Reign the Earth (The Elementae #1)(99)

“I’ll find the others,” Galen said.

I hadn’t known he was near me, and just as soon, he disappeared into the dust.

The others.

I wiped desperately at the dirt on Gavan’s face, trying to pull it off. There was too much of it, and my hands were trembling. Why wasn’t he moving? Why couldn’t he just move?

“Gavan!” I cried, shaking him.

“Shalia!” Kairos yelled. “Someone could still be alive!”

Alive. Gavan was dead. I knew that, but—but—

I stood, feeling sick and dizzy, pushing forward into the cloud that shrouded my family.

I saw Kairos, crouched and throwing rocks off a small body. I saw her hair. “Catryn!” I screamed.

Kairos looked up at me. “Find the others!” he said, his eyes wild, his chest heaving.

Nodding, I ran into the smoke.

Galen was pushing a large boulder that was near the start of the pass. All around me, I felt the threads, angry and pulsing, curling around my fingertips and squeezing. I pushed the boulder off with my power like it was a pebble, sending it flying into the crevasse under the land bridge, and Galen turned and looked at me for a moment before dashing in. As soon as I could see the rocks, I moved them out of my way, and in moments, we had uncovered a tangled mass of bodies: my father, my brothers, my whole family.

I dove forward, but Galen shook his head at me, going to each one and carefully checking them.

When he reached the last one, he closed his eyes for a moment, and picked up my mother’s body.

“What are you doing!” Kairos roared, trying to climb over rocks to get to him. “Don’t touch her! Don’t you touch her!”

Galen stood tall with her broken body in his arms. “She’s dead, Kairos. Let me get your family out of here.”

She’s dead.

Galen took a step, and the movement suddenly seemed sideways to me, twisted wrong.

I am a daughter of the desert.

The world took a vicious spin, and then Kairos’s arms were around me. “Shalia!” he yelled. “Shalia!”

Something hurt. I am a daughter of the desert, and my feet will never fail me.

Lightning crashed somewhere around us, and the moment froze, the light illuminating the dust in a distended vision. In the flash I saw Catryn, the moment she had been born. I had been the first to hold her, secreted away in the caves below Jitra, where the fires were stoked high to fill the cave with heat and smoke so the spirits of our ancestors could walk among us and greet the baby. I brought Catryn, the tiny thing who hadn’t cried yet, to my mother.

When we touched, the three women of our clan, I felt something. Something otherworldly and powerful, filling my body. Filling the space.

And then the flash of light ended, and the smoke was full of nothing but the dead.

“Kairos, help me up,” I said, but something was wrong. My arms weren’t moving. The words sounded foreign and misshapen, even to my ears. Everything was wrong. The threads around me felt like they were strangling me, bloated thick and grotesque, tugging the world at odd angles.

There was pain. My power was turning on me, clawing at my throat, wrapping around my hips, and causing a deep ache that made me cry out.

“Shalia, you’re bleeding,” Kairos told me, and his eyes were stark, wide open and wet.

Bleeding? No. No—they were bleeding. They had stopped bleeding, because without a beating heart they would never bleed again.

I am a daughter of the desert, and my feet will never fail me. I couldn’t feel Kai’s hands on me. I felt weightless, ungrounded, like I couldn’t tell the sky from the stones.

“Shalia!” he screamed at me, and my heart burst at the terror plain on his face.

The threads pulsed, rippling with anger, with hurt, with fury. The pulse came into my hands, touched my fingertips, and pushed.

My power ripped out of me. It felt like retching, like my body was fighting my mind for control and my mind was losing badly. I saw rocks, from pebbles to boulders, rising up into the air and beginning to swirl around me.

I felt the ground beneath my feet, and I tried desperately to focus. Kairos wasn’t touching me anymore. He was on the ground, his hands curled around his face. Dirt was thickening the curtain of moving rock, responding to me, waiting patiently for my command.

I gave my mind over to my power. I rushed out along the rocks, along the land bridge, along the pass. It wasn’t as simple as seeing, but where the rocks and dust existed, I could feel. The pass was blocked by rocks, but not gone completely. The mountains still stood.

I reached out farther until I could feel Jitra.

What was left of Jitra. I could feel the wounds in the earth where the caved-out rock had broken, where heavy stone collapsed on yielding bodies. I pulled it off. I could feel the heartbeats where people were clustered together, holding one another tight, praying for safety.

And all that stood between them and my husband’s yellow powder were a few rocks in the pass.

I saw soldiers at the edge of my vision, through the rotating cloud of boulders that encircled me, and suddenly I knew what to do. The desert would not be at risk. The desert would not fall, and whatever treasures my people protected, Calix would never touch them.

A scream tore out of me as I reached for the land bridge. Breaking, snapping, tearing the rocks to pieces like a twig over my knee. My work was rough and crude, but all I wanted was to cut the desert off from the Bone Lands, to collapse the pass into the mountains it came from.