After the End(61)

“Then you do it,” she challenges.

“I told you, I’m not—”

“No, just pretend like you’re doing it, so I can copy you.”

I straighten my back and exhale deeply, closing my eyes. “Dad,” I whisper, and then let my eyelids slowly open as I stare above the fire. I watch the flames lick the air. Watch the negative space above them, pointing downward in flickering Vs, and wait, without hoping, for the tingle of the Yara connection. After a while, I break my gaze and look at her.

“Did it work?” she asks. I shake my head.

She sighs, and then gets up and grabs me a couch pillow to put under my foot. Digging through a cupboard, she takes out a plastic-lined box and scoops something out. “Clay from the riverbed,” she says, and comes back to sprawl beside me in front of the fire. “I think better when my hands are working,” she says, and starts rolling it around between her palms.

“So when you were telling me your life story there, you ended up with your theory that you’ve lost your powers because you’ve lost faith in the Yara. But since you’ve been explaining to me how it all functions, I’ve noticed just how much you do seem to believe in it. Your face kind of lights up when you talk about it.

“However, with all that postapocalyptic crap that your elders were feeding you and the other kids, I don’t blame you for doubting everything you ever learned. But you can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, as they say. This is an important time for you, Juneau. You have other people to think about. You have a whole clan that’s depending on you. So you owe them to think a little bit harder about this.”

The clay is now squished into an oblong shape, and her thumbs are kneading it like she’s giving it a massage. “What I’ve just heard is that this one man came up with the whole idea of the Yara—”

“Whit based it on the whole Gaia philosophy,” I interject.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” she says, and pats the top of the clay with the ball of her hand with little slapping noises until it’s flat. “He gathered the info. He made sense out of it. He mined other belief systems for what would go with it. And sounds like he did a pretty good job synthesizing it all to make it something that is a powerful tool for you and your people. But that doesn’t mean he knows everything.”

I consider what she’s said. “You know what I’ve been thinking about, Tallie? How all the totems Whit uses for Reading and Conjuring, even though he claims they’re all necessary, they seem to detract from the pure connection between me and the Yara. Why do I have to go through something—whether a stone or the rabbits’ feet? I should be able to go directly to the Yara to ask what I want. All the bells and whistles might be extraneous.”

“Doubt everything, Juneau. Doubt everything at least once. What you decide to keep, you’ll be able to be confident of. And what you decide to ditch, you will replace with what your instincts tell you is true. You’ve been living in a crystal tower that just had the foundations knocked out from under it. Which sucks. But now it’s up to you to decide whether you’re going to wallow around in the wreckage or rebuild something sturdier. Nothing better than making something with your own hands,” she says, gesturing around at the house she built. “Or, in your case, with your own mind.”

She smiled at me. “Now that I’m done with my lecture, here is your reward for listening.” She hands me the ball of clay, and suddenly I’m looking at a miniature version of myself. High cheekbones, full-moon eyes, and spiky hair made by pinching the clay dozens of times. She’s even made the starburst in my right eye.

“Hey, you’re really good,” I say.

She shrugs but looks pleased. “When I’m not building log cabins, I’m an amateur sculptor.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“No, thank you,” she responds. “I think we just now fulfilled Beauregard’s prophecy. You taught me something, or attempted to. . . . I’m going to keep working on the fire-Reading thing until I make it work. And in exchange, I gave you something to mull over, drawn from my own hard-earned life experience. I’d say we’re pretty even.”



UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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44


MILES




I AWAKE TO THE SOUND OF THE CLEANING LADY unlocking my door. “Checkout was a half hour ago,” she says, and stands there with her fist on her hip like she’s kicking me out.

“Uh, could I have five minutes to get up and get dressed?” I ask. She makes a puffing noise and backs out, but leaves the door cracked open. I glance over at the glowing red numbers of the alarm clock on the bedside table. Eleven thirty a.m. My first night in what feels like forever in a real bed instead of on the hard ground, and I want to sleep all day.