broke through the Dust Dome for a second… even some of them have gotten Sick, while other people who were right out in it are okay. It’s like names are being drawn out of a hat or something.” She paused, seemed to measure her words. “And I think they might be.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Her eyes darted, looking into shadows as though someone was watching her. “I think Mother Morevna’s doing it.”
“What?” I breathed. This seemed so far-fetched, so insane. Mother Morevna was fierce, sure, but she loved her flawed creation more than life itself.
“Think about it,” Lucy said. “Another outbreak, just when we need to conserve resources? Then there’s the list.”
“List?”
“The rations you gave me,” Lucy said. “There was a list with it. It looks like a list, anyway. A list of weird symbols.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper. Even half-folded, I recognized it. It was that piece of paper of Mother Morevna’s, the one I couldn’t make sense of. I saw the familiar, alien symbols—sixty symbols at least—and, under the columns, what looked like a few sentences, also written in the odd symbol language Mother Morevna had never taught me.
“I just sort of held on to it hoping somebody could tell me what it meant. It feels… not right too, like it’s important. I thought it might explain something. But then I ran out of time.”
I took the paper and looked it over, scanned my finger down the column of symbols. It did feel important, I realized. It practically thrummed with Mother Morevna’s magic, and another familiar feeling too… a dark one. One that I couldn’t quite place…
“There’s something wrong here,” she said. “And Mother Morevna is responsible. I know it.”
I wanted to deny it. But I knew exactly what she was talking about. I felt the panic and the fear and the sense of doom, but there was something else, something sinister lurking beneath the very ground of Elysium. Something that set my skin tingling and my head aching. Deception. I recognized it now. But who was the deceiver? And what was the lie?
“Let’s take it to Jameson,” I said. “He’s the closest to Mother Morevna of anybody. Maybe he can tell us what it is.”
“Will you come with me?” Lucy asked. “He’ll pay more attention to you.”
“Of course,” I said.
Mr. Jameson was sitting on his front porch, just as he had so many nights before, his peach can in his hand, stark against the dark, supernatural sky. He looked sadder than ever, and more determined somehow. The set of his jaw reminded me more of a bulldog now than a hound dog, and he sat with his rifle next to him. The gravel crunched under our feet as we approached and he turned.
“Sal Wilkerson and Lucy Arbor,” he said. “The two most likely to be out after curfew. What can I do for you? No problems, I hope.”
Lucy and I exchanged glances. “We just have something we want explained. We were wondering if you could take a look at it.”
“I’ll do what I can,” he said.
Lucy pulled the list out of her pocket and unfolded it.
“This is Mother Morevna’s,” she said. “I just want to know what it means. That’s all.”
Mr. Jameson took the note and looked at it, squinting in the dim light that streamed from the window behind him. His brows furrowed.
“What in the…?” he breathed.
Suddenly, he heaved himself up and went inside, leaving the door wide open behind him. Inside there was a sound of rustling papers.
“Mr. Jameson?” I said. Lucy and I followed him inside.
“This just don’t make sense,” he was saying, shuffling through a stack of papers all in Cyrillic code. “It don’t make sense at all.”
“What?” I asked.
“Usually, we use this as a code, but these symbols are initials,” he said.
“Initials?” I asked. “Whose initials?”
Mr. Jameson got a pencil from his desk and began translating beside the list. We watched as he went down the list, his pencil leaving a list of initials behind.
“A.D.… J.M.… L.D.… A.S-R.…” Lucy read. “Wait…” She reached into her bag and pulled out a small notebook. She flipped several pages to a long list of names and skimmed it, her eyes flitting from the page to the Cyrillic list and back again. Her eyes widened. “These are initials of people who died of Dust Sickness. Starting a long time ago.”
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Look!” she said, pointing. “T.H. That’s Trixie Holland. And then, a column