“Someone is trying to open the Veil, and they need Sensitives to do it. Your mom and aunt are on a short list of those who’ve been targeted for information. The people who are doing this—we think it’s a defense contractor—is turning the Sensitives into wraiths to cover their tracks. We need to get to your mom and your aunt before they do, and we need to go now. I wouldn’t bring this to you if I didn’t think it was necessary. If I didn’t think there was a chance they were in very real danger.”
Her gaze stayed steady on me. “You’re sure about this? You’re positive?”
I nodded. “I’m sure.”
“They’re my family,” she said quietly. “Magic or not.” She cleared her throat nervously. “Right now they’re in Chenal. I knew where they were. I didn’t tell you, or anyone else, because . . .”
“Because they’re Sensitives,” I said gently. “Because they’re fugitives. I understand.”
She nodded. “We can go now?”
“Right now,” I agreed, standing, and offering her a hand. “And we’ll get there in time.”
Days like this I really missed telephones.
? ? ?
I considered, before we left town, going to the Cabildo and dragging Gunnar into the truck. But like Tadji and Burke, I wanted to ease him into whatever was going on here, not throw him into the deep end. We’d get Tadji’s family safe, and then we’d talk to Gunnar.
It would take about two hours to get from New Orleans to Chenal, and we’d pass what remained of Baton Rouge along the way. We hurried down I-10, the six-lane divided freeway that would get us past Baton Rouge to the Mississippi River.
Louisiana’s former capital had taken too much damage, and was closed after the war—the humans relocated, the Paras shipped to Devil’s Isle. Louisiana didn’t have a functioning capital anymore. The entire state was within the Zone, a “conflict community” under the Magic Act, and that made it Containment’s territory.
The city looked like a ghost town. The downtown had been almost completely destroyed in the Battle of Port Allen. Containment blew the levee to shift the momentum in the fight. It turned the tide, literally, but flooded the city. The capitol building’s former tower, four hundred and fifty feet of limestone, had fallen, and now spread across the ground in a long pile of vine-covered rubble.
Neighborhoods not blighted by war and magic still stood empty, but like the tower, nature and time were taking them back. Where the soil was still good, vines and grasses had crept in from the edges, threatening to overtake streets and bridges, and the asphalt had buckled in areas Containment hadn’t bothered to fix.
Liam slowed as we prepared to cross the New Bridge that led across the river. It wasn’t really new anymore, but the name had stuck.
“What’s wrong?” Tadji asked.
“Just want to take it slow,” Liam said, eyes scanning left and right. “You can never really tell about bridges—how well Containment’s kept them up.”
Tadji grabbed my hand, squeezed, and, just as I’d done when I was younger, I tried to hold my breath as we drove beneath the bridge’s steel ribs, and the river roiled beneath us.
“Look,” Liam said as we reached the crest of the river. A black bear ambled in the opposite lane, two small cubs trotting playfully behind her.
Humans were no longer in control of Louisiana, if they’d ever been.
? ? ?
We passed the cities, entered rural areas where there once had been long fields of rice and sugarcane. Some areas were still scorched by the magic. Shrubby trees were beginning to cover the fields that hadn’t been, because there was no one left to farm them. In another few years, it would be impossible to tell a field had ever been here.
“Why?” I wondered, staring at a strip of land that was still black and devastated so many years later. “Why does magic do this to land?”
“Salt.”
Liam’s answer was so quick, so simple, I glanced back at him. “What?”
“‘For they have destroyed the offenders and salted the earth beyond them, so that nothing else shall grow there,’” he quoted. “Magic is power. Power effects chemical and physical change. And where earth is concerned, it tends to make salts.”
I nodded, recognized a dark box on a pole near the road. “Magic monitors?”
Liam glanced out the window, nodded. “Yeah. Not nearly as many out here as closer to the cities. And the farther you get out, the fewer the markers.”
Along with the magic monitors, billboards dotted the landscape. They were peeling or shredding now, but they’d been long forgotten by whatever company had hung them. They advised people to save water, to GARDEN FOR VICTORY, and BEAT MAGIC WITH MIND AND MUSCLE. The letters were big, the pictures simple. The messages a little depressing, even now.
? ? ?
As twilight fell, scorched land turned to swamp and both sides of the narrow road dropped into murky water dotted with duckweed, cypress trees and their knobby roots peeking through like tentacles. Liam turned off the AC and rolled down the window. The scent of the bayou washed in—green things, wetness, decay. It was an earthy scent, not totally unlike the smell of New Orleans after a heavy rain. It was all swamp one way or the other.
Other than the occasional scorched tree, there wasn’t much evidence of war here at all.