Elysium Girls Read online

  “She’s an odd one, that girl,” said Nurse Gladys. “Always seeing things that aren’t there. People that aren’t there. Of course, in a world like this, who’s to know what’s real and what’s not? Still, she’s crazy as a horsefly in a henhouse.” She stopped, thinking of my rain visions maybe, and straightened herself. “Best not to talk about it. Now you’d better get on with your errands, Sal. And wash out that nose with salt water. It’ll do you good.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. And with a glance at the closed window, she headed into the hospital.

  A familiar tingle ran under my skin. Dishonesty. Ever since my first vision of the rain, I could feel it tingling like electricity the day before a dust storm. I didn’t feel it every time someone was being dishonest, but when I did, it was unmistakable. I wondered for a moment what she could be lying about and why; then I shrugged and went on my way. This certainly wasn’t the first time I’d been lied to.

  I went into my little shack and did my best to distract myself with an old schoolbook. But it seemed that every word I read passed over me like a cloud.

  I sighed and looked at my nose in the small hand mirror that had been my mother’s. Still red and angry and obvious. I can’t go out looking like this, I thought. Then the announcement blared overhead: Mother Morevna’s voice, amplified with magic so that it rang out all over town.

  “Attention, everyone! The ceremony is soon to begin! Please make your way to the center of town.”

  I groaned and pulled my hat back on, shutting my book. Outside, the night wind blew, but not harshly, and the dust only rose to my ankles. The banners hung from building to building, house to house, windmill to windmill, bright against the dark sky, and I followed them to the Square, where all the garlands met at the enormous pole that rose out of the platform in front of the church and jail. People from all over town were congregating on each side of the platform: white people on one side, and everyone else on the other, with buzzing tension in between.

  Everyone faced the doors of the Baptist church, where Mother Morevna would climb up onto the platform and begin the ceremony. People slumped, and their suits and dresses wrinkled in the heat—we didn’t have seasons anymore. Not in this world. Just endless, unbearable heat. One woman across from me was fanning herself with her wide straw hat. Many of them watched me out the corners of their eyes.

  I pulled my hat lower, keeping my eye out for Trixie and her aunt and uncle. God, I hoped they didn’t make me stand with them, though admittedly, there was a low chance of that. Glancing over my shoulders, I went to the shadow of the nearest windmill and stood there alone.

  “Scoot over, criminal,” said a voice. It was Lucy again, in a patterned feed-sack dress, her hair back in a brightly colored kerchief. Her eyelids shimmered slightly in the light.

  “How’d your supply run go?” I asked, making room for her.

  “All right. I gave Jane an extra blush for following us all the way back home.” She looked at me. “I should have given you some concealer. Your nose still looks bad.”

  “Well, it’s the thought that counts,” I said, and she smiled.

  I was thankful that I had someone to stand with. Mourning Night was always hard. The platform now held a small collection of photographs and a few other items. A pair of glasses, an old blue bottle, a bolt of fabric, something that glinted silver and was probably a thimble. These reminders of the dead were so grubby, so pitiful, that they tugged at the heartstrings of even the hardest in Elysium. There were only two toys that I could see: a dirty, one-eyed teddy bear and a turtle that someone had whittled out of a block of wood and painted. Yes, this was much better than last year. But what would next year bring? I had seen the frantic way the farmhands had worked, the textile mill ladies, the dairy farmers, the tanners. I had heard the grumbling. I had seen how much people had done without. But still, the question buzzed among all of us: Would there be a next year? Who would win: Life or Death?

  Suddenly, the crowd quieted. Everyone leaned forward, and all that could be heard was a dog barking somewhere on the edge of town.

  Then the church door opened and she appeared, the one who had saved us all. Mother Morevna seemed to demand attention, even though none of us had ever heard her raise her voice. She was elegant, fierce, powerful, everything I could never be, and the world seemed to stop for her. She wore a beautiful green dress, almost Victorian in modesty, but that seemed to whisper and move with a life of its own. A floral shawl was wrapped around her shoulders, even in the heat, and her hair was pulled back into a tight steel-gray bun. Her nose was like a hawk’s beak behind half-moon glasses, her hands, covered in their strange black tattoos, hung at her sides. Everyone cheered when she drifted out to us. But she raised a hand and the crowd went silent.

  “Dearest friends,” she said, and her clear, sharp voice seemed to crackle with power. “We are gathered here tonight, on this anniversary of the Great Storm of 1935, to mourn the passing of our loved ones. But just as we have found a haven in the great experiment that is Elysium, our loved ones have gone on to their great reward. We remain strong and united, no matter what the future may bring.”

  Lucy shifted beside me, and I caught a whiff of her perfume—yes, perfume, though who knew where she’d gotten it; even in Elysium, Lucy always made it a point to smell nice.

  “… so while we grieve their passing just as we grieve our own in these threadbare days before the Judgment,” Mother Morevna was saying, “we must be mindful of where we are, where they are: Elysium. A good, peaceful home for all.”

  The crowd began to applaud, but Mother Morevna held up her hand.

  “Also, it is of importance that I announce tonight I will be choosing a Successor, a young person who will learn the ways of magic and diplomacy, so as to preserve the society we have created for future generations.”

  At this, there was a low rumbling in the crowd as everyone turned to the people near them to see if they could make any sense of it. A Successor? Successor with a big S—that’s how she’d said it, right? She had never done anything like this before. But who here held the power that Mother Morevna did? Who here could ever hope to measure up to her?

  I turned, scanned the crowd. Out of all my classmates, I couldn’t think of many girls who were anything like Mother Morevna, who were so fearless and quick-acting and, well… magic. Lucy, maybe. She certainly had her own way of doing things, but magic?

  Mother Morevna pulled her black pendant from her blouse—the one she had found the Dowsing Well with. She wound the chain around her hand once, then held it up, where it shone in the light. The pendant pointed straight out into the air, in the direction of the audience.

  “And now,” she said, “I will find her.”

  As we watched, Mother Morevna stepped down from the platform, holding the pendant out as it strained forward, against the chain like a dog on a leash, leading her. She walked several feet into the crowd, then stopped in front of Anna McComber, a red-haired white girl a year older than me. She looked over her shoulder at her mother; Anna’s face was pale and terrified. Mother Morevna said something to the black pendant—I couldn’t tell what—and it went limp again in her hand. Then she raised it over Anna’s head. It hung still for a moment; slowly, it began to swing from side to side, and somehow I knew it meant no.

  Mother Morevna looked at Anna for a moment, then moved on past her as the pendulum went taut again: a black arrow pointing into the crowd. Anna’s mother gathered Anna up and held her close, but her eyes were on Mother Morevna.

  Mother Morevna’s pendulum led her farther, into the west side of the crowd. She stopped again, in front of a Black girl two years younger than me, Georgia Fuller. I saw a few older white men exchange glances as Mother Morevna held the pendulum over Georgia’s head. I wondered if Lucy saw them.

  “She’s wearing my lipstick,” Lucy said when Georgia turned her head away from the pendulum. “Petal Pink.”

  “Petal Pink doesn’t look like that on me,” I said.
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  “Not everything’s for white girls,” said Lucy.

  The pendulum over Georgia’s head swung back and forth, back and forth. Mother Morevna dismissed Georgia and moved on through the crowd for a few more feet before stopping at another girl. She held her pendulum over her head, then kept moving when the pendulum, once more, gave her a no.

  “She’s coming this way,” Lucy said. And she was. My stomach lurched. Mother Morevna was moving through the crowd, her eyes following where her pendulum led. I could see the chain clearly now, straining, pulled by unseen magic. She was moving straight through the crowd, and as girl after girl was dismissed, my heart sped, and some small, faraway, daring part of it seemed to take on the rhythm of what if, what if, what if? What if, after all this time, after all the hurt and sorrow and humiliation, this was what I was destined for? What would people say then? But Mother Morevna stopped in front of someone else.

  Lucy grabbed my arm.

  Trixie Holland, next to her bulldog-faced aunt and uncle. Three rows up, in a yellow dress patched with flour-sack fabric. Unlike the other girls Mother Morevna stopped before, Trixie didn’t cower or whimper. She gave Mother Morevna her wide smile, holding her broad shoulders back with the confidence of Roosevelt. Oh no, I thought, my nose throbbing as though it too was terrified. This isn’t good.

  Mother Morevna raised her pendulum over Trixie’s head. I turned my eyes away. I couldn’t watch. Not Trixie, I thought. Not Trixie. But even as I thought it, I knew that Trixie would make sense. She had all the qualities a leader needed, on the surface, anyway.

  My stomach lurched again. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t watch her be chosen. The Trixies of the world were always chosen. The mean, violent ones. The fight pickers, the hypocrites, the truly dishonest. But what did I expect? After all we’d all been through, it was stupid to think that anything could happen to us but the very worst thing.

  Somewhere I heard Lucy’s voice say, “Um… Sal?” but I barely heard her.

  What would happen once Trixie was the leader of Elysium? Would she toss me out into the Desert of Dust and Steel, like Olivia Rosales? In my mind, it seemed that Trixie’s shadow stretched over all of Elysium, her big hands grasping, her high voice laughing.

  “Sal.” Lucy tapped my shoulder. “Sal!”

  “What?” I snapped.

  But when I turned, it felt as though my stomach dropped out of my body altogether.

  Mother Morevna was standing right in front of me, her black pendulum straining against its chain, pointing at my chest like an arrow.

  “Sallie Wilkerson,” she said, and her voice didn’t echo like it had before. “Well, well. This is a surprise.” Then she whispered to the pendulum, and it went limp in her hand. She raised it up, over my head, the black stone directly over me. My breath froze in my lungs.

  It didn’t swing back and forth. It didn’t do anything at all. It hung still. Dead still. The crowd around me began to murmur, but Mother Morevna didn’t move and neither did the pendulum.

  My body was full of something that felt like ten thousand bees were making a home in my rib cage. It was unbearable. Please, I thought at the pendulum. Please move. The hairs on my arms, on my neck, began to prickle, and I closed my eyes as I realized what I already knew: I want this. I want it to be me.

  Then I felt the electricity intensify, go somehow gold above my head.

  There was a gasp in the crowd. Beside me, Lucy breathed, “Oh my God…”

  I opened my eyes and looked up. Above my head, the pendulum was swinging in a broad, frantic circle.

  “My new Successor, Sallie Wilkerson,” said Mother Morevna, her magically amplified voice echoing from the walls of Elysium. Every eye was on me—me!—and before all those eyes, I felt so small. Was this a mistake?

  Mother Morevna’s claws were on my arm. “Stand up straight. Don’t slouch.”

  I stood to my full, awkward height—just shorter than her, I realized for the first time.

  “Now, come with me.”

  She pulled me through the crowd, and I saw face after shocked face as I passed. Trixie Holland looked about ready to explode from surprise.

  We got to the platform, and Mother Morevna led me up onto it. In the bright light, I could see everyone in Elysium. And for the first time they could see—really see—me. I took a deep, shuddering breath and stood up straight like Mother Morevna had said.

  “People of Elysium,” Mother Morevna said. “Welcome Sallie Wilkerson, my new Successor.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, a murmur of thought so loud I could almost hear it: the Girl Who Cried Rain? And then the people of Elysium, the people who had called me a liar, the indifferent and the pitying alike, slowly began to applaud. I stood there, pale as a fish’s belly, my stomach threatening to turn itself inside out.

  Then Mother Morevna’s hand was on my shoulder, and she was beside me again.

  “Sallie will begin her training immediately,” Mother Morevna said. “Hopefully, her services will not be needed for a long, long time. But meanwhile, I am certain she will prove to be an excellent leader, worthy of your utmost admiration and trust.”

  It was a challenge to the crowd, I realized. She was challenging them on my behalf, daring them not to trust me—not to trust her.

  “Do you have anything to say?” she asked me.

  A speech? Now? I blanched. Public speaking was always my worst subject.

  “I…” I started. “I would just like to say that…” What would I like to say?

  But before I could finish, something caught my eye. A figure on top of the wall, small and quick. A child? A woman? I squinted. It turned, looked right at me.…

  I began to hear it: the rain. Not now, not now, not now… I fought with everything in me. I fell to my knees, trying hard not to vomit. The wind seemed to roar as the rain approached. My nose filled with the smell of it. The last thing I heard before the vision rose up and took me was one of the guards shouting.

  “The Sacrifice! We’ve been robbed!”

  CHAPTER 3

  The rain came like it always did, with a distant rumble that shook the base of my brain. It rolled in much like dust storms roll in. The sky was swollen and roiling; the entire dome of the heavens was so dark that the few trees standing inside Elysium seemed vividly green against the darkness. Then the horizon began to blur with falling rain. The desert began to look like an oil painting, ruined and bleeding as the rain came toward me, turning the dust to mud. It came in sheets, in curtains. Biblical rain, blowing my braids over my shoulders, soaking me to the skin. And as I stood there in it, my wet dress clinging to me, I lifted my arms up as though to welcome the rain home to this dusty, thirsty world, thinking as I always did, Why can’t this be real?

  When I woke later, I could still smell the rain for a few minutes. Then the pain hit. It always felt like I’d been thrown from a roof when I woke from seeing the rain. It was morning. But I wasn’t in my shack. I was in a bed and wearing a white nightdress—old-fashioned in style. Here, there was no dust on the top of the covers, nor on the floor, despite the fact that there were no sheets over the windows or rags under the doors. But there was something familiar about the room. It had been my own Sunday school room, I realized, long ago. There had been a table in the middle, and Miss Willis had gathered us around it and made us read from the Bible, out loud, every Sunday.

  “Hello…?” I said. My voice sounded creaky and hoarse.

  The voice that answered was as old and slow as a weather vane rusted stiff.

  “Hey there, girl.” Mr. Jameson was sitting in a rocking chair by the door, holding a cup of coffee in his weathered hands. The sight of him made me feel relaxed, despite myself. I wondered how long he’d been there.

  “That must have been a bad one,” he said. He handed me a plate covered with a napkin. I removed it. Toast. It had been buttered, and the butter had sunk deep into the hard bread.

  “What happened after I… after I fainted?” I asked.

>   “We brought you here and put you to bed,” he said. “Fortunately, the room was already waiting for you. Sal Wilkerson, the Successor to Mother Morevna.” He smiled. “I’m proud of you, kid.”

  A ripple of excitement went through me. So it hadn’t been a dream. This was real. I had really been chosen. Gingerly, I sat up, and without thinking, I touched my nose. It was straight and normal, not even a hint of tenderness.

  “Mother Morevna fixed that for you,” Mr. Jameson said. “Nobody can tell it’s been broken anymore.”

  I looked around at the unfamiliar familiar room, so stark, so sterile.

  “Everything’s so… clean,” I said.

  “A lot better than that ol’ chicken coop, huh?” Mr. Jameson said. “Mother Morevna prefers you to live here while you’re in training.”

  “Training,” I breathed, letting the smile I felt creep into my voice. I was really going to do this.

  Mr. Jameson sighed and put his coffee cup down beside his chair. “I don’t know if it’s my place to tell you this, but… there’s a little more to it than that. Mother Morevna’s sick—not Dust Sick, mind you. Something about the liver. It could be that she dies before the Dust Soldiers come, which would leave us without anybody powerful enough to face them.”

  I felt the air go out of my lungs.

  “So that’s why she needs a Successor now,” I said. “To face them if she dies before she can.”

  “I pressured her into it, to be honest,” he said apologetically. “She’s old and set in her ways, especially after…” He paused, redirected. “She had a few real bad experiences that have left her thinking she has to do everything on her own. She doesn’t like for things to be out of her control. But even she can’t ignore this possibility.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Fear began to bubble in my stomach. Of course she didn’t want to give up her power, especially not to me, the false prophet who had caused such a ruckus all those years ago.