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The girl turned her head toward the ball of dust. She smiled her rotted smile. “Ghosts on the road,” she whispered.
“Isaiah!”
On the edge of the cornfield, Isaiah’s mother shimmered in the blue-black feathered cape he’d seen her wear in dreams before. She didn’t look sick and tired like she had at the end of her life. But she didn’t look entirely human, either.
“Mama?” he said.
“Isaiah. Concentrate. Wake up.”
“I’m too scared, Mama.”
“You can do it.” His mother’s voice rasped as if she’d had a bad cough. “I want you to imagine a door that you can walk right through, and then you’ll wake up.”
Make a door. He could do that. Isaiah pictured the open pocket doors of the library a few feet away. The strange girl was back, though, and she was screeching like a flock of mad birds at his mother. “He will punish you! You will not glory in his future!”
“Hush up!” his mother snapped like the girl was acting up in church.
But behind his mama, the dark moved like a living thing, and Isaiah was afraid for her.
“Go now,” his mother commanded in her strange, squawking voice. “Tell the others: Follow the Eye. Heal the breach. Protect Conor Flynn. Don’t let—”
The girl screeched and the sky was filled with black birds. Her hair flew up around her face. Her eyes were wrong. “We will meet again.”
The darkness swallowed his mama, the girl, the farm, everything.
“Mama!” Isaiah cried.
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nbsp; Isaiah came out of his trance thrashing and gasping. Memphis’s concerned face hovered just above his. “Isaiah? Isaiah!”
“Memphis!”
Memphis let out his breath in a big whoosh. “You okay, Ice Man?”
Isaiah nodded, coming back to himself, and Memphis pulled him in tight for a long minute.
Will checked his watch. “He was under for three minutes.”
“What did you see, Isaiah?” Sister Walker asked.
“It was a place, a farm, I think. The farm wasn’t doing so well. The crops had turned bad. And…” Isaiah licked his lips, trying to work some moisture back into them. He could still taste the dust in his mouth. “I think I saw another Diviner. But she wasn’t very nice. She was kinda scary.”
“Do you know her name?” Will asked.
“Huh-uh.” Isaiah hoped he hadn’t failed the test. “But when I asked where she was, she told me Bountiful, Nebraska.”
At Evie’s gasp, Memphis asked, “What is it?”
“Bountiful, Nebraska, was one of the places with a thumbtack stuck into it on that map Sam and I found,” she explained.
Isaiah looked to Memphis. “Mama was there, Memphis.”
Memphis swallowed hard. “She say anything?”
Isaiah nodded. “Told us to follow the Eye and heal the breach. Or else we’d be lost. And she said we should protect Conor Flynn.”
“Who or what is Conor Flynn?” Ling asked, but no one knew.
