Dead Boys (30 page)

“But the point the Poet was making,” Siham was arguing, trying to maintain calm despite the increasing volume of the argument, “is that all of this is temporary! Eternity is an illusion. Every last one of us is going to become dust sooner or later, and when we are, we’ll be unified. We all know this is true; we’ve felt it in the sandstorm. Remington can accelerate that union on his own, one piece at a time—but somehow we don’t believe it even when we see it with our own sockets. And why not? Because we’re trapped in our old habits. Ways of thinking, acting, arguing. We’re defeating ourselves, over and over again, trapping ourselves in—”

Just then, she caught sight of Jacob curled around the skull of his companion and dropped to her knees. “Please help,” Jacob croaked. “He’s gone out like a light. I’ve made his suffering worse. Please, Bonemaiden, help us!”

As the Meeting dissolved in confusion, Shailesh’s booming voice rose above the rest. “Wait,” he said. “An awareness thrusts like a mountaintop from the molehill of my mind!” Bounding through the field of seated Seekers, he landed before Jacob, peered down at the head in his lap, then gasped, falling back on thick-fingered hands. “People of White City, hear me,” he cried. “This visitor has been here before! He is the one who walked bleeding out of the desert; he is the living boy we brought to health and begged to wait for the Poet’s wisdom; he is the boy who refused us, the boy I carried over White Gate into the Plains; and he has returned, incontestably dead and irreparably broken; oh, fate! All due to our weakness! All because we saw a human who was breathing and alive and, despite our years of training, felt a flame of jealousy that would burn him down to blood and ash.”

“What is he on about now?” said Leopold in a fit of annoyance. “I haven’t understood a thing since we sat down in this wretched square.”

“Oh, we’re about to go into the sandstorm,” said Remington, patting his shoulder.

“He’s
right
,” said Shailesh and Siham at once.

“We need to go scouring,” said Siham.

“Posthaste!” said Shailesh. “May it bring this suffering soul to clarity!”

“Let those who so love the loss of their minds chase that dragon,” said Ai as she withdrew. “May the rest of us take this time for quiet reflection on the truth that Master Shailesh has uncovered. All who met this boy in the bloom of his life can recall the urge we felt to destroy it. None were moved to help him, least of all myself. Let each of us examine this breach of our vows, and return to the Meeting when our emotion has settled.”

The company, bolstered by Shailesh, Siham, and Yasmin, strode through the hubbub that followed. “
Scouring
?” Leopold shouted at their heels. “Is that what you call it when the sandstorm rips every remnant of flesh from your bones?”

“You’ve got it,” said Siham as they approached Sandy Gate. “You up for the ride?”

“I am not,” said Leopold, stopping abruptly. “But we’ve known that for some time, haven’t we? I’m not like the rest of you, and I never will be. Whatever the future holds for me, it isn’t in that desert.”

The company paused, the Seekers looking to Jacob and Remington as if to ask whether this were worth the delay. Remington knocked at his skull, and the crow flapped out.

“If it means anything to you,” said Jacob, “know that I bear you no grudge. Your contributions, whatever inspired them, got us here—and I believe, despite all this unrest, that this is precisely where we need to be.”

The sand between them whispered, grains bounding onto the white stone between Leopold’s feet, where the crow pecked idly.

“I’ll be Leopold’s guide while you’re gone,” said Yasmin. “We’ll take good care of your pet bird. This is all very exciting, but not worth displeasing Mistress Ai, I’m afraid. Oh, Maiden, do come back soon!” she cried at their backs. “This place is so boring without you.”

“Enough speech!” said Shailesh. “The maelstrom insistently invites us. Who are we to refuse its susurration?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Song of the Sands

P
ast Sandy Gate, the air grew as opaque as tracing paper. A roiling mass that blotted out both earth and sky hung in the distance, dwarfing the dust-cloud of the scrimmage so definitively that Jacob was amazed such a paltry thing had ever daunted him. The Moving Desert hissed loudly enough that he had to shout to be heard, even as he shielded his eyes from its intermittent, blue-white flashes of light.

Jacob clutched Etienne’s head to his chest and leaned into the rising wind, lest he be left behind. Behind the walls of White City, crossing this crackling threshold had seemed like a reasonable plan, but now that the storm was close enough to rattle his joints, doubt was creeping into his mind. He saw, with an unruly burst of emotion, how unprepared he was to bid farewell to his flesh. It was rotten, ripped, and in terrible repair, but it was all he’d ever known, and he’d clung to it for so long—beyond his own death, after his unwitting swap with Leopold, deep into the wilds of his afterlife.

“Well,” he called, hoping to cover his anxiety with good cheer. “So this is scouring! And what precisely is it that we’ll find inside that cloud?”

“It’s a sandstorm, Jacob,” said Siham. “Chances are good there’s gonna be a lot of sand.”

“Sand and dust,” boomed Shailesh. “Wind and electricity! Leaping and shifting, threatening to bury all that does not rise above it.”

“So it’s rise or be buried?” said Jacob. “That’s the idea, isn’t it? See, it’s the particulars that interest me. If you don’t mind, I’d like to be a little better educated before we go any farther. Mightn’t we be putting ourselves in harm’s way? Has there ever been a case in which a Seeker
didn’t
make it out of the sandstorm?”

“Jacob, relax,” said Siham as a jittering eddy passed through her frame. “Center on the marrow of your bones. Imagine there’s a magnetic force holding you together, pulling in from the core. There’s a power in there strong enough to keep your body intact—even from sword-strikes! So whenever you feel like you’re in danger, focus on your marrow. And remember that the dust you’re made of is just the same as the dust that’s flying all around. You’ll do fine.”

Shailesh threw an arm around him. “Twin wills, in the bones and in the sands! Together they will uplift you. It should not be a source of worry.”

“Of course not. No worry whatsoever.” The storm was now so close that the air between them blurred. “Will it happen quickly?”

“Decidedly not,” shouted Shailesh.

“It takes a good long while,” said Siham, “but it might feel like minutes.”

“Alternatively,” said Shailesh, “you may feel as if you’ve been lost for years!”

“Metaphorically lost, you mean.”

“He means lost,” said Siham, taking Jacob by the shoulders and steering him behind Remington, who had, by some unspoken agreement, been chosen as the conductor of their train of Seekers. “Actually lost. ‘Where-am-I?’ lost.”

“Embrace the literality of your lostness,” said Shailesh, lining up behind the headless, “for it is the very heart of the scouring!”

“Right,” said Jacob. “So let’s compromise, and attempt a trial run. An hour’s jaunt, at lower risk, before we come back and regroup, and maybe
then
we’ll be ready to share some concrete details regarding best practices.”

“Just follow me, Jake!” said Remington, tugging him over the brink of blindness. Slapping Jacob’s trembling hand on his own shoulder, he resolved to make sure it remained there, no matter how bewildering things became.

The storm had no borders. It was impossible to say when they’d entered it. It took Remington over one agitated grain at a time, and then it was everywhere, inside and out. Sand rattled into his nostrils, bouncing through his brainpan, then spilling down his back. Sand trickled down his throat until a gut’s worth of storm split his carcass open, the weight flowing through him like swill through a drunkard. Sand slid under his skin, making him feel like he was sloshing through a downpour in loose, soaked clothes as he walked. It ground between his sockets and his eyeballs, which registered nothing but granular static. It swarmed in his ears, making them roar from within as it ripped them apart.

He felt Jacob’s hand rattling on his shoulder. He felt Jacob’s fear rippling through his bones. He could hear Jacob asking, again and again, What will hold us together? What will keep us from being buried? He remembered Siham’s answer: the marrow of your bones.

Remington turned inward, settling inside his own skeleton. In every segment of his body, he felt the dust holding fast to the core. He pushed that rippling calm backward, passing it through to Jacob, meeting the Seekers behind them in their struggle to persevere.

Six Seekers strode into the storm, bearing a seventh. Their sense of time was scrambled, as was their sense of self, for every mote of dust contained a tiny story waiting to be told. Fragments of the corpses who’d passed through this desert before collided with the corpses of Remington, of Adam, of Eve, of Jacob, of Leopold, of Etienne, of Shailesh, of Siham, of the Living Man. Some stories rang out louder than others; some were faint murmurs in the distance. But all of them were swirling at once, and Remington could feel them all, as if he was and had always been a part of each and every one.

He was more than himself now. He had been for some time. He’d peeked into everyone and everything he’d encountered, even the River Lethe, which was enormous, after all. But being inside this cloud, feeling all of the people inside it, was his first taste of being as large as the cosmos.

Six Seekers carried a seventh, surrounded by a vastness ringing with voices and tales.

Remington centered on the dust of the Seekers walking in the sandstorm, gently sweeping aside the voices of those who’d scoured before them. The six Seekers’ stories were jumbled, overlapping, but all present, concurrent.

Nor were the visions they shared confined to the underworld. Bits and pieces of their
lives
were splitting open, revealing themselves not only to Remington but to each member of the company. Suspended in the swirling winds before them were images of their deaths.

The flash of a bomb blowing a teenaged girl to bits.

A windshield raining glass into the open mouth of a kinky-haired youth.

A husky lad swelling like a balloon as he howled at the crushed body of a bee.

The bucking belly of a young woman strangled by the father of her child.

A man and a woman bent double, their severed heads thumping to the ground, reflected in the lens of a camera.

The freckled face of a boy with milk-white skin, the barrel of a shotgun sliding between his teeth.

Remington stopped, and the company stopped behind him.

There was still one among them whose stories they hadn’t seen. Etienne had found a way to keep himself apart, even in the face of such immense power.

Remington reached back to touch Jacob’s hand and felt bone scraping bone.

They were already skeletons, then. They were Seekers, and this was their seeking.

Remington led his friends to a rock that rose above the sands and helped them find their seats. Through the haze he reached out and took Etienne’s skull, hearing its tuneless humming echoed by the storm. Remington hummed along with it, harmonizing. Feeling his fellows around him, he reached into Etienne’s mind.

You can open up, he told him. You’re safe here with us.

The skull’s jaw creaked open, and the sand blew clean through it.

Rattling, crackling, the sand scoured the skull, prying loose an infinitesimal piece of bone.

Six Seekers bearing an seventh split open that mote of dust, releasing its contents into the swirling winds.

Etienne laid a hand on the cover of the Book.

It was leather-bound and dusty.

He found it in his family’s house.

His family was dead, except for his Amma, who was dying.

Etienne Rassendren was raised by the dead, or at least by the books they’d written in many languages and left in the house by the mountains. He had his grandfather’s gift for tongues and had taught himself all the languages on the shelf, but he couldn’t make sense of the language in the Book.

“It loops like Tamil,” he said.

His Amma glanced at the pages and wrinkled her lips. “An elephant’s tail hangs like a trunk,” she said, “but don’t try to feed it. I don’t know if that’s a language, or a code, or a game. It came from a box of old things my mother left to me—which is probably still around here somewhere. It’s yours if you can find it.”

“I should copy this out. The pages are crumbling.”

“Then do! It’s yours now. All of it is. No one in the family ever knew what to make of it. Maybe you’ll be the one to solve the puzzle.”

After she died, he remembered her words and found the velvet-lined box buried in a tall stack of keepsakes. Inside the box was a crown made of bones.

The bones were small, arranged in clusters and branches that formed a flexible loop. They had come from hands and feet (
human
hands and
human
feet, he thought, and wondered why he felt no chill), except for a cluster of vertebrae that seemed to be the front of the crown. There were too many bones to have come from a single body. All of them were ancient, some yellowed, some browned.