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Isaiah pinched his nose shut with his fingers. “Which way should we go?”
“I don’t know,” Memphis said, and that scared Isaiah, because if there was anything his brother was good at, it was acting like he knew everything. “Bill?”
Bill held up a finger, feeling for air. He shook his head. “Ain’t no way to know.” He took out a nickel, tossed it, and slapped it down on his arm. “Heads we go left; tails, right.” Memphis nodded. Bill took his hand away. “Tails,” he said, and they entered the tunnel to their right.
“Maybe those Shadow Men left Harlem and went back to wherever they come from,” Memphis said. Water swished over their shoes and trickled down the narrow brick walls. It stank.
“Doubt it,” Bill panted. “They never stop. I know ’em.”
“I didn’t even get to tell Theta good-bye. What if they went to her apartment to find me? What if… what if they hurt her?”
“Only thing we can do is keep going,” Bill said. “Soon as we get somewhere safe, you can put in a call to her, and to your auntie.”
Memphis snorted. “Somewhere safe. Let me know where that is.”
Isaiah chanced another look over his shoulder. Tiny motes of light fluttered in the vast dark. Isaiah blinked, wiped at his eyes. The muscles from his neck to his fingers twitched. Suddenly, his feet wouldn’t move. Isaiah felt as if a giant were squeezing him between its palms. The spots of light came faster, and then Isaiah knew.
“Memphis…” was all Isaiah managed before his eyes rolled back and he was falling deeply into space as the vision roared up inside him, fast as a freight train.
Isaiah stood on a ribbon of dirt road leading toward a flat horizon. To his left, a slumped scarecrow guarded over a field of failing corn. To his right sat a farmhouse with a sagging front porch. He saw a weathered red barn. An enormous oak whose tire swing hung lax, as if it hadn’t been touched in a good while. Isaiah had seen this place once before in a vision, and he had been afraid of it, and of the girl who lived here.
He heard his name being called like a voice punching through miles of fog. “I, I, I, IsaiAH!” And then, close by his ear: “Isaiah.”
Isaiah whirled around. She was right there. The same girl as before. A peach satin ribbon clung to a few strands of her pale ringlets. Her eyes were such a light blue-gray they were nearly silver.
Who are you? he thought.
“I’m a seer, a Diviner, like you.”
She’d heard his thoughts?
The girl curled in on herself like she’d just stepped into a bracing wind. “Something awful has happened, Isaiah, just now. Like a fire snuffed out, and it’s so, so cold. Can you feel it?”
Isaiah couldn’t, and that made him jealous of this strange girl. He was fixated on the horizon, where an angry mouth of dark storm clouds gobbled up the blue sky. The clouds cracked like eggshells, letting out a high, sharp whine, a sound so full of pain and fear and need that Isaiah wanted to run away from it. What is that?
“The King of Crows and his dead,” the girl answered as if Isaiah had spoken. “He’s come, like he promised he would. He’s come and we’re in terrible danger.”
Wind snapped the corn on its stalks. Birds darted out from the roiling, dark sea overhead. Their cawing mixed with the gunfire bursts of screaming. The noise stole the breath from Isaiah’s lungs. So much hatred lived inside that sky. He could fee
l the threat trying to gnaw its way out into their world.
The girl reached for Isaiah’s hand. Her hands were small and delicate, like a doll’s. “He tells lies, so many lies, Isaiah. He’s been lying to me this whole time, pretending to be my friend. But I had a vision. A lady named Miriam told me the truth. She told me what he did to Conor Flynn. He wants all of us, Isaiah. He wants the Diviners.”
Why?
“Because we’re the only ones who can stop him.” The girl kept her unearthly eyes on the unholy sky. “I know how to stop the King of Crows, Isaiah.”
Where are we? Isaiah asked. He didn’t know why he couldn’t speak here.
“Bountiful, Nebraska. That’s where I live.”
Isaiah saw a mailbox bearing the name “Olson” and the number one forty-four. That number came up a lot. He remembered Evie saying it was the number of her brother’s unit during the war. But her brother and his whole unit had died, and it had something to do with Will and Sister Walker and Project Buffalo and Diviners.
“Where are you?” she asked.
In the tunnel under the old museum. But we’re lost. There’s people after us.
“I’m afraid, Isaiah,” the girl said. “We’re not safe. None of us are. You’ve got one another, but I’m all alone. I can’t fight him and his army by myself. None of us can. We need each other.”
