The Outsider attendant pulls the door open. But I need to get back up to the top and look for whatever words I may have missed to make sense of this clue. “I want to go one more time,” I say. “Please.”
“Sorry. You’ll have to go back to the end of the line. Those are the rules.”
Darius is already standing when I look through the open gondola door and see two things that sink my hopes. The first is the ginger-haired racer, practically next in line for the ride.
The second is a group of at least five King’s Knights passing through the crowd, searching every face.
I think of the truck with its keys inside, somewhere in the lot outside the west gate. The princess took a risk to tell me about that truck. But if I don’t get the clue soon, I’ll already be running behind, or worse, arrested and not running at all.
Darius is still hovering at the edge of the crowd, watching the King’s Knights. For a moment, I wonder if he is about to turn me in. He easily could.
“Darius,” I say. I bite my lip and search the crowd one more time, looking for any other option, but I’m out of ideas. The ginger-haired racer moves up in line. The wheel turns another fraction. The next gondola to take on passengers will be his. “I have a proposition for you,” I whisper. “I may not know the clue, but I have transportation. If you’re willing to share the clue with me, I’ll take you to wherever we need to go.”
Thirty
Darius narrows his eyes and looks at me sideways before he says, “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” I say, though in truth, the only thing I’m sure of is that this is my only option. “Same deal as before. The vehicle belongs to me. I am the driver and you are the passenger.” I take a quick moment to glance around. It’s loud and bright, like I can almost see the peals from the trumpets and horns. The sun is sliding down, adding swaths of shadow but also lighting faces here and there like a warm spotlight. More than anything, though, I see too many Authority guards, so I duck my head and add, “It might be better if you lead the way. We’re headed to the west gate, behind the jousting ring.”
“Got it,” he says. “Saw it from the wheel. You ready?”
He waits only long enough to register my nod, and then we’re off. Darius’s size helps him move through the crowd, and I do everything I have to do to stay with him, including jostling and elbowing anyone who gets in my way. If they turn and glare, I don’t see it, because I keep my eyes on the ground between Darius’s feet and mine. From time to time, Darius murmurs bits of instruction to me, like Slow down a bit or Don’t look left, until finally he simply says, We’re here.
I raise my eyes to find myself standing among rows and rows of parked trucks. We made it. Behind my back, I hear a cheer go up from the crowd watching the jousting on the other side of the gate. “No guards?” I ask.
“Not yet,” Darius says, and I follow the line of his sight to the other end of the lot, where two guards are posted beside the only driveway that leads out. “Which vehicle is ours?” he asks.
I shrug. “Someone . . . ,” I start. I don’t want to say that it was Renya. “Told me that a truck out here would have the keys in it.” We start testing doors, but there are dozens of trucks here, and time is not on our side. We’ve made it all the way to the far side of the lot without luck, when I notice a delicately painted insignia on the back of a truck that is particularly new and particularly clean. I recognize the insignia with its two winged deer—it’s the crest of Princess Renya.
The doors are unlocked, and just as she promised, the keys are inside, on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Darius climbs in and flips them into my hand. “I held up my side of the deal,” I say, trying to speak with the tone Jayden used when he spoke to me, because I found him self-assured and a bit intimidating. “Now it’s your turn. What’s the clue?”
Darius glances around the truck and then asks if I have a pen. I hand him the one from the dormitory cleaning lady, and he finds a scrap of paper under his seat. He writes:
Truth
Mine
Wild
Want
Travel
Land
You
Edge
Desert
Through
Find
“Those are the eleven words that make up the clue.”
“And that’s all of them?”
“I found the first nine while walking the grounds. I had those all memorized. Then on the ride I added through and find. Those were the only two I needed to be in the air to see.”
“So what does it mean?” But I don’t wait for him to answer. I start moving the words around in my mind, shifting them like the pieces of a puzzle. “I wish my brother Marlon were here,” I say. And when I see the questioning look on Darius’s face, I add, “He’s an ace at puzzles.”
The words are barely through my lips when I realize that this is a memory. No memory sickness, no pain in my head, just a plain and simple recollection, like it had been there all along. But the casual way it comes to me can’t offset the weight of it. For the first time since I woke on that rock in the ocean, I see the cramped apartment in my mind, with its high, small windows and its meager lamplight.
My throat goes thick and my eyes fill with hot tears. Sitting here in this truck, so far away, I’d do anything to be back in that dreary apartment right now.
“What about . . . ,” Darius says, “Travel through the wild land . . .”
“The Wilds, maybe?” I pull the atlas from my bag and open it to the map of the continent. “That’s a place not far from here.”
Darius glances at the map in front of me. “That’s a nice thing to have,” he says. And then, looking back at the list of words he tries, “The truth you want to find is mine. Travel through the wild land to the desert edge.” He leans over my shoulder to frown down at the map, and I’m reminded of the time we huddled in the sandcrawler to try to get warm. I thought I didn’t trust him then. I trust him even less now. “Is there a place called the desert edge?” he asks, and I’m relieved he doesn’t move any closer.
“Here’s the Wilds,” I say, pointing. “They do border the desert, if we pass through them, but there’s no place marked as Desert Edge or Edge of the Desert. There’s a city on the border between them—the City of Jackals—and there’s a place marked Mineral Deposit Reserves. But if there’s one spot called the Desert Edge, it’s not on this map.” I stare at the list of words in his hands again. I can’t think of any other way to fit them together, but maybe my brain is too clogged with the thought of the ginger-haired racer finding all the words while he rode the Wheel of Fire. If he also found transportation, he could be on his way already. “Mineral deposits and the City of Jackals. Maybe the checkpoint is between those two?”
“They’re both on the edge of the desert,” he says. “If we head that way, we’ll find it.” But his voice gives away his skepticism.
“You’re not a very good actor,” I say.
He rolls his eyes, which warms me toward him, which only makes me angry at myself. “Well, it’s hard to fool someone with Cientia,” he says. He slides over to the passenger seat. I’m not sure if he’s saying something about my distrust of him, but I can’t worry about that now. I’m watching the guards at the exit from this lot. They’re bored, staring at their comms, and I have an idea to get them out of our way.
I start the truck, but neither guard flinches. There’s so much noise from the festival that it covers the sound of our tires on the gravel as I back out and tuck the truck near the rear of the lot.
Then I lay on the horn.
They both look up as if they were just caught napping on the job. One pockets his comm, the other drops his to the ground, and they both hurry this way, weaving through the crowded rows of trucks. That’s when I gun it and swing along the side lane, all the way to the front.
By the time they see us, they’re watching us disappear down the road.
It’s a familiar road, with its grass and moss and b
ridges . . . Ninth, Eighth, Seventh Isle . . . until, before long, we’re off the Ten Isles all together. The road I covered with Holly stretches through the sea of green pastures in front of us, but there’s a turnoff to the south right after we cross the Arrow River, and that’s the route I take.
This road is nowhere near as smooth as the ribbon through the pastureland, and before long I’m worried about two things: the rocks that litter the road, sharp enough to puncture a tire, and the fireworks in the distance, which I begin to suspect aren’t fireworks at all. “What do you think that is?” I ask, after a particularly loud blast that rumbles like thunder. I slow the truck. Darius gives me a sideways glance.
“Not a storm,” he says. Another one goes off, just as loud, with an even brighter flash. “Explosives? The OLA?”
There’s a hint of sulfur on the breeze. “Out here?”
“Maybe. They just set off that bomb in Falling Leaf—”
“Falling Leaf?” Of course, I know the OLA was there—I was with them—but I didn’t think they were planning a bombing. “How do you know that?”
“I heard people talking—”
“What people? Where?”
Darius gives me an odd look. “On the train I took to the Ten Isles from Falling Leaf.”
“I meant,” I say, glaring at him, “where did the bomb go off?”
“In some dormitory for Enchanteds.”
A snake twists in my gut, and I scowl through the windshield. The road is becoming rockier and narrower the farther we drive into the Wilds. Darius is silent, leaving me lots of room to think about Jayden and the case he had me leave in the taskmaster dormitory. Could that have been a bomb?
No. No. He told me it was a listening device. There’s no way that Jayden and the OLA would set explosives in a place where people sleep. They want to stop killings.
I’m shaking my head and breathing hard—I’m so angry—yet at the same time, so sure that my anger is misplaced. It can’t be true. Jayden could never set off explosives with the intention of killing people, and he would never trick me into doing it for him. I’m sure of that, yet that snake still slides around my insides, making me queasy.
Eventually, we’re forced to abandon the truck when the road becomes so narrow it’s no more than a path. Then even the path thins and disappears.
You could say this terrain has no paths, or you could say it’s nothing but paths, depending on how you look at it. If you’re willing to climb, there’s really nowhere you can’t go, but there are no trails, no well-worn tracks to serve as comforting reminders of the people who came this way before us. Darius and I follow a line of broken rock at the bottom of two shoulders of stone. I try to keep to the highest ground possible, where there’s a better view of what’s ahead and behind. On either side of the path, crevices hold shadows so wide and deep, they could conceal several people—or who knows what else—standing shoulder to shoulder.
Ahead of us a blast goes off. We exchange a glance and step back, when someone calls out my name.
“Astrid!” the voice calls a second time, and first a gun appears from between two rocks, and then a woman, giving off the heady scent of surprise. It takes me a moment to recognize Wendy, Jayden’s lieutenant from the train. She seems much plainer than she did before, standing here in dusty boots, her curls tied back, holding a long gun with chapped hands. “What are you doing here?”
Before I can answer, a blast of gunfire sprays over our heads, and we all drop to the ground. My beating heart jumps into my throat, but then I hear Wendy bark into a comm. A comm! It’s so strange to see an Outsider with one. But then, Wendy’s more of an outlaw than an Outsider, with her self-inflicted scar where her embed once was.
“Don’t fire!” she says. “It’s Astrid. We’re coming back. Hold your fire!” Then she turns back to me and gives me an inappropriately big smile. “Did you come to join us?” She glances at Darius, giving him a little nod. “New recruits?” she asks him.
“We’re in the race,” he says, his tone full of vinegar, like Wendy’s question is the stupidest thing he’s ever been asked. But he doesn’t know Jayden tried to recruit me. Or that I promised to come find the OLA after the race.
We follow her up a slope of broken rocks to a ridge that’s concealed by boulders on all sides, and in the center of those boulders, we find a tight knot of soldiers. They crouch in a circle, backs together, and when they see us coming up the hill they first raise . . . and then, after an excruciatingly long moment . . . lower their weapons. They each hold a long firearm like Wendy’s, and on the ground in the space between their backs, there are three open sacks overflowing with what appear to be metal balls. At a closer look, I realize they’re grenades. Jayden watches us approach, and I can feel uncertainty in him. But it’s okay if he doesn’t want to trust me. I don’t want to trust him either.
“What are you doing in the Wilds?” he asks, his gaze flicking from my face to Darius’s and back to mine again.
“You know what I’m doing,” I say. “What are you doing here? Don’t you prefer to set off bombs in more crowded places than the Wilds?”
He flinches. I think I catch a whiff of mint, the scent of guilt, but there’s a hard wind blowing in off the desert, and before I can be certain it’s there, it’s gone.
“Funny, that’s what we were off to do. We were headed to the Festival of Fire Flowers—thought we’d stir things up a bit—but then we saw the prince’s motorcade turn south. Well, there’s no point in stirring things up at the festival if the prince isn’t going to be there, so here we are.” He pats the back of the man who stands beside him, a man who’s built like two Jaydens put together. The man smiles. He’s missing a tooth in the front, and I feel so much aggression in him, I can’t help but wonder if it was knocked out in a fight.
Before I can say another word, an explosion goes off just beyond the boulder to our right. Bits of rock fly through the air like shrapnel, and we all hit the ground at once. I land with Darius’s hand on my back and Wendy’s shoe in my eye. Without even raising his head, Jayden grabs one of the grenades and, rising a hair higher on one knee, lifts his eyes just long enough to fling it at a distant ridge. It goes off like a much bigger bomb, but before the sound of the blast recedes, it’s answered with gunfire that rings across the wall of rock just above our heads.
I flip onto my back and watch the sky brighten as another explosion goes off, this time to our left. How long will we last before their aim improves?
“Jayden, you’ve got to get out of here! Why would you fire on the prince’s entourage?”
“We didn’t fire on them. We only returned their fire,” he shouts, as another blast rings out.
“They must have known it was you,” I say.
Jayden makes a small noise in his throat, like a scoff. “Or they believed it was you.”
On my back, I turn my face toward him, and if I didn’t know him when I came upon him yesterday, I know him now. He smiles at me, a thin sarcastic smile that hardly counts as a smile at all, and I’m thrown back to a time when we were children, and he sat up with me all night once, because I was afraid of a storm. He was so kind to me until the next morning, when he teased me mercilessly. “Aw, come on,” he says, as I feel tears welling up behind my eyes. “Don’t start crying on me now.”
“I’m not,” I snarl, and just that quick, my aggravation with him stops the tears before they can spill over.
The blasts have quieted down, and Wendy and the others sit up. Darius glances at me as we both prop ourselves up on one elbow, ready to drop at any moment. There’s a look in his eye. . . . Not fear. More like disbelief. He has that look of surprise a person gets when they realize they’ve been duped into joining something they want no part of, and now it’s too late. “Why is the OLA traveling with guns?” Darius asks. “I thought your goal was to disrupt, not murder—”
“Only a fool would enter the Wilds unarmed,” Wendy says, as she crawls on her belly to a spot where she can see between
the boulders toward the prince’s position. “They’re overflowing with monsters.”
“Too bad your memories are missing,” Jayden calls over his shoulder to me, as he takes up a spot at Wendy’s side. The sky is turning the dark blue of evening, and the clouds are whipping by overhead, like birds hurrying back to their nests. “I used to tell you so many stories about Lanoria’s monsters. About buzzards in the Black Desert that will peck your eyes out before you’re fully dead. Killer boars in the forests. Man-eating lizards that will stalk you through the Wilds.”
I don’t tell him that I do remember, that it’s all coming back to me now. All I say is, “So you brought guns to use against monsters, but you’re using them on people instead.”
Another loud blast rings out, somewhere in the space between the prince’s position and ours, and we all fall flat on our backs again. After just a moment, Jayden flips back onto his stomach and peers through the boulders, aiming between them, ready to shoot. “Ah. But it turns out, little sis, that people can be far more monstrous than actual monsters.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, thinking of the dormitory in Falling Leaf, wondering if the people there awoke to an explosion like the one I can hear to our left, far too close to our left. I wonder if the cleaning lady who gave me the pen survived. Maybe nobody died at all. Maybe they all did. I want to ask Jayden about the listening device I put there for him—if that was the bomb—but I don’t dare. I’m too afraid of what the truth might be.
“Jayden,” I say, “I need to get around Lars and his men so I can continue the race. I need to reach the edge of the desert.”
Now he sits up, as if his horror at my request outweighs his need to keep his head from being blown off. “What makes you think I would help you? I told you on the train. . . . The Race of Oblivion is nothing but a tool of oppression in the hands of the Enchanted. I’ve no idea why you would want to aid them in their tyranny, but I will not help—”
There are few things that could stop my brother mid-rant. I doubt even explosions at close range would stop him from making his point. But something disturbs the air, something more alarming than even an explosion to my blast-numbed brother’s eyes. The sky shimmers like it’s melting, and then a sound—a distant hum like wheels on rails—grows louder, deeper, until it’s a sound all its own, a buzz of energy I feel in my chest and on my skin. The warm sunlight cools, as if the coming shades of evening were suddenly crashing down.
Crown of Oblivion Page 25
