Astrid kept chanting. Their route took them past a derelict shopping mall that had been turned into a temporary camp for evacuees from Oregon. FEMA trailers lined its parking lot. Astrid made food spinners for the refugees, healing chantments, items that would mend broken tools and teach new skills. It wouldn’t be long before the camp realized they had magical items on their hands.
Igme kept sending out vitagua-contaminated bubbles, using the baster.
Astrid was chanting hundreds of things at once now: a rain barrel that purified water, a stuffed crab that cured cholera, air scrubbers, hole diggers, roof patchers, a shoemaker enchantment, a fireworks generator—anything a person might use to help, supply, even entertain others.…
A snap—one of the vitagua-contaminated bubbles had broken on a nearby willow. The tree wasn’t shooting skyward like the vitagua-drenched trees at home. Its leaves were stirring, and one of its spreading roots had broken through a nearby sidewalk.
“Trace contamination, just a little growth,” she murmured. The world would end up like this, covered in magically tinged vegetation. People had to learn how to coexist with enchantment.
They turned onto Market Street, and an inhuman cry rose around them. Starlings blanketed the roofs all around the buildings, cheeping and trilling so loudly, her teeth buzzed.
“They’re here!” Will said. Clancy brought the trolley to an abrupt halt in front of a yarn store.
“So much for catching them by surprise.” Aquino went into action, handing out chantments. He slapped a grocery pricer, disturbingly gun shaped, into Astrid’s palm.
Igme dropped the turkey baster, tightened his grip on a hunk of letrico, and cranked a pepper mill. The yarn store shivered, then blew away in a cloud of fine dust. In the space where it had been, a circle of men, women, and children was murmuring, as if in prayer.
“Carson!” Will’s kids were here, all right. “Eleanor!”
Chilly air gusted toward them—a heat draw. Four of the Alchemites broke ranks, putting themselves between the children and their father. Chunks of rock pelted the trolley.
Clancy yanked on a dog toy on the dashboard, squeaking it, and the missiles bounced away. Janet threw a hula hoop over one of the women. The hoop contracted, pinning her arms. She fell on her rump, dazed but unharmed.
Little Ellie Forest spotted her father.
She began to scream.
Carson Forest had stepped toward the trolley, but now his sister clutched at him, visibly panicked. The boy turned, the frown on his face so like his father’s.
The cold was spreading.
“They’re drawing power for something big,” Clancy said.
“On it,” Igme said, but the Alchemites were raising their faces to the sky. One had a whistle in her teeth.
Will sprinted toward the children, ignoring the flying knitting needles, batting aside a net thrown by a barrel-chested Alchemite. A chunk of letrico in his left hand powered his ring.
Astrid grabbed a set of carved wooden salad spoons. Open up a path, she thought, chanting the spoons and then sweeping them outward. The Alchemite circle broke, adults tumbling aside, clearing the space between Will and his children.
One of the defenders threw a beanbag at Will’s feet. A pit of muck opened up in front of him. Quicksand? Will stumbled, arms pinwheeling. The ring kept him from plunging in.
The children turned into starlings.
Now the Alchemites were all birds, shrieking in triumph as they flapped up to join the flock above. Thousands strong, it swirled upward.
Astrid scooped up an old purse, thinking of nets—
There was a boom and all the birds were gone.
Will let out a frustrated cry as he recovered his balance. He whirled, grabbing the Alchemite Janet had entangled. “Where are they going?”
The woman thrashed, straining to escape.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Astrid said.
“Filthwitch!” she shouted.
“It’s okay, Will. We’ll get the truth out of her.” Snatching a small wooden turtle, a toy, out of the crumbled remains of the store, Astrid chanted it swiftly, thinking of truth serums and lie detectors. Drawing letrico, she held it to the woman’s face.
“Where are the children?”
“Among the flock.”
“Where’ll they go?”
She grinned, gap toothed. “They’ll scatter.”
“Astrid,” Igme said. “We’re running out of juice.”
Will held out his spinner. The needle turned in slow circles. “It doesn’t know where they are.”
Among the flock. Astrid bit her lip. “We need to go home, regroup.”
Will scowled at the woman they’d caught. “What about her?”
“Knock her out.” Janet pressed a gooey plastic eyeball to the woman’s forehead. Letrico flowed; she fainted.
“We should take her with us.”
Astrid shook her head. “Leave her for the police.”
“Astrid, she might know more.”
“I’m sorry, Will—I promised the volunteers we wouldn’t take captives.”
“Some of us have been locked up,” Clancy put in.
“But—”
“Will, Sahara’s people move on. When they lose someone, they abandon them. She won’t be able to tell you.”
Will glared at her, furious, then at the unconscious woman.
“We can’t become a jail,” Astrid said again.
Under the hot umbrella of the St. Louis night, sirens were wailing. Here and there, alchemized trees were getting bigger as the contaminated soap bubbles began to pop.
“Will?”
“Fine, all right. I see your damned point.” They boarded the trolley and Clancy floored it, bringing them to the nearest VA hospital.
“What are we doing here?” Will asked. He was upset, but Astrid could see he was struggling to calm down.
Aquino held out a plastic model of the human heart, offering it to Will. “This is one of our more powerful healing chantments,” he said.
“It’ll fix anything physical—cancer, broken bones, chapped lips, diabetes,” Astrid chimed in. “It’s a power pig, but the idea is to cool off the city, give everyone a break—”
“Heal everyone we can, it leaves a good impression,” Janet said. “Frees up doctors and nurses too.”
“Fine.” Will stepped clear of the letrico lines, murmuring the heat cantation Astrid had taught him, and held it out. The plastic flexed; the heart started to beat.
“Temperature’s ninety-two Fahrenheit,” Igme said.
A low thump—buh dump, buh dump—issued from the heart. As the humid air around them cooled, fog pooled at Will’s feet, blowing outward, wisping out to caress a clutch of smokers crouched in wheelchairs beside the hospital’s glass door. The magic reached them too; one screamed as his amputated legs grew back. He jumped up, then tripped. Others scrambled to catch him.
Mist enveloped the hospital. The wind blowing from the trolley got stronger.
Spreading fog, a grumble said.
“Eighty-six degrees,” Igme reported.
Vitagua, spreading in a fog when the well opens …
Astrid shook away the murmur, imagining the surprise inside the hospital as the sick and injured recovered. The heartbeat buh-bumped, louder in the increasingly murky air. The chantment would cure common colds and undiagnosed tumors, fix bumps and bruises, restore failed organs, mend bones.
“Seventy degrees,” Igme said. Their sweat-damp clothes were chilly on the skin now. The air around them was gusting outward, and a warm wind was blowing in and getting cooled in its turn. Aquino caught Astrid’s eye, a question on his face.
Will was occupied; she nodded.
Quickly, Aquino hefted out an acorn-shaped trunk filled with chantments, tucking it under a lamppost. The acorn spun like a top, burying itself in the shallow soil. Will, focused on the hospital, didn’t notice.
“Sixty seconds to freezing here at the hospital.” Igme sa
id, counting down, voice raised. “Greater metropolitan area’s falling to a nice habitable fifty.”
“Three. Two. One.”
Will lowered the heart and climbed back aboard the trolley.
“Let’s go,” Astrid said. Bramblegate had bloomed on the hospital wall; Clancy drove toward it.
Leaving the city colder, healthier, and unmistakably enchanted, they went home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JUANITA HELD ON TO the next chantment for three long days.
In court, the Alchemites, looking ever more brutalized as their bruises yellowed, got tossed back into the squirrel cages for biting their tongues and spitting blood at the bench. Wallstone had the jurors experiment with a chantment, a child’s finger-puppet, a glow-in-the-dark ghost that allowed its wearer to create pockets of darkness in broad daylight. The lapsed Alchemite who’d surrendered the puppet, a sculptor, testified that he’d used it to obscure their movements during robberies.
Gilead Landon watched the demo with a look of pained forbearance on his face.
Special effects, Wallstone argued, nothing divine here. Court had adjourned then, so the jurors could rest up and bolt a protein shake to offset the calories they’d used making magic.
The kitchen had sent Sahara her steak, but Sahara refused to eat it. Heaven shot her a look of triumph when it came back untouched; next day, the prisoners began refusing food. A few reporters questioned whether the court was abusing the prisoners or simply incompetent, but the story didn’t get much play; the networks weren’t interested.
Sahara declined to join the hunger strike, so Juanita slipped a teaspoon of sesame oil into her soup. She had a mild allergy; within an hour, she was shaking, sweaty, and cramping up. Petty revenge, yes, but it also made a good excuse to conduct her to the infirmary, cuff her to an exam table, and leave her in the able hands of the medical staff.
Finding holes in allegedly secure systems was something Juanita had always been good at, and medical staff were often casual about protocols. It took a bit of doing, but she managed to slip into the pharmacy and get the keys to the drug cabinet.
Court staff and other civilians had submitted their medical records before coming to Wendover, allowing the pharmacy to lay in a store of prescriptions. On-site storage was part of a general strategy to limit the flow of material—and possible chantments—in and out of Wendover. Heaven’s antianxiety medications for the next year were in the cabinet, neatly labeled and dated, along with everyone else’s.
Juanita had entertained fantasies of switching sugar pills for the drugs, sending Heaven into a panic, but medication was designed with exactly that kind of tampering in mind. Tempting as it was to imagine Heaven was too flaky to know one pink pill from another, Juanita knew better.
Instead she flushed the prescription, leaving a conspicuous gap in the cabinet. Heaven would go for her refill, they’d find it gone, and hopefully the hassle involved in replacing the meds would bring the cook to Security’s attention.
As resistance went, it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as throttling Heaven unconscious and dragging her to Roche, but it also wouldn’t get Juanita’s family killed … she hoped.
Destroying the pills took about five minutes. Strolling back into the exam room, she gave Sahara a conspiratorial wink and passed over the magical amber bead. With luck, she would think the detour to the infirmary had served an Alchemite purpose.
“Looks like a food reaction,” the doctor said. “Someone in the kitchen must have gotten mixed up.”
“On purpose?” Juanita asked. Anything that drew attention to the kitchen staff might also trickle down to Heaven.
“Impossible to say. I’ll report it.”
“Thanks,” she said, taking her prisoner back to the cells.
That night she was dreaming of Ramón when Sahara turned up, stepping directly between Juanita and her brother. Birds fluttered around her, gold-marked starlings with razor-sharp talons. Her feathered gown was low cut, and a bottle cap shimmered, like a star, on her breastbone. “Time we had a chat.”
“I don’t want to chat with you.”
“Come on. I can make you happier with the situation.”
“Situation? Meaning your threats to my family?”
Sahara’s eyes blazed with righteous fire. “I’m not trying to hurt anyone.”
Juanita pointed at her brother.
“Relax. It’s paradise here: anything he wants, anytime he wants it. Nobody can hurt him, not even me.” Sahara laid a hand on Ramón’s shoulder. The Nevada desert formed around them: sagebrush, red rock, tumbleweeds. “Looks like he’s homesick.”
“He gets anything he wants except his freedom.”
“You’d rather I’d thrown him in a prison? He could be sitting in a rat-infested hole.”
“I thought you were above petty human rights abuses.”
“Of course I am. But without me to temper their impulses, a few of my followers may be inclined to do something impetuous to your other loved ones.…”
“Oh—so it’s them threatening me, not you?”
“I need you on my side,” Sahara said. “Having a little leverage … I know it’s unpleasant, darling, but—”
“Don’t ‘darling’ me. What I am is your bitch. You got me giving you God knows what.…”
“The amber bead lets me talk to people, like we are right now. Is that such a big deal?”
“And the postage stamp?”
“Hides my chantments from Roche. Little perks, basic civil rights I’m being denied—”
“Stow it. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t care.”
“Roche’s new buddy, Gilead Landon, wants to burn me alive on a stack of dry wood. Do you care about that?”
“You made a choice. If you’d told your followers to surrender, if you’d fought the contamination…”
“Are you that naïve? Maybe I could save myself from the fire, but I’d be locked up forever.”
“You sank an aircraft carrier!”
“Pooh. Nobody was hurt.”
“You call me naïve? You picked a fight with the United States of America. Now you’re surprised we got our game on.”
“It wasn’t you that caught me,” she purred. “Juanita, Roche can’t win. And you’ve been looking for a new direction, haven’t you? A fresh start, a purpose?”
Dammit, how does she know these things? “Right now I’d settle for not being blackmailed.”
“Darling, when I take Indigo Springs, you’re at my side—”
Juanita laughed.
“There’s going to be a battle.” Sahara ran a finger over one of the birds. “My voices … I hear Gilead Landon, burning a path into Indigo Springs. I’m holding him off—”
“All by yourself, I suppose,” Juanita said.
“You kneel before me, hands upraised—”
“Yeah, that’ll happen.”
“Show some respect. The Goddess has done a great thing tonight.” The voice came from behind them; turning, Juanita saw the tattooed woman who’d attacked Ramón. Passion flowers adorned her ankles, peeped out over the collar of her dress.
“A great thing,” Juanita repeated. “Like what?”
Sahara clucked. “Heaven’s going to give you another chantment, darling. I want it tomorrow.” With that, she put her arm around the new arrival, leading her away.
Juanita strained to catch a few phrases of their conversation: “… back to Missouri. Seek my gifts in the usual places.”
Twenty feet away, Ramón had dreamed up a coyote, was amiably walking around the desert with it, picking through flakes of obsidian, looking for Paiute arrowheads, the way he and she had when they were kids.
Juanita stepped past Sahara, and her brother smiled.
“Look—,” he said.
Banging. She was awake, at Wendover. Someone was rapping on her door.
“Yeah?”
“Something’s up—come to the TV room.”
Throwing on a robe, she padded down the hall in
to a crowd of base personnel, automatically scanning for the judge before she remembered he’d be with the higher-ups.
“What is it?”
“Windstorm in St. Louis,” said a pilot.
“Contamination in St. Louis,” someone corrected.
“Shut up.” A dour-looking lieutenant with a hearing aid grabbed the remote, turning on the TV’s captions.
“… a number of trees have grown to gigantic size…”
The contamination wasn’t following the same pattern as in Oregon. There, the whole forest had sprung skyward, destroying everything on the ground and forming a solid mat of vegetation. In Missouri, the effects seemed spottier: mutated fish in the Mississippi were capsizing small boats. Tangles of contaminated vines grew within stands of healthy ones. Compared to Oregon, it was small stuff.
That hadn’t kept people from panicking. Helicopter cameras showed refugees jamming the motorways, trying to get away.
“Alchemites,” someone said. The newscast agreed: Sahara’s disciples had already taken credit, promising to assist anyone who stayed to live “in harmony with the reclaimed Earth.”
“Will they napalm?” Juanita asked. Sahara said something to that woman, about seeking gifts in Missouri.
“Like that’s helped in Oregon,” a law clerk snorted.
“Fire has kept the forest from spreading.” That was the new guy, Gilead.
“Capturing Knax was supposed to put an end to this.”
“Knax is a symptom of the disease,” Gilead said. “Kill her, let her go tomorrow—it won’t change a thing.”
The clerk bristled. “So everything we’ve been doing here has been pointless?”
“Uncle Sam needed spin control. This trial’s just a big show.”
“Who asked you?” Juanita asked.
“Yeah, if Wendover’s such a joke, why are you here?”
Landon’s eyes flared like coals. “To do whatever needs doing.”
“Very ominous. Answer the question.” What was she doing? Provoking this guy would lead to trouble, and she needed to keep her head down. Gilead might sniff out her treachery.
To her surprise, he relaxed. “Sorry. I did some acting in college. Penchant for the dramatic, you know?” He launched into Henry V. “We few, we happy few…”
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