“Suppose I did beat the snot out of her. What would it accomplish? In nature animals fight to demonstrate superiority. The more powerful you are, the better your genetic material is. Stronger animal, stronger babies, a better chance of survival for the species. Raphael already knows I’m a better fighter and he chose her over me anyway. That’s a lesson for you—when you get a chance to be happy, you take it and you treat the other person the way they deserve to be treated. Don’t take things for granted.”
Giving advice was easy. Living by it was much harder.
We took a right at the fork, heading farther north. The charred houses continued. To the right, a large sign nailed to an old telephone post shouted DANGER in huge red letters. Underneath in crisp black letters was written: IM-1: Infectious Magic Area
Do Not Enter
Authorized Personnel Only
A second smaller sign under the first one, written on a piece of plastic with permanent marker, read: Keep out, stupid.
“We aren’t going to keep out, are we?” Ascanio asked.
“No.”
“Awesome.”
We rolled by another blackened home. To the left a large blue-green shard protruded from the ground at an angle. To the right, by the metal carcass of a fire-stripped truck, another sliver, pale blue, waited to bloody someone’s ankle. The first signs of the Menagerie.
Here and there more shards punctured the soil, and in the distance, far to the right, a jagged iceberg rose at a steep angle twenty feet high, glowing with translucent green and blue in the morning sun.
Ascanio squinted. “What is that?”
“Glass,” I answered.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Where did it come from?”
Ahead more icebergs crowded in, forming a glacier. “Some of it is from Hollowell Station. Before the Shift, Inman Yard used to be Norfolk Southern’s train yard. It was huge. Over sixty-five tracks in the bowl alone. Not only that, but CSX’s Tilford train yard was right next to it. Together they handled over a hundred trains per day. Then they built the Hollowell Station. It was supposed to be a new, super-modern terminal and most of it was glass. Guess what happened when the magic waves started hitting?”
Ascanio grinned. “It crashed.”
“Yes, it did. There were hills of glass everywhere. The magic waves kept causing train crashes, but the railroad hung in there. Over the next few months some railroad employees started to get the idea that the glass hills were multiplying. Nobody else paid much attention to it. Then during the second flare, creatures popped out of the glass and killed half of the railroad workers.”
“What kind of creatures?” Raphael asked.
“Nobody knows.”
Flares—intense, terrible magic waves—came once every seven years. Things that were impossible during normal magic waves became reality during a flare. The flare’s magic held for three days straight and then disappeared for a long while, but its consequences were often deadly.
“Eventually the military came back to reclaim the yard. There were roughly two hundred trains in there, and some of them were full of goods. The soldiers found that the glass had expanded and encased the trains. When they tried to chip it off, they were attacked by creatures. Nobody ever figured out what the creatures were, but they caused multiple casualties. Finally the MSDU gave up and cordoned off the Inman Yard with barbed wire. The glass never stopped growing. Helicopters were still flying once in a while back then, so one of the reporters looked at the place from above and dubbed it the Glass Menagerie.”
Ahead two glass icebergs met above the road, fused into a massive arch. We passed under it and into the labyrinth of glass. Peaks of green, blue, and white towered above us, some connected, some standing apart, some curving, others perfectly sheer. The light turned turquoise, as if we were underwater. The glass cliffs crowded the crumbling road, painting the ground with colored shadows.
The back of my head itched, the nerves prickling, as if some invisible sniper had sighted me from the scope of his rifle. Someone was watching us from the icy depths. Ascanio fell silent, focused and tense. He’d sensed it, too.
The road in front of us glittered.
“Stop,” I said.
The Jeep came to a stop.
A sheer ridge of glass crossed the road. A few yards before it reached the asphalt, it had shattered into a heap of shards. An identical heap marked the other side. Bell Recovery must’ve blasted through it. Kyle Bell was trying to reclaim the trains. The metal alone would be worth a fortune, not to mention the contents of the cars. Once reclaimed, he would have to transport the metal out and he needed a road in decent repair. Except now there was broken glass all over it.
I got out of the vehicle and padded forward, careful not to step on anything too sharp. My paw-feet were calloused, and Lyc-V would seal any cuts the moment they were made, but it would still hurt. Ascanio followed me.
The shards littered the asphalt, large slivers of glass at the edges, and smaller crushed glass dust in the center. I crouched for a better perspective. Crushed glass ran in two parallel rows.
“Track vehicle,” I said. “They’re using a tractor or a bulldozer.” The glass would slice our tires into shreds. “Park the Jeep. We’re going on foot.”
We hid the Jeep behind a glass mountain and shut off the engine. The sudden silence made my ears ring. I took a crossbow and a longbow out of the vehicle.
“Why two bows, mistress?” Ascanio asked, sinking a sudden English accent into his words.
“The crossbow has more power but takes longer to reload.” I strung the longbow. “Sometimes you have to shoot fast. And can you go ten minutes without being a smartass?” I grabbed the quiver.