I followed from a distance, the panic threatening to squeeze my heart to a pulp. The air was growing painful with static electricity, cold, taut, as it always did when a dust storm approached. I tried my best to stand up straight, but my legs shook, my knees seemed to bend against my will, and one thought drummed through my brain: run, run, run, run, run.
With her eyes closed, Mother Morevna took the ingredients into her hands and raised them outward. She took her hands and clasped them together, crumbling the eggshells, smearing it all with the blood, rubbing it all together between her long, bony palms. The tattoos on her hands seemed alive.
“PULVAREM FIRMAMENTUM!” Mother Morevna shouted, raising both fists and letting the wind whip the mixture out of her hands, leaving her bloody-palmed and defiant in front of the storm full of the glow of power.
There was a great thrum of magic that went up from her. Up toward the sky. And just as the dust started to slip over the walls, it was sent upward, outward, away. It flowed over Elysium as though we were inside an overturned glass bowl, looking safely up at the sky.
Dust Dome.
My heart was beating so fast it almost hurt. We’re safe, I had to tell myself. It’s over. We’re safe.
But it wasn’t over. Mother Morevna winced. Her eyes closed; she gritted her teeth, and she crumpled like a leaf, clutching her abdomen. There was a loud crack as her head hit the concrete porch.
“No!” I shouted, running out too late to catch her. “No, no, no! Mother Morevna!”
But she was unconscious.
All the fear, all the panic rose inside me again. Oh, God, what do I do? What do I do?
Then I heard a woman scream. The clear dome of magic over the city began to crack like an egg. The spell was breaking.
I have to fix it! I thought. I have to!
My hands were shaking as I stood up again. A long fissure was growing in the spell Mother Morevna had cast. I had to mend it somehow. I had to cast the spell again. Frantically, I gathered bits of fur and eggshells from the ground, dropping them, and trying to pick them up again. Please, I thought. Please, please, please. I closed my eyes and tried to ground myself in the feeling of the ingredients in my hands. The coyote fur was soft; the eggshells were sharp and small; the seashell dust seemed to thicken into a paste with the blood. I willed my panicked brain quiet and focused on the outcome, the spell I’d seen so many times before.…
I raised my hands like she had done, tried to clear my mind, to make the magic happen.
Come on, come on! But my penny was cold. Above me, the crack widened again. People began to scream and run back to their houses, securing their dust masks on. My heart raced; my hands were clumsy. I couldn’t breathe. I had to run for cover.
“Sal!” said a voice. Asa Skander was there on the steps beside me.
“Get back to your house!” I shouted over the wind. “Put your mask on! Shut your doors!”
“What are you going to—” Asa started.
But I didn’t have time to talk to him. I had a city to save. Desperately, I willed all my magic into my red-stained hands and screamed into the storm, “PULVAREM FIRMAMENTUM!”
There was another, weaker pulse of magic. Please, please, please.
Miraculously, the cracks in the spell began to heal themselves, to draw back together.
But then they stopped. Tendrils of dust came howling down with the wind. The crack lengthened, a big dark lightning bolt in the fabric of the spell. The dust grew thicker, its roaring sounding like a hundred freight trains at once, plunging us into darkness as it blocked the sun. The people ran for cover. The spell was failing. I wasn’t strong enough. Soon the dust would cover all of us like it had Mama so long ago, and with it would come the Sickness. I tried to stand, tried to shoulder the weight of it, straining against the wind and the force even as my breath began to come in gasps and my legs began to shake. The roar of it was overwhelming. It rose in me and drowned out everything else, even the beating of my own panicked heart. My knees buckled, and I felt myself fold. I crumpled down onto the steps next to Mother Morevna, my hands over