“Look,” Sal said. “My penny has never steered me wrong before. It might be that they’re taking us exactly where we do need to be to find whatever it is that can fix things.”
“Maybe,” Asa said doubtfully. He slipped out of the rope and scratched his nose free of some dust; then he slipped his hand back into the rope.
“Are you serious?” Sal said flatly.
“What?” Asa said.
“You can get out of the rope!” she hissed. “You… you don’t even have to be here right now, do you? You could vanish in an instant, just like you did back in Elysium. But you’re going along with being a prisoner. Why?”
Asa wasn’t sure himself. There were a million reasons, he thought. He wanted to make sure Sal was all right, for one. But even though he dreaded what lay ahead of them, he also felt… drawn to it somehow. Drawn as the needle of a compass to magnetic north. He thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know. But I know that the last time I left you, you felt abandoned. And I consider you the first friend I made here in the human world. My only friend. And what kind of a heel would I be if I abandoned you twice in one week?”
“Thank you,” Sal said, turning to look him in the face. “Really. Thank you. And we may have gotten off to the roughest start ever, but… I do consider you a friend too.”
And even though it was dark and Asa was semi-tied to a post, he couldn’t help but smile.
“What was that picture, anyway?” Sal asked. “The one they took from you?”
Asa shrugged. “Just a photograph I found and thought was neat. I don’t know anything about it, I swear.” He sighed. “For a human, I seem to be incredibly unlucky.”
“Welcome to Oklahoma,” she said.
“You don’t really think they’ll try to kill us, do you?” Asa asked after a moment.
Sal turned and peered out of the tumbleweed prison. Through a hole in the branches they could see Zo, her slim silhouette dark against the cold, bright sky, awake and alert, with her sharp tongue and her pistols always, always ready.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see,” said Sal.
When we woke the next morning, our necks and backs aching, they picked us up, dusted us off, and pushed us straight back into walking. As we traveled, the scenery began to change. Where there had been dunes and gorges and cracked earth before, now there were high buttes and mesas. The ground was spread with an array of cholla cactus, juniper, and scrub oak. Rising upward toward the sky was an expanse of hard, familiar black stone. Lava stone. I knew this place, I realized.
This was Black Mesa, the setting of vague, faded memories of a family camping trip when I was four, clearer memories of class trips we’d gone on at school, of getting tiny cactus spines stuck in my hand and pulling them out for days. The highest point in Oklahoma! and Watch out for rattlers! the signs around it said. I knew Black Mesa, and somehow knowing it made me feel like less of a prisoner, even if just for a moment.
Judith and Zo marched us through the black crags and desert brush of the Mesa, taking a path that seemed meandering and purposeful at the same time. I thought of the Booke in my pocket and how I’d read about illusion spells that could only be broken by walking in a specific path. Was this what they were doing? I wondered. Eventually, Zo and Judith’s winding path weaved to a stop in front of a black stone ledge. Zo whistled three notes, and the wall just disappeared.
More illusory magic, I thought as we went through the place where it had been. And not bad either. The witch who cast this must be very skilled indeed, someone you didn’t want to mess with. I gulped.
We turned the corner, and I felt the penny thrum.
Their hideout was an old, rusted train, or at least part of one, sitting like a snake bitten in half at the bottom of the ravine. It was red-orange with rust, but it was not simply a dead thing fallen into disuse: Bits and pieces of flannel and cloth had been hung over the windows, like our wet sheets back in Elysium. Smoke came from the smokestack, smelling like home cooking rather