Storm of Locusts (The Sixth World, #2)

by Rebecca Roanhorse

What I need more than anything is a fresh start. I’m tired of carrying around old ghosts.

incongruous spikes of determined survival in a world made of hard surfaces and callous time.

Long before the Big Water, before even the Diné became the Earth-Surface People that we are today, this part of the world used to be the floor of a great sea. The bilagáana scientists call that continental shift geology. We Diné don’t disagree exactly. We find the same strange ocean-born fossils in our rocks, the same signs of a world before ours, foreign and unfamiliar. We just attribute the current face of our homeland to different sources.

I stare at him. He stares back. I consider whether this is really the hill I want to die on and decide it’s not.

“Some,” I acknowledge, remembering the stories Coyote liked to tell me about the creation of the world. “I know that the First World was a red world, inhabited by insect people. Beetle, dragonfly—” “Locusts.” “—locusts. But they screwed up their world and were forced to flee to the Second World, the Blue World.” “And what made them flee?” “Uh . . .” “Floods. A storm.” “So this White Locust guy fits in how?” “When the Air-Surface People escaped the First World and traveled to the Second World, they sent out scouts to try to find a place to live. One of those

“Men like him can’t be happy with living. They got to be praying for the end of the world. They thrive on death. Convince weaker men that only they can save them, but it’s all bullshit. Don’t trust those death-dealers, no matter how sweet their words. They only want to die and take you down with them.”

It surrounds me, and for a moment I feel that sun-soaked warmth of late summer again, something fragile and beautiful from an idyllic childhood. But it’s a childhood that was never mine. It’s fake, something pretty that has nothing to do with me. An approximation of a perfect childhood too foreign a seduction to lure me in.

She glares at me, brown eyes shining with hate I haven’t earned.

Outside that wall is the horror of what happened to everyone else. And it may sound truly selfish, but I’ve had enough horror in my life. I don’t want to know about other people’s horrors too.

Her mom looks frail, a bad tiding away from broken.

“A woman’s got to keep secrets. Else who is she?”

Your paths are far from decided. There are still many trials. Most you will fail because failure is your nature. But others . . .” She shrugs.

“Do you think we don’t exist outside the borders of Dinétah? That we aren’t real in our own right? That we endure only at the whim of the five-fingereds, and if you do not believe, then nothing?”

“If not me, then who? Who fights the evil in this world?” “I kind of thought that’s what I was doing.” Her mouth twists, cynical. “Did you really?” I blink, caught off guard. But I can’t lie. “No. Maybe. Sometimes.”

“You know much of want, Battle Child. Careful it is not your undoing.”

“There are many places the sun does not reach, and darkness can be a balm to those who belong to the night.”

The last time I saw Coyote, I shot him dead. Slit his throat, cut off his head and threw it off a rooftop for good measure. Clearly, I should have done more. Because here he is, reminding me that the problem with immortals is that they don’t stay dead.

“It seemed reasonable at the time.” “To you.” “Yes, to me,” he says, sounding slightly annoyed. “Who else would it

sound reasonable to?”

“Is there no betrayal too large to be unforgiven?” “We all do things that need to be forgiven,”

“But forgiveness is not always offered.”

“Life is short, Maggie. Even shorter since the Big Water. Sometimes you just have to take people as they are, not worry about whether they’re good for you in the long run. Because what if there is no long run? What if there’s just a night in a haunted casino in the middle of the badlands?”

The federal government had long given up on helping anyone, the message clear that we were all on our own. And on our own, we would die.

“They’re not the only thing attracted to the shine,” Tó says. “All kinds of things are attracted to shine. You hear that, Maggie?”

are accounts of ancient stories—the Hebrew Bible, a story of something called a Tiamat from Ancient Babylon, another book with a Chinese dragon and what looks like a tortoise on the cover.

“Convenient morality.”

I was trying to do what was best for you, but all I did was deny you the right to make your own choices.”

“Sometimes a man is so used to keeping secrets, he doesn’t know how to stop keeping them. We get through this, I’ll do better by you. That’s a promise.”

“Magic, medicine, science, and a little luck. If I had duct tape, I’d throw that in too.”