our minds. This is the end.
“The defense spell,” Olivia said. “We’ve got to do it now.”
I pulled the black stone from my pouch. “I’ll do it. I wrote the spell.”
“Whoever sets it off will be locked outside the city!” Cassandra said. “We can’t ask that of you!”
“And I can’t ask it of anyone else!” I said. “This spell is the only chance we have of holding them off until morning. Get into the city and let me do this!”
“No,” Olivia said, putting her hand over mine. “It’s all of us or nobody.”
I looked at the others, their bleeding, bruised faces; Susanah, her nose broken, staring defiantly; Zo and Judith, bleeding from scores of wounds, side by side; Cassandra, her face the calm mask of one who has accepted her fate. Asa nodded. Then Olivia took the black stone into her hand and went to the door and closed it.
“I’m sorry, Rosa,” she whispered. Then she placed the stone in its spot.
She bit her own finger and let the blood flow. “PULVAREM SPIRITUM!” she shouted.
And a great dome of magic, pulsating with Asa’s energy, rose around the city. Where Dust Dome had been completely transparent, this looked like a globe of lacy runes written in chalk upon the very air itself, and it felt like protection and doom all at once. It rose above the walls and closed, seamless, over all of it, a great patterned bowl of magic. We had inherited this problem. We had fought like hell for it. And at least Elysium, and humanity, would be protected.
We turned to face them then, a high black wall of destruction. What will dying be like? I thought. Will it be fast? Will there be light? A tunnel? Or only darkness?
The Dust Soldiers began their charge then. Scimitars unsheathed, they ran, ready to cut down this chain of girls who dared to stare down the apocalypse.
Beside me, I saw Olivia clasp Asa’s hand. Then she reached out for Susanah’s. Susanah took Olivia’s and reached out for Judith’s. I reached for Zo’s. We were forming a chain, all of us, save for Mowse on her safe place on the wall. Defiant, even in the face of Death. And as my penny burned against my skin, strong and hot, I thought of what was written on it: E pluribus unum. From many, one. I closed my eyes. All of us or nobody.
There was a smell then, just a whiff of something green. Something achingly familiar.
A clap of thunder, a blinding flash of light.
And the rain fell.
It rolled in like a dust storm, covering the horizon. It fell in torrents, in buckets, in waterfalls, and as it fell on the Dust Soldiers, they collapsed in upon themselves like sandcastles at our feet.
It fell on roofs of families holding each other close, ready to die until they heard the unbelievable sound of it beating on their windows. It rushed in rivulets over the strange, unholy desert, blurring it like an oil painting, washing it clean and revealing the fields and prairies we had known before.
It felt as I had always, always known that it would. Because this had always been the truth, I realized. We had only had to make it so.
“I don’t believe it…” Asa breathed. “I never in a million years would have believed…”
“What?” Olivia said. “Did Life win?”
“No,” Asa said, a smile spreading across his exhausted face. “We did it. We won.”
Out in the desert, the world was ending. But it was not ending like it had before. This was no grave. Instead, it seemed we were being born. Patches of nothingness were filling in, but not with the desert that had been there before. The nothingness bloomed into fields, scrub, cacti. Back into the Oklahoma we hadn’t seen in ten years, and one word echoed through the marrow of our bones. Home. We are home.
The dome of our spell flickered and disappeared. Then we heard a groaning of metal as the doors opened behind us.
“Olivia?” said a small, weak voice. “Asa?” We turned. There was Rosalita, awake and blinking against the rain.
“Rosa!” Olivia shouted, running to her and embracing her. “?Mi hermanita! You’re all right!”
One by one, the Elysians ventured out of the gates, gasping at the new old world unfolding before them, all of them hugging and thanking us over and over and over again—even Asa in his daemon form. “You’re heroes!” they told us. “Heroes!”
“It was never about the crops at all,” I said. “Was it?”
“That was just a factor to add difficulty,” Asa said, able to speak freely now that the Game was over. “The real test was to see what you humans would do, what you’d make of the situation the Sisters put you in. I must admit, it was slick of Death to make Mother Morevna her Card. I only wish I’d seen it sooner.”
“But Death…” I said. “She had won.”
“Until you all beat Her,” said Asa. “All of you proved what humanity could be. Good and responsible—unlike the Goddesses, it seems, who were neither good nor responsible with Their creation.”
I turned to respond, but my words caught in my throat.
Asa was changing. A glow was traveling over his body, and the strangeness, the energy that he’d carried since the moment I’d met him, was dripping from him like oil and disappearing into the air. He levitated for a moment, then thudded back down to the dust… different. New.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I completed my mission,” Asa said, turning to look at me with newly hazel, unmistakably human eyes. “This… this must be my reward. From the Mother. I… I understand why She chose me now. To give me a chance to become what I always felt I was.” Asa put his hands on his chest, pressing as though he were afraid he’d disappear under them. “And now I am… I’m human! One hundred percent human! With a pulse and blood and eyelashes and intestines and a-a-a pointless appendix and everything!”
“One hundred percent human?” Olivia said, coming to stand beside him. “So that means I can do this now and we won’t have to think twice, huh?” She took his glasses off, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, the rain rushing over both of them until the kiss broke, and they stood, grinning at each other through the downpour.
“Oh, you can do that whenever you want,” Asa said. “Though this kissing in the rain business is a lot less romantic than everyone makes it seem.” Then he said, “I’m sorry I thought you were Death’s Wildcard. I’m just so drawn to you that I thought—”
“I’m just glad it was all right the whole time, you and me,” Olivia said. “But why are we drawn together?”
“Love, I guess.” Asa grinned.
Just then, a guard shouted, “On the horizon! Look!”
Everyone turned. A line of vehicles was coming toward us through the rain. There was a sound of ambulance sirens. Rescue vehicles. All the people of Elysium started running then, running toward that line of cars, splashing and waving and shouting and dancing. The guards were running and tackling each other and sliding in the mud. Judith had an injured Zo on her shoulders, and they were squabbling as usual with wide, rain-soaked smiles. Behind them, Cassandra, Susanah, and Mowse were catching raindrops on their tongues and laughing. Olivia and Asa and Rosalita were walking together, already a family. Even Mr. Jameson was striding out, his head held high, ready to go back to Texas, to the family that I knew somehow still waited for him there. He turned and waved to me to come on, to join them.
I stood back for a moment, watching all of them, my heart filled hurting-full with an emotion I couldn’t begin to describe.
“Sal,” said Lucy. And when I turned, the sight of her—her skin clear, her cheeks unsunken, her eyes bright again—made my breath catch in my throat. “You coming?”
She extended a hand to me, and I took a step forward to take it.
Then a shadow in the doorway caught my eye. Mother Morevna, just inside the doors, watching as usual with those cold, gray eyes. Watching her people rush out of the city she had built for them without looking back. Leaving her.
I stood there for a moment, feeling her magic in my veins alongside my own, as I would forever.
Then she held up a hand as bare and unmarked as any old woman’s.
I nodded to her. And slowly, with one final groan of metal, the great steel doors of Elysium closed forever. Soaked to the skin, I took Lucy’s hand and joined the others walking toward that bright horizon, toward the world that waited for us. And somewhere behind us, we heard the solemn song of a single cricket fading into the distance.