I saw Mother Morevna reach for the stone in her pocket. I saw the thin sparkle of her containment spell crackle overhead, an invisible dome of magic. Then she pulled out her own handkerchief and pretended to cover her nose with it.
I gave Asa another shake or two with my whirlwind and tossed him to the ground. He landed, crumpled, and as the crowd shouted, he rose to his feet, clutching his arm. Now would come the fire projectile. He’d send it at me, I’d send it back, and then it’d be over for both of us. Across the circle, Asa’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly.
Are you ready? he was asking.
Nearly imperceptibly, I nodded.
Asa raised his hand, palm outward toward me. I felt his energy grow stronger, vibrate. A jet of fire shot out at me from his hand, grew into a thick log of flame. I grabbed the handful of dust and threw it into the air, whispering it into action. Under the windmill, Mr. Jameson nodded, turned, and flapped his handkerchief again. The guards began following the thieves as they slunk, silent, through the streets and back toward the Sacrifice building. I stood up just slightly taller to see.
Then everything went wrong.
The fire ricocheted off my shield of dust, but instead of flying back toward Asa, it went up, into the sky—straight up, impossibly up. Parting the clouds. Then it disappeared, leaving the clouds dark and angry and boiling overhead.
An eerie silence fell.
Then someone pointed.
“Look!”
The fire was coming back down, bigger and brighter than it had been before. It descended like a comet, over the church, over the garden, straight toward the Sacrifice building. There was a deep, earth-shaking boom of impact, the sound of metal tearing, wood breaking.
Oh God…
Then came the bang bang bang of gunshots followed by screams. The thieves.
The crowd panicked, began to scatter. Smoke and dust rose around them, in a cloud, thick, choking. I felt someone grab my hand—Asa.
“What’s happening?” he said. “Did I—” he asked. “Did you—”
We jumped off the platform and started to run. Asa shouldered his way through the crowd, and I stayed close behind him until he stopped and I collided with his back.
“Get some water!” someone cried.
Above the cloud of dust, flames rose, huge and angry, cracking wood, whisking away black tar paper. The smell of burning food rose above it all. People ran and shouted. Buckets of water sloshed. Smoke rose into the billowing sky, unbelievably black.
The Sacrifice building was burning.
“This… this isn’t supposed to happen…” he breathed.
My breath came in gasps. What have I done? What have we done? What went wrong?
In the light of the flames, I could see black lumps on the ground. The guards lay, some unconscious, some bleeding. Mr. Jameson was rising from the dust, his head bloody but unbowed. I didn’t see any of the thieves. But… several ropes had been flung up over the nearest wall. A line of blood smear followed one rope, and through the smoke I could see a gaping, shimmering rip in Mother Morevna’s spell at the top of the wall. They had escaped. They had escaped, and the Sacrifice building was on fire.
Asa’s face was half-orange in the firelight. “I didn’t mean to!” he spluttered desperately, grabbing my shoulders. “I didn’t mean to, Sal, I swear it!”
But I couldn’t say anything. I could only stand and watch as townspeople ran to the Dowsing Well and back, trying to douse the fire. But the flames were all-consuming. There was a horrifying sound, a crackling roar. Then the Sacrifice building collapsed in on itself, the flames mushrooming into the sky. Forty feet high now and still climbing, fueled by homemade liquors and dried wheat and everything else we owed the Dust Soldiers.
The Dust Soldiers.
We would all be killed. Everyone. And all because of me.
I swayed on my feet. Bile rose in my throat.
“What do we do now, Sal?” Asa asked. “What do we do?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know, and a crowd was assembling around us, dark and angry, familiar faces suddenly featureless with rage. I wanted Mama. I wanted Mother Morevna. Where were they?
“You!” a voice said, sharp and accusatory. I turned and recognized the man from the Blue Moon. And he was pointing at us.
“This is all y’all’s fault!” he shouted.
A murmur went up over the crowd. They did it. It’s their fault. The murmur became a rumble.
“Hang them!” someone in the crowd yelled. Then two more people joined in. “Hang them! Hang them!”
There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. They had encircled us on all sides. Surely they would kill us. Where was Mother Morevna? Where was Jameson?
“No,” Asa was saying. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no… it’s not supposed to happen this way… I can’t… I can’t do this!”
Then, suddenly, he disappeared. Just vanished from behind me as though he had never been there at all, leaving me alone to face the crowd.
The people gasped, then seemed to grow even angrier. “Coward!” someone cried. “Come back and fight like a man!” But they didn’t look for him. They had me, and I couldn’t disappear.
The circle was closing. There were ropes in people’s hands, panic and anger in people’s eyes.
“Mother Morevna!” I shrieked. “Mother Morevna! Please help!”
Then I saw her: a lone, elegant shadow silhouetted against the flames. But she didn’t come to me. She didn’t turn and take my hand and tell me she had a plan for us, that it was going to be all right. Instead, when she spoke, her voice was as hard as obsidian.
“You have doomed us,” she said.
“But Asa—” I started.
“It doesn’t matter whose magic it was,” she said. “Someone must pay for this.”
An angry shout went up in the crowd, “Hang her! Hang her!” but Mother Morevna put her hand up and the crowd went silent.
“I will not see hangings in this city,” she said. “We have not grown so barbarous as that.” Her eyes flickered to mine. She reached behind her neck and took off her black pendant. She held it out over her hand in front of me.
“No…” I heard myself sob. “Please…”
But all I could do was wait for my judgment.
At first, the pendulum hung still in the air, its gold chain catching the light. The crowd was completely silent, and all I could hear was the sound of the timbers snapping in the fire.
Please stay still, I thought. Please…
But very slowly, very slowly, it had begun to swing. It gained momentum and speed, and everyone could see its direction: back and forth.
“A pity,” she said, stepping away from me. “You were becoming such a good witch.”
I choked back a sob.
“Sallie Wilkerson,” she said, her silhouette dark and jagged as she walked in front of the flames. “You are hereby banished from the City of Elysium, never to return. From this day forward, you must travel the Desert of Dust and Steel without protection, without love, and without pity. May the Gods have mercy on your soul.”
“Please!” I cried. I reached out and grabbed her hand. Mother Morevna’s eyes went out of focus. A wave of nausea rose inside me, just like it had when I saw Trixie’s memory. Like it did when I saw the rain. Voices rose in my mind. For a moment, I was a girl in a plain black dress, drawing something in the dirt, pricking her finger and drawing blood to make the crops grow taller. I heard a man yelling something in another language, dragging the girl away as she cried out that she meant no harm.…
Mother Morevna broke out of my grip, her eyes wide with anger and disbelief, as though she were truly seeing me for the first time.
Then she looked at Mr. Jameson. “Get her out of my sight,” she said. And she turned and walked into the darkness.
Mr. Jameson looked at me, his face sad and powerless.
“I’m sorry, Sal,” he said.
“No!” I cried, but the crowd was already coming toward me. T
hey surged forward, grabbed my arms and shoulders, lifted me up. Trixie herself was carrying my left arm, clamping it hurting-tight. I struggled, but they held my wrists together, pulled my hair, as they carried me through the city and to the steel door.
“No!” cried Lucy, fighting her way to the front. “Sal!”
“Lucy!” I screamed. But she was swept away by the crowd.
The great doors were pried open. The creak of the hinges was barely audible over the shouts and the hoots and the cries for blood. It was open, the desert black and bleak in front of me.
“No!” I cried. “You’re making a mistake! Please!”
Then they hurled me into the air. I fell hard on the ground, pain shooting through my side.
“So long, Rain Girl!” someone spat. And the door closed, leaving me in utter darkness.
Sobbing, I lay in the dark sand where I had fallen, crumpled in the shadow of that great closed door, and wept. Alone.
After the doors had closed and the people had gone back to their homes, Lloyd Jameson surveyed the damage. Nothing was left. The Sacrifice building was nothing but a smoldering pile of ash. The thieves had escaped back into the desert—though he’d shot one of them in the shoulder himself. Two of his guards had been wounded. Asa Skander was nowhere to be found. And Sal Wilkerson…
But Mother Morevna was right. Someone had to pay for all their deaths. Should it have been Sal, though? A surge of disgust ran through him. He spat on the ground, his tobacco leaving a dark stain in the dust. Now Sal was gone, and he hadn’t been able to help her. Everyone might as well be gone. All thoughts of Texas, of his ranch, of his wife and his daughter, were gone now, blown away like Oklahoma topsoil, irretrievable as rain.
“I can’t believe it…” a voice said. He turned. Lucy Arbor, the girl everyone knew was selling makeup, was standing there in the dark, staring at the door Sal had been carried through. “They just… threw her out like that.”
“Were you a friend of Sal’s?” he asked. “Sal never seemed like she had many friends.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “Since we were little. She was kind to me, even before Elysium. Can’t say the same for everybody, you know.”
Lucy looked at the great, closed door. She wiped away what might have been a tear. Then she turned to a little boy behind her, her brother probably. “George, you need to head on back to the hospital. Aunt Lucretia needs her bedtime story.”
The little boy wasn’t listening. Instead, he was picking something up off the ground. Something small, golden. A marble maybe.
“George!” she said.
“I’m going! I’m going!” said George. Then he stuffed the marble in his pocket and headed off toward the church. Lucy, however, stayed there, staring at the door like she could look through it and see out into the desert beyond. “I’ll miss her,” she said finally.
“Me too,” said Mr. Jameson.
The two stood in silence for a moment more, listening to the crackling of the dying conflagration.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Lucy, her voice quiet with fear and sadness. “They’re coming back in just a couple months’ time.…”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Jameson, staring into the embers. “I just don’t know.”
CHAPTER 13
2 MONTHS
AND
28 DAYS
REMAIN.
I didn’t sleep at all the first night in the desert. I couldn’t. The terror fell on me as soon as the doors closed, and all the stories of creatures, of cannibals, of god-knew-what rose in my mind like dust clouds until I was so smothered with fear I could barely breathe. In the end, I was able to gather enough of my wits to crawl into a ditch and pull a tangle of tumbleweeds over me for camouflage. And all night, all around me, the creatures of the desert made themselves known. The air was dusty and sharp, full of growls, screams, cries. I could barely think. All I could do was sit awake, listening, watching the dark for movement, my hand near my components belt, ready to run or fight.
The next morning, when the light filtered through the tumbleweeds, I climbed out of the ditch, gritty and filthy and bruised, and looked out at the desert in the day. Unbelievable miles and miles of dry, cracked earth, with jagged stones spiking up in the distance and pools of mirage just beginning to waver. That endlessly big sky like a bell jar over it, making me feel smaller than ever. A line from a poem at school jumped into my mind and stuck there. The lone and level sands stretch far away. The reality of my situation, the guilt, hit me like a sledgehammer, knocking me to my knees. It had really happened. I had really brought the end down on all our heads, on Lucy, on Mr. Jameson, on everyone. It beat painfully next to my heart: my fault, my fault, my fault. And after last night, I was too worthless to them to even be allowed to try to fix it. For the first time in my life, I was really, truly alone.
I sat there among the tumbleweeds and cried until my rib cage felt like it had been scraped hollow. Then, when my tears had left muddy rivers down my cheeks, I felt resilience spark, catch fire somewhere in the hollowness. I’m not going to let this be the end.
The thieves, the cannibals, the creatures. All of them had to be able to find a way to survive out here. They had to eat. They had to drink. There must be something out here, something to live off of, something of value. And if I wanted to live long enough to have a chance of figuring out what I could do to fix everything—of maybe even finding a way out of this desert—I had to look for it myself.
I looked out over the horizon of the strange, alien desert that had once been fields. The high mesas, the jagged peaks of red stone, miniature mountains making lakes of shadows beneath them. The picked-over skeletons of rusted cars stuck up out of the ground here and there. The remains of fencerows cut across portions of the land. But in the distance, Black Mesa and Robbers Roost were visible, unchanged despite the scenery that surrounded them, looking much closer than they actually were. And if I remembered them, maybe I could use them to find my way.
Quickly, I took an inventory of what I had with me. I had my dust mask. I had the belt of spell components, still full. I had The Complete Booke of Witchcraft in my pocket. Surely, with all this, and the penny to help guide me, I could find some food or some shelter.
But the most important thing now was to find water, and that I knew I could do.
I took my penny necklace off and held it by the twine.
“Water,” I told it, and after a moment, it pulled straight outward, pointing into the Desert of Dust and Steel.
“All right,” I told it. “Let’s go.”
I followed the penny for hours, over sunbaked rocks, the stubbly remains of fields turned into dunes, a plain filled with boulders, and still it strained and pulled against the twine that held it. By the time the penny led me to the side of a limestone plateau, the sun was so high and direct overhead that my shadow had all but disappeared under me. I stopped and looked up at the plateau, tall and unyielding before me. I wiped my forehead and mud came off on my arm.
“What, you want me to go over it? Under it?” I asked the penny. “Because I can’t go through it.” But the penny strained onward, ever forward. And sure enough, when I reached out, I found a crack between two rocks: a pathway leading to somewhere inside the plateau—somewhere with light streaming in at the end.
“Is it safe?” I asked the penny. It buzzed once. Yes.
Gulping with my dry throat, I crawled into the crack. It was narrow—so narrow, I had to edge sideways at times, feeling the dust and pebbles scrape off onto my clothes. I edged onward, foot by foot toward the light until I nearly stumbled out into a small, sandy clearing.
“Fancy meeting you here!” said a voice.
I spun around, my hand on my belt, the word Entflammt on my lips. There, sitting on a rock to my left, looking like the world’s scruffiest Harold Lloyd impersonator, was the last person I expected or wanted to see.
“Asa?!” I nearly shouted.
“Sal,” he said, tipping his hat to me. “I
was just in the neighborhood and—”
“You son of a bitch!” I shouted. “You left me there!” I grabbed a rock and threw it at him.
“Ow! Stop it!” He put his arm up.
I threw another rock.
“Hey, cut it out!”
“No!” I pelted him again. “You left me there to die!”
“Look,” said Asa. “I’m sorry! It was just getting a little tense back there and I thought—”
“‘Every man for himself!’ is what you thought!” I shouted. “Of all the slimy, spineless… You’re not even good enough to be called a worm, you… worm!”
“I get it, I get it,” he said. “But let me explain…”
“I don’t have time for that,” I said. “I have to get out of here, and that’s what I’m going to do. See you in hell. Never mind—we’re already here! Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Did you still want the water?” he said. And my throat was so hot and dry that I turned to him without thinking. In his hand, miraculously, he held a bag of rations.
“Where did you get that?” I asked. “Did you steal—”
“No, no, no,” Asa said quickly. “That old cowboy, Mr. Jameson, rode out here on a horse in the middle of the night last night and left them here. But these rations have got your name on them.” He rotated the burlap sack and, sure enough, the name SAL WILKERSON was written on it in smudged black charcoal. “I haven’t touched anything inside.”
Mr. Jameson. I remembered his sad, shocked face as they dragged me away, the surge of betrayal I’d felt when he hadn’t stood up for me. And now he was doing his best to make sure I didn’t die out here. Somehow, the world suddenly seemed a little better.
“Well, give it here,” I said, reaching for the bag. “And thank you for not touching anything in it. I at least need to make sure I don’t die of thirst before I either fix everything or find a way out of this desert.”
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