It made her feel greasy, but such was the deal she made, and she honored her deals. In return, she got this: the chance to see her parents. To see how she’d wrung them out with worry and care.
“They say you’re gonna quit the race,” Blane said. “How you ain’t got a car left that’s fast enough to make up the time.”
“Uh-huh,” said Shiara.
“Y’know, the Wreckers pick off the ones at the back. You don’t wanna be laggin’.”
“I know, Daddy.”
Melly raised her head, sniffling. “Come home, baby,” she said. “You done enough now. You come home.”
“We’re all real proud o’ you here,” said Blane. “You and Cassica. Even after all that stuff she said about Coppermouth.”
Shiara gave a brief laugh. She’d forgotten that. “She didn’t mean it, Daddy. You know Cassica.”
“Come home,” said Melly again.
The cicadas were calling in the floodlit night when Shiara made her way to the garage. There she found Cassica sitting inside Maisie, her hands on the wheel. “Remember her?” she asked as Shiara came over. She patted the dash and touched the seat, as if familiarizing herself anew. “Don’t it seem like forever since we took her out?”
Shiara climbed in the passenger seat next to her friend. She rarely heard Cassica reminisce.
“Remember that time we were racing the Mooncliff rally? We were in, like, seventh place or something, and then—”
“Somethin’ happened,” said Shiara, nodding. They never did figure out what it was, only that suddenly—
“We were in the zone,” said Cassica, her eyes distant as she saw it all again. “Just for a minute it was like everything fell into place, like the whole world shifted to suit us. Like we were just meant to win, and nothing or nobody could stop it. And we flew. Past one, past two. Seventh to first in thirty seconds, and we took that race.” She came back to the present, and she was smiling. “That was something.”
“That was somethin’,” Shiara agreed.
Cassica laid a hand on Shiara’s wrist. “It’s enough, you know,” she said, brave and sad all together. “You, me, and Maisie. Coppermouth. It’s enough.”
Shiara felt something bite down inside her, something that threatened to start a flood. Simple as that, they could go home, and this would all be over. The only thing she had to do was nothing.
But Cassica was her friend. Her best friend. And she’d had a dream. So Shiara reached into her pocket and pulled out a map, which she flattened on the dash.
Cassica frowned. It showed the third stage of the Widowmaker, a crescent-shaped cluster of mountains with Kniferidge Pass at the heart of it.
“I think we can win it,” Shiara said.
Cassica shook her head. “No, Shiara. There’s no point.”
“We can win it,” she insisted.
“They won’t let us!”
“We can win it if we go through the Blight Lands.”
Shiara pointed at the map. On its eastern edge was an empty space, the only hint of the vast desert that sprawled beyond the mountains. “Everyone’s gonna drive up toward the Kniferidge Pass, right? Because that’s the route. But there ain’t no reason we gotta take that route. Long as we get from A to B, anything goes.” She drew a line with her finger. “They’re gonna be drivin’ in a crescent, pickin’ their way through all kinda difficult terrain.” Then she drew a new line, a straight line from one horn of the crescent to the other. “Not us.”
Cassica was speechless for a moment. “You know … you know it’s the frickin’ Blight Lands you’re talking about? The kind of place even Howlers ain’t crazy enough to go? There’s things in the Blight Lands left over from the Omniwar, things that don’t even have names anymore, just waitin’ to kill us! People go nuts just from being in that place! Hell, you can choke from breathin’ a patch of poison air!”
“We can win it,” Shiara told her again.
“Yeah, and we could die!”
“Pretty sure that’s been the case every time we got in the cockpit together.”
“And what would we go in?”
“Maisie,” said Shiara, slapping the dash. “We gonna take Maisie. Anyone can get us through, she can.”
Cassica was confused, and it was beginning to make her angry. “Look, what you trying to do here, Shiara? I’d figured on going home. I thought this was over, and I’d made my peace with that. I almost got you killed for this damn dream of mine. Now you wanna go on?”
“I do,” said Shiara. “I wanna beat ’em.”
“Beat who?” Cassica cried in exasperation.
“Everyone who said we couldn’t. Them that tried to get us killed. Them that made it so Sammis got hurt so bad, and Linty Maxxon, and all o’ them who died. I wanna do it just to show ’em they don’t get to decide.”
Cassica studied her doubtfully, trying to decide if Shiara was only doing this for her sake, or if she really meant it. But Shiara meant it, alright. She’d rarely been so certain of anything.
“You know they’ll send the Wreckers after us,” said Cassica. “Soon as they realize what we’re up to, they’ll do anything they can to stop it.”
“Let ’em,” said Shiara. “Us two and Maisie can take the best they can throw at us. Plus I hear television and radio don’t work in the Blight Lands. Wreckers can’t track so well without their bosses tellin’ ’em where the racers are.”
Cassica put her hands on the wheel, flexed her fingers, faced forward. All her life she’d relied on Shiara’s sane, sensible advice to steer her when she had no answers for herself. Now Shiara was using those same relentless, plodding arguments to push her to a level of recklessness even Cassica would normally balk at.
But Shiara was taking a stand. And she needed Cassica by her side.
“Alright,” said Cassica. A smile spread across her lips. “Alright. Let’s do it. You and me.”
“You and me,” said Shiara. “Let’s get to work.”
The broadcasters didn’t pay much attention to Cassica and Shiara in the buildup to the Widowmaker’s final stage. The commentators made noises about how plucky they were for continuing in their homemade racer—the gutsy, never-say-die spirit of the boondocks—but everyone knew they couldn’t win, so the focus was mostly on those like Kyren Bane, who could.
An hour and a half into the race, twenty minutes after Maisie set off, things were different.
“We’ve stirred ’em up now!” said Shiara as she watched the footage on the screen they’d attached to Maisie’s dash. Commentators were going bug-eyed. Experts spluttered their amazement. People wondered: could it actually be done?
Cassica and Shiara were heading into the Blight Lands.
All the other racers—those who counted, anyway—had already gone up into the mountains by now. They couldn’t change course even if they were crazy enough to want to. Those few racers who started after Maisie were not inclined to follow her lead. They’d heard the stories. Only madness and death could be found in the Blight Lands. Most who went in there never came out, and those who did often left their sanity behind.
But some got through. Some.
The broadcast got fainter and more scrambled. After an hour’s driving it had dissolved into static. The hovercam that was following them became confused by the charged atmosphere and gradually fell behind until it was out of sight.
“Guess we’re on our own now,” said Shiara.
“Yeah.”
And it was a lonely place they found themselves—lonely and strange. They cut a straight line over the hardpan, mountains rearing to their left, a thin trail of dust drifting skyward in their wake. The sun seethed in an acid sky and felt more foreign than Cassica had ever known it, as if they were driving in the glare of an alien star.
The desert spread out before them, dry and rocky and cracked, broken with outcrops that thrust up like stone thorns. A blasted land, hostile to soft life. Crooked plants, black and twisted, clawed at the earth. Those in flower showed l
ong fleshy cups, wet throats that oozed poison.
“The hell they do to this place?” Cassica said. The sense of doom and desolation was so strong it had begun to seep into her, causing a deep unease.
“This area got it bad in the Omniwar,” said Shiara. Her voice sounded wrong to Cassica: tinny and flat. “Stuff got let loose you can’t imagine. Stuff that messed with the laws of physics. Make you crazy just thinkin’ about it.” She tucked a strand of white hair under her helmet. “You should see the other guys, though. Way I hear it, their whole country’s like this.”
They drove for an hour without seeing another living creature, navigating by the mountains. The land rose around them in towering red mesas and wind-carved formations that looked eerily like giants and monsters. The ghostly wail of distant singstones came to them on a hot breeze, and the air began to smell acrid and eggy.
“Has the sun even moved?” Cassica asked.
“ ’Course it has. It must have.”
“Could swear it hasn’t.”
A drop of sweat crawled down Cassica’s scalp. It was hard to convince herself it wasn’t some creeping insect trapped beneath her helmet. The singstones’ lament was making her edgy.
“When you think they’ll catch us?” she asked.
“The Wreckers? Dunno. We were so far back in the pack, they all set off ahead of us. They’re a lot faster than we are, but they gotta double back, come down the mountain, chase us down on the flats. That’s if they can find us without the producers tellin’ ’em where we are.”
“Might be they won’t send anyone,” said Cassica hopefully. “Might be they’ll gamble we won’t make it through. I mean, even if the Wreckers catch us, they won’t get it on camera. Pretty boring for the viewers, right?” Since they weren’t receiving signals, she assumed the cameras in the car and on their helmets weren’t broadcasting either. “Might be they’ll leave us alone.”
Shiara said nothing, but her face was grim. She wasn’t remotely convinced of that.
The ground began to lift ahead of them and they started a long climb up a shallow incline toward the crest of a rise.
“I heard they got flesh-eating gas here,” Shiara said suddenly.
“What?”
“Invisible gas. Clouds of it that stay close to the ground, blowin’ about with the wind. You drive through it and it just eats you to the bone.”
Cassica was horrified. “Why in hell you just tell me that?”
“Dunno,” said Shiara. “Was thinkin’ about it, is all.”
“Well, keep it to yourself next time!”
But it was too late: the thought was there, and doubt swarmed in. Why hadn’t they encountered anything yet? The Blight Lands had such a terrible reputation, but they’d traveled so far unopposed. Had they already brushed past death unaware? Was it waiting for them just ahead, impossible to detect?
In the footwell next to Shiara was the shotgun she’d killed the Howler with. It was illegal to use weapons against other racers and Wreckers, although locals and wildlife were fair game. Perhaps they should have been carrying some from the start, but their meager funds had been needed elsewhere, and they’d never thought they’d need them, never thought they’d have to step out of their car. Time had taught them otherwise, so they brought the shotgun for protection; but it wouldn’t protect against gas.
How would it begin? A tingling on the skin, then a pain like sunburn, deepening to agony till her whole body was aflame with it? Cassica looked down at her hands and for an instant she saw them rotting away before her eyes. It gave her such a jolt of terror that she jerked the wheel and they swerved.
“Whoa! Hoy!” Shiara cried as she was thrown against her harness.
Shut up! Why don’t you shut up? Cassica clenched her jaw. Damn, she was irritable! What was wrong with her? She was about to say something when she spotted movement up on the top of a mesa to their right, and her heart jumped. “You see that?”
“See what?”
“There!” She pointed. “I saw someone!”
“You did?” There was nothing there now.
“Looked like … I think it was one of them swamp folk.”
A flash in her mind: hands on her throat, that deformed face close to hers, the vile damp smell of him.
“One of them? Out here?” Shiara sounded doubtful.
“Maybe a Howler, then!” Cassica snapped.
Shiara scanned the tops of the mesas. “Might’ve been a Howler,” she said, a note of worry creeping into her voice.
“There!” A scramble of movement; dark figures running along the ridge. A different mesa this time. “Howlers! I definitely saw ’em that time!”
“I don’t see ’em.” Shiara was fidgeting in her seat. Cassica knew the thought of Howlers scared her badly. Those hours she’d spent chained to the radiator, waiting to die, must have chewed at her soul the way the swamp man chewed at Cassica’s. “You think they’re after us? Think they’ve set an ambush?”
“Frickin’ Howlers,” Cassica muttered hatefully.
“Wait, the screen’s back on,” Shiara said.
“What are they saying?” Cassica kept an eye out for more Howlers, fingers drumming restlessly on the wheel. She remembered the rocket launcher that took out their Interceptor yesterday and stayed tense, ready for anything. “Shiara? What’s happening?”
“It’s Mom,” said Shiara softly.
“Melly? You serious?”
“She’s tellin’ us we gotta come home. There’s somethin’ bad ahead. We gotta turn back.”
Cassica looked over at the screen, then at Shiara, whose eyes had become wide and childlike. A cold feeling crept into her.
“Shiara,” she said. “Shiara, there ain’t nothing but static on that screen.”
Shiara stared at her like she’d been slapped. “What you talkin’ about? She’s right there! She’s sayin’ we oughta turn back.”
“I’m telling you, she ain’t.”
Shiara was becoming hysterical, her voice rising higher and higher. “We gotta turn back! Mom says! We gotta turn back!”
“We ain’t doing that,” Cassica told her firmly.
Shiara shut up. Then her eyes narrowed, and her face became suspicious and shrewd, and she lunged across the cockpit and seized the wheel. Cassica was flung sideways by the sudden turn, but she wrenched the wheel back before it could tip them. Shiara popped her harness and threw herself at Cassica, wrestling her hands away, teeth gritted and face red. Cassica’s kicking foot found the brake, and Maisie screeched as her wheels locked and she skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust. Shiara was thrown on top of Cassica, crushing her down, and though Cassica fought, she couldn’t get out from under her.
She’s gonna strangle me.
The thought sent her into a frenzy. Somehow she got free of her harness, and she shoved and thumped at her attacker while Shiara tried to hold her down. Grunting, panting, desperate, Cassica pushed the heel of her palm against Shiara’s cheek, forcing her head back …
… and Shiara’s face crumbled beneath her hand.
Where there had been flesh and bone there was only a powdery dust, the red dust of the Rust Bowl. As Cassica flailed and shrieked, cracks ran outward across Shiara’s face and neck, chunks of her breaking away like a sandcastle on the edge of an incoming tide.
The dust was everywhere: in her lungs, in her eyes, in her nostrils. Shiara fell apart in front of her, replaced by something else: a terrifying, groaning thing of red dust, something that slid and collapsed and reformed again, a monster with sharp glinting eyes that loomed from the choking murk to paw at her.
Momma.
She screamed in raw, wild panic. Somehow she got a knee between them and shoved the creature away. It reared back, and she grabbed for the shotgun in Shiara’s footwell and pulled it to her. The creature saw the danger and grabbed it, mitten hands sloughing dust, and they fought for the weapon between them.
But the creature was strong. Cassica was losing the battle. And when s
he did, it would smother her, force its dry arm down her throat, throttle her with dust the way it happened to Momma. Then Cassica would be dust too, nothing more than powder to be blown away on the wind and forgotten. It would be like she’d never existed at all.
With one last cry of abject, senseless denial, she butted her forehead into the creature’s face. The dust gave before the blow, bursting in a cloud, and she hit something solid and heard a crack of bone. The monster reared away with a howl and Cassica pushed it across the cockpit with her boot, launching herself backward. Her elbow hit the door release and it fell open behind her, dumping her heavily on the hard desert ground, her legs tangled in her harness and the shotgun clutched to her chest.
The impact stunned her. She found herself looking up at the sun, which was somehow directly overhead, when a few minutes ago it had been nowhere near its zenith.
Then she felt the weight of the creature on her legs, which were still up on the seat. She tried to pull away but she couldn’t. Awkwardly she turned the shotgun so her finger was on the trigger, barrel aimed up toward the door, just as the creature billowed forth, eyes glowing in rage.
Right into her sights.
Something wet spotted her face, her lips, making her flinch. Before she could stop herself, she’d tasted it. Salty, metallic.
Blood. The thing was bleeding.
But creatures made of dust couldn’t bleed.
A sense of wrongness filled her. Some quiet alarm, previously unheard, now shrilled loud in her mind. How could it be so heavy, made of dust as it was? What did she hit when she headbutted it? How could it bleed?
Her finger hovered on the trigger. This place, this place. Some vital knowledge tickled at the edge of her consciousness, something she remembered, something about the Blight Lands and the stories they told, the way it twisted your mind if you let it. This dust creature didn’t add up. How could it be?