Tortus Bay

1.18: The Festival, part 2

There is no place safer that you could be, than here at the Anderson with me.

Henry hadn't meant to fall asleep. At Kara's insistence he sought out the makeshift bedroom in the guttyworks of the Anderson Warehouse, dried himself off, and pulled on a baggy change of clothes. Then he sat on the cot, and found that he could keep his eyes open no longer. No matter what is chasing you, it won't be able to find you here.

Now he rose, disoriented and exhausted. The rain had stopped, but not more than a couple hours could have passed. There was a tiredness in him that went beyond the physical constraints of his body. Magic was real. It flowed through the village every month. Clair knew how to fly. Kara made charms that actually worked. The crimson brand on his clavicle bore witness to that truth. How much deeper did it go?

Henry stepped out on the scaffolding, beside the wall-length mural of the boy smoking a cigarette, and surveyed the empty floor below. Kara's voice trailed down to him from above. She sounded weak. "Up here."

He followed her voice to a ladder against the wall that led him onto the roof. Dawn was fresh outside. Milky yellow clouds covered the sky, pushing back the fledgling purple of night. "How long was I out?"

"Not long." Kara sat on the edge of the building, her back propped up against a length of ventilation, looking out at the village. The bags under her eyes were darker than ever, and her skin shone nearly translucent in the yellow light.

"Did you haul yourself up here?"

"I'm not as bad off as I look."

He sat down beside her. "Didn't you sleep at all? Aren't you tired?"

"Exhausted. But every time one of my charms activates, I can feel it. I won't be sleeping today. Nor will I be leaving the warehouse," she said, nodding toward the horizon," and I recommend you follow suit."

Henry followed her nod, and realized that he'd been wrong about the sky. It wasn't a case of dawn's light pushing out the darkness. The sun was fully risen, but it did not shine down on the park. There, and only there, was something that he could only think to call a storm, swirling like a tornado, blotting out all light in its vicinity. "What is that?"

"Nothing natural. I've been watching it for a while now, and all I know is that it's not quite like anything I've ever seen before."

A looming sense of dread settled over him. What were the chances that something like that would just happen to occur over the park? What had Clair been mouthing to him, only a few hours before? "So this is weird, even by your standards?" he asked.

"Weird, and getting bigger."

And it was. Even as he watched, the edge of the black cone—the storm—reached out to cover a few more trees. Beyond the park, the wind scattered garbage and detritus down the vacant streets of Tortus Bay. "Kara, why are we the only people watching this thing? Where is everyone else?"

"Folk stay inside on festival day. It's an old tradition. They have their own things to do, or else they're frightened of what they might see."

Henry thought that wasn't entirely unreasonable. "Isn't there someone we can tell?"

"There are no people left who would come."

"What's going to happen? Will it just keep expanding?"

"I'm afraid it might."

There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask. A thousand things that he needed to know. The storm raged on, expanding, its interior hidden by obsidian gusts of wind. "Clair can fly," he said.