I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep. I waited to see what would happen. But Ursula only sat quietly, eyes closed, as if in deep meditation. I kept expecting her to jump up and do something crazy, but she just kept sitting there, remembering, or trying not to. We were all already so exhausted, and without any food since the evening before, it was impossible to resist the numb cold of the cage’s floor. I dozed, drifting a long time before I dreamed.
It was the best dream, Ory. So warm and safe and peaceful. So real I could feel it. We were all back in the RV again, some snuggled on the soft, worn couch, some stretched out lengthwise along the floor from back to front. Ursula was in the driver’s seat, like she always is, one hand on the wheel and one on the gearshift, and I was reclining in the passenger seat, nestled into the cushions. Outside, a lone road stretched beneath the stars, a gentle curve across the dark, endless plains, and our tires rolled smoothly for once, so smoothly you could barely tell we were moving at all.
“Max,” Ursula said softly to me from behind the wheel as I stirred. The night sky rolled by through the windshield. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Sure,” I smiled drowsily.
“I need you to hold on to the back of your seat as tightly as you can so you don’t crack open your skull on the dashboard.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Right now, Max,” Ursula said. “Right now!”
My hands clawed at my headrest as the nose of the RV slammed through the heavy doors of the abandoned church in a peeling scream of splitting wood and crumbling bricks. The whole wall shattered, but it didn’t matter—we burst through as it collapsed behind. We dropped over a ramp, maybe a short stack of stairs, and then suddenly the world opened back up. Ory! We were actually outside now, not just in my dream—speeding beneath the dark, starlit sky, crashing frantically through a maze of white tents and tiny, twinkling torches as Ursula tried her best not to hit anyone or anything, but refusing to slow down, no matter what.
“What’s happening?” I yelled, but even as I did, I knew. I turned and stared openmouthed at her. She had twisted Transcendence’s power against them by giving them exactly what they wanted. She had forgotten. Forgotten that we’d been captive for days, that we weren’t still free, in our RV, riding for New Orleans, and who knows what else. She hadn’t tried to break the unbreakable bars of the cage, because the woman in white was right: The Great One had remembered that the bars could never be broken. But she hadn’t remembered anything about whether or not they could be changed. Ursula had transformed the cage into our RV, with us still inside.
“Everyone to the windows!” she cried as she swung the wheel around another tent, past more torches where a mass gathering was being held before some kind of giant altar. The followers all turned in slow motion, rows and rows of tiny ghosts, their veils floating in the breeze. “I don’t know who these people are, but they don’t look friendly! Be ready to fight!”
“Ilaahayow!” Intisaar cursed as she stared out the front from between us. “There are hundreds of them!” The RV pitched through a tent as white robed figures dove out of the way, barefoot.
“Windows!” Ursula ordered her. Behind us, we could hear the roar of engines start up to begin their chase. The camp stretched out before us like a spider web, clustered and winding, some tents occupied and glowing softly with candlelight, others dark and lonely as their inhabitants milled outside. Pedestrians who had seen us racing toward them from afar had armed themselves with rocks, sticks, knives. They dashed at the sides of our RV now as it passed, trying to do some damage without being dragged underneath. “Keep them away from the wheels!”
If we could just get outside of their lines and find a road, we might make it, I thought. We might outrun their scouts, who would have to return to their camp eventually, wouldn’t they? There was no limit to how far we would go.
Ursula jerked the gearshift, and we careened past something tall and boxy, sides smashed and corroding in the heat of a trash fire. Half a shipping container, I thought at first, but then I saw the molten, dripping tires, and the remnants of what had once been a painted mural across one of the surfaces. Only the sunset hadn’t yet dehydrated and flaked into ash in the blistering heat of the flames. That’s our RV. I watched it whisk by, too stunned to move at first. The real one. Not our reimagined one. I stuck my head out the window to peer down the side of our vehicle as it raced jaggedly away. Only blank tan siding.
Ursula’s plan had been a success, but there was one fatal flaw—she had been the owner of the RV, or the one who found it, but not the one who painted our map. Her reimagining wasn’t complete.
“The painting!” I cried. “We won’t make it without the painting!”