CHAPTER TWO

A wash of wildflowers spilled out over the ridge, the purples too soft and yellows too inviting for the harsh outback. But it wasn’t the sudden beauty that made Mouse sigh. It was the dozens of dead camels scattered across the valley, their bloated bellies rising like islands among the sea of flowers.

“I wish they wouldn’t kill them.”

“The camels don’t belong here,” Angelo said. He’d gone out with the Martu men once for a culling, chasing down the herds, guns popping and echoing against the hills as the beasts toppled into the dust. The camels were invasive, brought in by white colonists a century ago, and killing them was an act of survival and stewardship for the Martu. Not for Angelo, though. He’d stayed home at the next slaughter.

“We don’t belong here either,” Mouse tossed back.

“But we’re not feral.”

Mouse turned to look at him, her eyebrow raised. Her hair was matted with sweat and tangled by the wind, and she had smears of red desert dirt on her face. They’d driven an hour from the outstation and then left the jeep miles back at the end of the rutted path. Angelo looked just as wild as she did.

He laughed. “Well, at least we don’t eat everything in sight.” He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her to him. “And we aren’t likely to fall into the watering hole, die, and contaminate the only drinking water for miles.”

“There has to be another way.”

“This isn’t our problem to fix, Mouse. Like you said, we don’t belong here. We’re just guests.” He took her hand. “And we have our own problems to work out.”

Mouse almost said, “More than you know,” but she stopped the words at the back of her throat. Since last night, she hadn’t been able to think about anything but her little brother, somewhere out in the world. Her mind kept sketching scenarios, an invisible doodle of what-ifs. Some conjured up a wave of wonder at what might be, the promise of finally having someone who shared in the uniqueness of being both human and not, someone who understood her. Her heart filled with unbearable joy at such imagined companionship. But other scenarios, far more likely, ended in terror: her brother at her father’s side, waging war on innocents, Mouse facing off against them, and rings of death and destruction rippling out from them like shock waves from a dropped bomb.

Despite her unnatural gifts and lifetimes of experience, Mouse could find no clear path forward. There were too many variables. She knew what she wanted, but she wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. And she was pretty sure Angelo wouldn’t go along with it.

That thought brought her to the more immediate problem she had to solve—how and when to tell him she had a brother. When they’d fled Israel together, Mouse had promised Angelo three things: She would never shield him from the dangers of being on the run, she would never sacrifice herself to protect him, and she would keep no more secrets.

But a little boy’s life hung in the balance, and Mouse couldn’t take the risk that Angelo would call the Bishop.

Angelo had severed ties with his mentor when he’d made the choice to come with Mouse. He hadn’t been happy about it, but he had understood that they needed to fall completely off the grid to have any hope of escaping the Novus Rishi, with their long reach and pervasive power.

Disappearing took planning. Over her long lifetime, one of the rules Mouse had learned was to be prepared for anything. She had squirreled away cash, gold, birth certificates, passports, and credit cards all over the world in places that were good at keeping secrets—home bases in her centuries-old game of hide-and-seek.

Angelo had fed the Bishop lies, calling with regular updates as they moved around Europe and gathered what they needed. Then they’d made an indirect path toward the Ukraine, one of the best places in the world to get lost. Angelo had kept the Bishop on the hook, deceiving the man who had once given his life purpose. When they crossed the border, Mouse and Angelo had disappeared like a blip on the radar gone suddenly dark.

“Hey, where’d you go?” Angelo whispered at her ear, his breath on her skin a cool contrast to the sweltering desert air.

“Sorry, got lost in my head.” She leaned back against his chest.

“Well, it is kind of big, so—”

Mouse goosed him in the side and then pointed over the sea of flowers and camel corpses to the ridge of hills on the other side. “The mountain we’re looking for is that tall peak to the right. That’s where Ngara said the secret of the Seven Sisters will be. Ready?” She pulled away from him, antsy with guilt and worry.

“I want you to try something first,” Angelo said, tugging at Mouse’s hand.

She sighed. “Not again.”

He pointed at a patch of thick green shrub dotted with yellow flowers that looked like melting butter, lit by the low outback sun. “Burn that one,” he said.

Mouse scoffed. “Aren’t burning bushes a God thing?”

“Come on, just try.”

Angelo had been pushing Mouse for months to test her abilities. Her immortality, heightened senses, and mental acuity were all part of her birthright, but that inheritance also gifted her with darker abilities, powers she had spent seven hundred years trying to escape. Angelo believed she ought to embrace that power and learn to control it. He wanted her ready to face her father when the time came. He also argued that they had the perfect training ground—one of the most remote places in the world. He reasoned that it was as safe as taking a new driver to practice in an empty parking lot.

Mouse wasn’t convinced. Besides, she didn’t want to play with her power. She didn’t want to use it as a weapon. She shook her head as she stared at the bush.

“Fine. If you don’t want to burn something, why not make it rain?” Angelo asked, running his sleeve across the sweat on his face. “You know, Jesus calmed the storms. Can’t you manage a light shower to drive off some of this heat?”

“Haven’t you ever read the fairytales where some well-meaning witch called for rain in a drought?” Mouse kept her tone light, attempting to tease him out of his frustration, but she was really afraid.

She had kept her power tethered her whole life—until two years ago when she’d had to unleash it. She had joined with it, let it become fully part of her, so she could save Angelo from a mob of demons in a Norwegian church when they’d opened the Devil’s Bible. Since then, the power had been surprisingly docile. It didn’t surge uncontrollably when she got angry or sad. It didn’t jump to lace her words with the power to compel a person to do her will. It didn’t feel like an enemy anymore. Mouse could still feel it inside her, tickling, dancing, but it seemed content now. Or was it just waiting for a chance for something more?

“If I ask it to rain,” Mouse said, “one of two things will likely happen: nothing, or it starts to rain and never stops, and Australia becomes an ocean again.”

“Well then, you know what Yeats said.”

“What?”

“Surely Ms. Perfect Memory has Yeats stored away up in that big head somewhere.” Angelo kissed her on the cheek. “‘Education is not the filling of a pail but—’”

“‘The lighting of a fire.’” Mouse shoved him away. “You should never be allowed to make jokes.”

Angelo kicked the shrub again, laughing. “Come on, try. But this time, don’t ask it. Tell it to burn. And really try this time, Mouse.”

With a sigh, she squatted beside the shrub. She felt the purr of power at the back of her throat. Angelo hovered over her.

“Can you move over there?” She nodded to a spot a few feet away. “I like you uncooked.”

As Angelo stepped away, she bent close to the bush and pulled a branch toward her. “Burn,” she whispered.

A gust of wind whipped up over the edge of the ridge and carried the word away, but the shrub did not burn. And Mouse was glad.

“Sorry,” she said, shrugging at Angelo. He pressed his lips into a disapproving line, but before he could say anything, she led him down the hill into the swath of purples and yellows. “Let’s find that cave before we lose what’s left of the sunlight.”

The shallow entrance to the cave was marked with Aboriginal rock art, but there was no sign of anything that might be the secret the Seven Sisters meant for Mouse to find. She and Angelo kept moving farther back into the cave. Sometimes they had room to walk, and other times they crawled, squeezing through cobwebbed crevices down into the mountain.

Hours into the search, one of the cramped tunnels unexpectedly opened onto a massive chamber with huge columns of stone erupting to touch the high, curved ceiling. The room looked like the sanctuary of a forgotten cathedral. But it was the image painted on the side wall that took their breath away. “It’s huge,” Angelo whispered. The lights strapped to their hard hats oscillated wildly with each turn of their heads, but Mouse and Angelo used the narrower beams from their handheld flashlights to follow the lines of the picture, as if they were tracing it for an art class. It was a snake, rearing high up to the towering ceiling, then twisting down to the floor and back into the shadows at the far end of the space.

“It’s beautiful,” Mouse said. Unlike most of the cave art they’d seen, this painting was still vivid, brilliant and sharp under the glare of the flashlights, as if it had been painted just that morning. The ochre stood out, bright red-orange, against the dark cave wall, and was patterned with blacks and whites that seemed to writhe under the light, as if the snake were alive.

“Do you think this might be what the Dreaming wanted you to find?” Angelo asked.

“Maybe,” Mouse mumbled as her fingers hovered above the image, almost but not quite touching it.

“Look at its eyes.”

Mouse swung her light up to where the wall curved into the chamber ceiling. Enormous, pupil-less white eyes, framed with wavering circles of black, looked down on her. They were spirited, wise, and full of life. Mouse shivered.

“It’s the Rainbow Serpent,” she said, her voice full of awe. “One of the beings in the Martu creation story, one of their most sacred figures.”

The painting seemed more sacrament than art, an act of worship or penance. Mouse knew about those, too. That’s what the Devil’s Bible had been for her—an illuminated manuscript filled with her penitence and sorrow.

Angelo made the sign of the cross. “It has a lot of teeth.”

The serpent’s mouth was open, and long white fangs curved down around its jaw, glowing eerily in the scattered light. Mouse snatched her hand back from the wall.

“This is it,” she said, peering toward the darker end of the cave.

“I sure as hell hope so,” Angelo said. “I don’t think my legs can take much more.”

“No, I mean the chamber. It stops. There’s nowhere else to go.” She shined her light against the flat back wall.

“Come out, come out wherever you are,” Angelo sang as he moved along the wall away from Mouse, searching.

She moved along the wall in the other direction. They swept their flashlights into nooks and crevices along the sides of the cave. As they searched, their boots crunched bits of loose rock against the floor, which echoed through the chamber and sounded like hundreds of invisible creatures gnawing and smacking at some bony meal.

“There’s nothing here,” Angelo said when they met again in front of the Rainbow Serpent. “I guess it was just a story. Sorry to make you go through all this for nothing. At least there weren’t any bugs.”

“None that we saw,” Mouse said playfully, and then she caught the disappointment on his face. “It was a long shot, Angelo. And we don’t really need some magic weapon anyway.”

“Yeah, you say that. But what if your father shows up? You refuse to work on using your power, and I—”

“He’s not coming. I doubt he even cares about me anymore.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Angelo asked.

Mouse opened her mouth, ready to confess about her brother and explain that her father would surely have no use for her now that he had a son. But fear choked her words. “It’s been so long. Two years,” she said instead. “If he wanted me, he would’ve come and gotten me, right?”

She kept her face turned away, pretending to scan the long wall under the Rainbow Serpent, running her light around the seams where stone met stone. She let out a small yelp and jumped back as a fist-sized spider scuttled out from underneath the snake.

Mouse punched Angelo in the arm. “I told you there’d be bugs,” she said.

“Just so I’m prepared—are you going to hit me every time we see a spider?”

“Yes.”

The spider disappeared through the tunnel, and Mouse stepped closer to the wall again, searching the place where it had crawled out—just where the painted snake’s belly slipped down to touch the floor. She looked back at Angelo with a twinkle in her eye. “There’s a gap! And it’s big—more like a small opening. It’s hard to see because it blends in with the painting.”

Angelo grabbed her hand. “No, Mouse,” he said. “You’re not going in there.”

Mouse spun around, ready to argue, but the panic on Angelo’s face silenced her. He was afraid not of what might happen here in this cave but of what had happened. His panic was a ghost from when Mouse had been trapped in the collapsing ruins of the monastery at Podlažice, the place where she had once written the Devil’s Bible. She and Angelo had crawled into the decaying structure looking for the lost pages of the book, which her father had hidden like bait in his Mouse-trap. He had meant to bury her beneath the ruins, but Angelo had been there to pull her out.

“It’s okay,” she said, stepping close and wrapping her arms around him. She wanted to convince him to stay here, safe, and let her take the risk, but she had promised she wouldn’t play the hero anymore. “You want to go first?” she asked. “It’s big enough for either of us.”

Angelo looked down at the opening. “You think?”

“All we can do is try. Or we can leave.” She shrugged.

Angelo blew out a sigh. “No, we’ve come this far.” He crouched, shining his light down into the gap. “Yeah, I think it opens up below.”

“How far down is the drop?”

“Let’s see.” He put his flashlight in his mouth, slid his legs into the gap, and eased himself down.

As he slipped farther into the dark, Mouse laid her own flashlight on the cave floor and grabbed his arms, bracing her feet against the wall and having second thoughts about letting him take the risk.

“Angelo, how about you—”

“There! I’ve got footing on something—a ledge or the floor, I can’t tell. But you can let go now.”

Slowly, her heart pounding, Mouse let go of one arm and then the other. Angelo disappeared.

“It’s another chamber, not as big,” he said, his voice hollow and faint. “There are several large formations jutting along the edges and then it smooths out. I can’t see the bottom.”

“Is there room for me?”

“Just a minute.”

She heard the scuffling of boots sliding against rock.

“Okay, you can come through now,” he said, “but take it slow. The ledge here is fairly narrow. I wish we’d brought better equipment.”

“Yeah, what were we thinking, leaving that hoard of spelunking supplies at the outstation?”

“Smart-ass.”

She chuckled as she shoved her flashlight in the neck of her shirt and then slipped her legs through the gap, reaching out with her foot to feel for the ledge. Mouse was shorter than Angelo, and the ledge was too far down for her. She’d have to let go and trust she’d land in the right place.

As she loosened her grip, she felt Angelo’s hand slide around her waist. “If you go, I go,” he said.

Mouse dropped and caught the ledge with the edge of her foot, but it kept sliding on the loose rubble, off the rock and into nothingness. Angelo jerked back as he caught her weight, his knee slamming down onto the ledge as her hip scraped the stone. Panting, he pulled her up against the rock wall.

Mouse twisted toward him and shoved his hands away. “Don’t ever do that again! If I fall, I get broken, but I get put back together again,” she said. “You don’t!”

“I guess that makes me Humpty Dumpty, huh?”

“It’s not funny!” The light from the flashlight shining up from her shirt cut her face into odd angles, a chiaroscuro jigsaw of anger and fear.

“What was I supposed to do? Just let you fall?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You have to learn.”

As the panic of the moment faded, so did Mouse’s anger. For so long, she’d been focused on hating her immortality. She’d never realized how comfortably she wore it, how cavalier and invincible it made her feel—until she’d met Angelo, who was not invincible, but who was every bit as cavalier. Mouse pressed her lips into a hard line as she watched him rubbing at his knee, sweat beaded on his forehead. If Angelo wanted her to respect his right to make his own choices and take his own risks, he needed to acknowledge that those risks were far costlier for him than they were for her.

But she knew that now wasn’t the time for that discussion. “Let’s go see if there’s anything to find and then get out of here,” she said as she pulled her flashlight free and pointed it down into the dark chamber.

They inched their way down the rocky ledge until it feathered back into the wall, where they were forced to jump to a nearby rock jutting up from below. Carefully leapfrogging their way from rock to rock, they moved down into the chamber. The air changed the farther down they went—it grew colder and charged with energy. It tasted like magic.

“I hear water,” Mouse said.

“Can you see where it’s coming from?”

She leaned past him, looking down. “I see the glint of the light against something shiny. It might be water. And there’s an odd glow coming from the other side of that jagged rock there.”

“I don’t see any glow.”

“Turn your lights off.”

The cave went pitch black for a moment.

“I see it! Like a blue haze,” Angelo said. “Maybe that’s it.”

He led them on until finally they could see over the edge of the last craggy stone and down to a small ledge hanging over a river several feet below. The ledge was scattered with shards of obsidian, glistening under the beams of light like exploding stars. The source of the blue glow rested on top of what looked like an altar—a black stone table erupting from the back wall, as flat and smooth as if carved. In the center was a long, iridescent sliver of something that pulsed with a pale blue light.

“What is that?” Angelo whispered.

“I’d guess the secret of the Seven Sisters.”

“But what is it?”

“A bone? Though the way it’s curved, it looks like a fang.”

“Like on the painting of the snake back there?” Angelo spun around to look at her.

She nodded. “The Rainbow Serpent.”

“Did Ngara mention it in the story she told you?”

“No. That Dreaming was just about one moment in the Sisters’ songline. I learned about the Rainbow Serpent when I was here before, a—”

“A long time ago,” Angelo said, chuckling.

“Yes, my young Padawan,” Mouse shot back in her best Yoda voice. “Most of the indigenous people here believe that the Rainbow Serpent formed the land, diving deep and pushing up the mountains, cutting the rivers and streams, shaping the dunes as she moved across the world. And when her work was done, she went underground to stay. Her spirit lives there still.” Mouse shrugged. “Nobody says what happened to her body. Maybe she left bits and pieces of it here and there to feed the land with her magic. Maybe this belongs to her.”

Angelo stared at the pulsing blue light. “Given everything I’ve seen since I met you, I’m not about to question a story that’s been passed down for millennia. And it makes sense that if that bone,” he nodded down to the shining altar, “came from her, it’s got power. Maybe enough power to beat your father.”

Mouse went still. “We’re just looking for something to protect ourselves, not a weapon to win a war. Right?”

Angelo didn’t answer. Instead, he scooted farther down the side of the rock, looking for a path to the bone. Mouse followed until he stopped at the edge.

“This next one’s going to be too far for you to jump,” he said, handing her his flashlight. “I’ll go down and get the bone and bring it back up.”

She grabbed his sleeve at the shoulder. “Absolutely not.”

“My legs are longer than yours. It’s simple physics. You can’t make it, and I can.”

“None of that looks stable, Angelo.” She looked down at the scattered black stone. “And what did we just say about weighing risks? You’re Humpty, remember?”

“To hell with that,” he said, and he jumped.

He landed solidly on the rock nearest the obsidian ledge. Mouse coiled herself, ready to jump after him, but she could see that he was right. She’d never make it; it was too far.

“Be careful,” she spat.

Angelo eased off the rock and onto the black ledge. He crossed to the altar in two strides, reached down, grabbed the bone, and turned to smile at Mouse, his arm raised in triumph.

And the ledge fell out from under him.

Angelo caught the corner of the altar with his free hand as shards of obsidian fell like arrows into the river, which was much wider and deeper than it had first seemed. Mouse cried out, but her uncanny mind was already racing to juggle the pieces—how long could Angelo hold on, how long would the fragile stone support his weight, how far was the drop, and how could she get to him?

With a squeal, the stone altar cracked along its base at the wall. Angelo looked up at it and then over at Mouse. She saw the fear and resignation in his face.

“Catch.”

She was shaking her head, opening her mouth to argue, but he didn’t give her time. He threw the sliver of bone over to her. She caught it on instinct, dropping the flashlights, which pinged on the rock and plummeted into the dark. She shoved the bone inside her shirt at the same moment she leapt toward the jagged rock, toward Angelo.

Her body missed the rock by more than a foot, but her hand caught one of the serrated edges of stone, spearing it through her palm and anchoring her as she swung her legs up to the flat front of the rock. She was still too far away to reach Angelo, and they’d run out of time.

The obsidian shelf broke away from the wall, tumbling down into the abyss and taking Angelo with it.

Mouse jumped, too, but her hand was still hooked on the stone, which snagged against the bones of her knuckles. She fell back to the rock face, blind with panic, but her mind grasped at the sound of water. The river. The river would save him from the fall. But then it would sweep him away from her. Drown him.

Peace, be still, something inside her whispered almost teasingly.

“Be still,” Mouse said, her head full of her failure to make the bush burn just hours ago. She looked down at the river, her eyes fierce with determination. “Be still!”

She didn’t yell, but the command sank like a stone down the depths of the chamber and into the water. The words were charged with the full force of her power and driven by desperation.

She held her breath, listening until the echo of her voice finally died. In the silence, Mouse could no longer hear the sound of running water. All was still.

She turned to pull her hand free of the jagged rock and jumped. The water stung like thousands of biting ants, cold and hot at the same time. She sank until her feet jammed into the river bottom, and she pushed up, breaking the surface of the water like a shot. She spun, looking for Angelo, the light on her headlamp swirling in the dark.

“I’m here,” he called out. He had his arm wrapped over a rounded bit of stone protruding from the cave wall.

Mouse swam through the still water toward him. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so. Just cut up a little from all the rocks. You?”

She shook her head. “Can you move?”

“I just said I wasn’t—”

“I need to see you move.” He seemed unhurt, but Mouse had another fear she needed to quiet. Every other time she’d laced her words with her power to command something, it had gone terribly wrong. She needed to know that her order to “be still” had commanded only the water. “Angelo, please, just do it.”

Angelo let go of his handhold on the stone and treaded water, waving his hands in the air. Mouse put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“There’s no place to climb out. It’s too steep. We could just let the river—” Angelo looked down at the water, then squinted as he studied where the river rested against the rock. “It’s not moving.”

He looked at Mouse, his eyes lighting up with awareness. “You did it! Didn’t you?” He laughed. “‘Peace, be still’? And you said the burning bush was cliché.” He swooped his arms around her, splashing water on her face. “You did it, Mouse! I knew you could.” He kissed her. “Can you undo it?”

She leaned down to the river, her breath making tiny ripples in the water. “Thank you,” she whispered as she imagined a ghostly echo of the Rainbow Serpent undulating just beneath the surface. “I release you.”

The river rolled forward once more. The water dancing around the stone and slapping the rock wall sounded like someone laughing as the river carried Mouse and Angelo away.

They weren’t in the water long before the river widened and grew shallow. Mouse and Angelo let their bodies float behind them as they dug their hands into the silt of the riverbed and pulled themselves along. They slipped out from under an overhang, the mountains birthing them back into the world. Exhausted, they dragged themselves up the creek bank. They lay panting, Mouse watching the hazy cluster of the Pleiades make a slow slide down the night sky, a silent prayer of thanksgiving running through her mind. She reached into her shirt and pulled out the bone. It was as long as her forearm and about as thick at its widest end, but it tapered to a fine point, fine enough that it had pierced Mouse’s side when she’d jammed it into her shirt. A thin streak of red, mixed with river water, ran down the iridescent tip.

“It’s not glowing anymore,” Angelo said, pushing himself upright.

“Guess it doesn’t need to, now that we’ve found it.”

“I’m glad. Explaining why you’ve got a bone shard seems tricky enough. Can’t imagine what we’d say if it was a glowing bone shard.” Angelo ran his hand through his hair, raking out some of the water. “What do you think it does?”

“I have no idea. But I bet Ngara will.”

“I guess we know our next stop then. You ready?”

“My body’s not.”

“It’s just a few hours’ hike through the desert and then an hour’s drive back to the outstation. You getting old or something?” He was chuckling before he even got the words out.

Mouse shoved him back down. “What did I tell you about not making any more jokes? You’re just bad at it.” She curled her leg over his, bent down and kissed him, then laid her head on his chest. He played with her wet hair.

“Thank you,” he said quietly after a few moments.

“For?” But she already knew.

“Keeping your promise.”

“Thank you,” she said in answer.

“For?”

“Not dying.”