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“Disgusting.” The thing is a severed animal foot. The sight of it makes me ill. It has toenails. “Who were these people?” I shake my head.
“Severed rabbit’s foot. An offering to the gods of luck, by some,” Tima volunteers. “In ancient times.”
“Why would a foot be lucky?” I stare at the lump of fur in front of me.
Ro looks at me—and then starts to laugh. “Because of what’s attached to the other end, genius.” He looks back to the cuff, shaking his head. “Forget it, Doc. I just got a better idea.”
Keys. The rabbit foot is attached to a set of keys. Most likely, to a car. More specifically, a Chevro. This one.
Doc’s voice echoes in the barn. “I object, Furo. Your logic is erroneous.”
“You know, I get that a lot.” Ro grins.
“One idea cannot be held to be empirically better or worse than another. More apt for a given context, certainly, but not intrinsically better, per se.”
“Yeah, this one is. She has the keys, Doc. To the car we’re trying to hand-wire.” Ro looks up at the ceiling, as if the voice came from above.
Silence.
“Yes. That is better. I stand corrected.”
“Don’t you forget, Doc, who the real brains are around here.” Ro grins and slides a key into the slit next to the big, round wheel. I’m surprised how quickly he is able to see where it goes.
Then he winks in my direction, smiling like he was meant to live in the time of Chevro transports and bloody animal feet offerings. “Wish me luck, Dol-face.”
“Good luck, Dol-face,” Doc intones.
I laugh. “Good luck, Doofus.”
And with that, Ro turns the key and the engine roars to life.
The road flows beneath us, streaming past our windows in the light. Ro drives in the exact center of the road, following a faded line of dried paint. “Why else would you put a line there?” he says.
“So you and Lucas can stand on opposite sides of it,” Tima says. “Now stop talking and watch where you’re going.”
“Was that a joke?” Ro looks astounded from the front seat. The Chevro swerves, almost barreling into the deep, grassy trench that parallels each side of the highway.
“You heard her. Watch the road, moron.” Lucas glares out the window.
Clouds of black smoke splutter out into the air behind us. “Do you think it’s supposed to do that?” Tima looks nervous.
“No,” says Lucas.
“Yes,” says Ro.
Tima sighs, wrinkling her nose. “Forget I said anything.” I notice she has belted herself to her seat like a Chopper pilot, tying the straps together above their useless, rusted buckles. I don’t know who is shaking more, Tima or Brutus, coiled at her feet.
This whole car thing is freaking both of them out.
Not me. After a Chopper crash and a hostile visit from the Lords, it would take a lot more than an old Chevro to freak me out.
So I don’t care where I am—not right now, anyway. I’m too exhausted. My legs are throbbing and my eyelids are as heavy as stone.
I lean my head back against the cracked seat, half asleep, staring out my window.
The highway runs along a ridge, and the top of the ridge is outlined against the sky.
The silhouette frames the rising slope of the tallest peak, and then my eye catches something else.
One small detail.
I sit up. A dark shape—tall, a jagged spike—rises in the distance, higher than any tree ever could.
“Is that an old comlink pole? All the way out here?” I tap my finger against the window.
“No,” says Tima, and when she answers, her voice sounds as cold as I feel.
“Didn’t think so,” I say.
Nobody speaks after that. We all know what it is—and we all want to get as far away from it as we can.
From them, all of them.
These new Icon roots.
Who can fight something that is everywhere? Who can win an unwinnable war like that?
I am too tired to think.
I am almost too tired to dream.
Almost.
Which is when I find myself losing consciousness.
“Doloria.”
I hear my name through the darkness of my dream. I can’t answer—I can’t find my voice. I don’t know which one is mine, there are so many in my head.
But when I open my eyes and see her, everything quiets. As if my dream itself is listening to her.
So she’s important, I think.
This dream is important.
But still, I don’t know why. And she’s no one I’ve ever seen before—a young girl in bright orange robes with a lightning shock of spiky white-blond hair, skin the color of wet sand, and icy green, almond-shaped eyes focused on me, full of curiosity.
Then she holds out her hand, and I look down.
Five tiny green dots the color of jade.
They glow in her skin almost like some sort of tiny, precious gemstones, but they’re not. Because I know what they are.
The sign of the Icon Children.
Our marking. It’s on her wrist, same as mine. I have one gray dot. Ro has two red ones. Tima has three silver dots. Lucas has four blue ones. Nobody has five.
Had.
Not until now.
This little girl. From the looks of it, she’s not our age, and not from the Californias. But somehow she’s one of us.
I feel my knees begin to buckle, and the girl takes my hand in hers. Her touch is cool, even calming.
“Doloria,” she says again. “I have a message. They are coming for you.”
“Me?” My voice is low and strange in my throat, a hoarse dream-whisper. The moment I speak, the unruly voices in my head begin to riot and clamor again.
Enough, I say, but they don’t listen. They never listen, and they never stop.
“You can’t escape them.” The girl squeezes my hand. “They’re everywhere.”
Then I realize she’s put something in my hand. A piece of carved jade, a human face, fat and round. Just like the jades the fortune-teller gave me, back in the Hole. “Do you still have them? My jades?”
They were for her.
She’s the girl who matters. She’s who I’m holding them for.
It’s a frightening, exhilarating thought—but all I can do is nod.
She smiles as if I am the little girl, not her. “Bring them to me. You’ll need them. And here. The Emerald Buddha will help you.”
I want to ask her what she means, but the voices grow louder and louder, and I drop her hand to press my own against my ears.
When I finally open my mouth to speak, I can’t remember any words. Instead, only a strange sound comes out—a thundering boom that vibrates in my chest, followed by an earsplitting, high-pitched whine, and a gust of wind that whips my clothes and twists my hair straight up.
And then I see them.
One silver ship after another, filling the horizon until the air is so thick with dust that I can’t see anything at all.
Instead, I smell salty copper.
Blood running, I think.
I feel the ground shaking.
People running, I think.
I should be running. I should be running and I want to wake up now.
I squeeze my eyes shut but I know they’re still there, the Lords. I hear them, smell them. Feel them. And I know that when they leave, everything I love will be gone with them.
Because that’s how this goes. That’s what they do.
Make things disappear. Silence cities. Destroy friendships and families—padres and pigs.
Every day is a battle, since the Lords came. Every day is a battle for everyone.
“Doloria,” the girl says, touching my cheek. I see her through the chaos. “I’m waiting for you to find me.” She sounds frightened. “Hurry, sister.” Then she doesn’t say anything at all, because she’s gone.
Sister.
A word I have never known, for someone I have never had.
Doloria, the darkness echoes, don’t forget.
But it doesn’t need to be said. Not to me, not in my own dream.
I remember better than anyone.
Every day is a battle and every loss leaves a scar.
I want to scream, but instead I shake myself out of sleep before even a single sound can leave my mouth.
Screaming is a luxury.
I open my eyes to find my hand curled around the shard, which is odd, because I don’t remember taking it out of my pack.
Strange.
As I weigh it in my hand, images unfold in my mind, as sharp as if I were really seeing them.
Strange memories.
The girl from my dream—the jade girl. The one who called me sister.
I’ve never had a dream like that before—one that didn’t feel like a dream at all.
Even stranger.
I also discover, by the look of things, that we have left the desert. We are in the mountains. Green trees spike the air between the road and the distant hills. These are not desert trees, nor are they the trees of the Californias. Nothing is the same now, and I realize we are in the final phases of the last snaking lines on the badly drawn map.
The Idylls must be nearby. There is nowhere else to go, no more lines to follow.
This is what I am thinking as we are climbing around the highest part of the mountain pass—
And then, just as quickly, flying off the road.
