the narrow sandy path. After a few minutes she commended his speed. “You’re keeping up nicely.”
“You mean you’re keeping up nicely.” He raced ahead of her.
“Hey, you can’t be ahead of me!” She tried to catch up. “You don’t know where you’re going.”
“Do any of us really know where we’re going, Mia? To the top of the mountain? How hard can that be to find? I go up, right? I stop when I can’t go any farther? Come on, slow poke. I haven’t got all day.”
By the time they reached the crest, she was flushed. Julian had barely begun to perspire.
“Not bad,” Mirabelle said, panting. “I didn’t know boxers could fight and hike.”
“Boxers can do a lot.”
“Oh, yeah?” She squinted.
He squinted right back.
“I like your spunk, Julian.” She had the most inviting, genial face. It was a face in a permanent state of smile. “You don’t run in vain, nor labor in vain.”
“I try. All anyone can do, really.”
“Yoda says do or do not. There is no try.”
“Yoda is wrong. He doesn’t know everything.”
“Oh, yeah? Does Mr. Know-it-All know there’s magic in these hills?”
“Mr. Know-it-All knows there’s magic everywhere.”
But when they reached where they were going, and up ahead he saw the stone enclosure on a flat mesa overlooking the valley and the city and the ocean—Julian stopped walking.
Mirabelle called for him. “A little farther, Jules. Over here.”
It wasn’t that he couldn’t walk.
He couldn’t walk because suddenly he found it hard to breathe.
“I know, it’s the oxygen,” she said, coming back and taking his hand shyly. “It’s thin up here. Harder to fill your lungs.”
He pulled his hand away from her. He didn’t think that was it. Words for some reason became inadequate. Doggedly he followed her into the center of the stony circle.
“We’re going to catch us some wishes, Jules.” From her bag she retrieved a jagged crystal on a long leather rope. “Are you ready?”
The sight of the crystal had a peculiar effect on Julian. He started to shake. Seeing it, seeing her standing in the sun, holding the quartz in her hands, triggered the heaviest sensation in his chest. He became freezing cold. He had not experienced anything like it, except ten years earlier when he was dying in the desert and saw a mirage named Ashton.
Burning soot filled his throat. She let go of his hand and disappeared into the smoke.
“Please, no,” he whispered. “Don’t go into the fire.”
“What fire? Don’t be scared. Watch and see. Prepare to be amazed.”
“Josephine, no,” he whispered. “Please, Josephine . . .”
“I’m not Josephine, remember?” she said with good humor. “I’m Mirabelle. Mia.”
Dumbfounded he stared at the inside of his bare left forearm, as if the hieroglyphs to explain what was happening to him could be found there.
She positioned herself in front of him, so close she was almost touching him, the stone in her open palm. Julian did not look at her and could not look at her. He did not feel well.
“You look pale. You okay? Don’t look so glum. What time is it?”
He showed her. 11:59.
“Excellent. Almost time. Don’t forget to make a wish.” Her face was enchanted, enchanting, smiling. “At noon, for a brief moment, the stars and the earth and all of creation will be so perfectly aligned that any wish asked for in faith can be granted.”
He wished he had something to hold on to.
“Place your hands under my hands,” she said. “That’s it, like that, like Red Hands. Don’t shake. Is the boxer scared of heights? The boxer should’ve told me.”
“Your heart is a refuge of coiners and thieves,” Julian said. “But I’m the one who has come to steal your life.”
“What?”
His heart grew numb, awash with terrible suffering and blinding fear. When the aurora flash of noon light hit her crystal, bouncing off the quartz stones around them and dispersing into a carousel of color, Julian started to choke. His hands fell from her hands and rose to his throat. He felt old love, and pain that swallowed him whole. His lungs were paralyzed. She stood in front of him smiling, and he was crying. He forgot to breathe. His heart forgot to beat.
She vanished for a moment inside the light, and as she vanished, ugly things reared up to replace her, crowding with Julian inside their intimate seclusion. He fell to his knees, scraping the ground, his palms slamming into the dust to stop himself from plunging face first into the sand.
Blind and deaf, he swallowed fire and then was under