Vault of Shadows (29 page)

The willow girl fluttered her branches in what Milo figured was some kind of bow or salute. Then she turned and hurried into the forest with surprising speed and grace. Despite the heavy ache in his heart, Milo decided that he liked the little tree spirit. In some way she almost reminded him of Lizabeth.

And in thinking that, both anger and urgency rose up in his chest.

“We're wasting time,” he said. “Let's get going.”

No one argued.

Within ten minutes they were leaving the train tracks and all that stink behind. Milo had stuffed his pockets with pecans, bull grapes, hackberries, and red mulberries, and he shared these as they walked. Between quick meals they all kept a small piece of tough, chewy root in their mouths so saliva would keep their throats lubricated. That made it easier to breathe. Miles fell away, and soon they got into a rhythm of walking, jogging, walking, resting. The scout pace of alternating between light running and walking kept their muscles loose and devoured the distance. Twice they passed small towns that had been thoroughly destroyed by the Bugs. Dead cars littered the broken streets and weeds choked everything. Some areas were flooded from the heavy rains, and they had to skirt these for fear of gators and other water creatures.

They made sure to stick to the shadows as much as possible. Because nature here in Louisiana had gone wild once people stopped tending to it, there was plenty of useful foliage. Birds sang in the trees, which Milo took as a good sign; birds generally stopped singing when Bugs were around, and they even hushed when the mechanical hunter-killers came prowling. Not that the travelers took the birdsong as an invitation to slack off on caution. They absolutely did not.

Most of the time Evangelyne stayed in wolfshape, and each time she changed back, Milo noticed that more of her injuries were healed. When he asked her why she didn't just remain a wolf until she was entirely healed,
she said, “It's not as simple as that. The longer I'm a wolf, the more I risk forgetting I'm a girl.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes . . . there are wolves in the world who are really werewolves who lingered too long on four legs and forgot who they were.”

“But I thought you had your human mind when you changed.”

“Why on earth would you think that?”

“Well, 'cause you don't kill me and eat me when you change.”

She laughed. “Maybe I just haven't been hungry enough.”

Still chuckling to herself, she walked on ahead and then transformed into a wolf and ran into the brush. Milo called after her.

“Hey, you're just joking, right? Right? Hey—right?”

Shark burst out laughing too. “You should see your face.”

“Don't mess, chubster,” snapped Milo, jabbing Shark in the stomach. “You'd make an even better meal for a hungry wolf than I would.”

Shark didn't take offense and instead patted his thick middle. “Dark meat tastes better. Everyone knows that. Does it bother you that you're so scrawny a werewolf won't even bite you? Wow, can't be good for your self-esteem.”

Milo tried to come up with a crushing reply, tripped
over it, and shut up. It had felt good to laugh, and he was surprised that any of them could. Somehow he found that encouraging rather than a betrayal of Lizabeth's memory. If laughter could still happen, then surely hope could still exist. To Milo they went hand in hand.

The miles burned away but the hours of the day seemed to drag.

They slept again, this time in the vault of an old bank. The Bugs had no interest in money, and the Earth Alliance traded only in food and supplies. As far as the world was concerned, the stacks of bundled fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds on which Milo and his friends would make their bed were relics as disconnected from their world as dinosaur bones.

Milo went hunting at dusk and came back with three rabbits. Shark, who was the best cook among them, skinned and roasted them on a million-dollar fire.

They sat on sacks of cash and nibbled their first hot meal in days. The fire turned Shark's brown skin the color of honey, and turned Evangelyne's white hair gold. Milo noticed that Evangelyne ate her food with great delicacy and good manners. It made him wonder if she did that to remind herself she was not a wolf. Maybe that was why she was so formal all the time. Was it a struggle to keep the two sides of herself separate?

Evangelyne caught him watching her. “What's wrong? Do I have something between my teeth?”

“Huh? No,” he said quickly, “I, um, was just thinking that we'll be
outside New Orleans by noon tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said, clearly unconvinced that Milo had been thinking about logistics. But she ran with it. “We'll have to scout the area and then find the best route into the city. Gadfellyn Hall is in the French Quarter, a few blocks from Jackson Square. The Bugs will be everywhere.”

“Yeah, they will,” agreed Shark, “and I'm kind of worried about that. I mean, not just the fact that they'll be there, but after what happened yesterday with the Stinger. He was sniffing Milo. I think he could smell the crystal egg. I think that's why he didn't just kill him.”

“You're right,” said Milo. “He was sniffing my pocket when Evangelyne attacked him. Another second and he'd have torn it open.”

“My point exactly,” said Shark, nodding. “So how smart is it, us waltzing into New Orleans with the crystal egg? Won't they smell it? Maybe it'll set off some kind of alarm. I mean, heck, the hive ship is right there.”

“It's a little late to be worrying about that, boy,” said Evangelyne.

Milo turned away, frustrated. He kept hoping the Witch of the World would pop up and say something useful. Or anything at all, for that matter. The only thoughts inside his skull, though, were his own and they were a jumble.

They set off on the last leg of their journey. Their bellies were filled with food, and there had been a rain
shower overnight, so finding clean water to drink was easy. They'd allowed themselves an extra hour of sleep so they'd be ready for whatever the day had to offer.

As they walked, Milo saw that Mook held a small creature in his hands, and when he asked the stone boy what it was, Mook showed him. Curled asleep in the big rocky palm was a miniature salamander with familiar red stripes.

“Is that . . .
Iskiel
?”

“Mook.”

“He's so tiny.”

“He'll get bigger,” said Evangelyne, glancing over. “It takes him a couple of days to come all the way back.”

Shark bent close and gently poked at the amphibian. Tiny puffs of steam escaped from Iskiel's nostrils, but the creature did not wake.

“He's kind of cute.”

“Mook,” agreed Mook.

During the trip Milo noticed a change in the relationship between Killer and Evangelyne. Until now the little Jack Russell had been shy of the girl in either of her aspects, and particularly the wolf form. Now whenever Evangelyne transformed and went running ahead as the wolf, Killer wagged his tail and ran after her. Soon they were scouting together and even play-fighting during breaks. Shark and Milo exchanged a look.

“I have no idea what to even say about that,” confessed Shark. “After the last couple days, my weird-o-meter is all
burned out. I actually don't think anything can freak me out at this point.”

They came through a dense grove of old hardwood trees that was clogged by younger saplings. Milo reckoned that they were getting close to the city. It wasn't until they emerged from the grove that he realized just how close they were.

It was right there.

The ruined, blackened, overgrown sprawl of New Orleans.

And hovering above it like the fist of a titan from old myths hung the vast egg-shaped monstrosity that was the Dissosterin hive ship.

They stood in the shadows and stared up at it, mouths open in awe and horror. Killer's sense of fun melted away and he shrank against Evangelyne's side, whimpering softly.

The hive ship cast its shadow across the city, and inside that shadow thousands of shapes moved.

Bugs.

Hunter-killers.

Stingers.

And more.

Thousands and thousands of them. Maybe millions.

And all of it between them and Gadfellyn Hall.

T
hey climbed a towering oak and stared in horror at New Orleans.

Milo had seen this city only once since the invasion. It had been on a clear morning when the kids in his pod had gone on a long march with his mother and her soldiers. They'd crouched in the weeds in Manchac Wildlife Management Area on the west side of Lake Pontchartrain. His mom had been scouting for a new location for their camp and had thought to settle on the far side of the wildlife park, closer to the much smaller Lake Maurepas. She ultimately chose to move deeper into bayou country.

It wasn't really a city anymore. It was mostly destroyed, burned black, the buildings' brick skin torn away to reveal the naked bones of wood and iron. And hanging over the ruined town like a storm cloud was the hive ship.

Seven of those massive ships had come to Earth after an interstellar journey of thousands of years. Impossibly huge, ugly, made up of patchwork metal from thousands of unknown sources. Milo thought that this one looked less like a well designed ship and more like some half-digested garbage spat out into space.

Milo could hardly believe he'd been aboard the thing. If it hadn't been for little Halflight and her glamours—spells that disguised Milo and the Orphan Army as shocktroopers—they'd never have managed it. He wished he had the little fire sprite with them now, because getting into New Orleans looked like it was going to be even harder than getting aboard the hive ship.

The town was crawling with Dissosterin. Literally crawling. Shocktroopers were everywhere, their many hands gripping pulse pistols. Others, bigger insects that looked like gigantic rhinoceros beetles, towered over scuttling hordes of cockroach-like drones, snapping at them with steel-barbed whips. Stingers on chain leashes walked beside them, growling and snapping at the worker bugs. In the main streets, segmented millipedes the size of school buses lumbered along, their backs hung with net bags of cargo. There were tens of thousands of green lifelights. Every shocktrooper, every drone, and every single one of the unnameable alien insects had a lifelight. Milo touched the pouch of metal ball bearings at his belt. He had plenty of shot left, but even if he had had a truckload he wouldn't have had enough to make a dent in that seething mass.

Swarms of flies bigger than vultures flew in and out through the openings of the hive ship, each of them carrying what looked like I beams and sheets of metal. Dense black smoke billowing from the openings carried
the smell of welding torches and hot metal. And below the ship was a growing heap of twisted deck plating, shattered machinery, and other nameless junk, including the bodies of hundreds of Dissosterin.

When Milo and the rest had stolen the red ship to escape from the monstrous craft, Milo had flung some grenades into the main birthing chamber. He knew that he'd done damage, but from the intensity and scope of the repair work, it was clear he'd accomplished more than he'd hoped.

Nice.

In its way.

The greater the damage, the greater the desire for revenge on the part of the Swarm.

Oh well,
he thought,
they can't want to kill us any more than they already do.

Beside him Shark quietly said, “Wow.”

“Yeah,” said Milo.

“Mook,” said Mook.

“At least,” said Shark, “I don't see any hunter-killers.”

Evangelyne pointed to a side street that was nearly choked with debris from a row of collapsed buildings. Weeds were thick and a few young trees poked crookedly from between the piles of shattered brick, evidence that the street was disused.

“That's our way in,” she said. “Come on.”

They climbed down and began moving toward New
Orleans. The Bugs had done so much damage during the invasion that there was plenty of wreckage to hide behind. Evangelyne asked to see Milo's map and he spread it out on the ground. She tapped a group of streets that made up a neighborhood that used to be called the French Quarter—back when human beings lived there. Then, using a stick, Evangelyne drew a larger map in the dirt of a few of those streets to indicate where Gadfellyn Hall was located.

“We'll need to be sharp, because it won't look like what it is,” she said.

“Which means what?” asked Shark.

“The house is a ghost too. Another building has been built where it used to stand, but the old hall is still there. It's inside, hidden in the shadows.”

“Okay, that's really, really creepy. How are we supposed to find it?”

“I can get us to the front door,” Evangelyne assured him, “but once we're inside, we'll have to search for it. There has to be a clue. Maybe a hidden passage or a door that's been sealed up. Something.”

“Wait,” said Milo, holding up a hand. They all looked at him, but he kept his hand up and closed his eyes, trying to remember something. Then he snapped his eyes open, unslung his satchel, and pulled out the battered little notebook he used as his dream diary. Milo riffled through the pages until he found an entry from a few nights ago. “Here. This is something I wrote down after
one of my dreams. It's about the Heir and the library. Maybe this will help.”

He held it out for them all to read.

When he was done, he went looking for more books. A white rabbit hopped out of the shadows and the boy followed it through a doorway behind a doorway that was behind another doorway. And there, beyond that, were more books.

“Okay,” said Shark, closing his eyes and rubbing them wearily, “so what you're saying is that we have to go to Wonderland?”

“How would I know? It was a dream.”

“Wonderland?” asked Evangelyne sharply. “What is that?”