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“What do you want?”
“Your healing power. All of it.”
The ash trees were diseased. The bark peeled down like loose skin, exposing the mangy, pustule-ridden sapwood underneath. Mushrooms popped up from the ground. A worm nibbled at one, then curled up and convulsed, helpless. There were no stars above, only a fat, jaundiced moon and strands of wispy clouds. The place felt airless and fetid and lost.
“If I give you this power, you’ll give me back Isaiah?”
“You have my word. Look into my coat. What do you see?”
Memphis saw the true history of the nation. Blood and blood and blood. Blood shed and bloodlines revered. He saw the Cherokee marched out of Georgia until they dropped. He saw the pioneers lost on the Oregon Trail, eating one another down to the bones to survive. He saw the white-wigged men of ideas signing declarations, then going home to whip their slaves. The history reached down Memphis’s throat. He wanted to speak but found he couldn’t. The force of all that history at once curdled his voice. The insect-like hum of the dead filled his ears. A war cry mingled with the noise of an approaching swarm. All that history trying to be screamed at once.
“No one really wants to see, hmm? No one wants to know. Better to create a story we like to tell ourselves about ourselves. For we are the mythmakers.”
Memphis felt as if he were falling into the coat’s vast lining, into the morass of all those stories. He was being overwhelmed by facts and myth intertwined, a tangle of slippery roots that had no beginning and no end. He felt he might drown in it. He tried to tear at the threads, but they would simply shift and become some other narrative over which he could not gain control. He grabbed for a loose thread and gasped at the bloody cut it left in the skin of his palm. Finally, he threw himself against the lining. Like an enormous gut, the coat began to devour Memphis. He was being swallowed up and absorbed into the coat’s history. The chorus of the dead grew louder. Memphis felt as if he were being buried alive inside the King of Crows’s blinding coat.
“Where is my brother? You promised to give me my brother!” Memphis yelled. “Stop! Can you please just stop?”
In a snap, the noise was gone. And so was the King of Crows. Memphis was on his knees, alone, in the land of the dead. Skeletal trees arched toward one another, forming a long corridor. Pale fog spilled out between their haggard limbs. Memphis pulled himself up and staggered over. Something was coming. He was afraid but he did not run. The figure moved closer. Closer still. And then tears streamed down Memphis’s cheeks.
Isaiah smiled at his brother. “Hey, Memphis.”
Imprisoned in the chair connected to Jake Marlowe’s Golden Eye, Miriam Lubovitch squirmed and moaned. “No…” If Marlowe and his thugs hadn’t put her through so much already, she’d have been able to contain what she knew. But they’d weakened her with so much exposure to the machine. Already, she could feel the Eye’s radiation twisting the cells in her body, shortening her life.
“Turn it on again!” Jake Marlowe said. “Where are they, Miriam? Tell us where they are and this ends.”
“It will end,” Miriam whispered. “But not the way you think.”
As the current coursed through her damaged cells, Miriam felt her connection to Memphis and to her son and to all the Diviners. “D-Devils T-T-Tower,” she croaked.
Jake turned down the dials and whipped off his goggles. “Ready my plane.”
Sam’s voice reached Memphis from far, far away. Memphis opened his eyes. He was on his hands and knees on the ground, vomiting into the spindly grass. Grave dirt and a tiny splat of blood came up in his bile, along with two wriggly baby frogs, each no bigger than a fingernail. With a startled shout, he rubbed feverishly at his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a bloody smear on his knuckles. His stomach clenched again, but he swallowed against the urge to vomit. The tang of blood sharpened the usual softness of his mouth. The point of his tongue pressed against a loose lower tooth that wiggled in its swollen socket. His hands. Cuts appeared on his arms, as if he’d been clawed by an angry beast. He felt as if he’d been gone for several generations, as if he’d swallowed down the history of the nation all at once. But they were here in the fabled west of Wyoming, with the night of fixed stars a hard shell above them. The others were gathered in a line, staring at him. Theta edged nearer. Her voice was a faraway train of sound rushing closer: “Memphis, what did you DO?”
Memphis’s head ached something powerful. And his hands… they no longer seemed like his hands. They were cold and wrong, somehow.
“Memphis?” Theta again. She sounded frightened, as if he were the monster, and not this rotten world.
His friends crept forward. He could tell they were newly afraid of him, too, now that he’d done this. Now that he’d shown what a man could be pushed to do. Memphis looked down at the ground. His brother’s body was gone.
Memphis laughed. “He’s coming back.”
“What’s he talking about?” Sam whispered to the others.
“Memphis, oh, Memphis,” Theta said, holding him.
Memphis took Theta’s face in his cold hands. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Evie asked, wary.
Memphis staggered to his feet and took a step into the brush. “He’s here.”
“What is he talking about?” Ling asked.
Memphis waved his arms. Out in the grass, near where the bison had roamed, Isaiah glowed like a promise. He smiled at Memphis and waved back. Memphis smiled, too. His mouth still tasted of blood. When he blinked, he saw the terrible history inside the coat. He wanted to claw his eyes out to make it stop, but every time he blinked, there it was. It had crawled inside him. He’d never be rid of it now. No matter, because there was his brother. There was Isaiah. Returned to him, for a price.
“Isaiah,” Memphis said, scratching at his arms. They erupted in long red streaks. “He’s here. He came back. I told you I’d do it.”
Memphis kept his eyes trained on the field. He could hear the thumping of Isaiah’s hea
