My dad, still in the doorway, buries his face in his hands. His voice, when he speaks, is muffled. “I never should have sent him away.”
No, I think, you shouldn’t have.
But then Whit shouldn’t have let himself be Excised, either. So whose fault is it, really?
Chapter 41
Whit
FROM WHERE I’M CROUCHED, I see mostly hooves. Sometimes I catch glimpses of the Horsemen’s boots, trimmed with snakeskin and feathers. And occasionally a squirrel skitters through my line of sight.
That’s pretty much it.
Not that I expected anything else. I knew right when I crawled in that, while a giant concrete drainpipe isn’t the worst place to call home, it’s damn close enough.
The funny—or unfunny—thing is that it feels right to me. I’ve got nowhere to go, so why pretend that I do? I’m embracing my fate.
Let’s say it again now: the fate I stupidly chose.
I’ve scavenged a handful of musty blankets, full of holes and mouse droppings. Layers of cardboard make up my mattress. They’re not what I’d call soft, but they act as insulation, keeping the cold of the concrete from seeping into my bones.
Pride won’t let me sneak back to my apartment for a pillow, or maybe another warm coat. Because if I take something, Janine will notice it’s missing, and then she’ll think of me.
I don’t want that.
Besides my pitiful bedding, I’ve got some matches, some candles, and a geranium. Seriously. Someone threw it away because it was basically 98 percent dead. But I repotted it in an old coffee can, and it’s looking pretty good now. There’s a bud—just a tiny pink speck—that’s going to turn into a nice flower one of these days.
See? Just when you thought there was no hope.
Actually, I’m being sarcastic. There is no hope.
At the other end of the pipe, the one that faces away from the street, is a pit where I build a fire sometimes. I heat chili in the coals and eat it, spoonless, right out of the can. Ditto chicken soup and canned spaghetti and meatballs.
As a structure, my pipe is as solid as it gets: while I’m tucked inside it, the world can go to hell around me.
And it seems like it is.
There’s shouting on the street, and I peer out to see a pair of Horsemen stopping a man and demanding, in their strange, guttural accent, to see his papers.
“I have to go to my mother’s,” the man pleads. “She’s old. Her boiler’s not working.”
The bearded man on the gray horse sneers. “No papers,” he grunts. “Criminal.”
“No,” the man says, “I just—”
Quick as lightning, the Horseman riding the bay clubs him on the side of the head. The man crumples to the ground, and they stand over him, taunting: “Get up, get up! Run home to Mama.”
After a few moments, the man struggles to his feet and tries to hobble away. But the Horsemen follow him. First they walk their horses behind him, and then, as he picks up speed, they urge them to a lope.
I can see his terrified face as he tries to go faster, and if I could magically give him the speed and strength of my legs, I would.
As they near him again, they begin to grin. The first one throws a rock, hitting the man in the back and knocking him down. The second spurs his horse over the man’s prone body—and I watch, in horror, as the animal tramples him.
To death.
And I do nothing. Because there is nothing I can do.
I bury my head in my blankets and curse myself, for the millionth time, for giving up my powers. I bite my lip to keep from screaming. I stay like that until I hear the footsteps. Close by.
Getting closer.
Now right outside.
I grab a can of beans as a weapon. But then Wisty’s head appears in the opening of the pipe, upside down. Her long, windblown hair brushes in the dirt.
“Well, well, well,” she says.
Then she drops all the way down and quickly scuttles into the pipe.
“Can’t wait for you to invite me in,” she says. “There are Horsemen just around the corner.” Instead of hugging me, or even meeting my eye, Wisty looks around the drainpipe. “Nice digs,” she says dryly. She reaches for a blanket and sits down cross-legged. “Candles, wool blankets, a plant—if there was a decorating magazine for homeless dudes, you’d be in it. This is totally hobo chic.”
I decide to take her joking as a good sign. Maybe she doesn’t hate me as much as I think she does. “How’d you find me?”
“Magic,” she declares.
I can’t take it; I look down at my powerless hands. “Comes in handy, doesn’t it?” I say softly.
“Oh, Whit, I could just kill you,” she cries, hitting the side of the drainpipe in frustration. “But you’ve already half killed yourself.”
Tell me about it, I think. But I don’t say anything.
“You can’t stay here,” she says.
Finally our eyes meet. “Really? Where am I supposed to go, Wisty? Tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
She bites her lip like she’s trying to hold something back. Something she knows will crush me even further than I’ve already crushed myself.
“What?” I ask.
She shakes her head. Whatever she was thinking, she’s not going to tell me. “You have to come with me,” she says. “You have to see what we’re up against.”
“Even if I can’t help?” I whisper.
She doesn’t answer. She just holds out her hand. “Come,” she says.
And so I do. Because Wisty, my baby sister, calls the shots now—and she knows it.
Chapter 42
Whit
WISTY CARRIES FORGED PAPERS, but just in case, we keep to the back alleys.
“Where are we going?” I ask, but she’s too busy watching out for Horsemen to answer. Too busy telling me how much everything’s changed since I “slithered into that moldy drainpipe.”
She pokes her head out of the shadows, scoping out the street before scurrying on to the next narrow corridor. As we go, she ticks off what’s been outlawed. “Video games, dancing, congregating in numbers greater than three, growing or consuming squash or squash products… and going anywhere without permission, obviously.”
“Whoa, hang on. Darrius outlawed squash?”
Wisty spits derisively into the street. “That was Bloom. Apparently during part of his exile, he survived on pumpkin rinds. Now he can’t stand the sight of the stuff—which is pretty ungrateful, if you ask me. It’s like a shipwrecked dude outlawing lifeboats once he gets back home, you know?”
She shakes her head, almost smiling now, and I realize just how much I’ve missed her.
I wish I could tell her that.
We pass under a bridge tagged with Long Live Darrius in giant letters, then turn up the alley behind the Municipal Library. Its doors are chained shut, and its windows are covered with plywood.
I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. “Did Darrius shut it down—just like The One did?”
“Not exactly,” Wisty says. “But he didn’t issue passes for it, so no one can legally go there. And he reclassified all librarians as nonessential workers. You know what that means.”
I shake my head. “Uh, no.”
“Seriously? Have you been living under a log?” She stops herself. “Oh, right, basically you have. If you’re deemed a nonessential worker, you get assigned a new work duty. You don’t pick your job, and you don’t get paid.” Wisty shudders, and her voice goes hard. “In other words, you become a slave.”
I’m trying to wrap my head around this as we make our way past the roller rink, the mall, and the stadium—all closed. The new community center had barely opened its doors before Darrius decided to shut them again.
A slave. I thought I had nothing left to lose, but I do: my freedom. The freedom of my friends and family.
“Well, here we are,” Wisty says, giving me a false, bright smile.
Behind her is the art museum. Its doors are
chained together, too. There’s even police tape strung between the pillars, as if art itself is a crime.
She knocks lightly a few times on one of the boarded-up windows, like she’s announcing our presence. But to whom? Then she pries up a corner of the thin wood and motions me inside. “After you,” she says.
I squeeze past her and worm my way through the broken pane of a window. A piece of glass catches the collar of my shirt, and some skin, too. As I drop down into the main hall of the museum, I feel a thin trickle of blood running down my neck.
Wisty lands much more gracefully behind me.
It’s dim and echoey inside, and it takes my eyes a minute to adjust. When they do, I gasp. Every painting on the wall, every sculpture, has been horribly defaced. Spray paint mars the marble statue to my left; the canvas nearest me has been ripped to shreds.
I’m shocked into silence. The One may have stolen our art—but Darrius has destroyed it.
Wisty doesn’t give the ruin a second glance. “This way,” she says.
I follow her down metal steps to the museum’s basement. In the huge, cinder-block room that smells like mold and turpentine, I get my second major shock of the day.
The room is full of kids. Dozens of them—maybe even a hundred—big, little, and in between. Kids I know. My heart does a somersault in my chest.
It’s the Resistance.
They’ve come together again.
Chapter 43
Whit
WISTY GIVES ME the first real smile I’ve seen in days. “The gang’s all here,” she says.
Without even thinking, I scan the room for Janine. She was a Resistance leader, after all. She braved death on the icy slopes of the Mountain King’s peaks. She fought by my side against two evil despots.
But I don’t see her anywhere.
Enormous Emmet, one of the original Resistance members, comes striding over and claps me on the shoulder. “Good to see you, man,” he says. “Too bad it’s not under better circumstances.”
Ross hurries over next. The last time I saw him, he was DJ’ing the City-wide party to celebrate The One’s defeat. He was best friends with Sasha, who died in my arms in the ice-bound forests of the Mountain Kingdom. “Whit,” he says solemnly, and I know he’s remembering our lost friend. “Glad you’re here.”
Then Wisty introduces me to new Resistance members. There’s Serena, a beautiful black-haired girl with the green eyes of a cat; Greg, a blond surfer type with his arm in a sling; and Lily, a little fireplug of a redhead who looks me up and down, wrinkles her nose, and says, “You need a shower.”
No doubt she’s right. “Where’s…” I start to ask. But suddenly it’s hard for me to even say Janine’s name.
Emmet frowns. “JD, our former weapons expert?” he asks. “He plays for Bloom’s team now.”
Ross nods grimly. “Darrius has turned a number of our members against us.”
I know I should care about this JD person’s defection, but I don’t. “Actually I was wondering about—” I begin.
But everyone’s talking at once now, trying to catch me up on everything I’ve missed.
“Darrius found our first hideout,” Emmet tells me. “This is headquarters number two.”
“He took fifty of us in that raid,” Serena adds, and beside her, Sam starts telling me about narrowly escaping a gang of Horsemen while Lily describes Bloom’s terrifying night patrols. The voices swirl in a blur around my head, and for a second I wish for the solitude of my drainpipe.
Then, out of nowhere, a gong sounds. Emmet nearly jumps out of his skin, and Wisty and I unconsciously grab each other. We turn around to see Ross, standing on a wooden crate above the crowd and grinning. “Effective way to call a meeting, don’t you think?”
“Effective way to get your teeth knocked in,” Emmet mumbles.
“Now that we’re all here,” Ross continues, “we have a few things to talk about.”
But we’re not all here, I think. Was Janine one of the fifty people taken? And if so, to where?
“The root of the alliance between our new leaders remains clouded in mystery,” Ross begins. “How did Darrius and Matthias Bloom find each other?”
“A dating site for psychotic dictators?” Sam jokes.
“An Assholes Anonymous meeting,” Serena calls.
Ross allows a flicker of a smile to cross his face. “Bloom was exiled to the desert by our very own Wisteria Allgood.” He claps, and a few people in the audience hoot in support. “We think that’s where Darrius is from, too, as well as the barbarians they call the Horsemen.” He pauses. “And today, our scouts tell us that more Horsemen are coming.”
“But Darrius is in power already,” Lily says. “What does he need more of those ugly sand cowboys for?”
Ross’s brow creases with worry. “We believe they want to take over our City.”
“Uh, haven’t they already?” Wisty points out.
Ross shakes his head. “Right now there are only a few hundred of them here, acting as Darrius’s enforcers on patrols and as guards at the Old Palace. But there are thousands more in the desert, biding their time. Life out there’s hard, you guys—and they’re tired of it. They want what we have.” He stops and looks at each of us in turn. “And any day now, they’re going to come for it.”
“And what happens to us?” Serena asks softly.
“Slavery—or death,” Wisty says. Her voice is sharp and bitter. “I doubt they care which.”
Ross nods briskly. “What we must remember is that we have many enemies. We need to gather all our powers in the fight against them.”
The room erupts into chaos again—people shouting out questions and giving voice to their fears—and amid the noise I collar Emmet. “Where’s Janine? Have you seen her?” I ask.
He shrugs his giant shoulders. “I don’t know. She’s not with us.”
My heart sinks. If she’s not with the Resistance, does that mean she’s against it? I’m desperate for answers—about Janine, about the Horsemen, about everything. And there’s only one place that just might have some of them.
“What about The Book of Truths?” I call. “Is there any advice or reassurance for us there?”
Ross looks pale all of a sudden. He hesitates.
“Go on,” I urge. “Tell us.”
Reluctantly, he opens a tattered copy and flips to the right page. “ ‘From ashes and exile, vital leaders rise,’ ” he quotes. Then he grimaces.
Beside me, Wisty jumps up. “Exile? That sounds like Bloom! And turning people to ashes—that’s what Darrius does! The Book of Truths can’t mean they’re right for us.” Her hands twitch in agitation, and I wonder if she’s going to spark.
I don’t claim to always understand The Book of Truths, but I have to admit, this wasn’t the reassurance I was looking for. “Maybe there’s another explanation,” I suggest.
“I hope so,” Wisty says darkly. “Because if there isn’t, we’re doomed.”
Then Emmet slings his arm around Wisty’s shoulders and gives her a little shake. “Come on, Wist,” he says. “Think of all the battles you’ve fought! When have you ever been afraid of insurmountable odds?”
Her eyes slide over to me. “Before,” she says quietly, “I had help.”
I turn away. She doesn’t need to keep reminding me of what I’ve given up.
“You’ll have a lot of help this time, too,” Emmet says. “I mean, come on—look at us! We’re going to kick some wizard ass!” He grins bravely, and everyone in the room starts to cheer.
My heart surges with pride. This gang of teenagers is going to figure out a way to take out the most powerful wizard the City has ever faced.
But they won’t have my magic to help them, and I’m not looking forward to the moment when they realize it.
Chapter 44
Wisty
I PEER BOTH WAYS down the darkened streets, poised to run at the slightest hint of hoofbeats. But everything’s quiet, so I motion my friends out from the s
hadows of the alley.
Emmet creeps along as quietly as he can, but he steps on Serena’s heel. “Ouch,” she yelps, then claps her hands over her mouth. “Sorry,” she whispers.
We’re breaking two laws right now, simply by walking around: it’s after dark, and we have no papers.
Yes, we could be shot on sight. As my brother keeps reminding me.
But we’re on a midnight mission: we want people in the City to know there’s still hope, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Even if Darrius is making us slaves, and The Book of Truths seems to tell us that we’ve gotten what we deserve. We need to prove to the City that the Resistance still lives.
We arrive at a small plaza, where I break law number three by making a pyramid of miniature pumpkins. Silly as it looks, it’s a coded message to a population living in terror and dread. We are here, and we will not give up.
“Perfect,” I say, making a final adjustment to the arrangement of Bloom’s vegetable enemy #1.
“Punishable by ten years in the slammer,” Emmet crows, moving one of the pumpkins an inch to the left. “There. Now, that’s perfect.”
Serena punches Emmet in the arm. “Assault!” she says. “Twenty years’ hard labor.”
Then Emmet runs ahead, stops, yanks down his pants, and moons us. “Indecent exposure!” he giggles. “Thirty!”
“Guys, come on. This is dangerous,” Whit pleads.
My brother’s right, of course. But what isn’t dangerous these days? We all know Bloom would sooner shoot a man than smile at him. So maybe it seems crazy to be joking around like this, but sometimes you have to blow off steam. Sometimes you have to give your so-called leaders the finger.
When we pass one of the City police stations—now occupied by Horsemen, Family members, and other traitors to our government—I shoot a jet of blue flame from my palm. I’ve got another message, but this one’s just for Darrius. This is our City, not yours, I burn into the side of the building. Are you listening, Darrius?
“Okay, sis, that’s enough for now,” Whit says.
But I’m only getting started. I turn to face him, hands on my hips. “You think? Because I’m not sure it is.” I point at a pile of newspapers and cardboard boxes waiting to be recycled. A tendril of smoke curls up, and then—whoosh!—the pile goes up in orange flames.