring catching fireflies. Spring gathering acorns. Ross shut his eyes, struck by another vivid memory: stuffing acorns into his shirt. He couldn’t have been more than four.

  “I remember Mom making acorn mush,” he said. “Sheriff Crow asked me what my tribe was. I didn’t even know if I had one. Do you know?”

  “Mom’s people came from all over. If she had a tribe, she didn’t know about it. Dad’s mother taught her to make acorn mush, years and years before you were born,” Summer replied. “But Dad was Miwok. His clan—”

  Automatically Ross said, “Coyote. We’re Coyote clan.”

  “That’s right. Spring and I went looking for them, because we knew they’d take us in, but we never got that far. Mom said they were way up the northwest coast.”

  She turned the page. A village of flat-roofed adobe buildings and a fence of interwoven cacti. A donkey. Spring riding and laughing and gradually getting older, until Summer stopped with her hand flat on a page.

  “Mom w
orked to get us horses,” Summer said, her voice low. “This is Mom with Pepper and Salt.”

  Mom stood with her hands on the polls of a black horse and a white one. Her smile was just like the one Ross occasionally saw in mirrors.

  “We were riding in the desert, and a rattler spooked Salt. Mom got thrown. Broke her neck.” Summer pressed the book against her chest, avoiding his eyes. “That was a bad winter. Spring and I were alone. We barely got to high ground ahead of a flash flood. When we finally found a town, they wouldn’t let us in because they had some sickness. By the time we found a camp, we were starving.”

  Her voice came quicker, with the angry edge Ross was used to. “They welcomed us. Fed us. Pretended to be friendly. It was a big family—twenty of them, uncles and cousins and so forth. The youngest was sixteen. They said if we were Changed we didn’t have to hide it.”

  Summer opened the book to show him sketches of people. “Alice, the mother, could teleport little things. She showed us and laughed. Said she was like a squirrel. So we showed her what we could do. The next morning, we woke up with Don holding a pistol to Spring’s head. Turned out they were bandits. They said we had to help them rob people, and if we tried to fight or run away, they’d kill Spring.”

  Ross’s fists clenched until his gauntlet scraped and his nails bit into his other palm. “I wish I’d been there.”

  “Well, you weren’t.” She gulped.

  “I’m sorry, Summer. If I had known any of you were alive, I’d have searched for you everywhere. I never would’ve stopped.”

  “I know,” she said, low-voiced, surprising him. “I mean, I know now. We would have kept looking, too. But Mom was sure you and Grandma were dead.”

  “What happened?”

  Spring appeared again in the sketches, no longer smiling. “We were with the bandits for two years. It felt like forever. Sometimes they robbed travelers in the desert. Sometimes they went to towns. They’d make one of us go with their son, Joe, to rob churches and rich people’s homes while the other stayed with an adult. I could jump through windows and Spring could pull things out of them. They never let us be alone together.”

  Ross had been a captive for a few months, and he’d nearly lost his mind. He couldn’t even imagine being held hostage for two years. He wanted to say something to his sister, but before he could, she started talking again.

  “One day they decided to rob some jewel traders.” She shut the sketchbook and pressed her knees to her chest. “We were going to distract the guards while Spring snuck up on the caravan and floated the jewels out of the trunks. But there were way more guards than we expected, and they fought hard. Alice sent me to steal the horses. Joe should have been guarding Spring, but he was off fighting someone to get their horse. Somebody in the caravan shot her. I ran to her, and Joe screamed at me to get back to my job. I jumped on him and broke his neck. But Spring was already dead.”

  Ross’s breath hissed in his throat.

  Summer fiercely wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “There was nothing keeping me there anymore. I grabbed Joe’s gun and shot as many of the bandits as I could until I ran out of bullets. Then I jumped on the horse Joe had been fighting over and rode out of there. Everyone was still fighting for their lives, so they couldn’t follow me.”

  In the long silence that followed, Ross swallowed in an aching, dry throat, then forced himself to speak. “I know it doesn’t help. But I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well,” Summer muttered, but she didn’t sound angry. “When I finally had to stop, I found a pouch of diamonds in the horse’s saddlebag. The jewels hadn’t been in the trunks at all. That was what Joe had been trying to get.”

  “They let Spring get killed for a bunch of diamonds?” Ross’s entire body flashed hot with fury. He wanted to reach back in time to finish off the bandits.

  Summer wiped her eyes again. “I didn’t care about the stupid diamonds. And I didn’t even get to keep them. The horse, either. A couple weeks later, I took a bath in a pond. When I came back, the horse was gone and everything with it. The only thing I had left was my backpack, because I always kept that with me. So I started walking. And the very first town I came to, everybody was talking about you.”

  “I’m glad you found me,” Ross said. “Even if I can’t kill a hundred bandits with one bullet.”

  Summer gave a snort of laughter. “That’s okay. I can do it for you!”

  Ross turned to the last drawing before the blank pages. A mean face glared at him. It belonged to a hugely muscled young man bristling with weapons, aiming a rifle straight out of the page. His weather-beaten, hard-featured features reminded Ross of the bounty hunter, though the man in the drawing was much younger. “Who’s this guy?”

  “You,” Summer said. “That’s how I imagined you after I heard all those stories.”

  Ross could see why she had been disappointed. Then, after a second look at the scowling guy with the muscles nearly ripping through his shirt, he was tempted to laugh. But he was also impressed by her skill. “You imagined someone and you drew him? But he looks like a real person!”

  Summer snorted. “Yeah, Ross. I can do that. If you described someone for me, I could draw them so you could recognize them.”

  “But you didn’t draw him looking like you.”

  “I could do that. Easy.”

  She took a pencil from her backpack and turned the book to a blank page. With quick, sure strokes, she drew a man. Long black hair, sharp black eyes, high cheekbones, a blunt nose, broad shoulders, and narrow hips. Ross couldn’t stop looking at the sketch. The young man seemed so familiar, and not just because he resembled Summer.

  “Could you make him older?” Ross asked, not knowing why he was asking. “Like . . . with lines around his eyes. And here.” He drew his finger down either side of his mouth.

  The pencil moved, shaded. Ross bent closer. He did know that face. “That’s my father—our father.”

  Summer’s head jerked up, and her black eyes met his. “You said you didn’t remember him. You told me you didn’t even know what he looked like.”

  “I didn’t. Until now.”

  Summer looked down at the drawing. In the distance a coyote ululated. “I guess now we both know.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Kerry

  Her sister, Spring, Kerry thought as they rode northward. She’d been right that Summer had lost someone before she reached Las Anclas.

  That was another unexpected thing that she and Summer shared: a dead sister. But out of all her siblings, Kerry had liked Deirdre the least, even before she got her power. Afterward, Deirdre had become impossible to live with. From the anguish underlying the jumbled rush of the story Summer had told that morning, she and Spring had been as close as Kerry and Sean. But once Summer had revealed her twin’s existence, she seemed glad to be able to talk about her. The “Spring and me” stories had been going non-stop since they’d started riding.

  “. . . and then Spring and me looked into the canyon, and saw an entire ruined town at the bottom!” Summer concluded.

  “Did you climb down?” Mia asked.

  “No. It was completely surrounded by singing trees.” Summer turned to Ross. “How about taking me into the ruins by Las Anclas? I’ve never been inside a real ruin that hasn’t been picked down to the bone.”

  Ross’s shoulders hunched up. To spare him having to answer, Kerry said, “I know you strangled a sand tiger with your bare hands, but I don’t know if you want to fight a thousand giant bees.”

  “Not a thousand,” Summer said. “And I didn’t kill a hundred bandits, either. I wish I had. I only shot three or four of them, and I don’t know how many survived the attack.” More cheerfully, she added, “But I did strangle that sand tiger.”

  Ross exclaimed, “I wish I could’ve seen it.”

  Summer flashed a smile. “I got pretty scratched up. You see, Spring and me were walking at dusk beside this huge rock formation, when this shape leaps out and knocks her down . . .”


  Kerry listened intently, amazed. Fourteen years old, and she really had shot bandits. She’d fought for her life and survived. Even Mia had had to fight—both Jennie and Ross had told Kerry separately that Mia had saved Ross’s life during the attack on Las Anclas. Kerry was the only one there who’d never been in a battle, though her father had killed many people and ordered even more deaths.

  Summer and Ross were survivors of people like Father.

  The closest Kerry had come to battle was when Jennie and her group had captured her. But she had always known they were trying to take her prisoner, not kill her.

  Father had offered her leadership of an army, and she had run away rather than lead that army to kill harmless citizens. Kerry still believed she had made the right choice. Sean had also made it. The weird thing was, she knew she would have to fight for her life sooner or later, but it would be against that army of Father’s. Kerry pictured them swarming out of their ships and on to the beach . . .

  “There must have been an earthquake,” Jennie said.

  At Nugget topped the rise, Kerry saw the rubble in the dip below. The concrete bridge had collapsed, blocking the road that ran between two hills. Huge chunks of fallen cement lay scattered as if some giant had torn up the bridge and flung it down in pieces.

  “I can jump over it,” Summer said.

  “But the horses can’t. We’ll have to lead them into the arroyo.” Jennie pointed to a deep ravine a little way off the road.

  They rode into the arroyo and proceeded two by two along a shallow stream of rainwater. Gravel crunched beneath hooves.

  Ross glanced up at one of the wide cracks that split the granite walls. “Looks like that crevice I hid in after I got kidnapped.”

  By Santiago’s patrol, Kerry thought. And they’re all dead but him.

  If Ross’s first escape attempt had succeeded, Santiago would be dead now, too. He and his patrol would have died trying to get Ross back rather than be executed for losing their captive. Father would be teaching Kerry about sea battles so she could lead or at least participate in the attack on Las Anclas.