I had everyone’s attention for days and weeks and even an assembly and, still, I managed to mess it all up. The cricket is gone, Sal. Lost. Sometime during the duel, I must have dropped it, and now I don’t know what to do. And then burning the Sacrifice… it really couldn’t have gone worse.”
“So it was you?” I said. “You destroyed the Sacrifice? All this time I thought it was me, accidentally aiming a little higher.…”
“I don’t know,” Asa said. “I assume so. But I don’t know how I would have messed it up that badly. My magic shouldn’t have been able to leave the salt circle, just like yours… unless…”
“Unless what?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Death, that’s what!” he shouted. “She’s been trying to sabotage me this entire time. She must have filtered in some magic of Her own. Yes… yes, that’s where the smoke came from! Because there’s no reason for Life to do something like that.”
“I thought you were sent by Life?”
“Daemons are neutral,” said Asa. “Even though Life made me, they can both interfere if they choose. Does that make sense?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know how to explain it any better,” he said. “All I know is that if it doesn’t get made right again, I’ll be taken apart, shredded, my particles scattered across the firmament until I vanish as though I’d never been!”
“And without the Sacrifice… without the cricket… we don’t have much of a chance of winning, do we?” I asked, my heart sinking.
Asa sighed. “From here, we’ve got two choices: to wait for the end of the Game—which will go to Death now, I’m sure—and be killed, or…” He paused, licked his dry lips. “Or we could hope for some sort of miracle, I guess.”
“No,” I said. “There’s got to be a way to fix everything.”
“How do you know?” Asa asked.
I was quiet. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I knew. It tingled under my skin like deception, like there was a way to fix this, even now. There had to be.
“I just know,” I said finally. “There’s a solution to this. It can be fixed.”
“And how exactly do you propose we do that from where we are now?” he asked, gesturing to the great, empty expanse around us.
“If it’s such an inconvenience, don’t come.” I shrugged. “Lord knows you’re not my favorite person—or whatever you are. But it seems like if you don’t fix this you’re in just as big a mess as I am. So are you coming with me or not?”
He extended his hand to me. “Partners?” he asked. “For now?”
“Partners for now,” I said, and I shook it.
He turned and looked over the vast, cracked plains and rocky crags. “But… uh… where are we going, anyway?”
“Only one way to find out,” I said. I brushed myself off and took my penny in hand. Closing my eyes, I whispered to it. “Just… show us where we can find something that will help us win the Game. Can you do that?”
And my penny thrummed once, then pulled straight outward on its twine, out toward the dunes and crags to what I guessed was north.
I opened my mouth to tell him what it meant, but before I could, I heard the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked.
“You’re not going anywhere,” said a voice. And when Asa and I turned, we found ourselves looking down the barrels of two pistols.
CHAPTER 14
Asa and I put our hands up and stood, completely taken aback. There were two of them: a tall, slim Black girl in men’s clothes and a cowboy hat, and a sturdy, broad-shouldered white girl in a sundress with her brown hair tied up in a bun. The Black girl had two pistols and an air of quiet confidence that told me she knew how to use them. The white girl had an animal energy and a football player’s stance, ready to tackle me or Asa or both of us with the ferocity of a wolverine.
“Who the hell are you?” said the white girl. “And what are you doing on our side of Black Mesa? If you’re from the Laredo settlement—”
“Do you see that black shit they put on themselves, Judith?” the Black girl said. “They’re not from the Laredo settlement.” She turned back to me and Asa and raised an eyebrow. “You do look familiar, though.”
“Harold Lloyd!” said Judith. “He’s the spitting image of Harold Lloyd, Zo!”
“No, you idiot.” Zo lifted her weapons. “They’re the two who were fighting