An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

She wasn’t joking. There was a tremble underneath the flippant smile.

  “I understand that we will both be dead,” I said solemnly, and took her hand with my free one. “And I will not hurt your brother unless he acts like a complete and total jackass.”

  “Hey,” Tyler said.

  A smile ghosted over Nat’s face. “Right,” she said, and squeezed my hand back. “Go pretend we’re out behind the barn,” she told Tyler, “gossiping about how goopily you probably kiss.”

  Tyler’s face could not have gotten redder. “I hate you, and you will pay,” he said, and limped gently through the kitchen door. Nat grabbed her jacket, and we crunched across the lawn to the road that ran up to the ruins.

  “I really will,” she said after twenty minutes of the ruined old city growing larger against the sky. “Kill you both. Don’t make me hang for murder.”

  “I know,” I said peaceably, and we trudged toward the gates of the ancient abandoned towers; down the pathway to the dead city where the Chandlers toiled among the graves.

  “Adventure, Hal,” Nat said, and pulled me forward into the maze of concrete ghosts.

  eighteen

  IT WAS TOO QUIET AT THE CHANDLERS’ HOMESTEAD: A CIRCLE OF whitewashed houses tucked between the moldering skyscrapers, their gardens and cattle pens under straw for the winter. The Chandlers’ cooperative of my memory was a noisy, bright-painted place full of the sound of hammers and chatter, blooming among the dead ruins. But today the bright shutters were locked tight, the flower beds heaped with piles of old-cities junk. Nat turned a circle beside me, scanning the desolation. “Hello the camp?” I called. “Anybody here?”

  A body shifted behind a doorway. “Hello?” I said, softer.

  A slight, dark young girl edged over the threshold, dressed in a dust-smeared coat and leather work boots. “Stop,” she said in a piping, tough voice. She lifted a metal contraption with both hands and pointed it straight at us. “Stop or I’ll shoot.”

  Nat raised an eyebrow. I stopped cold, sorting the face from the passels of Chandlers we saw, so fleetingly, on town days. Ada’s cousin, my memory supplied: an image of short braids and a big, thoughtful smile. Her name’s June.

  “Junie?” I tried, and her eyebrows drew in.

  Nat leaned against a fence post. “That’s a pretty tough—whatsit you’ve got there, Junie.”

  The girl’s rigid arms faltered. “You’d better not be soldiers,” she said nervously.

  Nat whuffed out a breath. “We’re not soldiers, hon. You know us: Nat Blakely, from down the road at Lakewood Farm, and Hallie Hoffmann from over at Roadstead. Where is everyone?”

  The recognition came slowly. She dropped the device loosely to her side. “Hi, Nat,” she said seriously, and her face was a ten-year-old’s again. “I just had to make sure you weren’t soldiers after all.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Nat said soothingly—Nat, who understood young kids, whose Sanchez cousins followed her like ducklings around Windstown. “Do you know where your cousin Ada is? We came to visit with her.”

  June nodded hesitantly. “She’s in her lab. But we’re not supposed to bother her there. She’ll yell if you do.”

  “It’s very important,” Nat cajoled. “We won’t bother her long.”

  June’s face squinched up. “Cross your heart?”

  “Hope to die,” I said.

  “Okay. C’mon,” she said reluctantly, and led us into the ruins.

  I had never spent much time at the Chandlers’: as unpopular as Marthe and I were, they were outright ostracized, tolerated for their relics and nothing else. They were a clan built on drifters and runaways, and they and Windstown had existed uneasily together as long as I’d been alive—ever since Rami Haddad left home, moved down the highway, and changed his name to Chandler, and his new brothers outright refused to make him go back.

  I could go there, I’d thought time and again, on days when Papa was worse, or late at night, when Marthe and I argued especially hard. No need for a lonely road south, into the unknown, when I could run away and live free as Hallie Chandler. It hadn’t taken long for me to realize that the Chandlers, every one of them, were smart. There was no place for a maker of malt and a keeper of goats among their sharper minds.

  I enviously drank in their houses as June led us through the compound: houses sealed tight against feral dogs and ruin rats, built by people who had, even when they’d lost families, found a family waiting down the black road. June ducked between rusted siding and old concrete thoughtlessly, humming a skipping song, and rapped on a burn-scarred brown oak door. “Ada?” she said, and pushed inside. “It’s not soldiers.”

  Ada Chandler turned, in a thin sliver of winter light, and I let out a breath. The door was ancient and battered, but the room inside was an old-cities dream. Shelves of precious board-bound books spilled over each other, the gilt lettering of their titles flaked off and rubbed dry. Her butcher-block counters bristled with relics I didn’t even understand: metal and glass, and trays of sun-bleached shards with wires twining out. Ada put down an ancient book, took off her leather gloves, and said, “Oh, great. There’s more.”

  Perched beside her on a tall stool, looking utterly exhausted, was Heron.

  “There you are,” I burst out, and Junie’s hands went to her metal contraption, suddenly unsure.

  “I’ve told you fifteen times not to play with that thing,” Ada said, infinitely tolerant, and plucked it out of June’s small hands. “I’m not playing,” June protested.

  “What is it?” Nat asked.

  “Gun,” Ada said, and tucked it on a high shelf. “Old-city weapon. Don’t worry; it’s never loaded. Jerome was teaching her piston engineering and was stupid enough to tell her what the thing’s really for when she started having nightmares about the soldiers in town. She’s been playing Guardian of the Compound nonstop.”

  “Ada, you don’t understand,” June started up.

  I barely even heard her. My eyes had snagged on that high shelf, and the five beneath it. They were packed with rows of floating bodies caught, loose-limbed, under glass. Stick-legged mice; lizards, hatchlings and adults; a bird or two, with soggy feathers. A whole farm’s worth of Twisted Things, displayed in neatly labeled jars.

  “Good God, Ada,” Nat said softly. “Are you trying to get hanged?”

  June’s dark eyes went as round as saucers.

  Ada cast Nat a dirty look and patted June’s braids. “No one’s getting hanged, love. Go find your dad, hmm? I’m sure he’s got some math for you to do.”

  June brightened, and skipped out into the snow. Ada turned and fixed Nat with a hard eye. “Where do you get off, saying that around a kid?”

  Nat shrugged. “I’d say she’s figured out the risks all by herself.”

  I edged around them to Heron’s side. “Miss,” he said quietly. “I thought we agreed you’d stay home.” He looked cleaner, at least. Someone had got him a bath and a warm jacket.

  “Don’t even,” I said. “You didn’t come home. What were we supposed to do?”

  “Travel out of the compound’s restricted as of last night,” Ada cut in impatiently. “There are still army scouts in the neighborhood. You shouldn’t even be here.”

  “We know there are,” Nat retorted. “Who do you think’s been leading their wild-goose chase?”

  I rolled my eyes. It had been long enough since someone put Nat and Ada in the same room that I’d forgotten why you just didn’t.

  “Look, they’re not here now,” I said, before they could get back to it. “They borrowed our rowboat. They’re at Beast Island, all day. And—” I couldn’t keep my eyes from filling. I swore, inward, at their constant treachery. “Thom’s in danger. He wants us to open the hole.”

  “That’s a stupid idea,” Ada said promptly.

  “I know,” I overrode her, and then reined back my panic. “But we have to bring him home. There’s got to be something you can do, Ada. Please.”

  Ada tore herself
away from the serious task of glaring at Nat. “I’m not a miracle worker. I do research, not—extra-dimensional magic breakouts.”

  “I’ll give you the run of our whole shore,” I said impulsively. “You can set up research, do experiments, whatever you want—as long as you need it.”

  Ada clucked her tongue. She hadn’t changed that much: the one thing she couldn’t resist was her curiosity. “I’ll ask Rami if we’re clear to travel,” she said, and leveled a finger at Nat. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Nat put her hands innocently behind her back, and took them back out the second Ada vanished around the corner.

  “Don’t,” Heron warned. “She’s been showing me some of her research. I wouldn’t lay a finger wrong in here if I were you.”

  Nat stuck her hands behind her back again, sobered. Her eyes roamed the half-lit jars. I shuddered.

  Ada was back inside ten minutes, brisk with energy. “Right,” she said, and swept up a handful of instruments from her desk. “You’re very lucky people.”

  “Yes?” I said, my heart lifting fast.

  “Yes,” she said, and stuffed them into a satchel. “We have until sundown to see your spooky beach. Let’s go.”

  There was no magic to it. Ada measured, hummed, poked stick after branch through thin air into the Wicked God’s world, and then scraped up jars of the melted, ashy ice beneath it. Heron paced back and forth under the tree line, standing watch for our little rowboat on the horizon. Nat sat beside me on a driftwood log, and we watched.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow,” Ada said when the sun stained the trampled snow orange. Frustration wriggled behind my rib cage; Ada looked as mild as a flower. “I’m going to need help with this one,” she said. “You didn’t even begin to cover how big a job this’ll be.”

  “But you can get him out, right?” I asked through a dry throat.

  Ada closed her pack. “I don’t know, Hallie. There’s a lot going on here. The composition of the air’s really finicky, and I want to know everything we can about those chemical burns on the sand. I don’t want to get it wrong, all right?”

  I closed my hands into fists. I didn’t understand half of what she’d said, except the unmistakable tinge of no. “Just . . . hurry, okay? Please. It’s my brother in there.”

  “I’ll walk you to the crossroads,” Nat said dryly, and brushed snow off her hat.

  Ada sized her up warily, and nodded: a sort of truce. “Fine,” she said, and they set off up the path.

  Heron eyed me for a moment in that old way, the one that wouldn’t meet my eye. He’s worried about me, I realized. “Go on,” I said after a moment. “I need to talk to him. To Thom. We need to talk.”

  Heron nodded silently and strode through the orchard trees, to another long, cold night in the smokehouse.

  I watched him go. And then, hands shaking like dead leaves, I picked up a handful of Thom’s river stones and wrote a letter about everything that’d happened this summer on Roadstead Farm.

  It was dark when I followed Heron’s mangled footprints up the orchard trail, to the crabbed warmth of the kitchen porch.

  Our door opened before I could touch it: James Blakely, muffled in boots and coat, let himself out of our dim kitchen. “All done?” he asked, and I colored helplessly.

  “I didn’t know you had come by,” I said, and he smiled, a humorless sliver. My gut turned over.

  Something was very, very wrong.

  “Clearly not. Walk with me?” he said, and steered me off the porch.

  “Sure,” I said, perplexed, and fell into step beside him. He’d brought a lamp. It cast soft marks onto the lane and over the sleeping hummocks of the fields.

  We crunched silent through the snow for a few minutes. And then he asked, “What are you playing at with my niece and nephew?”

  I went rock-still. His gaze was calm and steady, and I couldn’t think of one good lie to tell.

  “I changed diapers for all three of you, you know,” he said, casually enough. “It’s pretty plain when you all start sneaking. And if it’s plain to me and your sister, you’ll want to consider what General de Guzman’s soldiers think.”

  I nearly stopped breathing. “What did they say?”

  James stared down his scarred nose at me. “They spent an hour asking about your former hired man last night. It’s too much of a coincidence: when he showed up, when he left. And how little you want to say about it.”

  I swallowed. His eyes burned holes through my brain. “I gave my word,” I stuttered. “I can’t tell anyone.”

  “Is that how you put your sister off?” he asked mildly.

  I wanted to sink into the ground and die.

  “Don’t bother. I just spoke with her. I know it is,” he continued. “She told me plenty about how you’re haring off and dodging your chores. If your fields aren’t ready for the springtime, you’re not going to have a farm next summer. I’m not sure anymore that you’re taking that seriously.”

  “We are,” I burst out. “We’re doing everything.”

  “Such as?”

  There was nowhere to start: the ghosts in Tyler’s eyes, Thom’s stones, Ada’s endless rows of jars. In the back field, slumbering, John Balsam’s knife. James shook his head and started walking again, along the land that our family had held since the cities fell; since all the machines of the world went dark.

  I’d thought I wanted to die of shame before. It would have been better, now, if I never existed.

  “There’s a hole between our world and the world behind the Wicked God’s heart,” I forced out. “On the beach, near the riverbend. That’s where the Twisted Things are coming from; they’re coming out. We were trying to fix it, but those stones in the pathway—” I stopped, swallowed hard. “James, it’s Thom. He’s stuck on the other side.”

  James Blakely stopped mid-step.

  Keep Tyler’s sight out of it, I told myself. Keep Heron out. “We went to the Chandlers. That’s how Tyler got hurt. He was going for Ada, to find a way to bring Thom home. And she’s working on it: she took measurements and samples, and there’ll be a whole team with her tomorrow. But we can’t let the soldiers find out that hole’s there. They’ll tell Pitts, and he’ll force us off the farm. We’ll lose Thom forever.”

  James’s scarred face set into pale shock lines. “You’ve been creeping about under our noses, trying to solve what every fighting man in the country couldn’t handle.”

  I nodded.

  He shook his head. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or furious. “God,” he said wonderingly. “I wish I was sixteen again: totally brave and utterly stupid. What on earth,” he asked, and closed the distance between us, “made you think that you couldn’t tell us?”

  My careful lies swerved, halted, and crashed.

  I didn’t know. The road here had gotten so long. It was hard to even remember what I’d had, once, for reasons. I wanted to protect Marthe; to show her I could do it. I wanted, I thought, older and more selfish than I’d ever felt, to save the farm.

  James tilted his scar-torn chin. “Halfrida. You have to tell your sister about this. Right away.”

  I shook my head wildly. “I can’t—” My heart lurched to life under my ribs. “She’ll kill me. She’ll never speak to me again.”

  “Your sister,” he said with a glance back to that dark house, “cares more about you than you realize.”

  “You don’t understand. I can’t tell her this. Not ever.”

  “Because you’re afraid of her,” he said quietly.

  The sound of branches rattling in the distance was suddenly very clean and sharp. “She’s my sister.”

  “When she gets angry,” he continued without mercy, “you shrug your shoulders down. You pull back into your head. You think about every single word before you speak, and your face goes flat like—there.”

  I fought to keep myself from doing exactly that, forcing my chin up even though my head buzzed with the need to run . “She’s my sister,” I wh
ispered.

  “Hallie, I know what happened inside that house,” he said, and my whole soul froze solid.

  “Your grandfather was a hard man,” he said after a moment. “Your father did a little better, with your mother and with the both of you. Your sister does even better than they did, with some very hard choices in the mix and a lot of troubles I know she never wanted.

  “Between the two of you,” he said, very serious, “I have high hopes for how much that child of hers will be loved.”

  “Why are you saying this?” I said through a tight throat.

  He shoved his hands into his deep coat pockets. “Because Marthe is my friend. My best friend. And you’re old enough to take responsibility for your actions.” He paced a small furrow in the field and looked up. “Every child has to carve out their own place in the world. But if Thom’s caught on the other side of that—whatever it is—what’s at stake is Marthe’s husband. And keeping that from her is cruel.”

  I’d thought childish was a punch to the gut. It was nothing compared to this. I knew what cruel was: Papa’s acid tongue, his elaborate punishments. They’d grown terrible once Uncle Matthias wasn’t here to stop them. I closed my eyes, and the sound of his shouting rose up, always just a thought away: curse words shoving through the floor, around the corners, under the solid wood of my bedroom door.

  Through Marthe’s arms and Marthe’s hands clamped stubbornly over my ears.

  My sister. Not much older, then, than I was now. Telling me in an endless monotone that she’d keep me safe forever.

  “I’m not like that,” I burst out. “I’m not him.”

  “I’m glad you’re not a fan of the idea,” James said calmly. “But Marthe’s seen you pull away from her. She’s caught every lie you’ve told. She has years of reasons to be afraid right now.”

  “Marthe’s not afraid of me,” I protested. I couldn’t even conceive of it. “She’s Marthe. There’s nothing I can do to her.”

  James looked down his nose at me sadly. “There’s plenty our children can do, or be, that makes us afraid we’ve failed them.”

  “Failed?” As if Marthe could fail me: Marthe, who’d shielded me from Papa’s temper through the long, lonely, hard years; who came home from Windstown with his will unproven and swore in the most frightening voice I’d ever heard that no one would tear this family apart.