The guards looked from one to the other, deliberating, then the one who had spoken to us disappeared.
“Do the walls look a little taller, or is it just me?” Asa whispered.
They were definitely taller now in places, the mud brick still drying here and there. New graves. A lot of them. My heart dropped to my stomach. What has happened since we left? But aside from Rosa’s grave, none of the names had been carved on the outside of the wall. Mr. Jameson, I thought. Lucy. I swallowed the nothing in my dry throat and waited with the others in front of the great steel door.
A moment later, I saw Mother Morevna’s silhouette on top of the wall. She was more stooped than I remembered her, leaning on a cane now.
Her sickness must finally be catching up to her, I thought.
Mr. Jameson appeared beside her in his Stetson, squinting out at us from up on the wall. Then he saw me, and unmistakably, his face creased into a wide, relieved smile—one that I’m sure mirrored the one on my own face. He was still here, with his hat and his gun and his peach can. He wasn’t part of the walls yet.
“Hold off, boys,” he said. The guards’ rifles dropped but remained in their hands.
Mother Morevna’s expression, however, didn’t change.
“I thought you’d be along soon, Olivia,” she said. “Though I must say, this is bold of you. Usually those who are exiled do not return to the place they were exiled from.” Her eyes flickered to me, then to Asa. “And now I see not one, but three people I’ve exiled standing outside my door.” (Asa sheepishly tipped his hat.) “All three of you have caused enough problems already. Begone, the lot of you, before I order them to shoot.”
The other girls looked at each other. Mowse huddled into Susanah’s back. But Olivia climbed down from her horse and took a step toward the door with her hands up. Trying my hardest to calm my nerves, I climbed down from Asa’s and my horse and went to stand beside her.
“Listen to me,” said Olivia, her voice careful but firm. “We’re here to make you an offer, one that could be beneficial to both of us.”
“You’re not in the position to offer us anything now,” said Mother Morevna. “Except extra mouths to feed. And that, we cannot afford.”
“We’re offering a way out,” I said. “We doomed Elysium, and we want to save it now.”
“And how do you propose to do that?” Mother Morevna asked. “You think coming in here on those… things… and giving us a few sacks of supplies will make up for ten years’ worth of goods saved up?”
Olivia pulled the Dust Soldier’s scimitar from her bag and raised it over her head, pointing toward the sky. “We can get Elysium out of this mess. For good.”
The guards on the walls began to mumble to one another, their heads turning to measure their reactions. Mother Morevna remained expressionless.
“We know how to kill the Dust Soldiers,” Olivia said. “We’re offering to arm the guards and train them. Because right now, we’re past the point of winning and losing. All we can do now is fight.”
“Fighting them would be madness.” Mother Morevna’s voice was like a soft whip crack.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “Fighting is our only hope. The Game has a limit of ten years. And when they come for us on the final day, if we fight them from sunset until the dawn of the next day, we prolong the Game. And if we prolong the Game outside the ten-year limit, then we can end the Game on our terms. We can be part of the real world again. This desert, this godforsaken Game, can finally end!”
Silence fell. My heart skipped in my chest. But I didn’t take my eyes from Mother Morevna’s.
“And how do you know this is true?” Mother Morevna asked.
“Because her specialty is finding the truth,” Olivia said. “Not that you helped her figure that out in any way. You let people keep thinking she was a liar instead of what she is: a truth witch!”
My heart stumbled over itself. It was true, I knew. That was my specialty, and it always had been. How else would I know deception for what it was? How else would I be able to see people’s innermost pain, their first truths? It felt real, empowering to have a name for it. I looked back up to Mother Morevna, but her face was expressionless. She knew, I realized. How long had she known?
“Is this true?” she asked me this time, only me. “Is all of this true?”
“Yes,” I said, drawing myself up to my full height and glaring back at her. “It’s true, all of it. Take your pendulum out and ask it if you want.”
“Unless you’ve got a better plan for saving Elysium,” Olivia said.
There was a long moment of silence as Mother Morevna’s cold eyes bored into my own. But I didn’t look away. I wouldn’t look away.
“What is it that you want?” Mother Morevna asked.
I couldn’t believe it. She was willing to listen, to go back on one of her decisions.
“All we want is to be welcomed back inside the walls and be treated as equals,” I said. “All eight of us. We want a place to live, food, a place to train, and as much scrap metal as you can spare. Then we’ll help, as we said.”
“It can be done,” said Mother Morevna. “But I am wary of offerings of horses in this walled city. This will not be Troy. I will not accept this gift on simple trust when my city is at risk. You will be relieved of your weapons when you are not training, including spell components belts, and when the Dust Soldiers come, you will lead your attack from the front lines. Do we have a deal?”
“One last thing,” Olivia said, her voice fierce, her eyes flashing. “I know Rosa is alive. Give her back to me!”
A rumble went up among the guards. “Rosa? Rosa Rosales?” “I thought she was dead.” But Olivia stared straight at Mother Morevna. Mother Morevna’s mouth was set in a thin, straight line. Olivia’s eyes narrowed. It was a battle of wills, two wills, each made of steel. But to my surprise, Mother Morevna was the first to look away.
“All right,” Mother Morevna said. “She will be returned to you. But you must lead the attack against the Dust Soldiers, should it come to that. You must be on the front lines, ready to give your life for this last-ditch plan.”
“Done,” Olivia said. She turned to me, and I nodded, though the thought of being on the front lines made me a little queasy. If that was what we had to do, so be it.
“Open the door!” Mother Morevna said.
With a great, ear-rending groan, the steel door slowly opened. Up on the horse, Asa looked tense, his yellowish eyes darting to and fro. The other girls and I exchanged glances. Mowse peeked out from behind Susanah. Then Olivia and I climbed back onto our horses and led the girls through the gates of Elysium.
The feeling of Elysium, a shocking feeling of relief, rushed over me. The weight of watchfulness that I’d carried in the desert was lifted from me as soon as I passed behind the walls. I felt the familiarity of it change my stance, make my movements looser. Elysium was far from perfect, but it was home. One by one, the people of Elysium came out of their houses and stood in their doorways to watch. Every disbelieving eye was on us and our skeletal mechanical steeds. All around, I heard whispers of confusion, fear, distrust… and amazement. People simply didn’t know what to believe as we passed through the streets, the only three people to ever be admitted back into Elysium. But this time, with all of us there together, I didn’t feel alone.
“Oh, now she’s letting murderers back in,” an old white man said loudly as we went by. “Really is the end, isn’t it?”
“Don’t listen to them,” I heard Zo whisper to Olivia.
“Don’t worry, chica,” she said, her eyes forward, her back straight. “I’ve been at this for a long time. All I want out of this hellhole is my sister.”
“People of Elysium,” Mother Morevna’s voice suddenly boomed over the city. Up on the wall, she looked down at us. “There has been a change of plans. As a final attempt to save ourselves, I have permitted reentry to Elysium to three formerly exiled members of our community and their friends. I urge you t
o welcome them, for as I reassemble the Sacrifice, they will be fighting to defend us against the Dust Soldiers in the event that my attempts are unsuccessful.”
Asa smiled the brightest, most forced of smiles and gave a little wave to a woman in the middle of drying her laundry. She did not return it, but she gave him a somber nod of her head. All was not forgotten, but it was momentarily forgiven. I turned and exchanged nervous glances with the girls, and, wordlessly, one thought beat through all of us. We’re here now. And there’s no turning back.
From the shadows behind the water tower, Lucy Arbor watched as the doors were opened.
A jolt went through her. Sal’s back! She started to run forward, to embrace Sal, to tell her how she’d missed her, how none of it had been her fault. But then she saw the mechanical monstrosity that Sal rode in on. She saw others with her, these outlaw girls covered in sweat and grit and blood, and Lucy stopped in her tracks.
Sal was riding next to Olivia Rosales.
Though Olivia was plainly the leader, there was something different about Sal now. A hardness, a toughness that hadn’t been there before. Where Sal had once seemed out of place no matter where she was, she seemed at ease, confident… accepted completely. No, valued. She was as much a member of the group she rode with as any of them were.
Sal, the outsider who had nothing. Sal, whom Lucy had pitied and protected, had grown up in the short time she’d been away. Grown into someone who didn’t need protection anymore. Strength shone in the strands of her hair and the freckles of her skin. This new strength looked good on Sal, Lucy realized. Beautiful, in fact.
A fit of coughing seized Lucy, and she doubled over, hacking mud into her stained handkerchief. She gasped for air, pain blooming out through her chest before she could finally breathe again. How different she was now, the opposite of Sal. Before, Lucy had been beautiful, feminine, fashionable, with her underground makeup empire and coordinated outfits. But things were different now. Lucy looked down at her drab clothes, felt her rough kerchief, touched her sunken, Dust Sick, makeupless face. Sick, like Sal’s mother had been before.…
Lucy shook herself mentally.
Sal was looking into the crowd, scanning for familiar faces. Before Lucy could help herself, she ducked behind a nearby house. And troubled by this new, unrecognizable feeling growing in her chest alongside the pain, Lucy glanced one more time over her shoulder at Sal and the girls with her.
She can’t see me like this, she decided finally. She should remember me as I was. Then Lucy stuffed her muddy handkerchief back into her pocket, took a swig of her water ration, and disappeared into the dust and grit of Elysium.
CHAPTER 21
1 WEEK
REMAINS.
The guards came and gathered around us, and after they took our weapons and led us through the streets of Elysium, toward wherever we’d be lodging, the changes that had taken place in my absence became starker, more ominous. This was not the Elysium I remembered.
Entire houses that had once glowed with life were empty, boarded up. Everyone was thinner now, and sadder, their clothes more threadbare, their shoes more worn. Even the church seemed to have grown dingy, black around the edges and between the planks of the siding. Decrees from Mother Morevna hung on houses and on windmills: WE MUST ALL DO WITH LESS SO THAT WE MAY LIVE, they said, or NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR SELFISHNESS, or KEEP CALM. PANIC ONLY KILLS FASTER. And of course, the walls were higher, the worst sign of all.
But it didn’t seem that these signs and precautions had done anything. The panic was there, a tic like a pulse beneath the very earth of Elysium. The sense of doom in the air was so thick it was almost palpable. It hung like fog over the whole city, a silent, mortal panic that seemed to swarm beneath the skin of every man, woman, child, and even animal within the walls. You could feel it in the dripping of water into waiting buckets and dippers, in the hammering of workmen nailing the shutters of the emptied houses closed, in the footsteps of people passing, trying to live out their final days with some modicum of dignity. And as we passed with our mechanical horses, the whisperers fell silent.
I heard a familiar set of footsteps fall in next to mine and Asa’s horse. “It’s good to have you back, kid,” Mr. Jameson said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I was worried about you out there.”
Among all the stares, all the hostility and confusion, Mr. Jameson’s gravelly voice felt like an anchor in an unsteady sea.
“I’m just glad we’re back on the same side again,” I said.
“We are,” he said, giving me that hangdog look. “I promise.”
“Ah, Mr. Jameson,” Olivia said, riding up to him. “Didn’t think you’d see me again, huh?”
He touched the brim of his hat. “It’s good to have you back too, Olivia.”
“Well, we’ll see how the rest of Elysium feels about that,” said Olivia, looking out at the sunken eyes and sunken cheeks of the onlookers. “Now, where is my sister?”
“Mother Morevna will bring her to you tonight,” Mr. Jameson said evenly. “Just let me get you all settled in first. It doesn’t make sense to get her back without a place to take her, does it?” He sighed. “So you know, I objected to all of this from the very beginning,” he told Olivia. “Faking her death, using her as an Alarm to let us know when you were coming. I’m glad it’s over.”
I remembered then what I had overheard so many nights ago, when I had first moved into the church. That whispered conversation, Mr. Jameson feeling nearly sick about a girl who was directly above him. Rosa. I could feel all of this from him without even having to touch him. But that didn’t excuse it. I stepped away from him, letting him feel the distance between us.
“You still did it,” Olivia said, her eyes on his, hard and unforgiving. “You went along with it, what Mother Morevna told you to do. And even if I had trusted you before, I can never trust you completely now.”
“I understand,” he said, a thread of pain running through his voice. “And I don’t expect your trust. But I want you to know this: All this time, I made sure no harm ever came to Rosa and that she had all she needed. And if you want enemies, girl, look all around you, but don’t make one out of me, not when I’m trying my best to help you.”
Olivia was quiet. She didn’t necessarily trust Mr. Jameson—how could she?—but I could tell by the set of her jaw that she would call it a truce for now.
Through the open, sheet-covered windows of a nearby house, we heard the sound of someone sobbing. Loud, racking sobs that sounded like the poor person would surely be broken in two by her own weeping. On the porch, a man sat with a homemade cigarette, too beaten down by sadness to even look up as we walked by.
“I don’t like it here,” Mowse whispered. Susanah took her hand and said nothing.
“What’s happened?” Asa asked Mr. Jameson. “It seems a bit… heavier in here since we left.”
“A Dust Sickness outbreak,” Mr. Jameson said. “The worst we’ve ever had. And more than that. We’ve only got one week left. People don’t take doom well.”
Asa and I exchanged guilty glances. All we could do was what we came to do. To set it right again. To be the saviors we each had wanted so desperately to be. And now we had no other choice.
As we walked, I scanned the crowd, looking over heads, in between bodies. But the longer I looked, the more my heart sank. The face I was looking for was nowhere in sight. I started to look up where the white-clad morticians were laying another body to rest, bricking it up in the walls.
“Where’s Lucy Arbor, Mr. Jameson?” I asked. “Is she…?”
“Lucy Arbor?” He thought. “She’s all right, last I heard. Been spending a lot of time at the hospital, helping out. I’d have thought she’d come down here to see you. Maybe she’s still working with Nurse Gladys.”
“I’d have thought so too,” I said, my heart sinking painfully, dragging the rest of me down. “Maybe I was wrong.”
When we stopped in front of a two-story house with darkened wi
ndows, Mr. Jameson reached into his pocket and pulled out a jingling ring of keys.
“The last lady to live here died a week ago, so this one’s open,” said Mr. Jameson. The house had been white, long ago. White with green trim, it looked like. But now the paint had been almost completely stripped from the wooden planks. The roof was missing more shingles than it had been before, and the windows were caked with dust, but it was a house, and it was big enough for all of us.
We brought our horses to a stop by the side of the house and followed Mr. Jameson to the door, our boots leaving prints on the dusty porch. He opened the door with a creak.
We stepped into the house, which was like any other in Elysium, with newspapered walls, a round wooden table, an old green stove visible through the kitchen door. Though the woman who’d owned it hadn’t been out of it for long, it was already almost ankle-deep in dust. The stairs to the right were caked with it, and the windows were so bad that we couldn’t see out them.
“I’ll get Mrs. Winthrop to send water and rags for y’all in a little while,” Mr. Jameson said. “And some brooms.”
“Why are there guards outside?” asked Mowse. Sure enough, as we spoke, four guards were approaching, looking nervous. They went to stand outside each corner of the house.
“To make sure none of you puts a toe out of line,” said Mr. Jameson, giving each of us our own individual no-nonsense look. “Everybody thinks we’re taking a big risk with y’all, and most of them don’t even know the half of it. Now, while y’all are here, I don’t want to hear about y’all being hooligans, stealing pies off windowsills, writing ugly things on houses…”
“What do you think we are?” Zo said, leaning against the doorway.
“Thieves,” Mr. Jameson said. “Unless it was some other gang of girls who stole from the Sacrifice building a few months ago.”
Zo crossed her arms and went quiet.
“It’s nothing personal,” he said. “But y’all have a little bit of a… reputation. And until it’s proven false, we gotta keep the guards out there every night. Now, they aren’t gonna bother you as long as you don’t do anything stupid. So don’t do anything stupid, all right?”
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