Elysium Girls Read online

  Red clay (3)

  Beetle wings (Japanese, Potato, Red)

  Ink—nontoxic

  Crayons

  Beeswax

  I gave it back to her, and we watched as the workers finished what was left of their job on the platform and shuffled over to the little spread-out handkerchief on which a few water rations (old Coke bottles filled with water) waited.

  “Nobody suspects anything, don’t worry,” Lucy said, watching how nervously I was holding the bucket. “Least of all from you.”

  “I’m just a false prophet, after all. I couldn’t be a thief too.”

  “Oh, brush that chip off your shoulder,” Lucy said. “Besides, I don’t think you can steal from an endless well.”

  “There are people who would argue with you on that one,” I said.

  “Well, crime or not, I’m glad you can do it, because without that water, I’d be sunk.” Lucy squinted into the darkness and crossed slim, elegant arms. “Where is this girl? I’ve been out here for thirty minutes. She’s supposed to be coming from the west.”

  “I’m headed west,” I said. “You can come with me if you want.”

  Lucy’s eyes darted toward the platform. The workers, satisfied for the night, wiped their brows and began to leave the clearing in twos and threes. Across the platform, the steeple of the Baptist church jutted up, taller than the windmills, and somehow whiter, its wind-battered cross stark against the sky. The round rose window—unbroken by the high winds—was dark like a closed eye. Mother Morevna was asleep.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see how you do it anyway.”

  Sequestered in the shadow of the largest windmill in Elysium, inside a makeshift mud-brick igloo, almost as big as a house, was what I’d come for. The Dowsing Well: the salvation of Elysium. Mother Morevna had divined it herself, and we’d built the walls around it: the holy water that would never run dry. Once a week, I came to the Dowsing Well to trade Lucy a bucketful of water for a week’s worth of rations. That way, I wouldn’t have to see Trixie or her aunt and uncle at all if I didn’t want to.

  I hugged my bucket close to me, and we sneaked over to the door.

  It was locked, of course, but I pulled a hairpin out of my hair and went to work.

  “Jesus,” Lucy said. “You’re a lock picker too?”

  “Do you want this water or not?”

  It clicked open, and Lucy and I went inside. It was dark without a lamp, so Lucy struck a match from her pocket. There on the cool ground was a circular door. I opened it and looked down into the circle of darkness. Even through my broken nose, I could smell the slightly mineral, sulfuric tang of deep well water.

  I seized the nearby rope and pulley and attached my bucket. Then I lowered it down into the darkness until I felt it hit water and sink. Then I pulled up, up, up, until it emerged from the darkness, full of cool water. I heaved it into my arms, and it sloshed against my dusty skin as I handed the bucket to Lucy.

  She kept watch as I covered the hatch and locked the door.

  “Shoot,” Lucy said. “I left the rations back at my house.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Just bring them tomorrow.”

  “It’s just toward the Square. Come with me and I’ll give them to you. Unless you’ve got something important to do.”

  “Nah, I can come,” I said.

  We weaved back through the houses in the strip where the east and west sides met. We passed the little brick building where Mr. Truman lived and taught piano, then the little wood house where one of the German families (“them Krauts from down Shattuck” as a boy in my class had once said) made homemade schnapps. We passed the dust mask factory, the clothing factory, and, last, the enormous, stinking chicken coop, where the chickens slept fitfully, wondering if tomorrow would be the day they became dinner. All was quiet. All was still.

  Suddenly, Lucy stopped.

  I followed her gaze. There in the darkness lay a squarish plank-board house. Unlike the other houses, it had not been hung with Mourning Night banners. One window was broken. Bottles and dead weed-flowers sat, dusty and undisturbed, in front of the door.

  The Robertson house.

  No one talked about what had happened there four years ago, but it didn’t matter. We all remembered. That was when everything had begun to go downhill. It all started when Mrs. Rosales died and left her two girls in the care of their stepfather, James Robertson. He was a nice, smiling guard who was known for things like giving up rations to families with sick children and building houses for people who had never had houses before. And even though it was a shame that the Rosales girls’ mother was dead, we couldn’t imagine a better father for them.

  The girls themselves, however, were a different matter.

  Both of them were older than I was, fifteen and seventeen when I had been twelve, but I remembered them. Especially Olivia, the younger of the two. After her mother died, she began acting up at school, starting fights, stealing rations. She had often been seen going to and from the church—getting a talking-to from Mr. Jameson or Mother Morevna, probably. As for the older sister, Rosalita, she was rarely seen, even in those days. What was the point of a girl that slow going to school, after all? people said.

  There hadn’t been any crime at all in Elysium since the walls went up. Aside from my mother’s death, the first six years of Elysium had seemed almost dreamlike. Everyone, no matter their color or gender, had gotten along. Everyone had believed in Mother Morevna’s new, equal society, and if they hadn’t, no one had dared say anything. But then, one morning four years ago, Mr. Robertson’s corpse was found lying in the dust in the Square outside the church. He was spread-eagled, his throat slit. The words ¿Me oyes ahora? had been scrawled around him, a bloody halo.

  When guards went to the Robertson house, Olivia was holding her sister’s hand in her own bloody ones, and weeping, “No te preocupes, Rosa… cálmate, aquí estoy, aquí estoy…”

  And everything changed. There was a surge of ugliness. Fights sprang up between the races. There were threats, insults thrown in the streets. There was even talk of bringing back Whites Only areas, sending “Mexican” families out into the desert, and it had taken everything Mother Morevna and Mr. Jameson had to calm everyone again.

  I remember hearing stories about how Olivia just sat across from Mother Morevna, silent and hard-hearted as a stone, with his blood still under her fingernails. In the end, it was decided: Olivia Rosales, the fifteen-year-old murderess, had to pay for her sins in the Desert of Dust and Steel.

  I remember as they opened the doors to the desert. I remember how everyone gathered around the gate, how Rosalita cried out and drooled and had to be taken away to the hospital. I remember Olivia’s black hair flying in the wind, her dark eyes wide with fear and anger. But the doors closed behind her anyway.

  Rosalita remained at the hospital for a while, as little seen and ghostly as she had always been. When she died a year later, she was buried in the northeastern wall, at night, to avoid further scandal. Her name was carved into the outside of the wall as well as the inside, so that if Olivia was still out there somewhere, she could see. Their house was boarded up, and we all went back to our lives as well as we could, working ever onward, ever toward the goal we would be measured for in April. But the tension never completely went away. Crop production went down and unrest rose, simmering beneath the surface of Elysium. Especially in these last months before the Dust Soldiers’ return, unease and blame lurked in shadows, smiles, handshakes. And that bloodstained house sat like a scar in the center of town, a constant reminder of the crime that had cracked our foundation. Even going near it made me feel sick.

  “I dare you to go onto the porch,” Lucy smirked.

  “No!” I said. I glanced back toward the church, still visible from the shadows.

  “I’ll do it,” Lucy said.

  She crept toward the house, her shoulders bent, her dark skin gleaming in the torchlight.

  Just then, the
rose window of the Baptist church flared into light, its great round eye opening.

  Mother Morevna.

  “Shit!” we hissed together. Lucy leapt off the platform, and we ran off in the direction of the hospital, lugging the bucket as best we could together, water splashing against our dresses. No one chased us. No one came for us. But still, we felt Mother Morevna’s presence like breath down our necks. And, behind us, the light in the rose window dimmed again.

  By the time we got to Lucy’s house, our arms and legs hurt and we’d spilled nearly half the water. But there was no helping it. Lucy took what was left into her house and brought the empty bucket back out to me.

  “Here you go,” she said, handing me a stack of food and water rations. “Thanks again.”

  “Lucy!” came a voice from the darkness. We turned.

  Jane Cornett, a white girl a year younger than us, was standing in the dark a few houses away. She gestured to Lucy, then to her coat with its full pockets.

  “There she is,” Lucy said. “I gotta go. And if Trixie gives you trouble again, let me know, all right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Night, Lucy.”

  “Night, Sal.”

  And like that, Lucy slipped into the shadows with Jane and disappeared.

  I headed back across town with my empty bucket. Then I slipped behind Mr. Jameson’s house to my chicken coop. I unlocked the door and let it swing open. Inside were my few things: my scavenged dresser full of clothes and shoes, my little box of pictures and mementos, my father’s useless old radio, my bed. I crawled inside and set down my bucket, lit the kerosene lamp. On the wall just outside the window, close to the base, Mama’s name flared into light: MYRTLE WILKERSON. As always, my heart twisted in on itself when I saw it. Before I could stop myself, I remembered her as she had been the last time I saw her, thin and pale, lying on her cot in the hospital, her forehead beaded with sweat, a rag beside her covered with mud and blood.

  I shook myself and went through all the motions of going to bed in the Dust Bowl. I wetted the sheets that covered the windows, secured them over the frame. I washed up in the water trough close by, changed into sleeping clothes, ate a piece of stale cornbread. Then I lay on my back, my face away from Mama’s name, trying not to think about Trixie, or Mama, or the rain that never came. And in the silence, I could have sworn I heard my radio, dead for nine years, begin to crackle.

  In the place between worlds, Life sat, invisible and present as electricity, brooding on the Game, which was coming to its end. The young daemon She had called to Her hesitated just a moment before saying, “You called me, ma’am?”

  Ten years have almost passed, and the scales are tipping against me, Life said. But I will not give up to my sister so easily. Given her many advantages, I want to exercise one of my own: I am choosing my Wildcard.

  “I… don’t understand,” said the daemon in the darkness. “What do I have to do with that?”

  It will be you, said Life. I will make my own Wildcard, unlike my sister. I will fashion you a body, and you will go down to our Game board in the middle of the desert. Use your influence and tip the scales in my favor. If you’re successful, you will be rewarded handsomely.

  “Really?” he asked. The darkness thrummed, and he knew it was a yes. It wasn’t every day that someone was invited to go down, and certainly, he had never been chosen. And to have a body, a human body… it was like a dream!

  “But… why did you choose me?” he asked.

  I didn’t, said Life. She did.

  The Mother Goddess. The creator of everything that had been and everything that would be. She had chosen him. Him, over all the others. But why? What had he done to command Her attention?

  “There has to be some mistake,” the daemon started. “I’m not particularly special, or…”

  But as he drew himself up, he found that he was taking shape. He grew taller, leaner, shifting between several possible faces, skin colors, heights, hats, sport coats, suspenders, shoes. He looked down, and his hands were pale, long-fingered. Round spectacles—cracked in one lens—appeared on his nose. In his hand, he held a suitcase. In his mind, there was a past, a name.

  “Asa Skander,” he said, and he knew it was right.

  An odd form, said Life. It is not what I expected, but it is what was in you, so I suppose it will do.

  A door appeared in the darkness, narrow, wooden, and just taller than the young man himself. It seemed to vibrate with possibility, and he knew that beyond it was the World.

  Your mission is simple, She said, and there was a smell of petrichor in the air. In keeping with the rules, you may not tell them outright what they must do, and you’ll find you won’t be able to. But I will give you something important, something that can turn the tides of the Game, and you must return it to its owner. That is your mission.

  Asa felt something in his hand. A small piece of amber with what looked like a cricket inside it.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “That’s all?”

  It is not for a daemon to understand, said Life. Just worry about your mission. And keep in mind that Death’s Wildcard can disarm your entire mission—unless you want to try disarming hers, which I would not suggest. Death has the advantage, after all, since all She has to do is create enough chaos to tip the scales.

  “Who is she?” Asa asked. “And what is her mission?”

  I do not know, other than that she is unknowingly bent on destroying Elysium. I’m sure you will know her if you pay attention.

  Fair enough, thought Asa, pocketing the amber piece. I’m just along for the ride.

  The soles of his wing-tip shoes began to glow. He raised his foot and saw the designs on the bottoms: eyes, wheels, wings, lightning, the sun. They shifted under him, wiggled, changed, moved.

  “What happens if I fail?” he asked.

  The Sentinels will come and take back what is mine, She said. You don’t want that, do you?

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I surely do not.” And with a deep breath, he stepped through the door and disappeared.

  CHAPTER 2

  3 MONTHS

  AND

  29 DAYS

  REMAIN.

  Before Black Sunday, I’d never had a vision. But after the walls went up, the whole world had the feeling of an unseen storm about to creep up over the horizon. I smelled it in the air, felt it prickle my skin. It had been so real that a few times I’d run outside, my arms spread, my mouth open, convinced that rain would fall any moment, only to be met with dust and wind. But the truth was that I was strange long before the world of the Game began. Mama and Papa had thought I was funny, a little tomboy with her head in the clouds. My strange girl, Mama would call me. Her favorite story was how when I’d been born there had been blackbirds all over our roof. Not anyone else’s roof. Just ours. She said they’d given me a blackbird blessing.

  They’d read me books about knights and heroes, made up stories about inventive young girls who saved the day, and gradually I grew to understand that all these plucky young heroines were me in disguise. They both believed that I was special. And special people were born for a reason. Even after the accident that claimed Papa’s life, even after our world ended and the walls started going up, Mama never stopped believing that my specialness, my destiny, would make itself known. That I would make a difference someday. And when I smelled rain on the wind for the first time and it didn’t come, she didn’t think I had lied about it. Not exactly. But she didn’t believe it was real yet. She believed that I thought it was real. And to her, if I believed it, it wasn’t a lie. I should have known that not everyone thought that way.

  When morning came, I woke to a throbbing nose, filled with dust and dried blood. I washed up in the trough and got dressed in my shabby Sunday dress that was about two inches too short, and carefully shadowed my face with an old straw hat.

  But as I was passing the hospital, a nurse appeared, Nurse Gladys Ann, on her way to open up the hospital, and she stopped in h
er tracks when she saw me.

  “Sal Wilkerson?” she said. “Well, bless my soul! How are you doing these days?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Just… trying to get some errands run.”

  “I see,” she said. She glanced at my face and saw my nose. “What happened? Somebody beat you up? Because if they did—”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just stepped on a rake.”

  “Well, next time you find yourself in a situation like that, you run away as fast as you can. There’s no shame in running, you know. And stay out of unsafe areas. Wandering out on your own where no one can help can get you killed.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said flatly. “I know all about that.”

  “Oh, Sal,” said Nurse Gladys. “I didn’t mean… That was different… You were just a little girl. And there’s no running from a dust storm, Sal. You know that.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could, there was a crash from inside the hospital. A full bedpan was hurled against the nearest window and its contents splattered all down the glass.

  I jumped.

  From inside, I could hear the overnight nurses running down the hall, and a woman shouting in Spanish.

  “Oh, Lord, what is it now?” said Nurse Gladys.

  “Hold her down!” came a muffled voice through the window.

  “I’m trying!” said another.

  “Quick! The syringe!”

  “¡HOY!” the woman shouted. “¡Ella viene hoy!”

  “Hold her!”

  Then there was a high, keening noise and she fell silent.

  I glanced at Nurse Gladys. “Who is that in there?” I asked.

  “Oh, just Miss Ibarra,” she replied with a knowing look.

  I’d heard about Miss Ibarra, though I’d never seen her myself. During the unstable time when Elysium was still reeling from Olivia Rosales’s banishment, a young woman named Angélica Ibarra had gone absolutely insane when her fiancé had fallen from the west wall and broken his neck. She ran around town screaming and shouting and causing a ruckus until Mother Morevna had her sent to the hospital, where she’d been ever since. She was, possibly, one of the few people in Elysium that I pitied.