by N. D. Wilson
“Hush,” Glory said. She touched Sam’s cheek, pulling his eyes back to hers. “I’ll explain when I can. Just stay close. Trust me. And don’t let anyone stop me.”
Sam nodded. “My sister . . .”
“She’s fine. We’ll come back for her,” Glory said. “Later. We’ll come back for everyone. Are you ready?”
Sam swallowed, looked down at the bow in his hands, and nodded again.
“Good,” Glory said. “Then let’s go.”
Glory didn’t jump out from behind the counter. She stood. She didn’t run across the kitchen into the living room. She walked. She didn’t lash her glass or swing it like a whip. She held it out in front of her like the hilt of a sword, but instead of a pointing blade, it spun her a shield of living glass. She held it between herself and the Vulture’s shimmering door, just in case he could still fire at them from wherever he had gone.
Leviathan had a gun in his hands. The spikes in his beard were bent and misshapen. Five other men stood with him, also armed, along with small Samra—hair a wild, red cloud and face pale with surprise.
SAMRA SAW GLORY RISE WITH THE FLASHING SHIELD SPINNING from her hand. She had seen—or felt—everything that had just come before. The Vulture had appeared. The air had blurred, the room had been filled with a vile stink, thunderous gunshots had shaken the windows, and then the perpetually elusive outlaw villain that had long haunted her daydreams and imaginings had suddenly tumbled to the floor with an arrow in his shoulder.
The scream had flown from Samra’s lips before she’d even known it was coming. The outlaw had vanished again, almost as quickly, and more gunshots had rocked Samra’s eardrums.
And now Glory was on her feet, bright and alive and furious, and Sam was just behind her.
In one of the comic books, it would have taken two or three full pages to capture the battle that had just happened, but in the life Samra was now living, it had all played out in seconds, mostly out of view, and with impossible noise.
And in those seconds, four things became as perfectly clear to Samra Finn as the incredible ringing in her ears. First, this Glory was much cooler and more dangerous than she had first thought, cooler even than her comic book self. Second, there was absolutely no way that Samra Finn was going to get between Glory and Sam, not if she wanted to survive. Third, she shouldn’t even want to. Sam and Glory were in a war, and it was a war Samra wanted them to win. If the Vulture was half as evil as the shadowy comic version, every living soul in every time and every world should want Sam and Glory to win. Fourth, Samra was done with her life. It was time to be a hero or die trying.
“Sam!” Millie yelled from the floor. “Glory! Thank God!”
“They’re not staying,” Jude said.
“We’re not?” Sam asked. “Glory, why are they tied up?”
Leviathan Finn raised his shotgun.
“No!” Samra jumped in front of her father, but Sam’s right hand was even faster. The arrow hissed past Samra’s ribs and ricocheted off her father’s knuckles behind her. Levi dropped his shotgun onto the ground, wincing in pain.
“No more!” Sam yelled.
Samra looked at her grimacing father, and then she looked back at Sam. His eyes were wide and startled and even a little worried.
“Sorry,” Sam said to her. “You moved quick.”
Samra swallowed and nodded. Sam smiled and his pink, snaky right hand twisted up to scratch his horribly matted hair. He was actually embarrassed.
Samra began to rethink her earlier position. Maybe Sam and Glory would be stronger if someone did get at least a little bit between them.
GLORY IGNORED SAMRA’S CLOSE CALL, INSTEAD FOCUSING ON the big man with the spiked red beard who was squeezing his own bloody knuckles. She pointed at the Lost Boys tied up on the floor.
“Free them all,” Glory said. “Now. Or we’ll come back in about thirty of your seconds and you’ll be dead before you even see us.”
“Glory?” Millie asked.
“Sam!” Drew yelled. “What do you want us to do?”
“Kick these chumps out,” Sam said. “And be ready.”
Glory swung the hourglass up over her head and down again toward the last shimmer in the air. She needed a fast tunnel, one that would give her more than enough time to dive through the Vulture’s doorway before it became a mousehole. Webs of glass immediately formed into a tunnel stretching out in front of her, and she began to run. Instantly, inside her own accelerated time, the shimmer vanished and she could see the Vulture’s doorway clearly. The spinning cylinders were almost completely back together, sealing the open darkness between them.
“Keep up, Sam!” She jumped over the tied-up smoky bodies of her friends, preparing to tuck into a somersault and roll in case the Vulture or one of his friends had guns raised or an ambush waiting.
Heavy, sickening blackness swallowed her whole and Glory put out her hands to catch herself. But the ambush was of a different sort. A large, dimly shimmering hole waited where the ground should have been. Glory’s hands found nothing. Her feet kicked nothing. She was falling. Twisting, she flailed in every direction, but there was nothing to grab or catch or kick. The air went cold and sharp and clean.
Above her, she saw the tiny pool of light she had fallen into. Sam’s shape plunged through it. And then another, with a wild mane of hair.
Glory spun in the frozen air and looked down. Far, far below her, she saw the silvery shape of the Puget Sound, islands and water dotted with the lights of houses and boats. Not far away, she could see the lights and towers and streaming traffic of Seattle, sprawling and alive and magical.
She was back in the living time, but she was falling into it from the height of an airliner, and two more people were falling behind her.
How long did she have before she hit the surface? Thirty seconds? One minute? Not enough. That was all she knew for sure.
Tears were streaming from her eyes. The wind was trying to peel her face off. And she had to do something. Now.
Glory rolled onto her back and splayed her limbs, fighting to balance as she scanned the starlit sky above her, searching for shadows while her ponytail whipped her face.
“Sam!” she yelled again, but the wind swallowed her voice completely.
One hundred yards away, a black shape shot straight down, tumbling and spinning like a thrown knife.
And then a second shape slammed into her legs and grabbed on tight around her ankles. Glory and her passenger began to spin end over end.
“Stop!” Glory screamed. “Let go!”
Desperate to slow down, Glory lashed out with her hourglass. Glass melted into a sphere all around her, and then stretched into a drop as she slowed to a stop inside, suspended in the air like an astronaut.
Samra was still hugging her ankles tight. Her eyes were wide.
“Let go!” Glory yelled. And she kicked her off.
“What’s going on?” Samra asked, floating alongside Glory inside the uneven orb.
“No questions!” Glory spun around. Now without the wind, she should be able to spot Sam and then she’d figure something out. She’d dive and grab him and slow his time down or something.
But it was hard to make out anything through the glass. It was all moving so . . . fast.
“Oh, no . . .” Glory realized what she’d done. She and Samra had slowed down, but that just made everything outside faster by comparison. Her glass raindrop was falling just as fast as she had been a moment ago. All she had done was reduce the number of seconds she would have before splatting. She didn’t even have time to think.
“Grab on!” Glory shouted, smashing the raindrop with a snap of the hourglass, and she didn’t have to tell Samra twice. The redhead hugged her around the back of the knees as Glory went into a dive, searching for any sign of Sam.
And they didn’t seem so high anymore. The city lights were out of view. They were above a crescent-shaped island dotted with lights and one massive, glowing house.
; “There!” Samra yelled. “To your left!”
Glory saw Sam, limp and fluttering like a shot crow. She shifted her dive toward him, mind racing as fast as the wind, ignoring the screaming panic in her ears.
How could she possibly . . . couldn’t make the same mistake . . . slow? Fast? Back?
She needed a tunnel not a falling ball, a tunnel all the way to the ground, but first, between herself and Sam. And everything inside the tunnel all the way to the ground had to be slow.
Glory focused on what she wanted. With Samra flapping on her heels like a cape, Glory gripped the hourglass with both hands and swung it in a loop pointing toward Sam. She swung it as fast as she could, around and around, until sand and glass hissed and cracked not just beside her but out in front of her.
The tunnel leapt ahead, glowing orange, bending at her direction in pursuit of Sam.
But she was too late. The island was exploding upward now, coming at them like a race car. Glory pushed harder, and the blood drained from her eyes. And then her brain. She felt her body going limp. A cool calm washed through her veins. Her mind latched onto the flickering traces of old memories. Sam at SADDYR. Young Father Tiempo, impatient and bleak. Her right hand was on fire and hissing. For a moment, she wondered if she had been given a snake, too. But then she knew it was just the hissing of sand. And she was unconscious.
GLORIA NAVARRE SAT ON A SMOOTH, YELLOW PLASTIC BENCH in a large bus station. It was her birthday. She was officially eight. She had her heels up on the seat, her arms around her legs, and her face pressed into her knees, watching the bus station strangers flow past her in both directions from behind the frayed holes in her old jeans.
Gloria was wearing her brother’s old jean jacket, with patches on both shoulders and the too-long sleeves rolled up, with a purple backpack over the top of it. In the backpack, she had two small action figures—one missing an arm—one small stuffed penguin, one pencil, and one notebook full of pictures and puzzles and the only four photos she cared about from the first eight years of her life. In her belly, she had the remains of her only birthday gift. A donut. From her brother. Given to her four hours ago. Right before he’d given her a quarter and a scrap of paper with a phone number on it and told her to call if there was an emergency.
Before he’d left.
What was an emergency? Being hungry wasn’t bad enough to call a stranger. Having no bed, no house, no parents, she’d done without those things before. But being alone in the crowd, being without her brother, well, that felt like the biggest emergency she could imagine.
Gloria had never been without Alex. Never. The first photo in her notebook proved it. It was a picture of Alex, five years old, his hair black and thick, his round face and bushy brows serious and full of worry. His arms were around Gloria—hours old, pink faced and wrapped up tight in a white blanket with blue and pink edges. She took up all of his lap and more. Two days later, they would both be carried out of that hospital by unhappy strangers who were not their parents, but who were more willing to care for them than their real parents were.
Gloria had grown up in bedrooms that were not hers, in beds that were not hers, in backyards that were not hers, in old clothes that weren’t even hers. But her brother, Alex, he had always been hers. For real. All the way. Hers. And she had been his. Alex had told her that no one was allowed to adopt them for real, because half of their mother’s blood had been older than all the cities in California, and so it was against the law for normal people with normal blood to be their parents. The two of them were their family, the two of them and the long line of ancestors that ran back through desert kings and mountain healers all the way to unknown explorers who had found the New World in the time of unwritten histories. At night, Alex had made up stories for her about those ancestors, so that when they went to sleep, they were surrounded by a family as great and grand as the stars. That was how her life had always been, and that was how it would always be.
Until the bus station.
Telling time was easy, and the big clock was obvious. But Gloria didn’t look at it. Not after the first few hours. Instead, from the safety of her bench, from behind the fortress of her knees, she watched the buses pull up to the curbs and the people file off and the people file on. She smelled the diesel exhaust and she listened to the punch and squeal of brakes. She watched men and women line up at glass kiosks to buy tickets and she watched the tired people inside the kiosks read magazines when there were no tickets to sell.
When men swept the floors, she held perfectly still and made herself small. There was nothing wrong. Alex would come back. He would have food. He would have a plan. He didn’t need to explain why he had woken her up in the middle of the night before her birthday to sneak out of the foster house. She had seen his bruises. She had one or two of her own.
Gloria did not leave her plastic chair that day. Not to get a drink. Not to go to the bathroom. The bus station was big and Alex needed to know where she was. If he came back, she had to be where he’d left her. She had to be patient. And so, when the sun was down and the people had mostly gone, and the kiosks were mostly empty, she slept in that chair with her knees up and her backpack on. She slept with a full bladder and a dry mouth and an empty stomach. She slept until a man with a mop and a policeman woke her up and asked her name. And she looked up at them both and she told them what she knew to be the truth.
“It’s not an emergency. Alex will come to find me.”
SAM MIRACLE STUDIED GLORY. SHE WAS CURLED UP IN THE grass, on her right side with her knees up and her face almost touching them. Her ponytail was in her face, but she was still holding her hourglass tight, and a dark glass blade trailed out of it like a scythe, growing and twisting into a massive, towering glass cylinder that completely enclosed them maybe twelve feet across—grass at the bottom, pure darkness one hundred feet above them, muted daylight outside the thick, cloudy glass walls. Sam didn’t know how they’d fallen or how long they’d slept, or even where they were. He didn’t know who the Alex was that Glory kept muttering about in her sleep, but he was glad that her sleeping self didn’t think that whatever had just happened was an emergency. It sure felt like one to him.
Glory jerked in her sleep like a falling dreamer, but she didn’t wake. Whatever was going on in her dreams, Sam was pretty sure it wasn’t pleasant.
Leaning forward, Sam reached for Glory’s face with his left hand, but Cindy tensed, excited, and her rattle shivered on Sam’s shoulder.
Sam pulled her back and made a fist, pressing his knuckles into the soft ground, leaning his weight on that arm to make sure Cindy couldn’t surprise him if she tried. Then he stretched out his right hand, with Speck’s curious pink head, and he gently brushed Glory’s dark hair out of her face.
“Glory,” he said, but he paused. He had meant to wake her. But instead he was focused on her hair. She had a white stripe, an inch wide, that began at her neck behind her left ear. The stripe ran up to and through the rubber band she had used to pull her hair back, and then drifted out loosely through her ponytail.
Sam touched the white patch on her scalp with a single finger, and traced it up. He didn’t know what it meant, but it couldn’t be good.
“Is she dead?” Samra asked.
Sam looked back over his shoulder. A moment ago, the redhead had been just as unconscious as Glory.
“No,” Sam said. “She’s breathing.”
He looked up the long bent glass shaft at the darkness above.
“Why did you follow us?” he asked.
“Why would I stay behind? You two are superhuman.” Samra slid up onto her knees beside him. “I want to help. Have you gone into darkness like that before?”
“Yes,” Sam said, looking back down at Glory. She was breathing softly, blades of grass bending away from her lips and then rising again. “We’ve passed through the darkness before.”
“Do you always fall back out?”
Sam shook his head. “We’ve never fallen.”
“I’m guessing the tunnel just saved our lives,” Sam said. “For now, at least. And it came from Glory. She made it. So she’s tired.”
Samra returned to Sam’s side, looking down at Glory.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“We let her sleep. I don’t think that was easy. And whatever comes next will be harder.”
Samra leaned over and reached for Glory’s white stripe. “Ha! That’s weird. She must dye it in the comics.”
“Don’t touch her.” Sam slapped her hand away. “And don’t laugh. Not ever.” He shook his head, thinking about what she had just said. “Dye it for the comics? You do realize that comics aren’t real, right? Someone colors them however they want.”
The redhead sat back in the grass and studied Sam, eyes narrowed, head cocked.
“Sure,” she said. “But you’ve been pretty real so far. And so is she. I guess someone paints her hair for the comics, then. Because she has black hair. No white stripe.”
“She never has,” Sam said. He touched the end of her ponytail. “Until right now.”
Samra reached into her vest and pulled a rolled-up and flattened comic book out of an inside pocket. Then she tossed it onto the grass in front of Sam. He flattened it with his hand.
The Song of Ghost and Glory was trumpeted across the cover. But the words didn’t matter to him as much as the once bright picture. A boy with snake arms was riding a motorcycle in the upper corner. Sam didn’t think it looked like him at all, apart from that fact that the boy was wearing jeans, a tank top, and boots and a gun belt. And he had rattlesnakes in his arms. There was that.
The central image was of a towering boy made of black fire, swinging scythe blades of black fire from both hands. On the right side, a cartoony version of the Vulture was attacking, flying on golden watch-chain wings. On the left, Glory was also flying through the air, deflecting the black fire with a bright whip of glass and sand. She looked amazing.