Nia disentangled herself from Bernice, who almost objected to being left without her cousin’s embrace. But Nia stood up anyway; she wiped her hands on her pants and braided back the hair that had come loose during her flight. Bernice remained seated. Her hair still covered most of her face, which was probably a good thing. The caved, collapsed portion of her skull was not filling out fast if it was rising at all.
Mossfeaster tossed the shell to Nia, who caught it and turned it over in her fingers. It felt warm and vaguely unpleasant to touch. Where it sat on her hand, it left faint pink marks that looked like the start of blisters.
“This is the call?” she said, bouncing it from hand to hand. She pulled the scarf from her hair and used it to fashion a bag. She tied the shell up in knots and held the makeshift sack by a corner. “We got it? That’s it? Now she can’t disturb Leviathan?”
Bernice said, “I took it away from her.”
“I heard you the first time,” Nia told her. “And I saw you do it, anyway. But I’m not real sure I believe you did it to be helpful. You’ve never done anything to be good in your whole life.”
“How would you know? You didn’t know me for my whole life, did you?”
“I knew you long enough.”
Mossfeaster growled, and it was a low-pitched, deeply annoyed sound. “The call still exists, and it will be a constant danger until its power is dispersed. Such things are not created lightly, and they are not disposed of easily. The water witch did not have time to charge it, so it is less dangerous to us now than it might’ve been otherwise. But it could still lift the old god out of his slumber.”
Nia held the bag up and frowned. “So what do we do, bury it?”
“No, it must be lifted up out of the water witch’s reach. I know a place,” Mossfeaster said. “It is miles from here, farther away from the water, and safer. The call will take years to drain, but I have devised a system to speed the process.”
“How’s that?” Bernice asked.
Nia found her cousin’s curiosity worrisome. “Mossfeaster,” she said, cutting the creature off before it could tell Bernice anything else. “I trust you. If you say you’ve got someplace to put it and something that’ll take all the power out of it, then I believe you. Where are we going, and how are we getting there?”
Mossfeaster looked back and forth between the two women.
Bernice was on the ground, peering up with one bright eye from beneath the ruins of her sweetly curled hair. Her flattened, demolished hand was swinging from its perch on her knee, but it was reshaping itself. And even her head was inflating again, rising like a yeast-filled loaf of bread, but slower. Within another hour, perhaps, her skull would be the right shape again.
Nia stood beside her, above her. But she was glaring at Mossfeaster, trying to tell the creature everything it needed to know about why they must not tell her cousin anything at all, lest she use it against them.
Already Bernice was regaining her predatory posture, even sitting on the ground, looking as if she’d been run over by a train. Every moment that passed gave her time to heal, and Nia was suddenly wondering if she’d made the right decision after all. She might have torn off Bernice’s arm to take the shell and left the girl to die. She might have done any number of things differently.
But the choice had been made, and now it petrified her with uncertainty.
“Mossfeaster,” Nia begged it with the only name she had to call it by. “I don’t care if she’s almost saved the world. You can bet she’s got a terrible reason for it.”
“I don’t care about that,” it said.
“She killed—”
“I know she did. I’m sure she’s killed more people than you could guess, and I’m sure she’s done it with a smile. But she has been useful to us, even if it was against her own volition. Whatever she wanted, whatever she meant, and whatever she tried, she has nearly died to keep the call away from her Mother. She has proved that we share at least part of a goal in common. As for the rest of what she plots, I cannot say—but I will watch her.”
“Watch me all you want,” Bernice grumbled. “I’m just trying to help. I got your goddamned shell for you, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t get it for me. You didn’t even know I was coming.”
“Stop it,” Mossfeaster told them both. “Stop it, and let’s start moving. Sam is waiting with the ambulance. I told him to wait at the road.”
“Which road?” Bernice asked.
“I’ll take you there. We aren’t far.” It waved down at Bernice, indicating that she should rise.
She made a show of hauling herself to her feet, moving shakily and refusing assistance except from the tree she gripped. She used her good hand to draw herself up against it, and finally she stood under her own power. Weak, wobbly, and with legs still crooked in places, she was upright and defiant.
“But . . . but as long as she’s with us, Arahab will follow us!”
“As long as we have the call, she’ll follow us anyway.” Mossfeaster was moving, wandering back the way they’d come. “It doesn’t matter. The water witch cannot easily go where we are going.”
“She’ll slow us down!”
“You slowed us down when you were made of stone, little troll. As a matter of philosophical consistency, it would be illogical to leave her. Now, help her. Come.”
Nia sulked over to Bernice, who was standing and shaking in place. “I don’t trust you,” she informed her.
“I don’t trust you either. I’m the one who saved the world.”
“You did not.”
Nia offered her arm, and Bernice tucked it around herself, leaning into the assistance and using Nia’s weight to prop herself up. Together, the two of them walked and limped unsteadily behind Mossfeaster.
Back at the main road they found the ambulance, empty and pushed to the side of the road. There was blood all over the back of it. Nia wanted to ask Bernice whose it was, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t like the answer, so she didn’t let the question air.
Bernice brought the subject up herself. “Is this the one I took?”
“I think so. I saw Sam trying to drive it.”
She made a small noise that said she was impressed. “The clutch is crazy sticky. It’s awful to drive, but it was all I could get my hands on in a pinch.”
Mossfeaster paced around the vehicle while Nia deposited Bernice on its back bumper. “Samuel?” the creature called. “Samuel, where have you gone?” Then it turned to the girls and added, “He wasn’t able to find another means of transportation. He ran behind you, Nia. You’re much faster, but he wore himself out trying to follow.”
“I’m over here,” Sam announced, floundering through the underbrush as he stumbled up to the vehicle.
“What were you doing?” Nia asked.
“Hiding. This thing’s stolen, you know? People are going to be looking for it, and I’d rather they didn’t find it while I’m sitting inside it.”
She nodded. And then, flipping a thumb at her cousin, she said, “This is Bernice. She’s coming along. She’s the one who stole this ride in the first place.”
Sam looked her up and down with a frank and frightened glare of appraisal, but he knew better than to pry for details. “Fine with me. Mossfeaster says we’re going east.”
“Always east, until it’s time to go west.”
Nia helped Bernice crawl up into the back of the van, then sat down on a gurney from which she could monitor the other girl. “Now you’re being cryptic. Great,” she said to Mossfeaster.
“It isn’t cryptic; it’s precise. We’re seeking the center. I told you, I’ve made a place for the call. We’ll put it there, out of reach, and we’ll drain it dry.”
“And then what?” Bernice asked. She was huddled on the van’s floor, and her body shuddered when Sam started the engine. “What’s going to happen to us?”
“To us?” Mossfeaster climbed up into the van and shut the doors behind himself, closing them all in together. “To me,
nothing. To her—” It indicated Nia. “—precious little.” Then it turned its attention to Bernice. “Your Mother fears that she’s offended those who favor fire, and until someone tells her otherwise, I’m content to let her believe that Nia is their emissary. If she is careful, she can expect to be left alone.”
Bernice shifted and hugged her legs. “And what about me?”
At first no one answered, but Mossfeaster shrugged and said, “Eventually, she’ll catch you and kill you. There’s too much water in this world for you to hide forever. Do understand, little shark: You may travel with us if it suits you to have company while you repair yourself. But we are not your guardians, and we will not protect you. You have chosen your own path. Now she’s going to chase you down it, and you will run that way alone.”
East, into the Center
In the center of the peninsula, the land was not so easily cooled by the wind that blows across the ocean. The air was thicker and warmer, and in the afternoons when the thunderstorms wandered through, it was much wetter. There was no salty breeze to dry the dampness out, so it hung close to the ground and scarcely stirred.
East, and away from the water, the rain forest foliage thinned, and there were fewer trees. The landscape stretched into patchy places where the low spots became swampy, and the higher spots grew short, scraggly trees and tall, whip-sharp grasses.
Where it wasn’t white and brown, the world was a blackened green.
Nia had never been so far away from the water. She’d never seen the peculiar stretches of Florida that look like picture books of Africa. It was strange to her, the way it was dry except for the oil-dark puddles that stretched for acres, but felt so heavily wet to breathe. Even with the windows down, there wasn’t enough motion in the air to take away the worst of it.
The ambulance looked and felt like an oven, and every half hour Mossfeaster would swear that they had almost arrived.
When the vehicle overheated outside of Lake Wales, the passengers all unloaded themselves and set to walking.
Even Bernice, with her battered head and mutilated hand, could move again. She walked slowly and uncomfortably, but the few hours between the shore and the state’s interior had given her time to rest and heal.
Nia watched her cousin struggle to put one crooked foot in front of the other. It was difficult to match the sight with what she knew of the girl a few years ago. The broken, hobbling woman who shambled as if she were a thousand years old . . . she couldn’t be the swift and wicked thing who casually murdered and dressed like a photo in a catalog.
Maybe she’ll always be like this, Nia thought. Healing but never healed, that’s what Arahab said. Or maybe that means something other than the obvious.
She made a point of walking alongside Bernice, keeping the slower pace while Mossfeaster and Sam pushed on ahead. The sun didn’t so much shine down as press down, shoving against them with fiery hands that made them drag—except for Mossfeaster. He seemed to enjoy the warmth even as it dried him out. With every step, he’d shed another dusty puff of dehydrated leaves and dirt.
“You don’t have to keep me company,” Bernice said to Nia without looking at her. “I’m slow, but you don’t need me anymore, right? That’s what your big freaky friend said.”
“That was the gist of it. You made your own bed, and now you’ve got to sleep in it. That’s how Grandma used to put it.”
“Grandma. I guess you lived there with her? With them? Before you came down to the island, I mean.”
Nia nodded.
“Have you been back there? Since . . . since everything?”
“No.” Nia thought of telling her everything—how she’d been awake and alive again for only a few short days, how she’d been trapped at that house on the beach in the interim. It was that same damn house, the one she’d visited out of boredom, curiosity, and familial politeness, to which she’d been anchored by death and magic. But she stifled the impulse. She knew Bernice well enough, knew better than to tell her anything at all that she might use later.
But Bernice pressed, trying to squeeze out more. “Why not? I thought you liked them.”
“And you didn’t?”
“I barely knew them,” she said.
Nia almost argued, but then realized that Bernice might be telling the truth, just this once. “I guess you moved to New York when you were pretty small. Do you even remember Grandma?”
“I remember that there was a Grandma. I have this idea of her, like she was a big woman who wore men’s clothes that didn’t fit her too good. I think of her wearing overalls like a farmer, and having her hair held up in a scarf like the one you were wearing.”
Nia mumbled, “She did work on a farm. And it was her farm, too, after Grandpa died.”
“So they might still be there, right? Up in Tallahassee? Isn’t that where you came from? There might still be a farm there, with Grandma and your mom, and maybe my mother, too.” Her voice sounded funny, or maybe it was just the condition of her mouth.
Nia didn’t like where this conversation was going, so she wasn’t sure how to answer. It gave her a pang that tasted like sorrow and terror when she thought about Bernice showing up at the orchard. It made her throat clench to imagine how that might go. So she lied with caution. “I heard that your mom was going back to New York. If you’d look around, you’ll see—times aren’t real good. I don’t know if they’ve kept the farm or not. Lots of farms are going bust, and if Grandma couldn’t keep hers, I don’t know where else they’d go.”
“So you didn’t go looking for them?”
“No,” Nia said. She did not add that she’d not had time. “Things are different now. What would I say to them, anyway? It’s been years since we’ve been gone. They probably think we’re dead, and it would only confuse them and maybe hurt their feelings if they found out different.”
“Why would it hurt them? Maybe they’d be happy to hear we’re all right.”
“Happy? Only if you could make up some story they’d believe. And it’d have to be pretty crazy, but pretty believable—if you wanted them to think you’d been alive for years, but you never let them know you were safe. I can’t tell them I’m all right, because then they’ll wonder why I didn’t say something sooner, and I’m not—” She glanced sideways at Bernice, who was watching her closely through that matted hair. “—I’m not as good at lying as you are.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome, I guess.” She wanted to stop talking, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t had anyone to talk to in so long, except for Mossfeaster and Sam. “So, tell me, would you? And I know there’s no way I can believe you, but I want to hear you make something up anyhow. Why did you do it?”
“Why’d I do what?”
“Any of it? What’s wrong with you, Neecy?”
Bernice grimaced. “Don’t call me that. That’s what Daddy called me, before he died.” She took her time working up an answer, but the words she picked weren’t very complicated. “You ask that question like you figure there’s no real answer. And maybe there isn’t. What do you want me to say? You want me to make up some big defense? I don’t owe you that. I don’t owe you anything. I saved the goddamned world today, and I don’t have to tell you a thing. I’ve always got my reasons, how about that? You and me are different, that’s all.”
“It’s not just me,” Nia protested. “You’re different from a lot of people.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I’m just lucky or something.”
“Maybe you’re just crazy.”
Bernice’s face twisted, unable to decide on a frown or a smirk. She settled on a smirk. “Anything’s possible, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have said that once, but now? Anything’s possible. Hey, wow. Would you look at that?”
“What?”
“That.” Bernice pointed west. And there, rising above the rest of the landscape, appeared a tall, thin streak against the sky. They must have been a few miles away yet, but there it was: a pink, fleshy colored needl
e standing alone on a hill.
“That,” Mossfeaster said over his shoulder, “is the tower. And that is where we’re going, in case anyone was concerned about getting lost. If we get separated, now you know where to meet.”
Bernice stopped and cocked her head to the right. A tattered curl dipped away, and Nia could see that she had two eyes again; the one that had been crushed back into her sinuses had filled out, and although it was red and watery, it was blinking and aware. “That’s it? A tower? That’s how you’re going to get that thing away from Arahab?”
Mossfeaster kept walking, and everyone else did, too, so Bernice resumed her shamble and caught up quickly.
Nia wasn’t sure how she felt about Bernice’s speedy hobble. Her performance was improving faster than her appearance, and it worried Nia. This was just one more way for Bernice to lie, if she wanted sympathy or if she wished to feign weakness.
The creature at the lead faltered, and then tipped its head toward a pair of dirt ruts that might have served as a road. “But we’re going to detour, slightly. For safety’s sake.”
Bernice rubbed at the side of her head and asked, “For whose safety? Mine?”
“For everyone’s. I don’t know how fast your Mother moves through groundwater, but if she wants to lash out, she’ll try it from the lake nearby. I prepared this place years ago, back before either of you became what you are now,” Mossfeaster told them. “I should warn you that it’s haunted, but the haunting is benign and barely even interesting. Edward loved the place so much, he chose to remain. He says he likes the bells.”
“Is this even a road?” Sam kicked his soft leather shoe into the sand. “It looks more like a trail.”
“Be quiet, all of you, if all you can do is argue and complain. We’re nearly finished, and then you can scatter, or stay, or do anything you like.”
“But this tower, you said it’s safe from Arahab?” Bernice had fixated on that implication and was clinging to it.
“Yes. I chose the location because it would repel her. It is perfect in its design. It is as if the world-makers agreed, ‘There ought to be a place where she cannot go.’ And I found it, and I found a man who could reinforce it. And now it is a great fortress.”