you must travel the Desert of Dust and Steel without protection, without love, and without pity. May the Gods have mercy on your soul.”
“Please!” I cried. I reached out and grabbed her hand. Mother Morevna’s eyes went out of focus. A wave of nausea rose inside me, just like it had when I saw Trixie’s memory. Like it did when I saw the rain. Voices rose in my mind. For a moment, I was a girl in a plain black dress, drawing something in the dirt, pricking her finger and drawing blood to make the crops grow taller. I heard a man yelling something in another language, dragging the girl away as she cried out that she meant no harm.…
Mother Morevna broke out of my grip, her eyes wide with anger and disbelief, as though she were truly seeing me for the first time.
Then she looked at Mr. Jameson. “Get her out of my sight,” she said. And she turned and walked into the darkness.
Mr. Jameson looked at me, his face sad and powerless.
“I’m sorry, Sal,” he said.
“No!” I cried, but the crowd was already coming toward me. They surged forward, grabbed my arms and shoulders, lifted me up. Trixie herself was carrying my left arm, clamping it hurting-tight. I struggled, but they held my wrists together, pulled my hair, as they carried me through the city and to the steel door.
“No!” cried Lucy, fighting her way to the front. “Sal!”
“Lucy!” I screamed. But she was swept away by the crowd.
The great doors were pried open. The creak of the hinges was barely audible over the shouts and the hoots and the cries for blood. It was open, the desert black and bleak in front of me.
“No!” I cried. “You’re making a mistake! Please!”
Then they hurled me into the air. I fell hard on the ground, pain shooting through my side.
“So long, Rain Girl!” someone spat. And the door closed, leaving me in utter darkness.
Sobbing, I lay in the dark sand where I had fallen, crumpled in the shadow of that great closed door, and wept. Alone.
After the doors had closed and the people had gone back to their homes, Lloyd Jameson surveyed the damage. Nothing was left. The Sacrifice building was nothing but a smoldering pile of ash. The thieves had escaped back into the desert—though he’d shot one of them in the shoulder himself. Two of his guards had been wounded. Asa Skander was nowhere to be found. And Sal Wilkerson…
But Mother Morevna was right. Someone had to pay for all their deaths. Should it have been Sal, though? A surge of disgust ran through him. He spat on the ground, his tobacco leaving a dark stain in the dust. Now Sal was gone, and he hadn’t been able to help her. Everyone might as well be gone. All thoughts of Texas, of his ranch, of his wife and his daughter, were gone now, blown away like Oklahoma topsoil, irretrievable as rain.
“I can’t believe it…” a voice said. He turned. Lucy Arbor, the girl everyone knew was selling makeup, was standing there in the dark, staring at the door Sal had been carried through. “They just… threw her out like that.”
“Were you a friend of Sal’s?” he asked. “Sal never seemed like she had many friends.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “Since we were little. She was kind to me, even before Elysium. Can’t say the same for everybody, you know.”
Lucy looked at the great, closed door. She wiped away what might have been a tear. Then she turned to a little boy behind her, her brother probably. “George, you need to head on back to the hospital. Aunt Lucretia needs her bedtime story.”
The little boy wasn’t listening. Instead, he was picking something up off the ground. Something small, golden. A marble maybe.
“George!” she said.
“I’m going! I’m going!” said George. Then he stuffed the marble in his pocket and headed off toward the church. Lucy, however, stayed there, staring at the door like she could look through it and see out into the desert beyond. “I’ll miss her,” she said finally.
“Me too,” said Mr. Jameson.
The two stood in silence for a moment more, listening to the crackling of the dying conflagration.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Lucy, her voice quiet with fear and sadness. “They’re coming back in just a couple months’ time.…”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Jameson, staring into the embers. “I just don’t know.”
CHAPTER 13
2 MONTHS
AND
28 DAYS
REMAIN.
I didn’t sleep at all the first night in the desert.