“They say I washed up in some refinery machinery for catching dead animals. Turns out animals fall into the pipes more often than you think. They thought I was dead. How could they not? But I wasn’t, and when they realized their mistake, they made arrangements to have me sent back to be with my only living relative left.”
“Hastiin.”
“Hastiin’s mom, my shimasani. She was still alive back then. But she told me that when I first came to her, she didn’t have much hope for me. I had crude-oil poisoning. Some brain damage and temporary loss of my eyesight.”
“Did you get healing powers?”
“No. I healed at the normal rate. We didn’t even know about my clan powers for years. Until my shimasani died from an accident. She’d fallen. Busted her head, blood everywhere in the kitchen. I had to clean it up.” She lowers her head, clearly embarrassed. “I saved the towels. With the blood on them. I don’t know why. I think I wanted to keep part of her. Anyway, I didn’t go to the funeral. You know how old people can be about kids being around death. They didn’t want me near it, especially after everything I’d been through. But I wanted so badly to see my shimasani again. So I . . . I found her.”
“What does that mean?”
She closes her eyes. “I had those towels, and when I held them, when I . . . tasted them, it was like I could smell her. They had taken her all the way to Tse Bonito, to the funeral home there. Fifty miles from our house in Sheep Springs. But she was there with me, like something on the back of my tongue.” She shakes her head. “I show up at the funeral home and everyone is freaked out. I mean, I don’t really remember it. I was in some kind of daze. I learned to control it better since then, but I can track people once I’ve tasted their blood. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” she asks, her voice small and worried. “Like I’m some kind of vampire?”
“I’m not a medicine man. I barely understand my own clan powers. But it sounds like your tracking power awakened because you could have used it to find your mother. Clan powers seem to want to fix things for us. I think yours was trying to do that. So you would never be left alone again. Ever.”
She inhales sharply and then sucks on her lip, thinking.
“But right now we’ve got to go. Rissa and Aaron are probably already at Glen Canyon.”
“Oh, right. Do you want me to . . . ?” She holds up the tissue with Kai’s blood on it.
“Why don’t we just hold on to it for now. If Kai’s not where he’s supposed to be, then I’ll ask you again.”
“Do you think Kai can help me figure out my powers better?”
“I think if we get out of this and get back home, we can all figure out what’s going on.”
She grins, relieved. I fold the tissue and stuff it in my pocket, and we leave Kai’s room.
Chapter 40
We head to the parking lot at a run, Ben doing her best to keep up. Sure enough, the big black SUVs that stood sentinel at the entrance earlier are gone. But there’s a dune buggy, a little two-seater meant for doing maintenance work or gardening around the compound grounds. It’s not much more than an engine and a chassis on four massive wheels with a roll bar across the top. A quick search of the key box by the front door reveals several sets of keys, and Ben and I grab the handful that are left still hanging on tiny hooks. I pick a key that looks like it might fit, but no luck. I keep going, moving through the likely suspects until I find the right one. One turn and the engine growls to life. Ben dumps our packs in the back and starts to hop in the passenger’s side.
“I want you to drive,” I tell her, stepping out of from behind the wheel.
“You do?” Her face lights up.
“I may need to move quickly, and I don’t want to be stuck. Besides, the sword doesn’t fit, and I’m not taking it off. I’ll sit in the back and scout for trouble.” I position myself along the open back wall of the vehicle as Ben slides into the driver’s seat. “Give me the shotgun too,” I tell her. “Just in case.”
She does as she’s told. Puts the vehicle in drive with only the slightest grinding of gears.
“Sorry,” she says, but she’s smiling, damn close to happy. I find myself smiling too, glad I could distract her from having the relive the horrors of her life. But my smile vanishes when she hits the accelerator. I lunge for the roll bar to keep from falling out the back.
“Slowly, Ben!” I shout. “Won’t do us any good if you kill me first.”
Her next try has us pulling out of the driveway smoothly and then gaining speed as we head down the narrow road away from the Amangiri and down the road toward Page. At the top of a rise, I think I can see the lights of the dam in the distance, and farther east than that, the sky starting to lighten from black to indigo, a thin band of white signaling that dawn is close. Way I figure it, we’ve got an hour tops before sunrise. Not a lot of time.
I tap on Ben’s shoulder. She looks back at me.
“Go ahead and open her up. Let’s see what she can do.”
She laughs and gives me a thumbs-up. I grab the roll bar with both hands as the buggy lurches forward. We take a sand dune at speed, and for a moment we’re airborne. I grit my teeth as my ass lifts off my already precarious perch and I come down hard enough to rattle my bones. Ben laughs, a wild joy, and I find myself grinning again as we go flying across the desert like a shotgun blast straight out of hell.
Chapter 41
We hit the north entrance to the dam forty minutes later. Ben slows, and the buggy comes around and the massive dam comes into sight. It looked different when we crossed from the eastern side and from the driver’s seat. I had been too nervous to get a good look at it. But now I can see it in all its massive glory.
It’s enormous, ten times higher than the Wall, high as a mountain. Seven hundred and fifty feet and an almost sheer wall of concrete. It is an arch, curving upstream at the narrowest gap in the canyon, which is still, as Aaron had informed us, a little more than a quarter mile wide. Behind the arch lies Lake Powell at its capacity, all eight billion gallons of it. And along the concave side of the dam, something Aaron didn’t mention. Dozens of small pearlescent dots littering the sheer surface of the dam. I stand up in the buggy to try to get a better view.
“What are those?” Ben asks, seeing the same shimmering spots, no doubt. “They’re beautiful.”
And they are. In the light of the new sun they look like shining drops of dew strewn along the face of the concrete like jewels on a necklace. One every fifty feet or so, moving steadily down the face of the dam like drops of rain against a windowpane. Every once in a while a drop of pearlescent dew breaks free, shattering the beauty of the scene with a sudden violence as it goes rolling down the wall headlong. A quickening plummet, faster, faster, until the tiny pearl-like figure ruptures against the rocky shallows hundreds of feet below. And as I watch, others are tossed back and forth across the vertical surface of the dam, caught in crosswind. Their strange ballet is mesmerizing until I realize what I’m looking at. And that those shiny dewdrops aren’t dewdrops at all.
“Let’s go, Ben,” I say, tapping her shoulder.
“Is that a person?” she asks, coming to the same realization I did, her voice suffused with the same soft horror that’s making my stomach curl.
“I think that’s the Swarm.”
“But why don’t they use their wings?” She looks back at me, her face contorted with the insanity of it. “Why are they falling?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the winds are too strong out there, maybe once gravity and speed get a hold of them, those wings don’t work so well after all.” I don’t tell Ben, but I’m thinking that they just don’t care. Gideon’s brought them here to watch the end of the world. Maybe setting explosives on the dam face is volunteer work, same as letting yourself be nailed to a turquoise wall. Maybe dying like this is an honor. Maybe it’s their purpose.