“I forgot what disease factories they can be. Don’t go wiping that on anybody. Keep that to yourself. Now what were you telling us about school today?”
“I played five games of marbles against George Arbor and won all of them,” Mowse was saying. “And for all of that I won this!” She pulled something small and golden out of her pocket, and behind me I heard the sound of a glass breaking on the floor. Asa stood over the glass, white-faced and ashen.
“Wh-what?” Asa said, stumbling toward the table. “Let me see that!”
Confused, Mowse handed her small trophy to Asa. With a crazed look on his face, he held the tiny golden thing into the light. It was a small piece of amber with something suspended inside it. I squinted. Yes, a cricket. The thing Asa had been sent to return. The thing he had put from his mind forever, or so he’d thought.
“George Arbor?” I asked Mowse. “Lucy Arbor’s little brother? How did he get this?”
“He said he picked it up when y’all were kicked out of Elysium.” Mowse shrugged.
“Of course,” Asa said, his voice sounding strange in the silence of the kitchen. “Of course this would come to me now, when I am bound to be ripped apart in a matter of days.”
Suddenly, maniacally, Asa started to laugh.
He laughed and laughed, a cold, harsh, hopeless laugh, and we all turned our eyes away until he stopped.
“Well,” he said bitterly. “I suppose no one can accuse the Sisters of not having a sense of humor.”
CHAPTER 26
1 DAY
REMAINS.
By the evening before our judgment, the sky was so dark that there was barely any difference between day and night. But the clouds that rumbled and threatened overhead were not lined with blue, but an angry, supernatural green. The pile of supplies for the substitute Sacrifice had grown to nearly the height of the first one, and the great clock of panic was ticking faster and louder.
It was on the last day that I went to see Mama for the first time since I’d been back.
“Hey, Mama,” I said to her name on the wall. “I guess I’ve got a lot to tell you about.”
I reached out and brushed the dust out of the engraved letters, wondering where to begin. I could start with the witchcraft, how I’d been a witch the whole time and not known it. I could talk about the Sacrifice and how Asa and I had destroyed it. I could talk about Olivia and the girls, Mother Morevna, the Dust Sickness that had killed her and would soon kill Lucy. I could talk about our plan to fight our way out, to defy the Goddesses. But what I said was, “I don’t know if I’m ready, Mama.”
Saying it, hearing how easily it came, surprised me. And it was true, I realized. Sure, we’d practiced every day. Sure I could call down lightning, summon a whirlwind, breathe fire, but when I thought of the Dust Soldiers, my heart still beat like a rabbit’s heart must beat.
“Everyone is counting on us,” I said. “We’re in charge. And… it’s just… so much.”
Once I said that to her name there in the wall, it seemed like the words wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop. A dam of uncertainty had burst somewhere inside, and everything threatened to flow out of me and into the dust at my feet. Tears came then, hot and stinging, and I let myself cry them there in the silence.
As my tears began to cease, I reached out and lay my palm across her name, wishing she were there to hold me, to stroke my hair, to help lessen everything for me. At that moment, so faintly in the back of my mind, I felt a sense of warmth, smelled a familiar but unplaceable scent. And as I closed my eyes to try and keep it just a moment longer, I could hear a sound like black feathers falling.
When I finally took my hand off the wall and wiped the muddy stains from my face, I took a deep breath, clearing my mind, readying myself for the task that awaited us tonight.
“Goodbye, Mama,” I said. And I rose and left her for the last time, knowing finally what I’d always known: No matter what happened, I was born for this.
Asa sat at the kitchen table in the Robertson house, holding a cigarette between his teeth. They were long again now, pointed and black, and his spines protruded between the spokes of