Storm of Locusts

Chapter 39

Ben and I head back down to the compound. The solar-powered lights along the footpath are still glowing a pale gold, but the lights in the building itself are off. We reach the wing of rooms where Kai was. I stop and press my face to a glass door randomly. The room inside is deserted. Bed unmade, clothes still visible. I spot a half-eaten apple sitting on a desk. “They left in a hurry. Everything’s still here. They didn’t even pack.”

“So they’re coming back?”

“No one’s coming back,” I say, knowing it’s true.

We reach Kai’s room, and I push open the unlocked glass door. Step across the threshold. Ben follows. I flick on a lamp and the room lights up. The books are all still here, but the maps on the wall have been hastily torn down, the corners still taped to the walls. And the notebook Kai was writing in is gone.

Ben walks to the wall, puts a hand against the empty space. “How are we going to find him now?”

“Well,” I say, stepping over the wealth of books strewn across the floor, “my guess is he went to Glen Canyon Dam, but just in case . . .” I spot a pair of black dress pants draped over the back of a chair. Reach into the pocket and pull out the tissue, exactly where I expected it to be. “We have this.”

Ben comes over, curious. “What is that?”

I pull the material apart to show her the bloodstain. “Insurance policy.”

She takes if from my hand. Holds it up and sniffs. “How can you be sure it’s his blood?”

“I’m sure. I just need you to do your thing.”

Her face falls, and she catches her bottom lip between her teeth, clearly bothered.

“No?” I ask.

She walks to the desk chair and sits, weighing the bloody tissue in her hand. “I think I’m ready to tell you how I got my clan power.”

Damn. Not the best timing, but she’s sitting there with her head down and her feet swinging nervously, and I know I have to hear her out. I walk over to Kai’s abandoned bed and clear a spot to sit. “Okay, Ben, I’m listening.”

She exhales, clearly bracing herself to tell me her story. “You know my parents were Protectors in the Energy Wars, right? That they died outside Pawhuska, defending Osage land.”

“The Little Keystone,” I say. “You told me.”

She nods sadly. “One night Oilers raided the camp. I don’t remember much. Just the chaos. And the noise. The sound of automatic gunfire, my mom and dad arguing, people yelling. And then people screaming as they died. My parents were warriors and they were needed to defend the camp, so my mom told me to hide. Find a place and hide until she came to find me. So I went to hide in the pipeline—”

“Wait, the pipeline?”

“They’d already installed it, when the Osage were tied up in court and couldn’t stop them, but the crude hadn’t started flowing yet. It was empty and us kids at camp would play in it sometimes. Hide-and-seek, that sort of thing. The adults would yell at us when they found us, and we’d promise never to do it again, but it was still the best hiding place I knew. Plus, it was safe in the pipes. No way Oilers would destroy their own equipment.”

It sounds like a terrible idea to me, but I keep my mouth shut.

“I remember crawling in and pulling the port closed. The sound of the lock engaging. My mom had warned me it might be a few days before she could find me, so not to panic. She promised she would come back for me.”

“But she didn’t,” I say, voice quiet.

She shakes her head. “That was the last time I saw her. Or my dad. I waited, you know. I don’t know how long. Days? A week? Long enough that the food and water in my backpack had run out and the smell of my own waste was making me sick.”

“Jesus, Ben.”

“But you know what, Maggie? You can’t open those ports from the inside. I didn’t know. But that wasn’t even the worst part,” she says, rubbing her hands against her pants, the scratch of her palms against fabric loud in the room. “Turns out Oilers were raiding the camp to clear it because they got the court order to let the crude flow.”

She swallows, her hands making fists. And I can only imagine the horror of being in that small dark pipe for days alone, not knowing if your parents were alive or dead. And then the terror she must have felt, hearing the rush of crude coming for her and not being able to outrun it. Swept away on a dark sea of oil.

“They say I washed up in some refinery machinery for catching dead animals. Turns out animals fall into the pipes more often than you think. They thought I was dead. How could they not? But I wasn’t, and when they realized their mistake, they made arrangements to have me sent back to be with my only living relative left.”

“Hastiin.”

“Hastiin’s mom, my shimasani. She was still alive back then. But she told me that when I first came to her, she didn’t have much hope for me. I had crude-oil poisoning. Some brain damage and temporary loss of my eyesight.”

“Did you get healing powers?”

“No. I healed at the normal rate. We didn’t even know about my clan powers for years. Until my shimasani died from an accident. She’d fallen. Busted her head, blood everywhere in the kitchen. I had to clean it up.” She lowers her head, clearly embarrassed. “I saved the towels. With the blood on them. I don’t know why. I think I wanted to keep part of her. Anyway, I didn’t go to the funeral. You know how old people can be about kids being around death. They didn’t want me near it, especially after everything I’d been through. But I wanted so badly to see my shimasani again. So I . . . I found her.”

“What does that mean?”

She closes her eyes. “I had those towels, and when I held them, when I . . . tasted them, it was like I could smell her. They had taken her all the way to Tse Bonito, to the funeral home there. Fifty miles from our house in Sheep Springs. But she was there with me, like something on the back of my tongue.” She shakes her head. “I show up at the funeral home and everyone is freaked out. I mean, I don’t really remember it. I was in some kind of daze. I learned to control it better since then, but I can track people once I’ve tasted their blood. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” she asks, her voice small and worried. “Like I’m some kind of vampire?”

“I’m not a medicine man. I barely understand my own clan powers. But it sounds like your tracking power awakened because you could have used it to find your mother. Clan powers seem to want to fix things for us. I think yours was trying to do that. So you would never be left alone again. Ever.”

She inhales sharply and then sucks on her lip, thinking.

“But right now we’ve got to go. Rissa and Aaron are probably already at Glen Canyon.”

“Oh, right. Do you want me to . . . ?” She holds up the tissue with Kai’s blood on it.

“Why don’t we just hold on to it for now. If Kai’s not where he’s supposed to be, then I’ll ask you again.”

“Do you think Kai can help me figure out my powers better?”

“I think if we get out of this and get back home, we can all figure out what’s going on.”

She grins, relieved. I fold the tissue and stuff it in my pocket, and we leave Kai’s room.