theirs, right? Because he’s a… you know… a daemon, darling.”
I thought of the spears Susanah was creating, the spears that snapped out of the sides of the mechanical horses, sharp and deadly, glowing with Asa’s otherworldly magic, the only defense against the Dust Soldiers. “It does make sense,” I said.
“What if his magic is the key to keeping them out?” Cassandra said, her eyes alight in her exhausted face. “What if we just… did Dust Dome, but used Asa’s magic too?”
We looked at each other. There was something to this idea, we thought. Certainly none of the old, established spells were much help.
“I dunno,” Olivia said. “Dust Dome requires a lot of magic at once, and… at this point I don’t know if he can do it by himself and power the horses and have power left to fight. He’s falling apart as it is.”
It was true. With every earthquake, every change, Asa seemed to flicker. His mouth and arms and eyes had begun to go daemon far more frequently than usual. Was his magic a finite resource? I wasn’t sure.
There was a sparking in my mind, a sudden kindling into flame. I reached into my pouch and pulled out a black stone.
“We need to write our own trapdoor spell,” I said. “One that uses all our magic. One that can be activated by anyone with the stone. I can use Dust Dome as a model, I think, but instead of the coyote blood, we could use Asa’s. Maybe that will keep us from having to take so much magic from him.”
“Are you sure this will work?” Olivia said, her expression somewhere between impressed and wary.
“It’s going to take some time, but I think… I think it could.”
I looked out the window to the rose window of the church, but it was dark. Mother Morevna was nowhere to be found.
That evening, after we dragged ourselves back, our hands burned and bloody, our pockets full of stones, we were sore, brain-tired. We sat around the kitchen table, watching Judith and Mowse play Go Fish. Olivia was sitting in a chair, brushing Rosa’s long black hair as Asa read to her from The Red Badge of Courage. The earth rumbled beneath us, and we were silent for a moment. Then we shook ourselves and let it pass.
“You did it again, Mowse!” Judith said. “Fantastic! You’re real good at Go Fish!”
“Or she’s mind-reading,” said Susanah from her chair by the stove.
“What’s the capital of North Dakota, if you’re so smart?” Mowse asked, her nose in the air.
“Bismarck,” said Susanah. “Don’t forget, I went to school too.”
“You okay, chica?” Olivia asked, coming to where I stood by the window, leaving Asa to finish braiding Rosa’s hair.
“I’m all right,” I said. “Just… thinking. There’s just so much wrong and…” I sighed. “I… I can feel it all the time.”
“Thinking about your friend, huh?” Olivia said. “The one from last night? With Dust Sickness?”
I nodded. It was true. The news of Lucy’s Sickness had been weighing on me. Sometimes I felt like I’d fallen in a grain silo, like I’d just struggle in it, the unfairness of it, until it swallowed me whole and left my corpse suspended and irretrievable. It was evil, nefarious, but I refused to believe it was unstoppable, not now that I knew it was a curse. Surely there had to be some way to lift it without the Master Stone. But with so few days left… would it even matter?
“I know,” Olivia said. “And I’m sorry. It’s a hell of a thing to get, especially somebody as good as her.”
“How do you know how good she is?” I asked.
“If you like her so much, she must be,” said Olivia. She turned to me. “But look at the hand we’ve been dealt. We’ve got more power now than we ever had and we’ve done what we can. We’ll solve it. The defense spell, the Dust Sickness. All of it. But right now we have to focus. We have to break the Game.”
She was right, I knew. But how could I focus on one enormous thing when another loomed in my sight, darkening everything with its shadow? The earth rumbled underfoot then, as if in answer to Olivia, sending dust drifting down from the rafters. I could hear Asa saying, “Shhhh, shhhh, it’s going to be all right,” as he braided Rosa’s hair.