your society will continue. If your society has been irresponsible, then Death has won the Game. And every man, woman, and child shall be slain.
“This is a wicked Game to impose upon us,” the old woman said. “Haven’t we suffered through enough already?”
But the Dust Soldiers did not—or could not—answer, and in the end, the old woman had no choice but to agree to the terms of the Game we had been entered into.
“Who… who are you?” a man whispered when the Dust Soldiers had gone.
“I am Mother Morevna,” she said. “And if you listen to me, we’ll get out of this mess just fine. But we will have to do things exactly as I say.”
There was a murmuring among the crowd, then a nodding of heads. And then an acknowledgment: We had found ourselves a new leader.
That night, we gathered at the center of town and listened as Mother Morevna told us about the world we would make. Because, she said, we’d been given a chance to create a world that could be truly wonderful, truly prosperous. She said that we must band together—no matter our sex or color—or we would perish. She told us that we must build wells and irrigation systems, shelter, fields, and, most importantly, walls to keep ourselves safe from the desert creatures. We had to reinvent ourselves. And we did.
Cars proved useful once again: to be taken apart and used for scrap. And the old Case tractors… well, they had been the cause of a lot of our problems in the first place, hadn’t they? They were the first things we used for the walls. Next had come possessions. Last had come the bodies of the fallen, and between dust storms, the walls rose around us, keeping us safe.
Until I, Sal Wilkerson, brought an end to everything.
1944
4 MONTHS
REMAIN.
My nose was broken, it was pretty clear. It was reddish-black and bruised, and twisted off to one side, and when I touched it, pain lit up my whole face. As I sat up on my perch on the top of the west wall, I tried to lessen the pain by counting the names carved into the walls below me. Behind each one of those names was a body, adding its height to our walls. Joanna Schutter, Gregory Farrell, Ludie Mae Fuller, Andrew Jackson LaGrange, Noemi álvarez…
In cultivation class, Trixie Holland had accidentally hit me in the face with the backward stroke of her shovel, then made such a big show of being sorry that my classmates ended up consoling her. I tried, again, to breathe through my broken nose and felt a surge of anger as a big wad of blood slid down into the back of my throat. I hacked for a minute and spat it over the wall, into the desert, then wiped my nose again and wrote Trixie Holland is a bitch in blood on the mud brick beside me. Juvenile, sure, but it helped, if only just for a moment. Then I felt bad about it and wiped it away.
The walls were my sanctuary when Trixie and her girls tried to follow me after school—which was getting more and more frequent these days. They’d hide behind houses, under windmills, in storm cellars. Then there’d be a “Hey, Sal!” and the running would begin. Sometimes they caught me and harassed me, tore my things. Sometimes I lost them. It didn’t help that Trixie’s was the reluctant family I was supposed to be staying with this season. They say it takes a village to raise a child. But that only works if the village wants her. And after everything that had happened, Elysium, Oklahoma, did not want me.
Oh, they’d been fine with me at first. Back when I was Sal Wilkerson, the poor little girl whose mother had died. But then I saw the rain, and that changed everything. Rain. I saw it on the horizon, coming toward Elysium in sheets, in curtains. Heavy rain. Miraculous rain, coming to end this Dust Bowl and save us all. I had seen it in the sky, felt it on my skin, believed it in my bones. And being a nine-year-old, I had told everyone. I went from orphan to Child Prophet, lifted on shoulders, gathered around, and petted and celebrated. “When will the rain come, Sallie?” everyone had asked. “Soon!” I’d told them. “The rain will come and everything will be all right!”
But the rain didn’t come. And as the townspeople waited, I felt the tide