Page 84 of Ashes of Gold
Julius catches my eye, checking his watch, tapping his foot. I move toward him. Bri’s reason for not telling me doesn’t satisfy. But I let it go. For now.
“You good?” he asks.
“Let’s just go up.” Julius and I ascend the stairs. He pushes open the door a crack and peeks first, then gives me a thumbs-up. We step out and the door is silent as it eases closed.
The edge of the Central District is much more rural than the City center. The concrete landscape is a collage of tall buildings with chunks missing and others toppled over. The secluded spot where we found underground access is behind a row of abandoned warehouses. Faint smells of something metallic or soapy hang in the air, and Jue sets a blanket down. We settle on the ground, pressing ourselves back-to-back to keep watch in opposite directions.
“Anything in particular to look for?” he asks, and I can feel his heart thrumming against my back.
“Any people, sounds, lights in the sky even.”
“Got it. This place is wild. Y’all got shit more lethal than guns flying from your fingertips.”
“Well, it should only be flying fromourfingertips. They’re thieves.”
He pulls the round of onyx from his pocket I left with him foreverago. “It’s wild that all that magic can be stored in this tiny little rock.” He tosses in the air, catching it. “You figure out how you’re gonna get it away from the Grays?”
“Sort of.” I explain how the General’s onyx popped out when I fired my magic directly at it. “But for that to happen, it can’t just be me. There are thousands of Grays; we need an army to take them on.”
“Which is why the first thing is getting their magic back?”
“Yep.”
“It’s gonna be alright, Rue.”
I fidget in the silence. He doesn’t know that. He wants it to be true, and I appreciate the sentiment. But he doesn’t know it for a fact.
“You bugging?” His tone is gentle. “Talk to me. What you worried ’bout?”
That I can’t trust Bri now? That I don’t know who I can trust?But that’s all bobbing on the surface of the real root of it. I see my father’s open-eyed stare.
“That someone else will die because of me,” I say, my insecurity breaking through, cracking me like an egg. “What if I’d figured out my magic sooner? Got to the Row sooner? You know how many people would be alive if I hadn’t been so stubborn before?”
“You know how many people are alive because you were? If you’d given up, Rue… shit. But, nah, you’re too stubborn for that.” He shifts the way he’s sitting and we’re less back-to-back now. I can make out his profile in the moonlight.
“Who you trust most?”
“You, of course, negro, ha ha.”
“You shouldn’t.” He faces me fully and grips my shoulders. “I told you, you should trust yourself first and foremost.” He grins. “And me second.”
“But how do I trust myself with something like this when I’ve never seen no shit like this before? Jue, they wanted me to lead them. Likelead… be theirQueen.My last name isn’t Clinton. I don’t have some fancy Ivy League degree. I’m not some well-studied expert on Alexander the Great or Sun Tzu’sArt of War. I know none of that shit. I’m just me.” I sigh. “Yet somehow, I got a whole damn army of Macazi following me, basically looking to me for safety. And I’m making critical missteps, Jue!”
More people relying on me isn’t what I wanted. This wasn’t the plan.
“The plan is to get the Ancestors to fix this.”For something of this magnitude, they’re the fixers. Not me.
I rest my head on the wall and study the specks in the sky, jealous of how they hang there withonejob: to shine.
“When you was working that summer job at the Y, remember?”
“Yeah?”
“That boss lady told you the number of kids that could attend was like twenty or something, right?”
“Yeah, which is so dumb, because the Y is the best place in our neighborhood with stuff for kids to do when they’re out of school. There are hundreds of kids that wanted up in there. Twenty?! Yeah, right.”
“So you went door-to-door in the neighborhood.”
