I couldn’t see it, I felt a sensation like fog clearing, like an enormous flock of birds rising, like Atlas sighing in relief when the sky was lifted from his shoulders. And I knew that I was feeling the smothering heaviness of Dust Sickness lift. And then I felt the air move, a great simultaneous gasp of air, as though everyone who had had Dust Sickness suddenly breathed deep. Farther down the wall, I saw Mowse rise to her feet again, her color restored, the red mark on her hand gone.
Had I done it? I wondered, the beating of my heart drumming in my ears. I had stopped the curses, stopped the second sacrifice. We’d removed Death’s Wildcard, because that was what Mother Morevna had always been, wasn’t it? It was over now, I told myself. It had to be.
But the Dust Soldiers were still coming. Our world was still ending. My heart lurched. Our work wasn’t over.
I reached into my pouches for powdered seashells. Then there was another earthquake, bigger than any that had come before, so big we nearly fell from our places on the wall. The mechanical horses toppled to the ground, throwing their riders. And though the Dust Soldiers marched ever forward, the mechanical horses didn’t rise again.
Susanah, Judith, and Zo ran to the front, holding the Dust Soldiers back as Mowse watched, pale and shaking, from the wall.
“Come on!” Susanah shouted at the guards, her mouth bloody. “This isn’t over yet! We have to hold them!”
The guards and militiamen hesitated. Then, as the Dust Soldiers marched their death march toward them, each of the bodies of the soldiers they had killed turned to dust and blew away on the wind. And in this moment, I saw the remaining guards falter, as though each one realized that he was no soldier: only a rancher, a cowboy, a wheat farmer. One by one, the guards broke and ran for the door. Susanah, Judith, and Zo stood firm, facing the soldiers.
“We have to help them!” Olivia yelled.
“Asa!” I shouted. “Blitz us down there!”
Asa nodded. He blitzed to Olivia first, then to Cassandra, taking each of them down to the others. Then he was beside me. He grabbed my arm, and I felt myself disintegrating into nothing. I felt speed and darkness and light, and then Asa and I were there with the others.
Side by side, we stood, some of us drained, others bloody, all exhausted. The Dust Soldiers loomed just beyond the reach of Susanah’s spear, coming forward, a high dark wall of destruction.
“Let’s finish this!” Olivia shouted. And we charged. Susanah and Judith spun and jabbed and twirled. Asa and Olivia threw their brain-bending, infernal magic, and Zo fired her magic-laden shots, and Cassandra and I cast spell after spell. Fire, wind, earth, all at my command. We leapt and ducked, slid and dodged, great black scimitars slicing into our arms, grazing our ribs. We fought like animals. And one by one, the Dust Soldiers exploded. And as Judith ran her spear through the final Dust Soldier, black dust blanketed the battlefield, hung in the sky like cannon smoke.
Then there was silence. A hush fell over the battlefield, and where there had been slashing and hacking and screaming and running, now there was only silence, hazy clouds of dust, and the blood of the fallen soaking into it all.
We came back together, each of us bleeding, gasping for breath.
“That’s all of them,” Zo said, wiping blood from a slash on her cheek. “Finally.”
“I think… I think we did it,” said Cassandra.
But something felt wrong. The air felt tight and close, and my pulse wouldn’t stop drumming in my veins. I turned to Asa for comfort, for reassurance that we had done it. But Asa’s face was pale as chalk. He pointed out into the clouds of dust thinning before us. Among them, the dark, dust-covered ground began to move. To rise.
From the fallen dust, the Dust Soldiers were building themselves once more, all of them, all one hundred, re-forming themselves completely. They solidified into their previous shapes, huge, and terrifyingly whole again, and as one, they began to move toward us.
“No…” Judith said. “Oh, God… no…”
They were not running, not charging, but walking slowly, as though they already knew they’d won. And they had. Eight against one hundred regenerating Dust Soldiers was not just bad odds; it was suicide. And as I looked at the others’ faces, I knew the same thought was running through all of