Gasping, Asa fell to his knees, hardly daring to believe what had happened, what had been done for him. They had done the unthinkable. They had destroyed a Dust Soldier, and they had done it for him. A daemon would never, could never. They just weren’t capable of something like that, not for someone else. That was something completely and utterly human.
That is how I want to be, Asa realized then. That is what I want to be. Human like that.
And then they were on him, hugging him, screaming.
“You’re safe now!” Mowse said, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You’re safe, Asa!”
“They’re gonna have to try harder than that if they want to take you from us.” Olivia smiled at him, and Asa’s heart beat so hard he was afraid it would leap out of his chest.
“What’s Susanah up to over there?” he heard Cassandra say.
Across the dome, Susanah was standing over the pile of black dust, looking down at it. He saw her spit into her hand, then reach down and mix her spit with the black Sentinel dust.
“What are you doing, Suze?” Judith said.
“We won,” Susanah said, a strange tone in her voice. “My horse and I. We won our first battle.”
She spread the black dust and spit mixture over the palm of her hand, then pressed it to her horse’s flank, leaving a black handprint stark against the metal.
“Black is for victory,” Mowse explained softly.
Susanah stood back and admired it, her expression one of deepest pride. “Come on,” Susanah said. “Let’s head back home.”
CHAPTER 20
1 WEEK
AND
1 DAY
REMAIN.
The nightmare returned again that night, blazing and terrifying and worse than it had ever been before. This time, I had seen the people of Elysium leaving the city and running from the flame. Trixie had been among them, and her aunt and uncle, but the flames had caught them and swallowed them whole. Only Mother Morevna stood between the city and the flames, but as I watched, the flames began to climb her long black dress, and as the skin on her tattooed hands began to blacken and peel away, I heard that familiar, familiar voice: “?Ella viene! ?Ella viene hoy!”
I woke sweating, shaking, and when I touched my face, my hands were wet with tears. I kept seeing Lucy’s face as she climbed the walls, and every time my heart twisted more and more painfully in my chest.
I couldn’t hide from it anymore. I had to do something to keep this from happening. I took a deep breath and readied myself. I had to go get Asa. Wildcard or not, he and I had to figure out what we were supposed to do. We had to figure it out and go back, with or without Olivia. Olivia… I had to tell her, no matter what the result. She had to know. But how did I breach such a subject after so much time? So much pain?
I racked my mind as I dressed, brushed my hair, pulled on my boots. But when I went into the kitchen car for breakfast, I knew something was wrong. The room was quiet. Food sat on plates, growing cold. A game of checkers Mowse and Cassandra had started lay half-finished.
“What do you mean, gone?” Olivia was asking.
“North of the ravine,” Zo was saying. “That whole area of desert… it’s just… gone. Like it had never been. Like it dropped off the face of the earth. Like the earth ends there.”
“Did you go into it?” Olivia demanded. “Did you look around?”
“There was nothing to go into,” Judith said. “Just… nothing. Like the world is… I dunno… crumbling away at the edges, starting at the horizon and coming inward like a… like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse.”
“And what’s more,” Zo was saying. “They found us. Samson and the Laredo Boys. I don’t know how, but they found us. They found the train.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Olivia asked. “You didn’t see them, did you?”
“I saw their tracks.”
“Oh, tracks,” said Olivia. “Well, let’s all panic about tracks in the dust!”
“But, boss, all of them had stopped at the edge of Cassandra’s barrier,” said Judith. “From the looks of their tracks they stood there for a while before leaving. They definitely know where the train is.”
“But Cassandra cast a direction spell on it!” Susanah said. “Even though they’ve been here before, they shouldn’t have been able to find it again! Unless…” Susanah’s eyes went wide. “Mowse, did you ever find your doll?