They’ll know just as well as we do that I can’t cast the spell without help. I mean, the principle is sound. It would be better if I could sacrifice a bull or something, get all the life force out of something at once, but...”
“We could have bought that fancy camel back in town.”
“That was the fanciest camel.”
She dusted off her hands and looked around, chewing on her sunburned lower lip; as I watched, a droplet of blood emerged and slid down her chin, glinting transparently in the low light like a ruby. I realized with a start just how long the shadows were. How had so much of the day slipped away? We had only a few hours left.
“It’s not here,” she said, “but it’s close.”
I followed her out of the perimeter of the ruins and stood carefully on the wooden catwalk, listening to faint, high sounds in the ruins—bats, maybe? Getting ready for a night of bugs? Close meant nothing. It meant the desert, the scrubby grass and gravel around where the dig had collected a bit of dew or rainwater, and then nothing but sand, sculpted into low dunes that I knew would be exhausting to walk on.
And I was so tired. Not as tired as Johnny, probably, who had been clambering up and down the ladders and ramps all day with legs much shorter than mine, and with fewer reserves of body fat. But we were running out of time. I thought again about the timer she’d put on her computer, discreetly set at the corner of the screen, counting down. Like something dark and poisonous in there. A scorpion, under the tough waxed canvas.
A tiny bat, barely mouse-sized, swooped past my head; I caught a glimpse of one shiny eye, bright as a droplet of water, before it vanished into the open desert. Johnny balanced on the catwalk next to me, which creaked slightly under our combined weight.
“Do you know where to look?”
“I set up the spell to help find it, but it’s only good to within... a slightly weird measurement. Works out to about ten meters and then we’ll have to dig for it.”
“What’s the measurement?”
“Uh, the actual monster who cast the spell came up with it, so it’s his wingspan. Tip to tip. Part of what I had to look up to do kind of a conversion. All the sources said different things. So I don’t even know if it’ll be that accurate.”
I shook my head. “Monsters and their egos.”
She laughed. “Worse than scientists, even.”
“Worse than geniuses.”
“Let’s try here,” Johnny said. She set her hand-drawn map down carefully in the sand, weighting it down with a brick, and we started to dig. The sand was so soft and dry at first that it was more a case of pushing it aside, under her direction, into a big wide pit, eight or ten feet across. Then we hit a harder layer and fell silent, joshing done, waiting for a telltale clunk or chime as we hit something that even she had admitted she was barely sure existed. She called a halt after an hour, at four feet down, and I had to pull her out of the hole with her shovel handle.
“Okay, next one we dig a ramp, because we are obviously the hottest but not so smart,” I said. “Where do we... Johnny?”
She was crying again, quietly, her back to me. In the absolute silence of the desert, her squeaky sobs were barely distinguishable from the faraway cries of the bats. I hesitated. I’d never seen her cry as much as I had this week, and my God, I was so tired of waiting it out, of waiting for both of us to pull our shit together. By far we were too young for this. By far we had not seen enough of the world we needed to save. Our bones and teeth and brains weren’t even done growing yet, how could we bear this weight? This pain and fear? How could we form a structure that could bear it together? No one built great houses or churches or ships out of saplings. They waited till the trees were old and strong. What kind of fucking world was this?
My own eyes filled with tears as I came up behind her, some kind of sympathetic magic. I wondered what I could say that would move her. Or me. Or just keep us going a bit longer. “John,” I said. “We can do this. But