When mobiak pairs fought, the shanikas projected whorls, attempting to control the reality of the battleground, while shakas rode Ghosts and struggled to determine which reality would lead them to victory.
I saw flashing green bubbles outside in the rain where Beardo and Baldy were fighting a group of Hugo’s resistance fighters.
I looked around for my mom, but she was gone. She must have slipped away while I’d been fighting Brad. I didn’t know what I would’ve said to her even if she was there. I’d stupidly wasted a rekulak spell on her, as well as time. We should have been at the town’s western border by now, meeting up with Em and Zelda and the rest. How long did Kaliah want to torture Brad? If she gave him nightmares for the next week, that still wouldn’t be enough to punish him for what he’d done to her.
I gathered the typewriter and paced in front of the bathroom, trying to tune out Brad’s screams. I nervously watched for a turn in the strange battle waging in the other room and outside until I couldn’t take waiting anymore.
“Kaliah!” I said. “We have to go.”
She stomped on Brad’s testicles. Hard. He shrieked. I winced. She stomped again.
“Kaliah!”
Without acknowledging me, she tramped to the back door and threw it open. I followed her outside into a rain that was eerily warm for winter. We climbed over sandbags and sloshed through the now flooded streets, the water up to our ankles. Still riding the Ghost, my muscles were full of energy. I felt I was cutting through the water like a clipper.
The rain sounded like a storm of cicadas combined with a million dogs lapping up water. Still, I was able to hear sloshing noises behind us. Ten yards down the street, the otalith ran toward us, pushing a shopping cart full of the contraband she’d accumulated while here. Chasing after her was a Zaditorian with tape-worm arms that slithered through the air.
On top of the pile of stuff in the shopping cart was a samurai sword.
The otalith didn’t deserve my help. But otaliths were rare. If the world survived this, mobiaks, including Lou, myself, and my niece, would all need a steady supply of her cackle. I couldn’t let a Zaditorian kill her.
Still high off riding the ghost for the first time and brimming with irrational confidence, I sprinted to the otalith, ignoring Kaliah’s protests. I was already muttering my Pictionary poems as I grabbed the samurai sword. I hoped there was enough bloom left inside me for one more ride.
I entered the whorl with the campfire and the rapey ranchers, and I followed the pain, killing over and over, riding through loop after loop until—one with the whorl’s Ghost—I returned to the flooded streets of Arampom.
I spun around the cart, putting myself between the otalith and the Zaditorian, whose unearthly appendages attacked with alarming speed. I severed the small, fanged heads in bunches with a master’s skill and agility, sending the bodies spurting and wriggling back inside their bubbles. In seconds, the fight was over, and the Zaditorian ran away, screeching.
The otalith grunted at me and held out her hand.
I gave her back her sword and said, “You owe me.”
She grunted again, then walked away, pushing her cart off the road and through a flooded pasture toward one of the surrounding mountains.
“Why are you just standing there?” Kaliah said. “Let’s go! I can’t believe you did that. You feel tough now?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m happy for you.”
I smelled the western Wall of Blanche before we reached it—the sweet, nauseating smell of fresh carrion. Fewer birds flew overhead since the rains came, and their cries were fainter. Where there was higher ground, the wall was marked by a six-foot-wide band of sodden bird carcasses and the occasional concrete building housing a former monastery warden whose infected cackle spread out and combined with the next warden and the next, forming the invisible wall that would turn anyone who tried to cross it into Blanche.
Hugo and Rhonaya were waiting for us beside an army transport truck. The special squad of Zaditorian fighters sat in the covered bed, two large speakers at their feet, pointing out. Hugo gave Kaliah and me rain ponchos.
“Where’s Em?” I said. “And Zelda?”
“We don’t know,” Hugo said. “Something went wrong. We should go while we can. It will mean finding the sourdough totem without your mummers, but I think it’s our best course of action.”
I clenched my jaw and stared at him.
“That was the plan,” he said. “If something went wrong, that was the plan.”
Too disgusted to respond, I turned my back on him, shoved a hand in my pocket, and felt around for the tack I’d put there. After escaping from the otalith lair, Zelda had explained to me the limitations of our unique connection. If we were near each other, within one to two hundred yards, depending on certain factors, I could speak to her with my mind. But whenever I was in pain, whenever my cackle was spreading, our connection had no distance limits, as long as there wasn’t an angry otalith around.
I plunged the tack into my finger and reached out for Zelda with my mind.
She won’t come, Zelda said, frantic.
Em? I said.
She says she won’t leave without the rest of the mummers.
What? Why?
Hardship has bonded her with them. She says she’s sorry.
I turned back to Hugo. “We have to go get them.”
“No,” he said. “We leave now.”
“Then good luck. Because I’m not leaving without Em.”
He threw his head back dramatically and shook his palms at the sky, then walked away from me, climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck, and fired the engine.
Chapter 31
HUGO’S ELITE SQUAD OF Zaditorian fighters was comprised of barbershop singers, or more precisely, those that could ride the Ghost of ancestors who were barbershop singers. Kaliah and I sat in the covered bed with them, seven
