was another surge of magic. The radio under Asa’s arm chittered out some static, then, even stranger… it began to play.
A male voice was singing “… got to ac-cen-tchu-ate the positive… e-liiim-in-ate-the negative… latch onnn to the affirmative…” then the static rose up again and the words were lost.
“Was that… music?” Zo asked, her usually guarded voice soft with wonder.
“Oh, er… sorry,” Asa said. “Sometimes my… hic… my magic makes electronic things do that.”
“Do it again!” Judith said.
We all huddled around Asa then, and he turned the knob until the music strengthened and returned.
“… don’t mess with Mr. In-betweeeeen…” the male voice crooned.
“That’s Bing Crosby!” Judith said, then, softly, “Ma was always listening to Bing Crosby.…”
Then female voices joined the male singer, and we all listened in rapt attention.
As the smooth voice, made dusty and crackly by the radio, crooned out the end of the song and the final note faded into silence again, tears welled in my eyes. All around me, the others were crying too, some sniffling like me, some openly weeping like Cassandra, and others, like Olivia, quietly wiping their tears away before anyone could notice.
Asa was looking at us, plainly confused, wondering, probably, what it was about this very upbeat song that had made us all cry. “Humans are so odd,” he muttered.
The radio buzzed into life once more, and we all leaned forward again.
“That was ‘Ac-cen-tchu-ate the Positive’ by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters,” said a male radio announcer. Patriotic music began to crackle in. “And now it’s the daily report with Skip Joiner, bringing you the news from our boys at war. Two days ago, Allied forces dropped bombs.…”
“War?” Cassandra breathed. “We’re at war? Again?”
“They’re at war,” Olivia said. “The ones outside the desert.”
“Truly, nothing changes,” Susanah said.
We sat there then, rapt and unmoving, listening to a report about a war we didn’t know in a world we were no longer a part of. The feeling that had hung over the gathering before—warmth, acceptance, reverence—had been replaced by a deeper, sadder feeling that left all our hearts and heads and bones heavier. Then the broadcaster began to wrap it up. “And we would like to emphasize once more: our boys need your support! Buy a war bond today!” Patriotic music blared again, then the static rose up and the radio went silent.
“I think that’s it, everybody,” Asa said.
From our places on the ground, we wiped our tears away, tried to compose ourselves as well as we could. But the music, the radio, had affected all of us. It was contact. Contact with a reality that we forgot we needed, that we forgot we were missing, here in this dusty, hopeless place.
Silence hung over us for a moment; then Susanah slowly stood, a new fire in her eyes, as though she had realized something important, something life-changing.
“Asa,” she said. “Give me your hand.”
“Er… all right?”
She took his hand and put it on the side of the horse she was working on.
“That thing you did… do it again,” she said.
“All right, I’ll try,” said Asa. He closed his eyes, concentrated. But nothing happened.
“I don’t know if I can,” he said. “I think I’m all out of… hic!”
There was another surge of power. At Susanah’s feet, the mechanical horse lay as still as it had been, but where they once had been dark, the lightbulb eyes had begun to glow, surging with Asa’s magic. We all stood around it, looking at, watching as the pieces between its metal ribs whirred and clicked with new life.
Lucy Arbor had neither the time nor the materials to pursue her makeup empire anymore. And even if she had, she wouldn’t have done so. Not now, when the very air in Elysium seemed to reek with wrongness. Instead, Lucy found herself caring less and less about appearances, going out to do her Dust Sickness research bare-faced, with her hair wrapped in a kerchief. (Out here looking like Sojourner Truth, she thought as she looked into the mirror one day.) But in times like these, appearances didn’t matter. What did matter was Dust Sickness and stopping it from infecting anyone else.
Every night, Lucy walked completely around Elysium, latching open windows shut, giving away homemade dust masks, helping clean porches and bedrooms and kitchens for people who couldn’t do it for themselves. Many people had taken to wearing Lucy’s sack-cloth dust masks all the time, dust storm or not. Even now, Lucy wore one as she walked