14

ABRA COULD ALMOST FEEL THE RAIN, and she knew she was in that dream again, the way you can know it’s a dream but still feel like there’s no way out. But she didn’t feel trapped—she felt relieved to be back. There was something unfinished, something she needed to revisit. She was surrounded by the same leaves and branches, the same sound of drops pattering down through it all. She was up in the same tree, hanging by one of its highest branches, but there was something different this time.

She wasn’t afraid.

Her heart raced and her muscles tensed, but the heavy drag of fear wasn’t there. She clung to the branch she was on, a branch that was still much too thin to hold her, and she felt herself beginning to fall down through the tree, but still there was no fear. She grabbed for anything she could hold on to, confident this time without a seed of panic. There she was, dangling, looking down at the ground far below.

She watched as the same small girl was picked up in the jaws of the same huge, wolf-like creature and tossed aside. She watched as the boy grabbed on to the small sword, cried out in pain, and swung it again and again at the wolf. She watched, waiting for the moment when the sword found its mark and the huge creature listed to the side, drifting, plummeting. Then it was down, and the boy fell.

She twisted and turned where she hung from the branch, and for some reason this time she didn’t worry about the girl. This time, in the dream, she knew she would be okay. The streak of light came exactly when she expected it, and the man, or something in the shape of a man, knelt beside the girl. He put his hands on her head and closed his eyes, and brought the girl back to life.

And like every other time, she heard the man begin to whisper.

“Abra, this is very important. I have a few things I need to tell you.”

But this time she didn’t fall. This time he kept talking, and she heard what he said. She heard again what Mr. Tennin had told her almost exactly four years ago, words she had somehow grown over or forgotten.

“You will have to be very strong. I don’t understand why this responsibility is passing to you, but it is. And who knows? Maybe children are the only ones brave and true enough to save the world.”

He smiled a sad smile, looked over his shoulder, and then looked back at her, serious and determined.

“The sword is also a key, or perhaps you already know that by now. There are seven gates. Lock the gates with the sword. But don’t only lock them—seal them. You’ll know how when you get there. The atlas will show you where to go.”

He paused, and when he spoke again he sounded sad and confused.

“There is another Tree. I know that now. They are trying to plant the Tree on the other side of one of the gates. This one in Deen was only a diversion. The other one is already growing. Two at once. You will have to destroy it.” His voice trailed off. A sonic boom reverberated and the fire roared across the river.

“It’s all up to you now,” Mr. Tennin said as he stood up, then shot into the sky like a rocket.

Abra woke up as if rising out of cool water on a warm day. There was no falling this time. Her eyes opened and she stared at the ceiling, wondering where Mr. Tennin had gone. Had he died? Could angels die? Or, as he had said, had he simply passed on?

Was there a difference?

Reality returned to her slowly like an old memory. It was an early morning in July. The sun hadn’t yet risen, and the setting moon cast a pale light that would soon fade as the east turned a navy blue that grew into purple, red, and finally orange. The sun would drift into the morning sky. She stared out into that pale darkness. Stillness settled over everything on her farm at that time of day. The trees were heavy with dew, motionless. The barns held sleeping animals. The cornstalks, nearly approaching waist height, stood very still, listening.

The fair had been a dead end. Abra hadn’t wanted to go exploring with Beatrice constantly looking over her shoulder, chatting and smiling and waiting. Because no matter what Beatrice had said, no matter how she had acted, Abra had been overwhelmed with the sense that she was searching for something.

Abra looked down the lane and across the road, and she wasn’t surprised to see Koli standing there, facing away this time, facing the river. She was the only thing that wasn’t still—her hair and dress billowed out to the south as the north wind swept out of the narrow place where the east and west mountains collided. Koli stood there clasping her hands behind her back.

Abra crept downstairs without even changing out of her nightgown, opened the front door quietly, and guided it back until it rested against the frame. She danced lightly over the wet grass. This time she took the short sword. The cold metal somehow felt alive to Abra, as if it was a thinking, living, breathing being. She looked at it in her hands while she walked, examined its dullness. From a distance, someone would have thought she was carrying a piece of gray plastic or an ashy branch already burned. But it felt full of life, and she wondered why she hadn’t named it yet.

Already the light gathered. The moon, directly to her left, was sinking down below the mountains. The air felt like warm water with streaks of coolness in it, the way the surface of a swimming hole can be warm while arms of cold reach up from the depths. The curtain felt light to Abra that morning—whatever it was that divided Deen from the Tree of Life seemed especially thin, almost transparent. She kept looking around, expecting to see anything. Nothing would have surprised her.

But nothing out of the ordinary showed itself. Nothing except Koli Naal, facing the river.

Abra continued down the driveway, the stones digging into the soles of her feet. She wasn’t afraid. After the dream and Mr. Tennin’s words, Koli was nothing more than a distraction off to the side, something only marginally important. Abra knew now what the sword would do for her. She knew her mission, and this time she carried it. She would go to New Orleans and destroy the Tree. Somehow, she would do it. Abra felt powerful, invincible.

The moonlight faded and the morning paused, neither night nor day. The woods across the street had their own sounds: crickets and cicadas and the rustling of young leaves learning to dance for the first time. And always the river, always the river, that distant roar of time and life. Rivers run, always the same, always different. Out of the blue Abra remembered something she had read during all of her research into the Tree of Life.

A river flowed from the land of Eden, watering the garden and then dividing into four branches.

A river flowed.

Koli started walking away again, walking north on Kincade Road, and Abra followed her. They were like two stars, gravity pushing and pulling, spinning through the endless universe. Koli seemed somehow less than she had been the previous time, as if some crucial part of her had been spent on another venture.

They arrived at the parking lot, the place the church used to stand, and Koli walked around its ruins with light steps. She seemed to draw a power from those remains, as if desolation and abandonment filled her up. Abra stood on the edge and watched. Waited.

“Will you help the man and his child? Will you unlock the gate?” Koli asked absentmindedly without turning to face Abra.

“I’m going to New Orleans, if that’s what you mean,” Abra said. She felt annoyed with this . . . thing. Whatever Koli was. And not knowing made Abra even more annoyed.

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” Koli said slowly, her voice somewhere between a hiss and a whisper. She turned and looked at Abra, and she had that horrid face again, the one that had terrified Abra before.

“You can’t scare me,” Abra said, clutching the sword.

Koli glanced at the sword. “What, this?” She pointed at her own face, which suddenly reverted to that of a beautiful woman, with smooth teeth and gentle, pink tongue. “Oh, Abra, that’s nothing. That’s simply a preview, a glimpse, a foretaste. You have no idea.”

“I do know. I know who you are and I know what you’re trying to do,” Abra said. “I stopped Mr. Jinn and I can stop you.”

“You did not stop Jinn. He grew . . . tired, careless,” Koli said in a sympathetic voice. “And who can blame him? Tree after Tree after Tree. Tennin always waiting, always sitting there with that smirk on his face, sword buried up to its hilt in the soft bark. No, Jinn was a tiny, dying flame. Snuffing him out required so little.”

Her eyes were like fire.

“I will not be so easily extinguished,” she said.

Abra took a deep breath. “Why don’t you take the sword from me? Unlock it yourself?”

Koli seemed to grow angry at that, and she paced the ruins faster, waving her arms as she spoke. “Take the sword? I won’t disgrace myself by touching it.”

It burns you too, Abra thought.

“Why did you think I would help you?” she asked. “Why would I go all the way to New Orleans and unlock a gate without knowing what will come out?”

“Help me? Child, it’s much bigger than that. You don’t see what’s coming. I don’t have to scare you into helping me. Once you see what is happening, you’ll gladly help. You’ll see why our side is the right side.”

“No,” Abra said.

Koli shrugged. “Go to New Orleans, child.” When she said “child” it was in a pitying, whiny voice reserved for parents talking to the youngest of children. “Go to New Orleans. Unlock the gate that leads to Over There, and leave it unlocked. Leave the door open. That is why you have the sword. Use it.”

“No,” Abra said again. Every word took an incredible effort. It felt like there was a spell clamping her mouth shut.

“When you get there,” Koli said, “you’ll find that our missions are not so far apart.”

Abra shook her head—no, she would not. The silence between them was alive, as loud a silence as you will ever experience. Abra gripped the sword, held it with two hands out in front of her, and her white nightgown blew around her in the breeze. For a moment she felt otherworldly, a child warrior from a long-ago legend. But some of her hair drifted into her face, and she pushed it back with a shaking hand, and she was simply Abra again, a sixteen-year-old trembling with fear and adrenaline.

“Save the man and his child. Unlock the door,” Koli said in a firm but quiet voice. “Let those who are trapped go free. Or, perhaps, do it for more selfish reasons, knowing that if you do not, your family is mine. Your clumsy bore of a father . . . your mindless mother . . . your lamb of a baby brother. Jinn didn’t have such . . . negotiating tools when dealing with your friend. Sam had already lost nearly everything. But you?”

Koli Naal leaned her head to the side, and her voice was quiet and compassionate.

“You are different. You do not know loss, so you fear it.”

“If you do anything to my family . . .”

“What, child? What will you do?”

The walk home felt long, and Abra wanted to go back to bed. Her feet hurt from walking barefoot on the stone road and through the weeds around the church. She had been thrust back into the middle of this fight, but it didn’t feel like the wonderful adventure she remembered from before. No, it felt hard and dangerous and already hopeless, and she wondered if her first adventure had seemed that way too when she was in the middle of it. She wondered if all adventures are wonderful to talk about and reflect on but actually contain more pain and sorrow than we remember or are willing to recall.

She walked through the front door, and there was her mom in the kitchen with her back facing her. Her wonderful mother, whom she was suddenly desperate not to lose. She wouldn’t let Koli do anything to her family. She would protect them. She would never sleep. She would pace the house at all hours, watch all the doors, sit beneath all the windows to make sure Koli could never come in.

“I’m sorry,” Abra said in an attempt to head off her mother’s protests about going out in her nightgown. She held the sword behind her. “I wanted to go for a walk this morning . . .”

Her mother turned around and stared blankly at her. “Child, you can wear whatever you want, but it would help me if you called before you came over for breakfast. Good thing for you I made extra this morning.”

Child? Her mother never called her that.

“Are you okay?” Abra asked.

Her mother didn’t look at her this time. She kept washing a few dishes in the sink.

“Now that you mention it, I do worry what your parents will think about you scurrying over here so often. Doesn’t your own mother want you around for breakfast some mornings?”

“My own mother?” Abra asked, confused.

Her mom looked over her shoulder a moment. “What’s that look on your face, child? Don’t get me wrong, I like when you visit. It’s nice having a young one around. But I worry, that’s all, about what your parents will think.”

Abra walked slowly to the kitchen counter. Her mother didn’t look at her.

“Who am I?” Abra asked in a quiet voice.

Her mother looked at her and smiled a strange smile. “Who are you, child?”

“Yes, who am I?”

Her mother stopped washing the dishes and put a wet, sudsy hand on Abra’s shoulder. She started to laugh. She laughed and laughed, one of those good, hard laughs that leave your sides hurting and your belly sore. She stopped laughing and sighed.

“Child, if you don’t know who you are, why don’t you hurry back to your house and ask your brother Sam?”

A tidal wave of emotions washed over Abra: panic, grief, confusion. But when the wave receded, all it left behind was anger. Koli had done this. Koli had caused her mom to forget who she was. She knew it.

“Now, if you’re finished asking silly questions, you’ll say hello to your friend.”

“Who?”

“Your friend,” Abra’s mother said, and she motioned with her chin in the direction of the dining room. “She walked in before you did.”

Abra turned around. It was the girl she had met at the fair.

“Beatrice?” Abra said.

“It’s just B, remember?” she said with a laugh. Her eyes were deep pools, and they sparkled.