I sit back down in the buggy.
“Let’s go, Ben,” I say, more insistent.
“But . . .”
“There’s nothing we can do for them. We’ve got to find Kai. My guess is he’ll be somewhere close, near the control tower, so head in that direction.”
Ben is silent as she drives us over. Once we’re at the gate that blocks entry across the top of the dam, I motion for her to stop. The gate’s been chained shut, closed to vehicle traffic until the Alt-Rangers arrive for their morning shifts. But nothing’s keeping us from walking out over the roadway. I climb out of the buggy. Check my weapons out of habit. Throwing knives. Glock. Big-ass lightning sword. Ben climbs out beside me, and I hand her the shotgun.
She looks at me, eyes wide. “You mean it?”
“Hastiin taught you how to shoot, didn’t he? Then you’re going to cover me.” I point with my lips to the top of a concrete pillar, probably twenty feet high and wide at the top. “Up there.”
She nods, her face solemn. I start to walk away but turn back to her, face grim. “Once I’m on the dam, you stay out of sight. If anything happens, like the dam starts to blow, you get in that buggy and you drive like hell back toward Amangiri. Go find Tó. He’ll help you.”
“Don’t die, Maggie,” she blurts. Runs forward and hugs me. I let her. She sniffles a little, and I pat her on the back. Give her a second before I gently push her away. I wait for her to climb the ladder to the top of the pillar and get herself in position. I can see the barrel of the shotgun laid out across the top, Ben hunched over, already scanning the landscape ahead of me.
“I love that gun,” I mutter, nostalgia hitting me. Because I don’t want to admit it, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this. A bad feeling that I’m missing something important. Some clue or sign that I should have seen. Little to do about it now. I’ve come this far. So I pull the lightning sword from the scabbard, feel its supernatural energy curl up my arm and around me, and step onto the Glen Canyon Dam.
My feet tell me there’s solid ground beneath me, a well-traveled road wide enough to move a semitruck across, but my body doesn’t agree. My stomach drops, and a wave of dizziness pulls me up short. I suck in a breath and try to calm the adrenaline that’s pumping through my blood. To my right is the lake runoff, a sparkling bed of water a hundred feet deep. To my left is a seven-hundred-and-fifty-foot drop to certain death. The wind picks up a little, and out on this precipice there’s no protection from the elements. I lean into the breeze, pushing myself forward. My mind flashes back to the Swarm, falling one by one to their beautiful deaths, and for a moment, I swear I can still hear their screams.
Head down, leaning into the wind, I make my way across the dam. I keep moving, eyes scanning, heading for the tower and hoping Ben has my back. A worrying dread has settled in my gut like black tar, and my breath comes in short pants. The back of my neck itches, like someone is watching me, but so far I can’t see anyone.
And then I spot him.
A small figure kneeling on a platform hanging just over the protective railing along the lake edge of the dam. He’s in dark jeans and a black Metallica T-shirt. He has his maps spread before him on the ground, the corners held down by rocks. He’s fighting the wind, too, as it tries to throw his notebook over the side. I’m close enough to hear him curse as he pushes his too-long hair from his eyes.
I have to school the grin of relief that flashes across my face, calm my heartbeat that speeds up, try not to remember the way his mouth tasted like smoke and wine.
“Kai.” I call his name, not wanting to startle him.
He doesn’t hear me the first time, so I say it again, louder. This time he turns, her face tight with annoyance at being disturbed. His eyes meet mine, and his face brightens. And then his glance immediately darts to the sword wreathed in lightning in my hand, and his joy fades.
“Friends?” he asks, voice tentative.
“More than friends,” I say, grinning. “Partners.”
He laughs, tension draining from his body. He sits back on his heels. “I didn’t know if you were coming.”
“ ‘Come hell or high water,’ ” I say, quoting his last words to me back to him. “You’re not trying to help Gideon; you’re trying to stop him.”
He nods, relief breaking across his face. “Once I figured out what he wanted to do, I thought I could talk him out of it. Bit’ąą’nii and all. And at first it worked. A day would pass and he would forget. But then it was only an afternoon and then an hour. And I realized if I was going to stop him, I would have to stay with him. See it through to the end.”
“Why didn’t you tell me last night?”
“I don’t trust myself around him. He has a persuasion all his own. We’ll be talking and I’ll tell him things. Things I don’t mean to, even as the words are coming out of my mouth. I had to commit. I had to be convincing so he wouldn’t ask.” He runs a hand through his hair, fighting the wind to push it from his eyes.
“He’s using you. He doesn’t have the answers you need, Kai. He can’t give you purpose. You’re going to have to find that on your own.”
He narrows his eyes, squinting into the rising sun. “The Godslayer—that’s you, isn’t it?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“He wants to use you, too.”
“He can’t. His powers of persuasion don’t work on me. I don’t know why not.”
His eyes flicker to the sword in my hand.
“Maybe,” I admit. “It has other properties. It’s possible.”
He nods once. The wind whips up, rattling his maps.
“So, what’s the plan? You have a plan, right?”
He grins and motions me closer. “I’ve calculated everything. He wants to blow the dams all up and down the Colorado River. My job is the keep the water on track and running true to her tributaries. Only”—he hunches forward, excited—“I think I can generate enough force to push the water into the atmosphere, to turn it into rain. If I can do that, and spread it wide enough, it should become a natural phenomenon, self-sustaining. Nature will take over and I won’t even have to hold it together. There’ll still be flooding, some damage, but nothing like what he had planned. I can’t save everyone. But I can save a lot.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I don’t for sure. But it makes sense theoretically.”
“But you’re using clan powers to do this, not science.”
“I definitely need a little luck,” he says, the grin I missed so much ticking the side of his mouth up. “Magic, medicine, science, and a little luck. If I had duct tape, I’d throw that in too.”
“And if this doesn’t work?”
His voice is matter-of-fact. “Then we die.”
“Can you die?” I ask before I can think better of it.
“It’s one thing to take a bullet. It’s a whole other level to be crushed under the pressure of millions of acre feet of water. I’ll die.”
“Well, when you put it that way . . .”
We sit there for a moment in awkward silence, and then I remember Tó’s parting gift.
“I have something for you.” I reach into my shirt and pull out the pot Tó gave me. It’s the size of my palm and thankfully still intact.
“What is this?”
“Not sure, but a friend gave it to me. Said to give it to the silver-eyed boy. That’s got to be you.”
He frowns. “I don’t understand. A friend?”
“He lives on the lake. Called himself Tó.”
Lines crease his forehead as he stares at the pot, turning it over in his hands. “What does—” He cuts off with a gasp, eyes wide. “Did you say Tó? As in Tó Neinilí?”