He’s in need. I have the bike, so I have the upper hand, and he doesn’t like it. Even if I didn’t have Cientia, I’d still be able to feel that. And I’ll be honest—it doesn’t feel bad. “How did you even get here? I left you in the back of a truck heading south—”
“The driver picked up a girl in the road. He turned around and came right back to Hedge. Dropped her off at the police station.”
A laugh ripples out of me before I can stifle it. Darius shushes me and I nod. I don’t want to attract any more attention. But it feels good knowing that little spotted cow helped me get Jane out of the race and turn Darius around, all at the same time.
Still, Darius knows where the next clue is, or so he claims, and if he’s telling the truth, no one else does. “All right,” I say. “Tell me where we should be going. Tell me, and I promise we’ll go there together. But remember this: the bike is mine. I am the driver and you are the passenger.”
“So we have a deal?” A tug at the corner of his mouth almost becomes a smile.
I nearly smile back, but I catch myself. “Just tell me,” I say.
He glances around and drops his voice. “I got to this dance hall before they even opened for the day—the band was inside, practicing, and the door was propped open to the street. The bandleader was calling out songs: ‘Down a Lonesome Road’ and ‘To the Girl Next Door.’ They rehearsed those two songs over and over—they were quite rusty at them at first—but the leader kept telling them to take it from the top. ‘We’ve got to play both these songs a lot today,’ he told them.”
“It’s the clue.”
He nods. “It took me a while to find out what it means. I walked next door to the billiards hall and asked around.”
“And?”
“And I found out that, if you are good at darts, you can win a wad of mackels. And if you’re willing to pay a few of those mackels to the right person, you can find out that The Girl Next Door is the name of a roadhouse, far to the south.”
“Down a lonesome road,” I say.
“Correct. Spend a few more mackels, and you can even convince a person to draw you a map.” Discreetly, he reaches into the pocket of his pants with his right hand and produces a folded paper napkin with marking on it.
I can’t help but imagine this scene: Darius, dirty and scraped, nonetheless charming a bunch of drunk, dart-playing Enchanteds. I wonder if they were female, but I don’t ask.
“So how did you hide the clue?” I ask.
“I came back in here and paid the bandleader not to play ‘To the Girl Next Door’ anymore today.”
“You what?” I pull my hand from his grip and shove his other hand off my hip.
“Hold on! He wouldn’t go for it. He said he’d get in trouble, but he agreed to give me a head start. And that was a while ago.”
“All right,” I say, but I scowl at him. I promised to take him with me, but I didn’t promise to like him. “I guess we’re heading south.”
We turn toward the door, shouldering past a few dancers who seem to have grown roots into the floor, but just before we reach the raven-haired woman at the podium, we both stop. At least a half dozen Authority guards are heading in. The one in the front hands the woman some kind of official document. I make out a single word across the top: Warrant. My stomach sinks. I’m not sure what’s about to happen, but I know it’s not going to be good.
“Where do you think you’re going with that jacket?” a voice growls into my ear.
I spin to find the first Enchanted man I danced with, the one who looks like he was built from blocks. He’s been drinking, I guess, because the blocks are caving in.
His sleepy, bloodshot gaze drifts to the officers beyond Darius’s shoulder, and his eyes wake up fast. He takes a step backward.
The band abruptly stops.
Darius presses on my back from behind. “They’re coming in,” he says. Everyone around us shifts; every neck cranes to see what’s happening.
The blocky Enchanted man, who a moment ago was demanding the return of his jacket, no longer seems to care about it. I stay with him as he snakes deeper into the crowd. He never slows. I spot his friend in the corner where I met them, just at the same moment he does. He turns and shoves me away. “You can keep the jacket. I don’t want it,” he says. A bright light flashes across a few faces in the crowd. One of the guards is sweeping a battery light back and forth. “Just stop following me.”
“I’ll stop following you,” I say, “if you’ll show us the back door.”
Twelve
Without comment, we are swept through a door in a dark corner that leads to a cramped back room. The first thing I notice is the smell. There’s something sweet, almost syrupy, lingering in the air, like someone just melted brown sugar in a pan. At first glance the space looks like some sort of workshop, but I can’t tell for certain because it’s full of men packing stuff up and carrying it out the back door with a sense of urgency I can only imagine was brought on by the presence of the Authority guards.
I catch a glimpse of something that looks like an electronic scale, and a few large plastic bags. Some appear to be full of ground coffee, some full of flour. A few of the men carting the equipment away shoot grubby looks at the Enchanted man who brought us in, but one of them slows and gives me a half smile. He rests the heavy cardboard box he is carrying on one hip. “Revelry or Oblivion?”
“Excuse me?”
He tugs two small baggies—one filled with black powder and one filled with white—from a breast pocket in his tunic, and a light flicks on in my mind. The bags I’d seen were not full of coffee and flour, but street versions of the drugs Revelry and Oblivion. “Are you looking to remember, or to forget?”
“They’re not looking for anything. They’re looking to leave,” snaps the blocky Enchanted man, and the tension in the room suddenly jumps. Not that I care. All I care about is the door on the opposite side of this room, the one that keeps opening and closing as they shuttle out their equipment. It opens, and I can see the alley out back, lit with the yellow light of gas lamps, and then it closes, and someone blocks my way. It’s a woman—a really big woman—who places the palm of a huge hand in the center of my chest. “What do you think this is, a turnpike? Get her out of here,” she says. She reaches for the knob of the door we’ve just stepped through, but our escort moves to stop her.
“They’re racers,” he says. “They’re just going out the back door.”
The big woman whirls around, and I can tell a confrontation is coming, but before she even opens her mouth, I’ve dashed across the room and slipped out into the alley. The door slams closed behind Darius.
I think we’re free and clear until light bleeds into the alley from behind us. Someone’s followed us out. The door bangs shut, and someone grabs my shoulder from behind. “Not so fast. I’ve decided I’ll take that jacket back after all.”
“Of course,” I say, shrugging my bag from my shoulder and sliding the jacket off. “Thanks for the loan.” I drape it over his arm. He is quite drunk. He looks at it as if he’s forgotten why he wanted it.
I’ve made it around the corner and back to the bike before I dare open my left hand. “What’s that?” asks Darius. The clear plastic baggie, no bigger than my palm, stuffed with a bright white powder, is visible for only a moment before I clamp my hand closed over it.
“It’s mine, that’s what it is,” I say, dropping it into my bag’s inside pocket when I take out the key to the bike. “Mind your own business.”
I don’t wait for Darius to tell me which way we are headed. As soon as he’s climbed on behind me, I take off.
It takes me a few wrong turns, but we find the village gate, and my body actually feels lighter as I leave the shadow-filled Village of Hedge and return to daylight. We’re back on the farm road, and I’m forced to ask Darius which way I should turn. He’s tugged the folded napkin from his pocket and he’s staring at the hand-drawn map. “Turn south,” he says into my ear. His chest is p
ressed tight against my back, but his hands grip the seat, rather than me. I appreciate the discretion, though I can still feel his heart beating against my spine. “Follow this road until you come to a crossroads, then turn right. That’s the King’s Inland Highway. We stay on that road for a very long time.”
“I thought you said we were headed south?”
“We are. Inland and south.”
So without another question, I slide the bike into gear and take off. We fly down the corridor of corn, and before long, with that puddle of blood I know to be a field of poppies just coming into view, we come to the crossroads. I remember the potato-faced taskmaster and I think I hear a scream far away, but I know the bike’s too loud and it’s only in my head. A faded signpost points west, engraved with the words The King’s Inland Highway. It’s a fancy name for nothing more than a second corridor of corn, but I lean the bike right and leave the farm road behind.
The landscape is nothing if not familiar. Over the sea of corn, a network of silver arms pumps bucket after bucket of water into the air, and I spot rainbow after rainbow hanging in the mist as if they are caught in sticky spiderwebs. We ride on, the road bends south, and we move beyond the reach of the silver arms, until the corn ends and the flat fields on either side of the road give way to rolling stretches of twisted brambles. Darius never says a word, but sometimes he points at something interesting, like a truck way out on the horizon, kicking up a grimy cloud behind it. Sometimes I feel his chest rise and fall against my back, and it’s a strange comfort.
We drive into the late afternoon, our shadow lengthening beside us, until we come to a place where nothing grows on either side of the road at all. The ground breathes out puffs of dust as we pass. High overhead, birds fly in a thick flock. They must know where there’s water somewhere. Down here on the ground, as far as the eye can see, everything is dry.
The asphalt becomes gravel, and the gravel becomes dirt.
I check the battery gauge. The last charging station was miles back near the last of the cornfields, and the needle is floating around an eighth of a charge. We could probably go one more hour before I started to truly panic that the battery might drain before we saw another station.
“The person who drew the map for you,” I call over my shoulder. “Could they have been trying to send you to your death?”
“I beat her boyfriend at darts. That’s where I got the mackels to buy the map.”
So yes, I think. Definitely could have been hoping to send Darius down a long road that led to nothing. “There’s a half-full canteen in my bag,” I say, and I wonder if we’d be able to push the bike back to that last charging station before nightfall.
I shoot a quick glance over my shoulder, hoping to get an idea of the distance we’ve come, and I’m surprised to see a vehicle close behind us. It’s a little four-seat motorized carriage—more a cart than a carriage, really—with a driver and three passengers. “They’ve been back there for a while,” Darius calls into my ear. “They might be following us.”
I want to ask Darius if he has an idea who it might be, but there’s no point in trying to have a discussion while the wind is robbing half of our words. So I decide to pull over. If they are following us, we’ll soon know.
The bike isn’t idling for more than a moment when the little cart pulls to a stop alongside us. It’s all open, just a frame without roof or doors, so I know in a moment that two of the passengers are racers, the same two racers we saw in the dance hall. The boy with the tree-trunk arms glares at me, while the woman looks away. Her hair, the color of muddy water, stands straight up from her forehead from the wind.
I recognize the driver as the woman who was trying to take my picture with a fancy camera in Poppee’s Dance Hall. No embed, no scar. She was born an Enchanted. She unfolds long legs from under the wheel and climbs out of the carriage. Her camera hangs around her neck. Before I can raise my hands to cover my face, she’s snapping my picture.
“Will you stop that!” I say. She lowers the camera, peering over it at me with a quizzical gaze, like I’m a monkey in a zoo who just started screeching. I really don’t care if I’ve hurt her feelings, all I care is that she stops. Her companion—an intensely upright young Enchanted man with an expression far too eager for me to trust—steps out of the passenger seat and strides over like he’s about to try to sell us something. Instead he asks, “Why did you stop?”
“You should see it as a favor we’re doing you,” Darius says. He peers out from under a tightly furrowed brow, and if Darius’s looks could be called rugged, they’re all the more so in comparison to this elegant man-boy. Darius’s voice is low and there’s something implied in his tone. Not truly a threat, but a warning. “There are strict rules against lending help to racers.” He shoots a look at the backseat of the carriage. The two racers sit watching us, like dutiful children waiting for their parents to return. “The penalties are harsh if you get caught. So really, we’re protecting you from your own worst impulses.”
“You’ve got us all wrong,” says the man, and if his expression is overeager, it’s nothing compared to his voice. “This isn’t about our worst impulses, it’s about our best. We’re concerned with the public’s right to information. Most Enchanteds have no idea about the horrors of the race. We want to translate the struggles of the racers into words that will come alive on the printed page.” My face must be dressed in the blank stare of the truly confused, because he adds, “We’re journalists.” When I still don’t know how to respond, he adds, “We’re documenting the race.”
I shake my head, just the smallest of movements. “Why—”
“Why would we take on such a difficult task? Why would we risk failure, when failure could result in such dire consequences?”
Listening to him, you’d think they were running in the Race of Oblivion. I don’t say this, though. Instead I say, “Why would anyone want to read that?”
I’ve forgotten about the long-legged photographer. She sneaks up on the opposite side of me and says my name. “Astrid!” My head turns toward her and her shutter clicks a dozen times.
I want to grab her camera and kick it across this dusty road, but I think better of it. I hold my arms tight to my sides and ask, “How do you know my name?”
“Lots of people know your name, because of what happened at this year’s Apple Carnival. I realize you can’t remember, but I assumed someone would’ve told you by now. You were so tragic. That’s why everyone’s rooting for you. That’s why we need to share your story.”
“What story?” I ask. I remember the words of the fisher I came across on the beach. It’s got to be on account of her father dropping dead like that.
“It happened at the Apple Carnival,” says the man-boy. “The royal family was greeting a few people from the crowd before the parade. The princess was speaking to your father when he collapsed. You tried to help him, but it was too late. Your father died right at your feet.”
He keeps talking, but his voice fades to background noise as I repeat these words in my head: Your father died right at your feet. . . .
Your father died.
Just like the fisher said.
“I mean, what could be more tragic?” He asks this looking right at me, as if this is a question I could somehow answer.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman says. “What happened next, with her brother, made it far worse.”
She’s lowered her camera, so I finally feel safe looking at her. She has the confidence of a woman who is just beyond her girlhood. She wears a white tunic tucked into a short blue skirt, both of which are far too crisp for this heat. Her hair is carefully styled and as short as an Outsider’s, and her brown eyes are so wide set, I almost have to shift my focus back and forth to look at them both at once. She possesses an effortless beauty that, for some reason, I associate with money. “Here, I took this one on that day.”
She holds out the camera so I can see its small display on the back. It shows an image of a
girl. She wears a red dress, and she’s leaning over a man who’s flat on the ground beside a metal barricade. “Is this me?”
The woman nods. She looks so stricken, I think she might cry. I feel overwhelmed, looking at this image of a stranger, in perhaps the darkest moment of her life. A stranger, who is me. Darius is looking at the picture, too. I don’t have to wonder what he’s feeling. Shock radiates out of him. “It doesn’t even look like you,” he says. He’s right, but I know it’s me. Maybe not the version of me standing here now, but some version of me.
“And that’s your father,” she adds, quite unnecessarily. I stare at the face of the man on the ground, and though my mind has no memory of him, my heart does. My chest grows tight, like an invisible band is wrapped around my ribs. I have to pull my eyes away from the image to draw a deep breath.
“What happened with my brother?” I ask. I’m not sure why. I dread the answer, but like with my father, something in my heart clicks into place at the thought of him, even without my memories. “You said what happened with my brother made it even more tragic.”
While I wasn’t paying attention, the young man retrieved a notebook from the carriage. He’s furiously making notes. Like the woman, he is far crisper than this heat should allow, and he radiates a quality only Enchanteds have. The best word I can think of to describe it is vitality.
Behind him, the boy with the tree-trunk arms is climbing out of the carriage.
“You tried to help your brother,” says the girl. She’s scrolling through images on the camera screen. “But the Authority dragged him away.”
“And that’s why people are rooting for me?” I ask. But they are both too absorbed—the man in his notes and the woman in her photos—to answer. So instead I say, “Could you show me a photo of my brother?”
Crown of Oblivion Page 10
