I couldn’t. The terror fell on me as soon as the doors closed, and all the stories of creatures, of cannibals, of god-knew-what rose in my mind like dust clouds until I was so smothered with fear I could barely breathe. In the end, I was able to gather enough of my wits to crawl into a ditch and pull a tangle of tumbleweeds over me for camouflage. And all night, all around me, the creatures of the desert made themselves known. The air was dusty and sharp, full of growls, screams, cries. I could barely think. All I could do was sit awake, listening, watching the dark for movement, my hand near my components belt, ready to run or fight.
The next morning, when the light filtered through the tumbleweeds, I climbed out of the ditch, gritty and filthy and bruised, and looked out at the desert in the day. Unbelievable miles and miles of dry, cracked earth, with jagged stones spiking up in the distance and pools of mirage just beginning to waver. That endlessly big sky like a bell jar over it, making me feel smaller than ever. A line from a poem at school jumped into my mind and stuck there. The lone and level sands stretch far away. The reality of my situation, the guilt, hit me like a sledgehammer, knocking me to my knees. It had really happened. I had really brought the end down on all our heads, on Lucy, on Mr. Jameson, on everyone. It beat painfully next to my heart: my fault, my fault, my fault. And after last night, I was too worthless to them to even be allowed to try to fix it. For the first time in my life, I was really, truly alone.
I sat there among the tumbleweeds and cried until my rib cage felt like it had been scraped hollow. Then, when my tears had left muddy rivers down my cheeks, I felt resilience spark, catch fire somewhere in the hollowness. I’m not going to let this be the end.
The thieves, the cannibals, the creatures. All of them had to be able to find a way to survive out here. They had to eat. They had to drink. There must be something out here, something to live off of, something of value. And if I wanted to live long enough to have a chance of figuring out what I could do to fix everything—of maybe even finding a way out of this desert—I had to look for it myself.
I looked out over the horizon of the strange, alien desert that had once been fields. The high mesas, the jagged peaks of red stone, miniature mountains making lakes of shadows beneath them. The picked-over skeletons of rusted cars stuck up out of the ground here and there. The remains of fencerows cut across portions of the land. But in the distance, Black Mesa and Robbers Roost were visible, unchanged despite the scenery that surrounded them, looking much closer than they actually were. And if I remembered them, maybe I could use them to find my way.
Quickly, I took an inventory of what I had with me. I had my dust mask. I had the belt of spell components, still full. I had The Complete Booke of Witchcraft in my pocket. Surely, with all this, and the penny to help guide me, I could find some food or some shelter.
But the most important thing now was to find water, and that I knew I could do.
I took my penny necklace off and held it by the twine.
“Water,” I told it, and after a moment, it pulled straight outward, pointing into the Desert of Dust and Steel.
“All right,” I told it. “Let’s go.”
I followed the penny for hours, over sunbaked rocks, the stubbly remains of fields turned into dunes, a plain filled with boulders, and still it strained and pulled against the twine that held it. By the time the penny led me to the side of a limestone plateau, the sun was so high and direct overhead that my shadow had all but disappeared under me. I stopped and looked up at the plateau, tall and unyielding before me. I wiped my forehead and mud came off on my arm.
“What, you want me to go over it? Under it?” I asked the penny. “Because I can’t go through it.” But the penny strained onward, ever forward. And sure enough, when I reached out, I found a crack between two