it’s my place to tell you this, but… there’s a little more to it than that. Mother Morevna’s sick—not Dust Sick, mind you. Something about the liver. It could be that she dies before the Dust Soldiers come, which would leave us without anybody powerful enough to face them.”
I felt the air go out of my lungs.
“So that’s why she needs a Successor now,” I said. “To face them if she dies before she can.”
“I pressured her into it, to be honest,” he said apologetically. “She’s old and set in her ways, especially after…” He paused, redirected. “She had a few real bad experiences that have left her thinking she has to do everything on her own. She doesn’t like for things to be out of her control. But even she can’t ignore this possibility.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Fear began to bubble in my stomach. Of course she didn’t want to give up her power, especially not to me, the false prophet who had caused such a ruckus all those years ago.
Mr. Jameson’s eyes were gentle, concerned. “I’m sorry, kid. It’s a hell of a thing to have to deal with: a game with unclear rules and unclear goals, and you leading everybody against it. But she chose you. You’re the best option for this, whether you realize it or not.”
The Game and the Dust Soldiers rose up in my mind, snuffing my excitement like a flame. I swallowed nervously, dry toast tasteless as a shingle on my tongue. But, I told myself, I was the one who had been chosen. It had to be for a reason.
When I looked back at Mr. Jameson, he was looking out the window, out over the walls, where a sliver of desert was showing. “Of course, after last night, we’ve got even more to deal with.”
I remembered the cry then, just before I fainted. I remembered the shadow on the wall.
“Were we robbed last night?” I asked cautiously, in case, like the rain, it had all been “my imagination.”
Mr. Jameson nodded slowly. “Unfortunately so.”
I felt sick to my stomach all over again. “What did they take?”
“A lot, sad to say. It’ll set us back about a month. Forty pounds of salt pork, twenty pounds of beef, four sacks of flour, six sacks of potatoes, six sacks of charcoal, five bottles of moonshine and two of schnapps. All from the Sacrifice building. But there’s still time before the Judgment, and Mother Morevna laid a curse on anybody who steals from the Sacrifice, so we’ll be finding their bodies somewhere around town pretty soon. Though it’s strange. I can’t think of a single person in Elysium who’d want to do something like that. Especially not now.”
“And this was… this was while I was…?”
“Yes,” he said. “While we were making sure you were all right.”
In my mind, I saw the shadow I’d glimpsed before the vision took me, the flash at the top of the wall, small, quick… familiar in some way. But sometimes I saw things before my episodes, shadows flitting in the corners of my eyes, so I said nothing. Were my visions magic? I thought suddenly. And if so, what did they mean?
“It’s not your fault,” Mr. Jameson said. “But it is what it is, and we’ve gotta look it straight in the eye and deal with it.” He picked his cup of cold coffee up off the floor and stood. “But that’s my responsibility. All you’re responsible for now is learning.”
He stopped and looked at me for a moment, an odd expression on his face.
“What?” I asked.
“I was just thinking of your mama, how proud she would be,” he said. “She always knew you were something special.”
And despite all the fear, all the nerves, all the uncertainty, I couldn’t help but smile.
In the desert, Asa Skander was alone. He had been barely a smudge at first, but now his lines had steadied and he had begun to cast a shadow. At first, the sensation of sensation had nearly overcome him, and he’d lain gasping on the dust until the sunlight dazzled his eyes into bright blindness. What a thing it was to go one’s whole life, if life it could be called, without feeling anything, smelling anything, tasting anything, and then suddenly to have all the senses roar into being. He was struck by the grit of the dust, by the weight and drape of his clothes, by the dry heat of the sun and wind. He held his hand