Elysium Girls

  Olivia and Asa sprung into action, throwing down every spell they knew into the jigsaw puzzle stretched out before us. Flames, wind, light, shadow.

  Mr. Jameson climbed up the nearest tower and pulled out his enchanted rifle. Dust Soldier after Dust Soldier exploded with his every shot.

  I hesitated, holding the Master Stone in my palm. Then I closed my eyes and closed my hands over it. I accept.

  The amber grew warm, melting in my palms like honey. Then there was a powerful surge, an unspeakable wave of power, rocketing through me. It filled me up, full to bursting, so full of magic that the very follicles of my hair seemed to glow with it. There seemed to be no end to the well of magic inside me, Mother Morevna’s magic. My magic. And I saw for the first time, the memories that were in the cricket. Mother Morevna’s memories.

  I saw two Mennonite girls: an older girl, Greta, and the other, a young Marike Morevna herself, running away from home. Home, where their strange ways were ways to be hidden or punished away. For there was no room in the community for girls who could keep the bees from stinging and make the plants grow just by whispering to them. Greta had been thrown out, excommunicated, and Marike’s punishments had gotten so harsh that she thought she would rather die than live another day being punished for being who she was. Then Greta had returned with spell tattoos under her gloves, returned and whisked Marike away into the safety of the night, to the safety of the Russian coven. I saw the amulet Mother Morevna had made as her first object, this very cricket in amber itself as she learned to use it. I saw the tattoos rise on her hands. I saw the hands beneath the tattoos begin to age. I saw the coven rise in sisterhood and fall to bickering, to competition, to spite, until every witch in it splintered from the group, certain she alone knew what had gone wrong.

  I jerked myself back into the real world, a lump of sorrow in my chest that was not my own. There was a wiggling in my hands then—the cricket had come back to life. It jumped out of my hands and down onto the battlefield.

  I took a deep breath, mustered as much magic as I could into my voice.

  “Setzen Sie es richtig!” I shouted, willing power into every syllable. Set it right.

  A thrum of power knocked me to my knees. Magic spread from me, and though I couldn’t see it, I felt a sensation like fog clearing, like an enormous flock of birds rising, like Atlas sighing in relief when the sky was lifted from his shoulders. And I knew that I was feeling the smothering heaviness of Dust Sickness lift. And then I felt the air move, a great simultaneous gasp of air, as though everyone who had had Dust Sickness suddenly breathed deep. Farther down the wall, I saw Mowse rise to her feet again, her color restored, the red mark on her hand gone.

  Had I done it? I wondered, the beating of my heart drumming in my ears. I had stopped the curses, stopped the second sacrifice. We’d removed Death’s Wildcard, because that was what Mother Morevna had always been, wasn’t it? It was over now, I told myself. It had to be.

  But the Dust Soldiers were still coming. Our world was still ending. My heart lurched. Our work wasn’t over.

  I reached into my pouches for powdered seashells. Then there was another earthquake, bigger than any that had come before, so big we nearly fell from our places on the wall. The mechanical horses toppled to the ground, throwing their riders. And though the Dust Soldiers marched ever forward, the mechanical horses didn’t rise again.

  Susanah, Judith, and Zo ran to the front, holding the Dust Soldiers back as Mowse watched, pale and shaking, from the wall.

  “Come on!” Susanah shouted at the guards, her mouth bloody. “This isn’t over yet! We have to hold them!”

  The guards and militiamen hesitated. Then, as the Dust Soldiers marched their death march toward them, each of the bodies of the soldiers they had killed turned to dust and blew away on the wind. And in this moment, I saw the remaining guards falter, as though each one realized that he was no soldier: only a rancher, a cowboy, a wheat farmer. One by one, the guards broke and ran for the door. Susanah, Judith, and Zo stood firm, facing the soldiers.

  “We have to help them!” Olivia yelled.

  “Asa!” I shouted. “Blitz us down there!”

  Asa nodded. He blitzed to Olivia first, then to Cassandra, taking each of them down to the others. Then he was beside me. He grabbed my arm, and I felt myself disintegrating into nothing. I felt speed and darkness and light, and then Asa and I were there with the others.

  Side by side, we stood, some of us drained, others bloody, all exhausted. The Dust Soldiers loomed just beyond the reach of Susanah’s spear, coming forward, a high dark wall of destruction.

  “Let’s finish this!” Olivia shouted. And we charged. Susanah and Judith spun and jabbed and twirled. Asa and Olivia threw their brain-bending, infernal magic, and Zo fired her magic-laden shots, and Cassandra and I cast spell after spell. Fire, wind, earth, all at my command. We leapt and ducked, slid and dodged, great black scimitars slicing into our arms, grazing our ribs. We fought like animals. And one by one, the Dust Soldiers exploded. And as Judith ran her spear through the final Dust Soldier, black dust blanketed the battlefield, hung in the sky like cannon smoke.

  Then there was silence. A hush fell over the battlefield, and where there had been slashing and hacking and screaming and running, now there was only silence, hazy clouds of dust, and the blood of the fallen soaking into it all.

  We came back together, each of us bleeding, gasping for breath.

  “That’s all of them,” Zo said, wiping blood from a slash on her cheek. “Finally.”

  “I think… I think we did it,” said Cassandra.

  But something felt wrong. The air felt tight and close, and my pulse wouldn’t stop drumming in my veins. I turned to Asa for comfort, for reassurance that we had done it. But Asa’s face was pale as chalk. He pointed out into the clouds of dust thinning before us. Among them, the dark, dust-covered ground began to move. To rise.

  From the fallen dust, the Dust Soldiers were building themselves once more, all of them, all one hundred, re-forming themselves completely. They solidified into their previous shapes, huge, and terrifyingly whole again, and as one, they began to move toward us.

  “No…” Judith said. “Oh, God… no…”

  They were not running, not charging, but walking slowly, as though they already knew they’d won. And they had. Eight against one hundred regenerating Dust Soldiers was not just bad odds; it was suicide. And as I looked at the others’ faces, I knew the same thought was running through all of our minds. This is the end.

  “The defense spell,” Olivia said. “We’ve got to do it now.”

  I pulled the black stone from my pouch. “I’ll do it. I wrote the spell.”

  “Whoever sets it off will be locked outside the city!” Cassandra said. “We can’t ask that of you!”

  “And I can’t ask it of anyone else!” I said. “This spell is the only chance we have of holding them off until morning. Get into the city and let me do this!”

  “No,” Olivia said, putting her hand over mine. “It’s all of us or nobody.”

  I looked at the others, their bleeding, bruised faces; Susanah, her nose broken, staring defiantly; Zo and Judith, bleeding from scores of wounds, side by side; Cassandra, her face the calm mask of one who has accepted her fate. Asa nodded. Then Olivia took the black stone into her hand and went to the door and closed it.

  “I’m sorry, Rosa,” she whispered. Then she placed the stone in its spot.

  She bit her own finger and let the blood flow. “PULVAREM SPIRITUM!” she shouted.

  And a great dome of magic, pulsating with Asa’s energy, rose around the city. Where Dust Dome had been completely transparent, this looked like a globe of lacy runes written in chalk upon the very air itself, and it felt like protection and doom all at once. It rose above the walls and closed, seamless, over all of it, a great patterned bowl of magic. We had inherited this problem. We had fought like hell for it. And at least Elysium, and humanity, would be protected.
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  We turned to face them then, a high black wall of destruction. What will dying be like? I thought. Will it be fast? Will there be light? A tunnel? Or only darkness?

  The Dust Soldiers began their charge then. Scimitars unsheathed, they ran, ready to cut down this chain of girls who dared to stare down the apocalypse.

  Beside me, I saw Olivia clasp Asa’s hand. Then she reached out for Susanah’s. Susanah took Olivia’s and reached out for Judith’s. I reached for Zo’s. We were forming a chain, all of us, save for Mowse on her safe place on the wall. Defiant, even in the face of Death. And as my penny burned against my skin, strong and hot, I thought of what was written on it: E pluribus unum. From many, one. I closed my eyes. All of us or nobody.

  There was a smell then, just a whiff of something green. Something achingly familiar.

  A clap of thunder, a blinding flash of light.

  And the rain fell.

  It rolled in like a dust storm, covering the horizon. It fell in torrents, in buckets, in waterfalls, and as it fell on the Dust Soldiers, they collapsed in upon themselves like sandcastles at our feet.

  It fell on roofs of families holding each other close, ready to die until they heard the unbelievable sound of it beating on their windows. It rushed in rivulets over the strange, unholy desert, blurring it like an oil painting, washing it clean and revealing the fields and prairies we had known before.

  It felt as I had always, always known that it would. Because this had always been the truth, I realized. We had only had to make it so.

  “I don’t believe it…” Asa breathed. “I never in a million years would have believed…”

  “What?” Olivia said. “Did Life win?”

  “No,” Asa said, a smile spreading across his exhausted face. “We did it. We won.”

  Out in the desert, the world was ending. But it was not ending like it had before. This was no grave. Instead, it seemed we were being born. Patches of nothingness were filling in, but not with the desert that had been there before. The nothingness bloomed into fields, scrub, cacti. Back into the Oklahoma we hadn’t seen in ten years, and one word echoed through the marrow of our bones. Home. We are home.

  The dome of our spell flickered and disappeared. Then we heard a groaning of metal as the doors opened behind us.

  “Olivia?” said a small, weak voice. “Asa?” We turned. There was Rosalita, awake and blinking against the rain.

  “Rosa!” Olivia shouted, running to her and embracing her. “¡Mi hermanita! You’re all right!”

  One by one, the Elysians ventured out of the gates, gasping at the new old world unfolding before them, all of them hugging and thanking us over and over and over again—even Asa in his daemon form. “You’re heroes!” they told us. “Heroes!”

  “It was never about the crops at all,” I said. “Was it?”

  “That was just a factor to add difficulty,” Asa said, able to speak freely now that the Game was over. “The real test was to see what you humans would do, what you’d make of the situation the Sisters put you in. I must admit, it was slick of Death to make Mother Morevna her Card. I only wish I’d seen it sooner.”

  “But Death…” I said. “She had won.”

  “Until you all beat Her,” said Asa. “All of you proved what humanity could be. Good and responsible—unlike the Goddesses, it seems, who were neither good nor responsible with Their creation.”

  I turned to respond, but my words caught in my throat.

  Asa was changing. A glow was traveling over his body, and the strangeness, the energy that he’d carried since the moment I’d met him, was dripping from him like oil and disappearing into the air. He levitated for a moment, then thudded back down to the dust… different. New.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I completed my mission,” Asa said, turning to look at me with newly hazel, unmistakably human eyes. “This… this must be my reward. From the Mother. I… I understand why She chose me now. To give me a chance to become what I always felt I was.” Asa put his hands on his chest, pressing as though he were afraid he’d disappear under them. “And now I am… I’m human! One hundred percent human! With a pulse and blood and eyelashes and intestines and a-a-a pointless appendix and everything!”

  “One hundred percent human?” Olivia said, coming to stand beside him. “So that means I can do this now and we won’t have to think twice, huh?” She took his glasses off, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, the rain rushing over both of them until the kiss broke, and they stood, grinning at each other through the downpour.

  “Oh, you can do that whenever you want,” Asa said. “Though this kissing in the rain business is a lot less romantic than everyone makes it seem.” Then he said, “I’m sorry I thought you were Death’s Wildcard. I’m just so drawn to you that I thought—”

  “I’m just glad it was all right the whole time, you and me,” Olivia said. “But why are we drawn together?”

  “Love, I guess.” Asa grinned.

  Just then, a guard shouted, “On the horizon! Look!”

  Everyone turned. A line of vehicles was coming toward us through the rain. There was a sound of ambulance sirens. Rescue vehicles. All the people of Elysium started running then, running toward that line of cars, splashing and waving and shouting and dancing. The guards were running and tackling each other and sliding in the mud. Judith had an injured Zo on her shoulders, and they were squabbling as usual with wide, rain-soaked smiles. Behind them, Cassandra, Susanah, and Mowse were catching raindrops on their tongues and laughing. Olivia and Asa and Rosalita were walking together, already a family. Even Mr. Jameson was striding out, his head held high, ready to go back to Texas, to the family that I knew somehow still waited for him there. He turned and waved to me to come on, to join them.

  I stood back for a moment, watching all of them, my heart filled hurting-full with an emotion I couldn’t begin to describe.

  “Sal,” said Lucy. And when I turned, the sight of her—her skin clear, her cheeks unsunken, her eyes bright again—made my breath catch in my throat. “You coming?”

  She extended a hand to me, and I took a step forward to take it.

  Then a shadow in the doorway caught my eye. Mother Morevna, just inside the doors, watching as usual with those cold, gray eyes. Watching her people rush out of the city she had built for them without looking back. Leaving her.

  I stood there for a moment, feeling her magic in my veins alongside my own, as I would forever.

  Then she held up a hand as bare and unmarked as any old woman’s.

  I nodded to her. And slowly, with one final groan of metal, the great steel doors of Elysium closed forever. Soaked to the skin, I took Lucy’s hand and joined the others walking toward that bright horizon, toward the world that waited for us. And somewhere behind us, we heard the solemn song of a single cricket fading into the distance.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The world of children’s books is a vibrant, many-splendored one that I’ve dreamed of joining since I was about eight years old, creating my own versions of the great American fantasy novel in spiral notebooks on car trips. And though I put in a lot of hard work in order to get here, this sometimes seemingly deity-defying mission would not have been possible without the community of people I met along the way (or knew all along) who have been every bit as dedicated to my success as I was.

  First, of course, I’d like to thank my agent, Sara Crowe, who is phenomenal in every way and who cannot be lauded enough. You believed in me despite everything, and I hope I make you and the other Pips proud! Thank you also to my editors, Laura Schreiber and Hannah Allaman, who saw the potential in this extremely odd story and decided to take the gamble on me. You’re both fantastic, and even if you have to hand the phone back and forth during phone calls from your tiny office, I can always count on your feedback to be brilliant and inevitably exactly what my work needs. To my film agent, Addison Duffy at UTA, thank you, also, for believing in Elysium Girls! It’s a weird b
ook, but I’m glad all of you love it as much as I do. Thank you to the Cimarron Heritage Center museum in Boise City, OK, for providing me with invaluable information about the Dust Bowl, and letting me touch that extremely fine, terrible Dust Bowl dust. The museum is excellent, and was one of my best resources. Thank you also to my sensitivity readers, poet Reyes Ramirez and Linda Medina Martinez, who provided feedback for my representation of Mexican American characters and Spanish, and to Tiffany Morris, my Comanche sensitivity reader, whose advice on the language was spot-on. Your services are necessary and I’m so, so grateful to you.

  Thank you to my friends, too: Ramsey Knighton, my dearest friend and fellow artist, who grew up in East Texas alongside me and was witness to both my highest highs and lowest lows. I love you. To JoJo, too, my biggest fan, who was always there to bounce ideas back and forth and to be my first reader. You are invaluable. The DnD crew—Lauren, Edwin, Kirk, Heather, and Matt—are also to thank for the weekly creative ventures that keep me sane. And, in faraway Dallas, Brandon Stewart, my fellow home-cooking enthusiast, whom I hope is still using so much garlic he wakes his roommates with the smell of it.

  To my VCFA family, the MAGIC IFs (graduating class of winter 2014), YAM and I love you. A special thanks to Autumn Krause, Aimee Payne, and Jenn Barnes (Jenn Bishop) for reading draft after draft of my work and always listening to me complain about how writing is HARD. Other VCFAers, too, deserve thanks. My advisors, Mark Karlins, April Lurie, Susan Cooper, and Louise Hawes, taught me invaluable lessons about writing and children’s books and trusting both myself and the process (somehow). Vermont College truly is the Hogwarts of writing for children and I will treasure it in my heart always.

  And finally, to my family. My mother and father easily could have pressured me toward a different, more lucrative pastime and eventual college major and career, especially since we never had much money. But they didn’t. They did nothing but encourage me throughout all of the pitfalls and pools of quicksand I encountered along the way, whether artistic or financial. My brother Matt, my aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins were all equally supportive, and took me seriously even as I was a twelve-year-old memorizing passages of Children’s Writers and Illustrator’s Market like a weirdo. I wish Granna and Granddad could have lived to see this, and I’m glad that my niece and nephew, Bonnie and Finn, are young enough to never know a world in which Aunt KayKay isn’t an author.