Clouds rolled in around me like thick fog. I tried to fly lower, then almost panicked, thinking I would crash into the ground if I couldn’t see it. Just before I started to fall, I dropped out of the clouds and found myself high above Helvan Shores, the town back East where I’d grown up.
The first thing I thought was that Helvan Shores looked different from Mill City. It wasn’t just that the shiny black line of the railroad tracks skimmed by the edge of town instead of cutting through the indent and coming to a dead stop. The whole town was paler somehow, and less active. The colors moved stiffly, and there were gray areas that didn’t shift at all.
I dipped lower, and saw that there was a wall around the outside of the town. It reminded me of the Great Barrier Spell, only it was darker, more solid, and much less shimmery. I flew lower still, and suddenly I started falling.
I flailed my arms around, knowing I had no idea how to stop falling and fly again. The wind whipped my hair and tore at my skirts … and I landed with a thump in my bedroll. My eyes jerked open and I found myself staring at the embers of the campfire, cold and panting as if I had been running hard.
I lay there for a while, waiting for my heart to stop pounding, and thought about the dream. I knew it was like the first dream, and yet it wasn’t. The first time, I had been terrified the whole time, until I woke up shaking. This time, I hadn’t been scared until right at the end when I started falling. I knew they weren’t normal dreams. They felt as if they meant something, but try as I might, I couldn’t think what. It was a long time before I fell back asleep.
CHAPTER 12
JUST LIKE I THOUGHT, PROFESSOR TORGESON TALKED WASH INTO letting us spend three days at the abandoned settlement, so we could survey whatever was living inside the settlement walls, as well as what was outside. It didn’t take as much time as I’d feared. The settlement had only been two years old, so it had only had the original settlement group to house, and they hadn’t wanted to take the time or labor to enclose any more than they absolutely had to. So there wasn’t much open ground inside for anything to grow on.
We did find a couple of mud swallow nests and the start of a bluehornet nest up under the eaves of the last house. Professor Torgeson got Wash to bring out a table that the settlers had left behind, and climbed up on it to examine the bluehornets. She spent over an hour standing there still as a stone, watching the hornets fly in and out. When she finally climbed down, she was stiff and frowning.
“Mr. Morris,” she said, “would there be any chance of finding another bluehornet nest nearby?”
“I doubt it,” Wash said.
“The ones building that nest have to have come from somewhere,” the professor persisted.
“We might get lucky and find the old nest within a hundred yards or so,” Wash replied. “But bluehornets sometimes fly three or four miles to start a new nest. It’d take a week for us to cover that much ground, even if a lot of the land nearby is cleared. An old nest isn’t easy to spot, either. I don’t think we have the time.”
Professor Torgeson made an annoyed sound. “I was afraid of that. Well, we’ll just have to wait, then. Or hope to be lucky. Eff, would you bring me my observation journal and then dig out one of the collection jars?”
I had her journal right there; I’d known she would want it as soon as she came down from the table. I was surprised about the collection jar, though. The jars were specially spelled to preserve whatever was put inside. They were supposed to be for new or unusual bugs we found, and they took up a lot of room, so we hadn’t brought very many. The only reason we had them at all was because everyone was still edgy about the mirror bugs. It seemed odd to be using one up on something as ordinary as a bluehornet.
My face must have shown some of what I was thinking, because the professor shook her head. “Explanations later, Miss Rothmer. I need to get my observations down while they’re still fresh.”
I left to dig through the packs for the collection jar she wanted. I found the little bottle of chloroform, too, though she hadn’t asked for it, because I knew she’d need it to kill the bluehornets. It took me a while, but I still had to wait for her to finish writing.
Professor Torgeson smiled and nodded in approval when she saw the chloroform. She put three drops on the little pad of cloth in the bottom of the collection jar, then climbed back onto the table and waited. I thought she was going to catch the next bluehornet that came back to the nest, but I was only half right. She waited for a bluehornet, all right, but when it came, she scooped the whole nest, hornet and all, into the collection jar and sealed it up. Then she handed me the jar and climbed quickly down from the table, and we headed back to camp before the rest of the bluehornets came looking for whatever had vanished their nest.
“Professor,” I started as soon as we were well away. “What —”
“Look,” the professor said, nodding at the jar.
I held it up. The nest looked a little like a bit of honeycomb made of blackish gray paper instead of beeswax. About half the cells were empty; the others were closed over. The bluehornet was lying at the bottom of the jar with its legs curled up. I frowned. “This isn’t — I mean, didn’t you want a better specimen? This hornet is missing a leg and one of its wings is crooked.”
“That’s precisely why I wanted it,” Professor Torgeson said. “Every bluehornet I saw this morning had something wrong with it, and they weren’t all the same things, either. Something is wrong with this nest, and I’m hoping to find out what and why. Keep an eye out tomorrow when we’re surveying outside the walls.”
We kept an eye out the next day, but none of us saw any more bluehornets or found another nest, then or the day after. I expected Professor Torgeson to be cross, but instead she was just thoughtful all through the ride to the next settlement.
Novokoros was a two-year-old settlement that had been started by a group of farmers from the easternmost part of Avrupa who’d been forced off their land by some Old Continent politics. They only had two people in the whole settlement who spoke English, so it was hard to tell whether they were suspicious of strange travelers or just shy of standing around watching a bunch of folks they couldn’t have a conversation with.
Once Wash arranged with the settlement magician for us to stay inside the palisade, Professor Torgeson said she had a few questions. The settlement magician frowned. He was a tall, stringy, stern man with an enormous curly beard, and he made it pretty clear that he didn’t approve of women being magicians or asking too many questions or riding around the frontier without a wagon and a lot of menfolk for protection.
The professor looked as if she wanted to roll her eyes, but she went ahead and asked very politely where the settlement’s mirror bug trap had been. The settlement magician told her, still frowning. The professor thanked him briskly, then turned to Wash and me. A few minutes later, we’d sent our packhorse off to the stable and ridden back out to look at the mirror bug trap.
The mirror bug trap was a spell that Papa and Wash and Professor Jeffries had worked out the previous summer, after I’d figured out how to use the bugs’ own magic against them. All the different stages of the mirror bugs’ life cycle — the grubs and the striped beetles and the mirror bugs themselves — were attracted to magic. If there was enough of it around, the grubs and beetles absorbed the magic and then popped into mirror bugs like chestnuts popping in a fire. Normally, the mirror bugs’ own magic protected them, but I’d found a way to keep their protection from working, so that the grubs and beetles absorbed the mirror bug magic and killed them. Then the grubs and beetles turned into mirror bugs themselves, and the next wave of grubs and beetles would absorb their magic and kill them. The cycle kept on until there was nothing left in range but a few mirror bugs.