fraction of a second in mid-air. I squeezed my eyes shut too late and had to study the scene in its afterimage, burned into my retinas: a wall, a cloud, a hole, a girl.
Johnny had somehow climbed to the top of the tallest structure, the arched brick gateway we’d seen on our way in. Straight ahead, if I could keep my bearings in the sand. There was more light now, heavy and venomous to the eyes, like staring into a UV bulb—like the lightning, it seemed to be both seeping up from the sand and down from the clouds. As headachey as it was, it did make it easier to see, but it also meant that the alignment was close—that I had perhaps even missed it, and Johnny was up there because she couldn’t get back down. Shit.
I screamed her name and waved, but she didn’t respond, unsurprisingly; I couldn’t even hear myself over the noise. The chanting was building into a roar now, the sound of a packed stadium, rushing in synchronous waves, as if millions of voices were crying out the same thing, pausing at the same moment. A choir, unholy, unblessed, singing songs of praise for evil gods.
I stumbled over the sand till my feet hit something hard—an aqueduct, thank Christ—and sped up along the solid length till I reached the base of the arched building. Think. Look. Someone five feet tall with asthma and several recent injuries climbed this in the pitch black, dragging a laptop computer and a ton of clay tablets in a bag behind her. Where did she get up? Where did she start?
I jogged around the building in three frustrating loops. Where? Where did she get a hold? Jesus, hold it together, hold it together. Nothing. Time was wasting away. Jesus. Move! I threw myself at the wall, skinned fingertips unable to hang onto the jointless brick and stones, nails shredding. The pain woke me up, and I stopped, hands to my face, protecting my eyes. My heart pounded as the air around me thinned, breath replaced with sand.
Wait. There. Two boards torn from the excavation and propped against the side of the building, making a steep ramp just high enough to reach a ledge, from which you could climb on the protruding broken bricks till you got to the top, if you were very lucky, or very light, or both.
Being neither, I kept spilling off both the boards and the ledge, each time landing on my back not as hard as I thought I should—something had gone wrong with gravity, tangibly, as if the ground were pushing up on everything that was on it. My fifth try took, though by then my fingers were cramping and my legs trembling from the effort, and I finally made it to the roof, nearly toppling at the last minute as I swung myself over the edge, coughing.
Johnny’s face was inscrutable as she turned, no expression at all. I wondered if I looked the same way. Whose betrayal was worse, I couldn’t say. And what help I could be now that I was here, I didn’t know. Maybe I was worse than useless, to have come back. A distraction. Too bad.
I crossed the roof to stand next to her, my feet sliding on the sand as if someone were pushing me backwards. Her nose had been bloodied again, I saw, not quite dried, crystalline with adhered sand. It was quieter up here, only the howl of the sand rather than the constant hiss, though the chanting was louder. I waited for her to thank me for coming back, even though I knew she wouldn’t. At least, I thought, an acknowledgement that she hadn’t expected it.
“What did you do to Drozanoth?” I said after a long time, when I couldn’t stand to stare up at the curdled sky any longer, bereft of stars. The clouds were so wrong, moving in ways clouds shouldn’t ever move.
“Only what was deserved.”
“Good.” I paused, and added, “Fucker.”
“I couldn’t find the hua-sinoth in time,” she said. “I knew I would have to stop looking and prepare to just... do the spell without it.”
I stared at her, suddenly dizzy, and put a hand to the rough brick roof to steady myself. My stomach was flying up like the rocks below us. “But you said... it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t be powerful enough.”