After the End by Amy Plum
This shakes Miles out of his rant. He’s silent as we drive into the city center. I have obviously made my point. I’ve reminded him that he needs me as much as I need him, like Crazy Frankie said. But I still have no idea why.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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26
MILES
I HAVE TO GET TO A PHONE. TO CALL MY DAD. Have him take her off my hands. I can’t stand this much longer. I’m in way over my head. It’s one thing playing driver for a schizo teen who thinks she’s being chased by dangerous people. It’s a whole other thing when said dangerous people are actually chasing said teen and, by proxy, me.
But I can’t get away from her. She had me pull up to a woman pushing a baby carriage so she could ask where a supermarket was. (She called it a “food shop,” but whatever.) And once we had walked into Walmart Supercenter, she insisted that I accompany her every step of the way while she crammed a cart with food: canned stew, beans, and vegetables; liters of water; a sack of potatoes, a sack of apples; and, yes, a small pouch of birdseed.
She went all out on the flashlights, buying three jumbo ones along with a mountain of batteries. “I saw batteries in Seattle,” she whispered to me as if they were a state secret. I wonder what they would have thought of her pack of size-D Duracells back in hippie camp.
It looked like she was preparing for a monthlong wilderness survival trip from all the staples she was stocking up on. But that was just the beginning. Then we hit the junk food aisles.
She transformed from a middle-aged nature mom into an eight-year-old girl with a serious sugar deficiency in the time it took to fill the rest of the cart with Pop-Tarts, Cap’n Crunch, and cheese puffs. This was followed by a meltdown in the chocolate aisle. The hippies obviously didn’t grow their own cocoa beans back in Alaska, because I’ve never seen anyone load up on so many candy bars in my life.
At the checkout, Juneau digs in her bag and pulls out a leather pouch with money in it. Seriously—a leather pouch tied together with a cord. Like Grizzly Adams, but with major cash. I’m talking a fat wad of bills. She pulls it out and starts counting really slowly in front of the checkout lady, turning each bill over a couple of times and squinting at them like they’re Japanese yen.
The clerk stares at the money kind of scared, like she’s afraid Juneau’s running a teenage counterfeiting operation. And then she looks at Juneau’s face and catches a glimpse of that weird contact lens, and her eyes get a little wider. Finally I grab the cash and slap down enough for the total, jam the rest back into the pouch, and push Juneau out of the store in front of me.
“What’s wrong with you?” I hiss as soon as we’re outside. “You freaked that woman out so much she might call the manager.”
“What are you talking about?” Juneau asks, as innocent as a kindergartner.
“Flashing all that money around. Where’d you get it anyway?”
“That’s none of your business,” she says, frowning.
“Can’t you just try to act normal?” I ask.
“What is your definition of normal?” she asks cautiously.
I’m about to say, Well, it wouldn’t be pulling a fat wad of cash out of a leather pouch at Walmart and then staring with your freaky contact lens at the bills as if you’re hoping the green’s not going to rub off, but I opt for, “Nothing,” and beeline to the car. I pile the bags into the trunk and return the shopping cart to its corral. By the time I get back, Juneau’s feeding the birdseed to the raven, who’s eating it out of her hand like they’ve been best buds for their entire lives.
I get ready to start the car and then pause. “You have to take out that weird-ass contact lens. Not only did it freak out the checkout lady, but the woman in the breakfast place said that your mentor and his thugs are using it to hunt you down.”
She sits there looking like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Then, putting her finger under her right eye, she says, “You mean my starburst?”
“If that’s what you call it, then yes.”
“I can’t take it out,” she says simply.
“What do you mean?”
Blank stare.
“You’re not telling me you have a gold iris shaped like a star . . . naturally?” I don’t bother to downplay my sarcasm.
“Yes, actually,” she replies. “All the children in my village do. It comes from being close to the Yara.” I nod, unwilling to bite if she’s luring me into asking what the hell she’s talking about.
“So you can’t take it out?”
She shakes her head and the sun glints off the gold flecks in her mutant eye, and for a second it strikes me that it’s actually not that weird-looking once you’re used to it, maybe because her other eye is kind of a nice honey color and doesn’t contrast too much.
“Can you wink with that eye?” I ask. She winks. “Can you hold it shut whenever we’re in public?” I prod, and she looks at me strangely, and then her eyes narrow and her face closes down like it does when she’s mad at me, which seems to be more and more often since she found the raven and realized her mentor is playing for the Dark Side of the Force. Like it’s my fault she trusted him.
“Is it essential that we waste time talking about my eye, or can we go now?” she says stiffly.
I try to speak like she does. “Considering the fact that we’re being trailed by a dangerous hippie bird hypnotist and two thugs, I don’t mind continuing the eye conversation later.” Turning the key in the ignition, I head out of the parking lot and toward signs for Highway 47.
As we leave town, I have an idea and pull over in front of a drugstore. “Stay here,” I order, and duck out so fast she doesn’t have a chance to stop me. Two minutes later I’m back in the car. Juneau’s sitting there staring quizzically at me as I pull onto the road and drive toward the edge of town. I let her stare, and we sit in silence until we’re way out in the country, driving past a sea of yellow flowers toward a horizon of low purple mountains.
Juneau’s fidgeting like crazy, and the longer she tries to fight the urge to ask me what I bought the happier it makes me feel. She’s been freaking me out so much for the last eighteen hours or so, it’s kind of nice to finally be getting under her skin. I glance at the clock. Almost an hour passes in complete silence. I’m kicking myself for not thinking to ask to use the phone in the drugstore. But the thought of people chasing us has driven almost everything else from my mind, including the reason I’m driving her. Also, it’s so much fun watching Juneau squirm, I don’t mind putting off contacting my father a little longer.
Finally I reach forward to turn on the radio. Before I can touch the button, she blurts out, “What’d you get?”
“Well, Juneau, I’m glad you asked,” I say in my Dad voice. I hand her the small plastic bag from the floor in front of my seat. She opens it and pulls out a pair of black sunglasses. She stares at them, confused for a moment. And then a broad smile stretches across her face.
“It’s to help you look like a normal person,” I say.
“Thanks a lot,” she replies, but she cracks a little pleased smile.
“No problem.” I grin. “You have to peel this label off before you put them on,” I say, and reach toward the glasses. My hand brushes hers, and something electric passes between us. Juneau looks at me, surprised. I return my hand to the steering wheel and focus on the road and try to ignore the tingling in my fingers.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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27
JUNEAU
WE’RE PASSING OVER THE LINE FROM WASHINGTON into Oregon when Poe starts shifting around in the backseat. He flaps his wings a couple of times, and then goes into full-fledged panic, banging against the window, shedding feathers, and squawking like someone’s squeezing him.
Cursing, he yanks the wheel and we veer away from the truck just as it lets out an earsplitting honk.
“Is anyone behind us?” Miles shouts.
“No,” I yell back, and he crouches down, ducking out of reach of the flailing wings to steer over to the side of the road. I crawl into the backseat with Poe and wrestle with him until I get ahold of him, folding his wings in and pulling him firmly against my chest. His heart flutters wildly against my fingertips. I try to still his panic by closing my eyes and slowing my own heartbeat, but it has no effect on him. No longer able to struggle, his eyes roll in panic.
Something is trying to pull him out of the car. I concentrate and attempt to tap into the Yara, but I am getting absolutely nothing. Please, I think. I pull my opal out from under my shirt and press it tightly against the bird. Nothing. A minute passes, and Poe starts to struggle again and there . . . finally it comes, my lips and fingers tingling as I make the connection. “Thank you,” I whisper, as my mind is filled with Poe’s emotions. Fear. Possession. After a second, I recognize what he’s feeling from something we studied in our wildlife lessons with Kenai’s dad. Ravens have an ability to remember where they have hidden food. And Poe has the overwhelming feeling that another bird has found his cache. He is desperate to fly there and protect his food.
I can just guess who is messing with his little bird mind, and try to picture where it is that Poe wants to go. I see the same clearing that I saw before—the place Whit released Poe with the note for me. He must have lost my trail and gone back to where he started to wait for the bird’s return and get a clear picture of where I am. A flare of anger ignites in my chest.
I still don’t understand what Whit is doing, but I am the last of my clan running free, and he wants to help the bad guys capture me too. Over my dead body, I think, and wonder if it will actually get to that point if I resist. I don’t plan on letting him find me to test that question.
Poe feels my anger, and our fragile connection is broken. He flaps to break free from my grasp, so I pick up the T-shirt he was sitting on and wrap it around him, like I’ve seen the clan mothers do with their flailing babies. Once he is swaddled and can’t move an inch, he gives up. He shudders once, and then his wild eyes close and he seems to sleep. I place him on the floor, tucking Miles’s other dirty clothes around him like a nest.
The car has stopped and Miles is staring at me, eyes wide, lips pressed tightly together. I crawl out of the back and into the front, strapping myself in. “He’s okay now,” I say, but instead of putting the car in gear, Miles turns it off.
“Why was the bird having a panic attack?” he asks, his voice a note higher than normal.
“Whit was trying to get him to come back and tell him where we are,” I say, and then, seeing a twitch in Miles’s right eyebrow, correct myself. “I mean, Whit was going to read his memory to see where we had gone.”
Miles nods, his eyebrow still twitching. “So you used my shirt as a straitjacket.”
“It’s called swaddling,” I said. “It’s to calm him.”
“Because that’s what you do when you’re ‘close to the Yara,’” Miles says, ending in a spooky voice; then his lips form that sarcastic smile that makes me want to punch him.
“No, that’s what you do when your baby’s freaking out. So, Poe’s a raven—I inter-species extrapolated. And it worked. What would you have done?”
“Rolled down the window,” Miles says. “Let the bird go before it shits all over my backseat.” He gestures to two white splats on the upholstery and looks mildly upset.
I roll my eyes and pull out the atlas. “We need to get off this main road. When Whit realizes that Poe’s not coming back, he will come after us. And if we were headed in the right direction—toward my clan—this would be one of the obvious routes we would take.” I trace our path on the map and find a junction where two small roads veer off and away from the highway, one meandering past a lake before it joins back up with the larger road near Idaho.
There’s a road sign within view, and I compare it to the map and calculate how far we are from the turnoff. “We’ll keep driving another sixty miles and then exit,” I say, and then wait.
Miles sighs and turns the key in the ignition. I’m going to have to tell him more. I need him to understand what’s happening or else . . . Or else what? a voice says in my mind. Or else he might leave me. And I still need him, I think, cursing the fact that, for some reason, I need this boy to help rescue my clan.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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28
MILES
“GIVE ME BACK MY WATCH, YOU FLEA-RIDDEN winged rodent!” I am chasing a raven around a clearing in the woods in the middle of nowhere Oregon as a brainwashed teenage ex–cult member meditates by the campfire. It seems that crazy spreads, because I have finally lost it. I’m at the end of my rope.
“It’s shiny,” Juneau calls, shaking herself out of her trance. “Ravens like shiny things.”
“Why did you even let him out of the car if there’s a chance of him flying back to Whit?”
“He’s not acting paranoid anymore. Whit stopped trying to get him, so he’s safe now.”
I stop chasing the bird and walk over to stand in front of Juneau. “Where. Are. We. Going,” I say, my teeth clenched so tightly I have to bite the words out.
“Like I said, I’m trying to figure that out,” she says calmly.
I stare at her, my eyes wide. “Three days, Juneau. We’re on day three of our demented road trip now. If you don’t tell me right now where we’re going, then I am out of here. Gone. And I will leave you and the bird here and go back to California and you’ll have to find someone else to drive you. Someone who doesn’t mind sleeping on the ground and being forced to eat innocent wildlife on a daily basis by an insane hippie.”
“Innocent wildlife?” Juneau says, confused.
“The roasted lizard we ate last night. Which, along with the bunny we ate on the mountain, makes two innocent wild animals that I consumed within twenty-four hours. What next? Bambi? Why don’t we eat something non-innocent and annoying? In which case, I vote for the bird.”
“If you don’t want Poe to pick up your things, you shouldn’t leave them sitting out,” she rebuts.
“I didn’t! It was in my bag!” I growl, and spin to see my bag sitting on the ground beside the tent, its contents strewn all over the ground. “I’m going to kill you!” I yell, and make a lunge for the bird, who flaps away and alights on a branch too high for me to reach.
“Go ahead. Leave us, then,” Juneau calls. She turns and walks away from our campsite, out of the clearing onto the pebble beach lining the lakefront. Sitting down on a flat boulder, she pulls her knees to her chin and looks out across the water. I sigh, and my anger fizzles out when I remember what she looked like last night in the tent.
She looked her age—a rare occurrence. She looked defenseless, even though her hand stayed inches away from her loaded crossbow all night. She looked sad.
She spoke in her sleep again, but this time I think she was talking about me. “I know. I can’t trust him,” she said a couple of times. And then she whispered, “Who else have I got?”
Right then, for the first time, I felt bad about what I’m doing. I mean, now that it’s clear I can’t talk her into going to California with me, all I’m trying to do is stay with her long enough to get a phone call through to Dad. There’s no way I’m driving her on her crazy mission. I’ve decided that as soon as we get to a town, I’m making the call.
But she believes I’m going to help her. She believes her family has been kidnapped and that we’re on a quest to save them. She believes she has some kind of superpowers.
Ok
But as for the imaginary superpowers: All day today, she’s been trying to do things. Talk to the bird. Press her necklace against the ground and talk to it. Skip rocks and watch the ripples on the surface of the water, lips moving as she does. Each experiment ends with her giving this frustrated, teeth-clenched growl before she goes off to try something else.
She didn’t even offer to make lunch today, so I heated up some pork and beans, which wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it would be. I left her a bowl of it, but she fed it to the bird. And now it’s almost night, and it doesn’t look like dinner’s going to happen unless I do something about it.
I hesitate for a moment, hoping she’ll spontaneously remember mealtime and fix us something from the supplies she bought. I concentrate really hard. Dinner, Juneau. Remember dinner. Hell, if she can read the raven’s brain, maybe she can read mine too.
Of course it doesn’t work. I settle for the direct approach and walk down to the waterfront and sit next to her on the rock. She doesn’t move, just stays still with her head resting on her knees, looking out over the water.
“You okay?” I ask after a minute.
“No,” she replies.
“Is it because I called you insane?”