That was sensible. But on the other side of that wall lay the child we’d come to find, and I wasn’t willing to admit defeat. Not yet.
“Stop!” Luis yelled. I barely heard him through the contact of our two helmets, as if we were in the vacuum of outer space instead of safe on the ground. “We can’t do it!”
“Hold!” I ordered him. I bent my head, firmed my grip on the Victory, and kept rocketing forward.
We hit the sand, or the sand hit us, with the force of a net stretched across the road. If I had not clung viciously to the motorcycle, we’d have been thrown headlong, likely killed. The Victory skidded, and I tried to right her, but the darkness and screaming sand had no direction, no dimensions. Which way was forward? Even my instincts flailed helplessly. The storm had reached an intensity that crackled with its own energy and power, a half-sentient monster whose only mission was to expand, consume, grow. Life, at its most basic.
Oversight helped a little. I drew power through the grip of Luis’s hands on my waist and poured it in a laser-straight line through the darkness in the direction I thought was north. Even with his power and my ability to amplify and control, I achieved no more than a narrow window in which the sand was merely thick instead of smothering.
I accelerated again, following the line. Around us, the walls of darkness swirled and lashed. The faceplate on my helmet was scratched first, then scoured into fog by the unrelenting blast. I felt a sharp pain in my leg, then another in my shoulder. Rocks. There would be more debris mixed in as the sandstorm’s power grew. It could pick up metal, barbwire, wooden posts.
A strand of barbwire could decapitate me as easily as a sword, and for a moment, my courage wavered. I am going to kill us both. What would happen to Isabel then?
Ahead, something flickered in the gloom. Oversight was a confusing boil of color, half-recognized patterns, nothing I could identify. . . .
And then, with shocking suddenness, the patterns resolved into gray lines, snapping into angles.
It was a car, and it was heading straight for us.
Chapter 12
I DIDN’T HAVE time to warn Luis, but from the strength with which he was holding on, he was in no danger of slipping from the bike.
I veered sharply, out of our small tunnel of clearer air, into the heart of the storm. I had no choice, and even so it almost made no difference, as I felt the sucking rush of the car’s passage, and felt a hiss along the side of my boot where it bumped a passing tire.
I couldn’t see it, because here in this lightless hell, there was nothing but screaming wind, burning sand, and false midnight. I had lost directions again, though there was still road beneath my wheels. I had to slow down, uncertain of where the road might end, and I coughed as sand began to filter in around my faceplate, coating my face in acrid dust. Choking me.
Luis was right. We would not survive this.
You’re afraid, the Djinn ghost of me whispered. Like a human.
And once, I might have found that ridiculous or a matter for contempt. Now I found it a matter of survival. Every nerve in my body screamed in anguish. I wanted to hide, to curl up in a protective ball and wait for this terrible thing to pass me by.
That’s your flesh thinking, the Djinn ghost of me said. That’s what they want you to do. And she was right about that. If this was a Warden-driven storm, it could hover in place, flaying the leather from my back, the skin from my body, like being caught in a sandblaster.
I picked a direction based purely on instinct, and hit the throttle full speed. If I ran off the road into the sand, we’d crash and die in the storm. I won’t, I told the screaming panic inside me. I am in control.
The tires chewed loose gravel in the dark. I took in a gasp, choked, coughed. My mouth was coated with dust.
The handlebars of the Victory danced with hot blue sparks.
I veered left again, off of the shoulder, found the edge by trial and error, and concentrated on short, shallow breaths as we sped into the boiling, punishing darkness.
Something hard and hot slammed into my thigh and dragged loose. Metal, I thought. Wire, most likely.
Faster.
The storm could not last forever. Not even the most powerful Warden, the greatest Djinn, could keep this focus for long. Weather was the most unstable of forces, spinning apart under its own weight.
Oversight showed me nothing, a chaos, an unending sea of flashes and smoke and fog.
And then, dimly, a light.
My scoured, abraded faceplate cracked with a sound like thunder, and the drift of dust behind it became a rushing torrent into my face. I squeezed my aching eyes shut. I was driving blind in any case.
There was no way to draw breath, so I held it, struggling against the impulse to cough.
Almost there. Almost . . .
We burst out of the back side of the sandstorm, into stillness and drifting, smokelike dust. Overhead, the sky was a dull orange, the sun a shriveled dot.
There was no road, only a flatter area of sand.
I skidded the motorcycle to a stop and clawed at my helmet. The buckles seemed frozen in place, but it finally popped free, and as I removed it, the faceplate fell off in two pieces. The plastic was as gray and foggy as the eyes of a corpse.
My helmet, on the front side, had been stripped of paint, reduced to dull gray. A fountain of dirt cascaded out as I dropped it to the road. More dust spilled as I bent my head. I coughed uncontrollably, spitting up dirty mouthfuls, and I finally felt Luis’s hands let go of me. I’d have bruises where he’d gripped, I thought, with every finger clearly imprinted.
Luis got off the motorcycle and staggered a few steps as he tried to wrestle off his own helmet. He’d been protected by my body, but even so, when he turned, his face was a muddy mask of sweat and dirt. He coughed and spat, bracing himself with both hands on his knees, and shook his head.
“Can’t believe we made it,” he croaked. I couldn’t speak at all, I discovered. My throat wouldn’t cooperate. “You okay?”
I gave him a thumbs-up gesture. Running through my abused body was a rush of warmth, of ecstatic satisfaction.
I had survived. I had forced myself through, and I had survived.
As a Djinn, I had never understood how it felt to win against such odds. It’s only adrenaline, that old part of me scoffed. Illusion and hormones.
Behind us, the sandstorm rolled on, howling, black as night. There was nothing we could do to stop its progress, nor was I inclined to try.
I set my face forward, toward Colorado, where Isabel’s track still led.
Neither of us could go on for long without some kind of relief. It appeared in the form of a dilapidated, barely operating roadside motel just shy of the state line. If it had a name, I didn’t see it, only the rusting, flapping sign that said MOTEL, and below that COLOR TV AND AIR-CONDITIONING.
The Victory was coughing as much as I was, and I hoped that it had not been badly damaged by the sandstorm. It had blasted edges, pitted and smoothed, but seemed to have come through relatively unscathed. The same could not be said for me.
I rented a room using gestures and the Warden credit card that bore the name of Leslie Raine. The attendant behind the ancient, cracked counter looked young and far too excited to see a customer. “Y’all were in that sandstorm?” he asked as he hand-cranked a machine to get an imprint of the card. I nodded. “Y’all are lucky to be alive,” he said. “Here ya go. Sign here.”
I signed where he told me, using the name on the card. The boy was fascinated with my pink hair—still visible, though coated with dirt. “Not from around here,” he decided. “Dallas? LA? Las Vegas?”