In two hours, we crossed the border into the Jicarilla reservation. There was little to mark it—faded signs and the same harsh country. State Highway 537 led through the heart of it.
I pulled over to the side of the dusty road, into soft sand, to go up into the aetheric. Isabel’s position had moved on, but it was not far ahead . . . another two hours at most.
I wondered why our enemies were moving so slowly. Surely a five-year-old child couldn’t hold back their progress so drastically.
Unless . . . they meant us to follow. Why attack us, wasting their own energy, when they could force us to waste ours in pursuit, and trap us in the end?
I didn’t speak of it to Luis, but I knew his thoughts would have led him to the same conclusions. The technique we had used to track the girl was rare, but not unknown among Earth Wardens; we had perhaps used a less common tactic, but if our opponents were as determined as I expected, they could have planned against it.
And the Jicarilla reservation stretched across the border, from New Mexico into Colorado.
“What are you doing? We need to get moving!” Luis said. He’d taken care of his call of nature, and mine could wait. “Something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How many Wardens between here and the Colorado border?”
“Zero. We’re stretched a little thin, you know, and besides, far as I know, there’s only one or two left in the entire state. Most of the top rank went to answer Lewis’s call on the coast. They’re gone now, out of the country.”
I turned my head slightly. “Were you asked to go?”
“Yeah.” His tone didn’t invite further conversation on the subject. “Why are you worried about Wardens all of a sudden?”
I fixed my eyes on the far, shimmering horizon, where the black ribbon of the road rose up to meet the sky in a vanishing point, and I held out my hand to him. After a hesitation, he took it, and this time, I was the leader rising into the aetheric. We did not go far. We didn’t have to.
When we dropped down again, Luis shuddered as he entered his flesh again, and said, “Damn. I was hoping they wouldn’t know we were coming.”
“So was I,” I said. “Helmets.”
“Helmets won’t help visibility,” he pointed out. “You’ll be driving blind.”
“Put your hand on my back,” I said. “On my skin. I can use Oversight if you don’t let go.”
“You think you can drive like that?”
Blind? Using only the confusing information available on the aetheric to see? Possibly. What choice did I have?
I watched the vanishing point on the horizon grow hazy, then disappear as dirty red smudged the clear blue sky in an uneven, growing line.
What I was showing him in the aetheric was a sandstorm coming. A bad one.
I donned my helmet. It wouldn’t keep out everything, but it would do enough to allow me to breathe—unless the plastic broke. I didn’t want to consider that possibility. Behind me, I felt Luis adjusting his own helmet, and then his hands slid up under my jacket, tugged my shirt from my trousers, and settled in a warm span on either side of my waist, skin on skin.
The connection snapped tight between us, stronger for the touch, and I took in a deep breath.
“Keep your head down,” I told him. “I don’t know what else might come out of the dark.”
I pressed the throttle and threw sand on the still air, achieved the solid surface of the road, and the Victory dug into the asphalt, growling its challenge. I edged the speed faster and faster. It reminded me of old days, of horses thundering toward the enemy lines, of knights jousting, of a pure, clean purpose. Kill or die.
The red line on the horizon boiled up and out, like ink dropped in water. I felt the forces driving it—not Earth but Weather, the interaction of cold and warm air creating this deadly and explosive windstorm. In wetter climates, it would have brought thunder and rain, but here it only lashed the land, picked up abrasive grit and rubbed it together, building its own energy within the sandstorm.
The first gust of wind danced across the prairie, heading for us at a right angle. Tornado, my mind named it at first, but I knew that was not right. Gustnado. It didn’t matter what it was called, only that it hit us broadside in a stinging, powerful rush, and I felt the back tire of the Victory skid a bit, then grab traction again. The oncoming wall of sand grew darker as it came on—still red, but shading now toward brown as more and more light was blocked. It would blot out the sun altogether.
“We can’t do it!” Luis yelled behind me. I didn’t have the time to answer. It was true: we couldn’t possibly affect the entire sandstorm, but I wasn’t trying to. All I wanted was a tunnel through it, a lessening of the intensity. We could do that. I was certain we could.
I was certain until the moment I realized how huge the storm truly was. It had looked large from a distance, but it was monstrous now, and still growing larger. It covered the horizon in red-brown waves, rippling like silk, stretching to the heavens.
A dusty, rattling pickup truck roared up from a side road, took the turn, and sped past us going the other direction. I heard the driver shout a warning to us. He was running.
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.