“When it is, I hope I’m your assigned to your arrest detail, bitch.”
“As you were!” another soldier snapped.
Isa opened scratchy eyes. Her right cheek rested against Murmur’s chest. Khaki camo and boots filled her field of vision.
“All right,” the owner of those boots said. “On your feet.”
When he marched them out of the building, Isa lifted her face to the cold touch of early morning sunlight. The sun had crested the rolling expanse of frosty desert east of camp. Heavy frost glittered on a spiderweb strung between the wire mesh covering one of the windows and a rickety, makeshift light pole.
Isa caught sight of it out of the corner of her eye as she and Murmur passed. Her heart squeezed. Frowning, she turned her attention to the web and the spotted brown spider hanging head down in her home.
The breath left Isa’s lungs in a visible rush of steam.
Mountains. The web had been woven in a pattern Isa recognized from childhood. Sparkling frost outlined the familiar zigzag pattern the Navajo weavers used to signify the mountains that bordered the sacred land of the people.
Of course it was a message. She couldn’t work out how Ruth, Joseph, and Henry had influenced the black-and-tan banded-legged spider to weave their “there’s no place like home” image into her web.
The soldier marching them to the administration building strode through the frost-bejeweled work of art. He crushed the spider between glove and body armor.
The world lurched sideways beneath Isa’s feet.
Nausea sloshed in her stomach.
She gasped and stumbled.
Murmur closed a hand around her upper arm, holding her upright without apparent effort. Not a mote of power communicated from his touch.
Shivering, Isa swallowed hard. The only heat in her body gathered behind her swollen eyes.
Why were her spiritual guides so intent on sending her to a place she’d been thrown out of? And how could these people surrounding her be so callous about the needless destruction of innocent life?
Spider belonged to the Holy Ones.
And the man had so casually destroyed her.
Isa prayed for her. And for herself.
The soldier herding them pulled open the admin building door, then stood to one side as Murmur and Isa trooped into the dingy aluminum and gray panel erector set building. A kerosene heater in one corner attempted to take the chill off, but Isa could see the young receptionist’s breath as well as her own.
The young man nodded at the corporal huddled at the desk and went straight for the commander’s door. He knocked once and opened the door.
He gestured them in with a nod, rifle at the ready.
Murmur, his hand still on her arm, angled her in before him.
Her body seemed to be learning and accepting that even though it was Daniel’s body hanging on to her, he wasn’t a threat. Not anymore.
The thin-faced colonel stared at them, as if he’d already heard everything they’d done in the quarantine building or said to one another while trying to avoid being shot. He had someone else in the office, lounging in the sole folding chair in front of his desk.
The dark suit unfolded, and turned to glance at them.
“Mr. Delmedico,” Isa said.
“Ms. Romanchzyk. Mr. Alvarez,” the lawyer said. He smirked.
The “Mr. Alvarez” bumped her. She glanced at Murmur.
He straightened and released her.
“Lieutenant?” the colonel said. “Report.”
The click and rattle of the young man coming to attention sounded above the hum of the heater that seemed to take a much bigger bite out of the cold in this little office.
No one’s breath fogged as they spoke. It made no difference to the chill wracking her.
“The detainees attempted to breach quarantine, sir.”
“We attempted to save lives,” Isa said.
“You have the right to remain silent, Ms. Romanchzyk,” Delmedico noted. “I suggest you make use of it. Consider the tip my pro bono for the month.”
“How many innocent men, women,” she snapped, “and their tattoos died for nothing? We could have prevented it.”
She didn’t know what Murmur saw in the faces around them. She detected nothing but contempt.
He wrapped his grip around her arm again. This time, he squeezed.
She subsided.
“The rules regarding quarantine are clear,” the colonel said, his tone rigid. “So are the punishments for anyone who interferes with—”
“My client is no longer subject to your rules,” Delmedico said.
“He broke—”
“This piece of paper, signed by the governor, says otherwise.”
The colonel braced his hands on the desk and rose. “You are in my containment camp, Counselor. You, like your client, are subject to . . .”
Daniel’s lawyer had tossed the paper on the desk and pulled out his cell phone. He unlocked his keypad and pressed a button. “Shelly! Would you put me through to Cam? She’s expecting this call. Thanks.”
Cam?
The colonel froze.
“Camren?” Delmedico said into his phone. “I appreciate your time. Yes. Yes, I am. It’s going exactly the way you said it would.”
He chuckled. “Absolutely. I see why you put the colonel in charge here. Tough, thankless job. He’s playing by the book. Yes. Thank you, General.”
Ah.
Delmedico hung up and looked at the colonel.
The man’s lips thinned. “You’re bluffing.”
The phone on his desk buzzed.
Baring his teeth, he punched a button. “What?”
“General Micek, Colonel. Line one.”
He straightened. The glare he threw at Delmedico should have ignited the man’s suit. Even it couldn’t penetrate the cold.
“You’re a son of a bitch,” he snarled.
“Yes, sir,” the lawyer agreed. “I love my work.”
Nostrils pinched as the colonel sucked in an audible breath, he picked up the phone. “General. Yes, ma’am. They’re in my office right now. Yes. I have the document in question. Ma’am, the person in question was involved in a disturb—ma’am?”
His grip on the phone tightened until Isa could see the bones bulging against the tight skin of his hands.
“Yes, ma’am,” he gritted. He put the phone down in slow motion, appearing to mull over his options. When he looked up, only Murmur’s continued grip on her arm kept Isa from backing away.
“You have sixty seconds to get out the front gate,” he said. “After that, I’ll make you disappear where not even my general will find you.”
“Right. Mr. Alvarez? If you’ll come with me?”
Murmur didn’t respond immediately.
“Go,” Isa said.
He turned, her arm still in his grasp.
“She stays,” the colonel barked.
“No,” Murmur said.
Delmedico came instantly to Murmur’s side. “We need to go—now. You cannot help her, if that’s what you want, while you’re in here. I have to point out she accused you of kidnapping and torturing her.”
“She’s right,” Murmur snapped. “He did.”
Isa’s heart lurched.
“He, who?” the lawyer sounded confounded.
“His tattoo. The one that came off,” Isa said in a rush.
Delmedico frowned. His brow creased as calculation ran across his expression. He nodded. “We have to go, Mr. Alvarez.”
“Get her out,” Murmur commanded.
“We’ll discuss it,” the lawyer said.
“Go while you still can!” Isa shook off Murmur’s grasp.
Growling, he spun on his heel, and stalked away. His footsteps rattled the entire bui
lding.
She assumed the lieutenant either opened the door for them or had to leap out of Murmur’s path.
The rumble of him stomping his rage into the floor didn’t pause. The sympathetic ripples dwindled until they died away.
Leaving her bereft. All traces of him gone from within.
“Solitary,” the colonel snapped. The air around him shimmered silver. “And throw away the damned key.”
Chapter Eleven
The lieutenant shoved Isa into a four-by-six-foot cinderblock room. The door clanged shut on a note that set her heart to thudding in her chest. Panic beat frightened wings against the inside of her ribs.
No matter the differences, the room reminded her enough of the prison where Daniel had kept her that her hands shook as she picked up the single thin wool blanket from the cot and draped it around her shoulders.
She had to do something or go crazy trying not to succumb to her own form of post-traumatic stress. She cased the room. That she could walk around was different than Daniel’s prison. So was the fact that she wasn’t bound.
But the isolation and other people treating her as if she didn’t exist? One hundred percent the same. Maybe worse. Rather than treating her like an animal the way Daniel had, the soldiers treated her like she was a monster.
And she wasn’t even the one destroying sacred creatures, much less letting innocent people die.
She hadn’t expected to ever find out there was something worse than what Daniel had done.
Her breath quivered in a visible cloud when she blew it out. She stared at the wall, tracing the pattern of blocks set with mortar. It became obvious that the tiny concrete block building that served as the camp brig had been hastily constructed. The mortar between the concrete blocks wept dark, foul liquid that puddled where the walls met the floor. Cement paving underfoot breathed out water vapor as if still trying to cure in the frigid, high desert spring. Musty water meandered in rivulets across the gritty surface.
As she stared at the floor, her vision shifted. She saw sand and recalled that as a child, she’d drawn pictures in the dirt. Pictures that had come true, albeit, often in unexpected and occasionally deadly ways. That ability had matured into putting Living Tattoos on people.
Time to find out whether she could still draw a picture that would come true on her behalf. She was an adult now, with training and control on her side. Surely she could draw something and have it come true the way she intended. Isa fumbled in her pants pocket for the smooth, speckled granite stone she carried for no reason. A worry stone, Nathalie had called it when she’d seen it. Maybe so. Isa liked the feel of it between her fingers. It reminded her to stay grounded merely by the weight of it against her thigh.
Tucking the blanket up around her, Isa squatted on her heels in the center of the floor and, pressing her rock against the concrete, drew an experimental line.
Granite scored the cement beautifully.
When she couldn’t do anything else, she could still draw.
But what? Nothing remotely Mayan if she could help it.
She’d have one shot, since, unlike her childhood in the desert, Isa couldn’t erase her drawing with the sweep of a filthy bare foot.
If she put just enough intention into the making of the scene, whatever she put on that floor should come true.
Was that magic per se?
Would the soldiers feel it? Would they shoot her if they did?
Did she care?
A vision of the entire containment camp in flames leaped unbidden into her brain.
She smiled. Tempting. Dangerous. She’d undoubtedly kill every unjustly held prisoner here.
What did she want to draw? Freedom. What did that look like? Her walking out the front gate? What about everyone else? Did she owe her fellow detainees anything?
A picture of all of them walking out of the gates? Could she draw that much detail with such crude tools?
Whether she did or didn’t owe them anything, they were safer within the confines of the containment camp, where the portal could no longer destabilize their Ink. At least until Isa could get that damned door locked.
Whether Murmur would help her do that job or not.
His thirst for vengeance was all very well and good. She’d help him get revenge, if she could—Uriel had it coming—but not at the price of more lives.
Very well.
Every Live Ink artist for herself, then.
The sparest mote of power she summoned mingled with the yellow glow of the lightbulb eight feet overhead. Neither offered much in the way of warmth. Enough to keep the water on the floor from freezing. Little else.
The cold gnawed on her fingers as she used her pebble like a piece of clumsy chalk. She dropped it often. Picking it up and pressing another line into the hard floor first made her fingers ache. Then her hand. Wrist. Then, finally, all of her as she pressed her will into each stroke.
As a six-year-old, she’d crouched like this for hours. Two decades on, her body informed her it no longer appreciated the restricted blood flow. Isa ignored it.
The day waxed and waned. Darkness fell outside.
She couldn’t say how she knew. There was no window. No breakfast, lunch, or supper, however paltry, appeared.
Did the colonel think he could break her where Daniel hadn’t? Did he not realize he’d set free the one person who could? Who had?
Isa added a bonus side picture of the colonel bursting into spontaneous flame. But she did it without intent behind it. It was merely a bit of childish revenge.
Somewhere in the coldest hours of the night, when she could no longer feel the hand wielding the stone, Isa took up a song she’d learned from Henry. Remembering how he’d laughed over her tone deafness, she smiled at the portrait taking painstaking shape at her feet. She didn’t give up on the chant.
It lifted her slow-beating heart and eased the muscles of her legs and back. They’d long ago given up complaining. They’d gone wooden and dead in protest. As if the whisper of her chant hanging on the visible clouds of breath drove the blood in her veins rather than her heart, her legs and feet tingled.
Almost done.
The scrape of a metal on metal punctuated the Navajo words spilling from her childhood. She didn’t even know what the words meant. Henry wouldn’t have taught her any of the proper prayers. Those weren’t for her.
A child’s nonsense song, maybe? A counting game his grandfather had taught him?
Clang.
The noise tried to penetrate her focus. She kept it at bay with her toneless song.
Another voice joined hers, cutting across the rise and fall of Henry’s words as Isa finished the picture of herself. She was recognizable. As she was, not as she wished to be seen. In the picture, she strode, her hair caked and dirty, her tattered wool blanket fluttering in the breeze of her going.
Now to finish the gates, to make them recognizable so there would be no question of what it was she sought freedom from.
Polished black dress shoes stepped into the middle of the picture.
Her brain stumbled. Isa choked on the incongruity and on the chant. Blinking, she glanced up.
A boulder of a man stood in the dress shoes. He wore a black suit. No pinstripe. He frowned at her.
“Ms. Romanchzyk,” he said. His tone suggested he’d been saying it for some time to no purpose.
Annoyance rocked her.
“Get off,” she growled, rapping icy knuckles against his leather-clad toes. Pain exploded through her fingers.
He started. The motion exposed a fraction of the drawing.
“Ms. Romanchzyk,” he said. “We’ve come to get you out of here.”
His voice tripped a memory.
A boulder in a suit trying to keep her from helping one of Ria’s people. Then he’d said he and his people had wanted a word with her.<
br />
She peered at him, suspicion clouding her vision. She snorted.
Same man. She recognized the crooked, been-broken nose above too thick lips. Why was he back for her?
Feds?
Had this thing gone nationwide?
Isa scowled at him.
“Will you get up and come with us? We’d like to get you out of here. It’s a good bet you have hypothermia. If you’ll cooperate, we’ll help you bring charges against the administrators of this camp.”
Not quite the colonel bursting into flames, was it? She’d settle for torching his career.
“I can’t get up,” she said.
The man’s brow crinkled. “Dick. Help me.”
Another pair of dark suit trousers appeared in her limited line of sight. They moved to her side. The one standing on the drawing moved to the other side. They hooked hands beneath her arms and hauled her upright.
Blood crept into cold, rigid muscle tissue. Nerves woke at the influx of oxygen and screamed.
Isa stumbled.
They caught her, carried most of her weight, then hesitated. When she cast them each a glance, they stared at the drawing on the floor.
“That’s an amazing self-portrait, Ms. Romanchzyk. Is it intended to serve a purpose?”
“Preservation of my sanity,” she lied. They didn’t need to know they were the instruments of her will. Maybe because she hadn’t finished the portrait, she didn’t actually get to walk out of the gates. Didn’t even get to walk to their car, really.
They carried her between them.
Somewhere, on the other side of the camp, Isa hoped the colonel was smoldering and choking on his rage at having another prisoner removed from his grasp.
She hadn’t expected her drawing to come true so swiftly. As it happened, she didn’t walk out of the gate with her pathetic wool blanket fluttering like a cape behind her.
The agents swept Isa out of camp like knights who’d ridden to her rescue. They tucked her up in a much cushier blanket and bundled her into the back of a huge black SUV. No identifying marks that she could see. They even gave her a window seat.
The driver, another man in a suit, nodded.
“Water and sodas in the mini fridge,” he said. “Snacks in the pockets of the seats. Help yourself. You’ll feel better.”
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