I watched my skin for circulating blue scrill.
Other than an umbrella scraping against the outside of the bus that made me jump, the group of Blanches was silent as they walked by. After a while, I poked my head up and sighed relief. They were gone. We’d dodged a bullet. I could have easily lost Em to the Blanche infection just as I’d gotten her back.
I went to the front of the bus and made a little speech: “Looks like Blanche is still gathering her army to invade all the stomachs,” I said, “which means we’re not too late. Since I’m the only one immune to Nemaloki poison, I’m going to scout ahead to find a path through that’s safe for all of us. After I go, turn the bus around and park at the south end of the mill, away from the people arriving. I’ll come find you there.”
I looked down at Hugo in the driver’s seat, and he nodded.
I’m coming with you, Zelda said.
No, I said, you’re hurt.
I’m feeling better.
Em needs you.
Em needs you.
I knelt next to Em/Suzanne, put my hands on her broad, working-class shoulders, and said, “Take care of Zelda while I’m gone.”
Em/Suzanne narrowed her eyes in determination, nodded, and wrapped her arms tighter around Zelda. Through my connection with Zelda, I felt her warmth and love for my niece.
I stood and looked at Kaliah, who was staring fiercely at something out the window, jaw clenched. She was mad and hurt, more than I’d suspected.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her.
She didn’t turn from the window or change her expression.
Hugo opened the door, which I took as my cue, and I hopped off the bus. I skulked from parked car to parked car until they ended at a long, two-lane concrete bridge. More cars were parked on the other side, but on the bridge itself, there were only three vehicles, an RV, and two trucks. Throughout the length of the bridge, dozens of people performed various tasks: some unloaded from the two trucks, others set up stages, others erected canopy tents.
Directly to the west, adjacent to the bridge, was its sister, also concrete, also two lanes, but for southbound traffic. An RV and two trucks were on it, too, along with dozens of people working setting up stages and tents. Further west was a steel truss bridge, painted green, that connected Scotia to the town of Rio Dell. It was the bridge from my dream in the deprivation tank, I realized for the first time.
This was the place where Blanche and her followers had died forty-nine years earlier, which had resulted in the creation of a Nexus Whorl. She was gathering her army in the same place, during similar conditions, so her soldiers could graft to the new flood, enter the Nexus Whorl, and invade the seven stomachs.
I’d crossed all three bridges many times, taking tourists to and from the Avenue of the Giants, sometimes stopping in Rio Dell for lunch. During a typical winter storm, forty feet separated these bridges from the Eel River below. Now, less than ten feet separated them, and the water had risen above the tree-covered bluffs on the north bank and spilled into Rio Dell. The north- and southbound lanes of 101 on the other side were dry but surrounded by water, like two spits running parallel.
We couldn’t swim across in current like that, and I didn’t see any boats handy, but even if we found one, I would be afraid to launch in these conditions. The bridges were the only way across, but they were teeming with Blanche’s worker bees, who were preparing for a mass grafting to the flood. They would sound the alarm as soon as they saw me.
Squatting behind the wheel of a truck, I brooded over how to get across unnoticed: lure the workers away somehow, create a diversion . . . . If I hadn’t used that rekulak spell on my mom, I would have it now, to use in any number of ways. I had wasted it. Why? I shouldn’t have needed a spell to figure out she was lying. A lifetime of experiences with her should have made that clear from the beginning. I shook that train of thought out of my head.
What did Blanche want, besides to become a god? What could I use? She liked being interviewed. She liked her exploits to be filmed. She had set up a whole town to create art in her honor. She was a narcissist. She wanted to control the whole universe, literally turn it into her, but she had tucked a select few of us away in Arampom so that we would be around to notice her achievements. Who was she trying to impress? Her dad? If so, could I use that somehow?
I was getting nowhere until my thoughts swung back to the flood. It was the totem that led to the Nexus Whorl. If I could corrupt that totem, make it somehow different than the flood forty-nine years ago in a significant enough way, it would no longer work as a totem. Blanche’s followers wouldn’t be able to graft to it, and she wouldn’t be able to spread herself throughout the stomachs. I wouldn’t need the sourdough starter totem to stop that. But how could I alter the totem of a whole town, of a whole flood?
Fire.
The bridges were evidently a crucial part of the flood totem, which meant this place was crucial. Neither Rio Dell nor Scotia had burned during the ’64 Christmas flood. If I set one of them on fire, it might corrupt the flood totem, change the grafting conditions just enough to prevent Blanche’s army from making a clean graft and marching into the Nexus Whorl. And it might also create enough of a distraction to allow me to
