Until the Beginning (2 page)

THE SCENE . . . IT KEEPS REPLAYING AS I SLEEP
, over and over again like it’s on loop.

It starts once again, as from the darkness I hear her voice. “Miles,” she says, and it’s like a pure musical note piercing through the thick fog enveloping me. “Miles, are you still here with me?”

My mouth is already open. All I have to do is push out the words, but it is like shoving a boulder up a hill to get them out. “I think so.” I want to see her, but my eyes won’t focus. She is an angel radiating a light so intense it has blurred her features.

“You have to swallow this,” she says. I feel something warm touching my lips and a tangy paste being smeared onto my tongue, and then a flood of water cascading over my mouth, my face. I swallow automatically, and then choke and cough, spasms racking my body. She wipes my mouth with something soft.

The musical notes come again, penetrating the haze. “Miles Blackwell, do you hear me?”

“Yes,” I hear myself respond.

She says something about the Yara. About my becoming one with it. About dedicating my life to the earth. I hear the words but they bounce off me, like I’m made of rubber. My words scratch against my throat. “Juneau, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Miles, do you agree to trade your life of eighty years for one of many hundred?” she continues.

And now my mind is clear enough that her words make sense. Juneau is giving me the Rite. She is giving me the drug that my father is so desperate for. She’s trying to turn me immortal. I wrench my eyes back open, and there she is, shining like a supernova. “If I don’t, do I die?” I ask.

“You might die anyway. But this is my best try,” she confesses, and her eyes are tipped with flames. Flashing. Shining in the candlelight.

I fight to get the words out, but my voice is like dust. “Then I do, Juneau.”

She moves around me and settles my head in her lap. She combs my hair with her fingers, and it feels like she’s stroking my soul. Kneading it into a peaceful rest. I have been holding on so tightly that when I let go and breathe my last breath, it is a comfort. It is a relief.

Before the scene replays once again, there is a pause. It’s long enough for me to formulate my thoughts into questions: Did this really happen? And if so, where am I now?

ALTHOUGH WE’RE HIDDEN FROM THE MAIN ROAD
, this deserted cabin a half hour outside Los Angeles won’t hide us from our pursuers for long.

I breathe deeply until the hypnotic daze that floated me peacefully through the Rite evaporates and my mind is once again sharp and clear.

I assess Miles as I would a kill: height, weight, and shape of the animal needing to be shifted. Miles is probably six foot one and has an athletic build.

Even though I’m strong, he’s close to a foot taller than me. It will be like transporting a yearling deer.
If I had my dogs and my leather puller, it wouldn’t take more than a minute
, I think, and the husky-shaped hole in my chest threatens to reopen before I slap a bandage on it and resolve to think of them later.

I walk outside and cross the dusty yard to the car. The sun beats the desert around me into shimmering submission. Sweat beads on my forehead and under my arms as I drive the car as close as I can to the porch and dig a sleeping bag out of the trunk. Nothing moves in this punishing heat except a couple of lizards scuttling from one hole in the ground to another.

Once back in the cabin’s dark coolness, I unzip the sleeping bag and spread it out next to Miles’s body. And then, as carefully as I can, I roll him onto it, pull the loose side over him, and zip it up around him.

Grasping the top of the sleeping bag, I drag Miles out of the cabin onto the porch until he’s next to the car, and open the back door. Wiping sweat from my eyes, I rummage through a box of tools in the trunk and find a length of thick, flat cord labeled
TOW STRAP
. Like a spider binds her victim, I wrap it up and down around Miles’s sleeping-bag shroud. Then stringing the cord in through the backseat, and out the front seat, I anchor it to one of the posts holding up the shack’s front porch roof. Using the same principle as my husky-puller-dogsled technique, I drive the car forward a few feet, and Miles’s body is shifted from the porch partway into the backseat. I’m able to wrangle him the rest of the way in.

Jogging back to the cabin, I grab my bag and give the empty room one last glance before closing the door. I don’t want to leave any trace of our having been there, but seeing the pool of blood staining the floor, I realize the futility of that plan.

I toss my pack into the front seat and unzip the top of the
sleeping bag. Miles’s mouth has fallen back open and his eyes stare blindly at the car’s upholstered ceiling. I close them gently and hum a few more notes of the Song.

Before sliding into the driver’s seat, I scan the horizon, and instantly my heart is in my throat. There is smoke—way off in the distance—in the direction we came from. I wonder what is burning. And then, suddenly and terrifyingly, I understand. It’s a car, and it’s heading directly toward us. It’s still a long ways off, but I can see the flash of metal and the cloud of dirt kicked up by its wheels.

Immobilized by panic, I force myself to think. I need to hide us. In a split second I know what I have to do. I must Conjure the camouflage Whit used to hide our village from the outside world. Or, as he explained it to me back then, to protect us from the brigands when he Read they were coming. This was his most difficult Conjure—camouflaging the whole village and keeping it hidden until danger passed. But I need to reproduce it. I have camouflaged myself before, but have no idea if I can expand it outside myself to include the car and even the cabin if possible.

I try to remember what Whit did, and realize that the totem he used to Conjure the metamorphosis was the snowshoe hare feet. The one I tossed into a fire just days ago.

It doesn’t matter
, I remind myself.
You don’t need Whit’s material crutches to Conjure the Yara. You only need your faith in your link with it
. I think of the powerful connections I’ve experienced since I stopped using totems, and know I can do this. But I will
need to push aside the fear and grief of the last few hours in order to concentrate.

I focus on slowing my racing heartbeat and spread my arms wide. I direct my mind to contact the Yara, and feel the lightning bolt of power when I connect with it. I call on the energy that flows through all things and imagine myself changing . . . transforming into the colors around me, which in this case is a uniform reddish dirt brown. I look down and see that not only my skin but my tank top and jeans have taken on the desert’s brown. I blend in perfectly with my environment.

Now the car
, I think, and imagine the Yara stretching out from me like a net and wrapping around the car. A dot of earthen red appears on one door, then spreads quickly to envelop the whole thing. Miles’s car fades into the background and disappears.

My confidence is grounded.
I can do this
. I focus the Yara’s energy on the cabin. I wait. Nothing happens, and the car is getting closer, maybe even close enough to see the cabin. And if they see it, they might stop to check it out and discover the pool of blood—evidence of how recently we were here.

My heart races, and I fight to maintain my calm.
Metamorphose!
I urge, and I feel a spark of electricity burning through my veins like flames. And as I watch, the shack disappears. We are now, for all practical purposes, invisible.

As the car approaches, I recognize the man riding in the passenger side. It is Murray Blackwell, head of Blackwell Pharmaceutical and father of the boy lying dead beside me. He must
have mobilized this search party as soon as he discovered his son abducted me from his own house, where he was keeping me prisoner.

And all for a drug,
I think. All because he wants to know the “formula” for the elixir—Amrit, as he called it—that I use to perform the Rite. He and whoever kidnapped my clan are desperate to get it. “Another example of violence spawned by capitalism,” I can almost hear Dennis say—one of his favorite refrains in our Past Civilizations lessons. Now the infernal machine wants to suck
us
into its cogs and wheels, and I’m the only one left to fight it.

A burly man sits behind the wheel beside Mr. Blackwell, and the two security guards who kidnapped me from Salt Lake City are in the backseat, craning their heads to survey the barren landscape. The car moves so slowly that it seems like an hour before they pass us and are following the dirt road over the crest of a ridge.

I don’t dare breathe. The Conjure weighs heavily on me. I’m pouring with sweat now, my clothes clammy against my skin. I flex my fingers and roll my head to both sides to avoid freezing up completely, and wait. In a couple of minutes, the car reappears at the top of the ridge. Its passengers scan the horizon, searching for what is right in front of them.

This time the car passes mere feet from me. Mr. Blackwell’s eyes meet mine for just a second, and although he can’t see me, panic scorches a jagged hole in the pit of my stomach. He looks away, and I can once again breathe. I wait until the car is out of
sight, once more just a plume of dust on the horizon, before I let go of the Conjure. The car, the cabin, and I slowly infuse with our true colors. I lean back against the car, trembling from the effort and residual fear.
They were so close
.

But I had done it. I worked a major Conjure, and did it without a totem. A flash of hope bursts through me. I am capable of more than I imagined. My father’s words come back to me, “You’re a prodigy in the Yara, Juneau. Just like your mother was.”

Whit kept so much from me, claiming that he was waiting until I was older. Until I had undergone the Rite myself. But I don’t need his permission anymore. I don’t need his questionable expertise, cobbled together from other belief systems and trial and error. I am ready to explore the Yara on my own terms.

My battle against my clan’s kidnappers is just beginning. But instead of apprehension, I feel excitement. I’ve had a powerful weapon at my fingertips my whole life, and I’m finally learning to wield it. I feel unstoppable.

I AM BEING DRAGGED ALONG A CURRENT, FLOATING
in a wide river with tall trees on either side. My body is pulled under and pops back up as if I were nothing but a twig floating on the surface of a stream. I am unafraid, my senses bathed by the sound of the rushing water and the touch of the cool liquid. Only the smell of the sparkling pure air in this dream world is missing—absent because I do not breathe.

Someone is next to me. I can’t turn my head, but I know it’s Juneau. She rides the river beside me. From somewhere far away I hear music. Singing. An exotic tune, the words of which I can’t quite capture, but their purpose is clear. The song, like the silent girl beside me, accompanies me. Wraps me in its security. Its confidence. Others have been here before, and the song accompanied them, too.

A roaring noise grows louder every second—it is hollow, like the noise inside a seashell. The trees on either side of us disappear gradually, the riverbanks flattening out until finally I am thrust with great force out of the mouth of the river into an ocean so wide that no shore is visible. I can feel my body dissolving in the saltwater waves that toss me back and forth, and still Juneau is there. Staying close.

My body melts away until there is nothing left but a small white ball, feathers, beak, and a flash of light. And like that, I am sprung into the air. The words of the song grow clearer, and I sense another bird keeping pace with me, just outside my vision. I flap my wings, banking steeply as we climb together, high over the endless ocean. We catch the wind and soar.

I SCRAMBLE INTO THE DRIVER’S SEAT, GRAB THE
atlas off the floor, and open it to the map of California. On the way here, I was too busy concentrating on steering us through a car-chase shootout to keep track of directions. Now I have no clue where we are on the map. I scan the horizon through the dusty windshield. I have two choices: go out to the main road Mr. Blackwell and company just took, or follow the dirt road over the ridge to see where it leads.

I head for the ridge. Once on the other side, I stop the car and get out to look around. A desert vista spreads before me, ending at the foothills of green tufted mountains in the distance.
We could hide there
, I think. It’s just a matter of crossing the flatlands before being swallowed by trees. But, not far along, the dirt road we’re on narrows to little more than a path.
That must be why Mr.
Blackwell and his men turned around
, I think. And that’s exactly why I’m going to follow it.

I get back in the car and check the clock on the dashboard. 3:24 p.m. Miles has been dead for almost two hours. Which means six hours to go. I need to get us somewhere safe before he awakes.
If he awakes
.

I put the car into drive and, without thinking, press my foot down hard. The wheels spin, throwing up a cloud of dust. I pick up my foot and let the forward motion of the car carry us a few yards before pressing down very lightly. The tires catch and the car moves smoothly ahead.

My first time driving was intimidating, especially since it involved stealing the car from under Miles’s nose. But now I’ve figured out what most of the dials and buttons are for. In a way, I want to keep this car—the only one I’ve ever driven—for the security of its familiarity. It’s everyone else’s familiarity with it that’s the problem.

Mr. Blackwell isn’t the only one after us. I wonder what happened to Whit and his military thugs after they chased us through the desert and shot Miles as he drove. Even though I saw their jeep flip over, I didn’t stick around to see how bad the damage was. They could have gotten their vehicle back on the road. And if they did, it won’t be long before Whit tracks me down. Only weeks ago he was my mentor—and my clan’s Sage. Not only is he skilled at Reading, but he knows me better than anyone besides my own father.

I drive toward the mountains for a half hour, seeing nobody.
Hawks circle slowly overhead. It’s slow and hard-going driving this made-for-the-city rich-boy car across a desert. I try to steer across the flattest surfaces, but even so we jolt and bump along, every rock and crater I hit shaking the car violently.

Finally the path turns left and heads off away from the mountains. I decide to follow it instead of setting out off-road. Before long, my path turns into an actual dirt road and, soon after, becomes paved. And before I know it, we are driving past a lone gas station with a dozen or so motorcycles and a few cars parked behind.

My body stiffens as I look for any sign of Whit’s green jeep or Mr. Blackwell’s sleek black car. But the only person I spot is a man kneeling down next to one of the motorcycles with tools spread on the ground around him.

He stands as he hears my car coming. He’s wearing a one-piece jumpsuit that probably started out white but is now a finger painting of rust and oil and dirt. Whipping his cap off, he uses the back of his arm to wipe his forehead. He strolls over when I stop.

I glance in the rearview mirror to make sure my sunglasses hide my eye’s telltale starburst, and then reach back and pull the sleeping bag over Miles’s face.

The man approaches the car, hands in his pockets. “You lost?” he says.

I hesitate. “Um, yes. I made a wrong turn a ways back, and have been trying to find my way to a main road.”

He takes his cap back off and replaces it on his head. Squinting up at the sun for a moment, he looks back at me. “So where’re you trying to go?”

“East,” I say.

“Mmm-hmm.” He nods and then spits a brown liquid out the side of his mouth. “She says she’s going east,” he says under his breath.

“I guess I could get some gas while I’m here,” I say, and pulling past him, park the car up to the sole gas tank. The man follows, wiping his hands on his pants, and starts pumping the gas.

I watch him. The way he hides his hands in his pockets, the way he talks to himself, the way his posture seems to curl inward—he’s as easy to read as a children’s book. He is solitary, doesn’t trust anyone but himself, and is probably involved in some shady business that has nothing to do with selling gas. He would betray me in a second if there was something in it for him. “Do you get much business here?” I ask finally.

“Rent out those dirt bikes,” he says, nodding his head toward the motorcycles. “Got a few out today, but the season really picks up in June. High school and college kids, mainly. Like to ride around the desert.” He clicks the nozzle of the gas hose and places it back in its rack. “That’ll be sixty-two eighty-five,” he says. I pull my pouch out of my backpack and hand him a hundred dollar bill.

“I’ll get you your change,” he says, and turns to go back to the station.

I get out of the car to stretch my legs while I wait. “What are all the cars for?” I call after him.

He turns and waves toward a couple of new-looking cars, “Those belong to the kids who rented the bikes.” He points at
a row of three pickup trucks in various states of disrepair. “The trucks are mine.”

I walk over to them and he follows me, hands in pockets. There’s a black pickup that looks like it died a painful death years ago. Another, cherry red, is in better shape. The third is a dark forest green—a good color for camouflage. And although it’s not new, it seems to be in good condition. I walk around it, inspecting it from every angle.
CHEVROLET
is spelled out in letters across the back. The truck bed is wide and spacious.

I walk back to where he pretends to watch something in the distance, as if I’m not there. “I’ll trade my car for yours,” I say finally.

He spits again and then laughs. “You’re telling me you want to trade your brand-new Beamer for my Chevy?”

I don’t know what that means, but I nod. “I’ll give you my blue car for your green.”

He squints at me suspiciously and asks, “You in some kind of trouble, missy?”

“Maybe I am. What’s it to you?” I ask, straightening my back.

He scans my face like it’s one of his broken motorcycles—trying to diagnose my problem. Then he sighs, his whole body sinking an inch as he exhales. “Well, hell, who am I to ask questions?” he says, and striding up to the green truck, opens the passenger side and pulls some papers out of the glove compartment.

I copy him and go to get all the papers I can find out of Miles’s car. When I return, the man has spread a paper that reads “California Certificate of Title” on the hood of the pickup truck and
is writing on it. “There you go, missy,” he says. “I’ve put my name down and signed it. You can fill your part in yourself.” He hands me the paper, and then watches as I unfold my own certificate and place it on the front of the pickup. I hesitate, and glance up at him.

“Just sign right there,” he says, pointing to an empty spot on the page. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
I’m sure you will
, I think. From the crafty look on his face, I am convinced of what I suspected from the beginning: Miles’s car is worth much more than this man’s. But it’s worth nothing to me if it’s going to get us caught. So, as the man sticks his dirty hand forward and I reach out to shake it, I consider it a deal well made.

I press the button on Miles’s keychain that opens the trunk of the car, and begin transferring the camping equipment to the pickup. The man helps me until I close the trunk and move toward the backseat. He sees the zipped-up sleeping bag and freezes. “Whaddya got there?” he asks, uneasily folding his arms across his chest.

I have no idea what to say, so I just stand there looking at it, and finally admit, “It’s heavy.”

“Is that right?” the man says, chewing slowly. “Well, I can’t help you with that, but there’s a dirt bike loader with an electric winch in the back of each of my trucks.” He paces over to the green truck, lowers the tailgate, and pulling out a metal ramp, leans it between the truck bed and the ground. At the top of the ramp is a winch, much like the kind my clan used to move heavy objects. Except this one has a box and a button instead of a hand-turned crank.

He eyes the sleeping bag warily. “I’m just going to go get the change for your hundred, and by the time I get back that thing’s going to have disappeared. Right?” And he turns and leaves.

I get back in the car, drive it a few feet from the truck, and open the back door. “I’m sorry, Miles,” I whisper, and then grabbing the sleeping bag by the corners, yank hard until his body flops down onto the dusty parking lot like a bulky slab of meat. I use all my strength to drag Miles to the bottom of the ramp. Working quickly, I hoist him into the back of the pickup and stow the ramp and winch in their slots on the side of the truck bed.

I let myself into the truck and turn the key. It starts, and after fumbling a bit with the lever, trying to get it to point to
D
, and making the truck leap forward by pressing the pedal too hard, I stop in front of the shop.

The man comes out of the building and walks up to my window to hand me a few bills and coins. I give him Miles’s keys, and he pockets them, satisfied. “Truck’s tank is full of gas, so here’s your change and we’ll call it even. Sure has been a pleasure doing business with you,” he says, pulling his cap off. He runs his fingers through his hair again and glances at the back of the truck. Spotting the sleeping bag, he pulls his cap back on. And without looking back, he returns to the bike he was working on and picks up a wrench.

I pull out of the station and head down the road until I see a sign. Finding my position on the map, I see that if I follow the road for a few miles, I can get onto a highway heading east.

And with Miles’s dead body in a sleeping bag in the back, I put the truck in gear and head toward Arizona.