I hadn’t considered this, and the realization that I again need to depend on Darius, especially after making it clear that I was ready to move on without him, forces my teeth together in a tight clench. But it’s not a concession, I tell myself. It’s simply a new bargain. “So you’ll pay to charge the bike, and that will get you a ride as far as the outpost,” I say. I want the terms to be clear, so he doesn’t expect any more than I’m willing to give.
When Mary comes back with my bag, it looks the same but it’s heavier.
“We’ll have two more corn vodkas.” Darius smiles and slides the fifty-mackel bill across the bar to her. “And you can keep the change.”
I feel the shimmer of shock in Mary. “You should keep your money—”
“We have enough,” he says. “And we don’t want to be in anyone’s debt.” He glances sideways at me, so quick I almost wonder if I imagined it.
Mary tucks the bill into the pocket of her black apron.
Neither of us drinks our vodka. We just wait. When the crowd in the back room is in full swing again, I notice three of the racers in the room—the woman who stomped on Darius’s hand, tree-trunk boy, and the woman who came in alone—move to the doorway, drawn to the chaos.
Perhaps it’s their intention to watch the matches. Perhaps it’s their intention to search for the clue. It doesn’t matter. We’re out of time, and Darius and I need to leave.
Darius leans over the bar toward Mary. “Who do we pay to use the charging pods?” he asks.
“They’re dead,” she answers, and my heart drops into my stomach. “The charging truck is late—it should’ve been here yesterday. He may be here tomorrow. . . .”
I shake my head.
“Too late,” Darius says. All at once I feel anxiety spike in him. He takes a swig from his corn vodka and leaves.
“Thank you,” I say. I touch the hair clip and she nods at me, but then I turn and hurry to the door. I don’t know what Darius is planning, and I suddenly fear that I’m the one who’s going to be ditched.
In the lot, I find Darius tugging on a battery from another bike—one with a sidecar attached. “The charge is almost full,” he says. “They must’ve stopped at that last station—”
Before he can finish, a man comes out the front door, first walking, then running when he realizes what Darius is doing. It’s the ginger-haired racer who punched him in the eye, the one Darius spit on. His face goes red like a fuse ready to blow. He grabs Darius by the shirt with both hands, throwing him into the road so hard, Darius sprawls across the ground.
I missed it. The sense of his intention . . . I hadn’t felt him coming. Maybe because he came from inside. Maybe because Darius’s anxiety was overwhelming me.
But that first move is the only one I miss.
While he waits for Darius to get to his feet, I grab him by both arms from behind. I catch him off guard, but he’s much bigger and stronger than I am, and he shakes me loose with little effort. He turns, towering over me. “The little magician,” he says.
I see Darius behind him, running back to the bike to get the battery. I keep the guy occupied, dodging and ducking while I watch Darius pull the battery free. I land one strong kick to the racer’s chest, and it slows him. I land a second one, and it almost knocks him down. Darius struggles a bit to connect the battery to our bike, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m distracted, but I lose some of my speed, and the ginger-haired racer lands a blow to the side of my head.
I stagger back, almost tripping over my own feet. My vision goes black just for a moment, but it’s a moment too long. He follows up with a second swing to the same spot, and my legs crumple under me. My palms and knees scrape raw when I hit the ground.
The bike pulls up beside me, but before I can get to my feet, the ginger-haired racer climbs on behind Darius. I’m still struggling to get up when the bike takes off, disappearing into the dust that obscures the road.
Sixteen
I may have worried I was being played when Darius passed me on the road on the bike earlier, but it’s nothing compared to how I feel now. Did they conspire to steal the bike from me? How did Darius know that this time, the ginger-haired racer would beat me? I’m still standing on the road outside the Girl Next Door, wondering where I’m going to get a ride, when I hear an engine coming toward me through the dust. I think I recognize its sound, but visibility is so poor, he’s almost right in front of me before I know for certain it’s Darius, returning on the bike alone.
“Get on,” he says. “While I’m still in the mood to share the bike.”
I’m not sure if he truly believes the bike belongs to him now, or if he just thinks he’s funny. Either way, he’s wrong, but I’m not about to argue with him about it. I climb on and Darius speeds away. We don’t get far before we pass the other racer along the side of the road, but we’re going too fast for me to see the look on his face, which is a shame.
We fly into the darkening night, the air losing the heat of day, the wind chilling me as it ripples over the clean gray dress. An occasional vehicle passes, mostly trucks headed inland like us, so big and dark I can’t see who’s inside. It isn’t long before the sun sets completely, and we seem to be the only travelers left on the road. I begin to hope that we’ve passed the halfway point between the roadhouse and the outpost.
Before I can ask Darius what he thinks, the bike stalls. We coast to a silent stop.
Darius turns. It’s so dark, his hazel eyes are a flat gray. “Battery’s dead,” he says. “That’s as far as the bike goes.”
I climb off the back and walk in a slow circle. The wind is blowing hard, rippling my dress like a flag and carrying waves of black sand across the road. Well, what I think is the road. With the headlight dead, it’s hard to tell. A sickle moon is just clearing the horizon, and the little bit of light it gives reveals a nightmare landscape. In every direction, emptiness stretches. As far as the eye can see.
We don’t say much to each other. We just start walking. I know we won’t survive long out here if the temperature keeps falling, and I’m sure Darius knows it, too, so what’s there to say?
It’s hard to know how long we walk, but I watch the moon rise high over gray ground. Sand fills the spaces between the straps of Mary’s sandals as I trudge forward, and it rubs my feet raw. My skin, numbed long ago by the cold wind, begins to burn at the tips of my fingers, toes, and nose.
“I’m tired,” I say. “Maybe we should sit down and rest, try to huddle together to keep warm.”
“If we sit down now,” Darius says, “I doubt we will ever get up again. We’ll die before the sun comes up—”
“And you think shuffling forward into the wind is going to keep us alive?”
“I think walking is going to get us to the outpost.”
“Not at this rate,” I snap. I decide to run, in part to warm up and in part to leave him behind, but my body won’t cooperate. I stumble forward, my legs as heavy as if they were knee-deep in syrup. When I slow to a walk again, I haven’t gotten more than a few yards ahead of Darius. I stop and let him catch up, and thankfully, he lets the whole thing go without comment.
After a long stretch of silence between us, Darius grabs my arm. He points to a spot in the road, and I see her too—a woman sitting on the ground. She sits perfectly still, facing away from us, her outline barely visible in the thin moonlight.
“Hey, are you all right?” Darius hurries ahead of me, but I know why she doesn’t reply. I feel nothing from her—no fear, no startle, no relief when Darius lays a hand on her shoulder.
He doesn’t look at me when I catch up. “She’s dead.”
The woman is an Outsider. Her eyes are closed but her mouth is open, as if she fell asleep in the midst of saying something.
“She’s a racer,” I say. “The one who came into the roadhouse alone.” I recognize her by the coat she’s wearing. I worried I would envy it. Turns out I do. “She must’ve been in one of the trucks that passed us earlier.”
“Maybe she was a stowaway and got caught—”
“But if that’s right, she froze to death pretty quick. She couldn’t have been out here any longer than we have—”
“No, but look at her,” Darius says. “She’s old . . . too old to be a racer. Someone’s grandmother, maybe. I bet she had a bad heart. . . .”
He’s right. What I’d taken for fair hair under the lights at the roadhouse, I see now is gray.
I’m glad Darius doesn’t say anything more. I feel tears coming. I’m holding them back, but I swear if he says one more word about this old lady’s heart they will pour down my face, and I don’t want them to freeze on my cheeks.
She looks more asleep than dead. I picture her sitting down right in the middle of the road when she got too weak and too tired to keep going. Sitting down to wait for someone to come along and help her. Her mouth is open just enough to reveal a crooked tooth that juts into her bottom lip. I imagine she hated that tooth. I wonder if it showed when she smiled. “Someone must’ve passed her. But no one stopped.”
“Too big a risk to help a racer, I guess.”
I remember the Outsider farmworkers in the back of the truck. The way some tried to help me, while others tried to warn them not to. “Would you have helped her?” I ask.
Darius still doesn’t look up or speak, but he nods.
My thoughts turn a sharp corner and alight on the small baggie of Oblivion tucked into the pocket of my bag. It would be so nice to take it out and hold it in the palm of my hand, bright white and clean. It would glow silver in this moonlight, I bet. If I snorted a bit of that Oblivion now, what would I lose? I wouldn’t remember Darius. I wouldn’t remember how we got here. I wouldn’t remember Mary or the motorbike or anything that happened at the roadhouse. And what would I gain? A feeling of well-being. A feeling of strength. The belief—however fleeting—that I would live to see tomorrow.
And I could forget this woman, sitting dead in the road.
“I’m taking her coat,” I say.
I don’t know what I expect from Darius—if I expect condemnation or maybe a fight to have the coat himself—but instead, he helps me remove it from her body. I’m glad to have the help, because touching her is enough to fill my mouth with the taste of hot bile. She’s as cold as ice but not yet stiff. She couldn’t have been sitting here dead for very long. When we jostle her, her head snaps backward and her mouth falls open. Her tongue is dry and pale.
As cold as I am, I have to turn away from her before I can slide my arms into the coat. My hands burrow deep into the pockets and I immediately feel some tiny measure of warmth. It gives me a twinge of guilt, since Darius saw her first, so I say, “I’ll warm up a bit, and then you can take a turn with the coat later.”
Darius doesn’t respond. Probably thinking we won’t have a later to worry about.
I button the coat all the way up to my throat and shrug the straps of my bag onto my shoulders. Darius drags the dead woman’s body to the base of the dunes beside the road. I’m not sure why but I don’t ask. The wind shifts direction. A gust comes from our right, carrying a blast of sand across the dunes, and something else.
Boredom. Restlessness. And some other feeling. Something I can’t place because it’s being carried from too far away. But it’s there. At least for a moment, until it’s scattered with the blowing sand. Even inside the coat a sudden chill makes my body shudder, not from the cold but from the haunted feeling of other people where there shouldn’t be anyone around.
I stop walking and turn in place. “I felt something.”
“What kind of something?” Darius says, but it comes out like Wha kind ov sussing.
My heart skips. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he says, scrubbing his face with his hands. “What kind of something,” he repeats, and this time he pronounces it slowly and deliberately, the way I spoke when I learned that Mary was reading my lips.
“The kind of something I feel when people are around.”
Darius’s head finally snaps up. His eyes are as wide as a bullfrog’s. “What do you mean?”
I swallow. I may know I have Cientia, but I’ve never said it out loud. “You remember what those racers said about me, when I fought them off at the lighthouse?”
“That you can use Enchanted magic?”
I nod.
“Are you saying they were right?”
I bite my lip and nod again.
“But how . . .” Darius holds my eyes with his. I feel confusion in him, but then he looks away and shakes his head. “Never mind. You can tell me later.” He looks around. “Where did this feeling of people come from?”
I point over the ridges of sand that fence us in on the right, and Darius starts out, leaving the road behind him and climbing up and over the uneven drifts. The wind pummels him, the sand shifts under his feet, and he struggles with every step. Still, he presses forward, until he turns and sees me with my feet still planted on the road. “What?”
“I’m scared, that’s what. You think it’s smart to leave the road—the only place we at least have a tiny hope of being found—and walk straight into the dark across empty sand?”
“If you really felt people, there must be shelter. Or a vehicle.”
I can’t see his expression in the dark, but I can feel his trust: a small vibration, like a heartbeat. His trust terrifies me. I don’t know if I deserve it. At the Hearts and Hands match, I felt so sure of the strength of my Cientia, but now all that I feel is fear.
But then the wind gusts again, and it’s there—the boredom, the restlessness, and the third emotion I couldn’t get before: resentment. “I just felt it again,” I say, “stronger this time.”
Without another word—why waste the strength?—I catch up to Darius. Together, we trek out over the ridges of sand, putting the road behind us.
Farther and farther behind us.
We walk so long without seeing anything, I become convinced I’ve got it wrong. The emotions still wash over me in sporadic waves, but the endless, unbroken sand is hard to argue with. There is nothing out here. At the crest of every ridge, the view ahead reveals a broader stretch of the Black Desert. What if the wind is blowing in circles? What if the people I feel are actually behind us?
But then we climb yet another ridge—it might be the tenth or it might be the thousandth—and in the distant sky a blinking light glows red. An electrical tower. And at its base, lights glow in the windows of a guardhouse.
If we could run, we would run. As we are, we stumble toward the small building as if it were a palace. The lamplight in the windows glows a golden yellow. If heat were visible, this is what it would look like.
It takes all my effort not to storm right through the front door, but I know we wouldn’t be welcome. Instead, we duck down so we can’t be seen by anyone looking out, and we approach from the side of the building where a hulking sandcrawler is parked. The sides of the truck are so broad and high, they block the blowing sand. While I crouch beside the huge belt, Darius tries the driver’s door. It opens, and without a word we both climb into the cab.
It’s not heated, but just getting out of the wind is unbelievably good.
Darius searches for the keys. When he fails to find them I push up against him. “We can share the coat,” I say, and his arms slide under it while we both huddle behind the steering wheel. I’m tucked up tight under his chin. His teeth chatter so hard I feel like a jackhammer is trying to break through my skull. “Are you all right?”
He’s silent, but I notice his head bounce against mine as he nods. I notice his arms around me. I notice his breath in my hair. I notice the fear pouring off him, as cold as his hands on my waist, even through the fabric of Mary’s dress. I notice so many things that I notice nothing.
“I’ll be all right,” he says finally. “Warming up is almost worse than staying cold. Like there’s ice cracking inside my bones.”
At first Darius gives off nothing but cold fear
, but as his shivering slows, I notice a bit of hope, subtle in the air around us, like the scent of tea leaves steeping in hot water. It’s so inviting, I almost dare to hope too. “This truck won’t be enough to save us,” I say. I look down at my toes, wondering if they’ll be black by morning. Wondering if I’ll be alive in the morning to see them. “Not unless it’s running. We’ve got to get the keys.” When he doesn’t say anything to that, I add, “Three. There’re three people inside. I think it’s three, at least.”
“Probably guards,” Darius says. “This is a guardhouse, right? They’re here to keep this tower secure.”
I pull back from Darius. I need room to think. “What if the tower suddenly became insecure? Would the guards leave the station to investigate?”
“You’re thinking about sabotage—”
“Just enough to draw them out.”
Darius nods, grunts, “All right,” and turns away to rummage through a metal box of tools in the backseat.
I stare through the film of dust that coats the windshield, thinking about how hard it will be to step back out into the cold to save ourselves. It’s so much easier to pretend you’re safe than to admit you’re not and keep fighting.
Darius pulls a heavy wrench from the backseat. “This could do some damage,” he says.
Then we’re back out in the wind, climbing a ladder that leads straight up through the center of the tower toward the stars. The sky is cloudless, covered in a blanket of stars so thick it reminds me of snow. I barely noticed the stars until now, I’ve been so focused on what’s been happening on the ground. Even now, I can’t really appreciate the stars, so beautiful against the blue-black sky, they make me want to live to see them another night. A growing part of me wishes I could stop striving for life and lie down and die, so the beauty of the stars only stokes my anger, to be honest.
Stars are for people safe enough to enjoy them.
I force myself to stop thinking about stars and concentrate on the climb. In the light, it would be perilous. In the dark, it should be impossible. The steps are no more than narrow rungs, and the wind gusts so hard I worry it could blow me right off the ladder.
Crown of Oblivion Page 13
