Austin left the car behind and walked until he couldn’t see the lights of anything anymore. The desert ground was cold under his bare feet: cold dirt and rock and sand spotted by spindly shrubs. There was a light breeze hissing dust along, and overhead there were so many stars, like it was a fairy-tale world. It felt good here. There was none of the erratic tidal tug of people out here, and the power in the earth flowed smooth and slow as continents sleeping on molten beds.
The orcs had picked a good desert to build their strange little paradise town. They’d been lucky the White Mountain Apache liked them. Or maybe the tribe had just wanted their own army in case what was left of the US government came knocking again.
Ahead was a flicker of golden light, and all the stress in Austin drained away. The light streaked toward him. Austin, blind to anything he was doing, awash with relief, walked faster toward it, faster until he was running, until finally he slid, burning the knees of his khakis thin, and the tiny ball of light leapt at him. He caught it and held it to his chest and nuzzled it and said, “Hey there, boy, hey Nebraska, hey,” and nearly cried from the comfort the animal gave him.
Nebraska was a fennec fox the size of a football. He was magical and flickered with pale-golden light like starshine on a pond. Austin cooed at his familiar and muttered all kinds of silly things, things he would have denied had anyone overheard. “Yeah, I missed you too,” he said, as if Nebraska had spoken to him. “He’s just a big dumb orc. You wouldn’t like him anyway. Did you find me something? Come on, show me what you found.”
He set Nebraska down, and the fox darted off, and Austin pulled the power of the land up into him and set off after, fast as the fox, no trail behind him.
It was two months ago Austin had come down from Winchester Mountain with Nebraska in his arms. The summoning ritual had taken days, and Austin was dizzy from lack of food. He blinked three times before he was sure it was really Grandfather Henry who waited for him at the trailhead and not some hallucination. The old man was sitting at the base of a hemlock eating an apple, truck idling nearby, no explanation for how he’d known that now would be the hour Austin returned. Grandfather gave Austin’s familiar a good look and nodded, satisfied.
That surprised Austin. “You can see him?”
“If you’d have done what I told you when you was younger, you two would have met long ago. A lot of suffering and confusion avoided.”
“You can see him,” Austin said again.
“It’s my job to see magical things, innit?” He crunched into his apple and chewed messily. “Most will not see him. The ones who care for you, though, he might choose to reveal himself to them.”
“That’ll be a short list,” Austin muttered.
He held the glittering fox up with both hands to the late-afternoon sun and looked into the star-filled eyes. Then Austin sighed, tipped his head to one side and grimaced like the creature had peed on him. “I don’t mean to complain, but he’s awfully small. He’s really not like me at all. He should be a mountain lion or a tiger or a cheetah or something. Something with claws and teeth.” The fox yawned and showed his tiny needle teeth. “Bigger teeth,” Austin told him.
“It has your ears. What will you call it?”
“Nebraska.”
“This is Washington.”
“And I wasn't born in Texas, either. Neither of us belong here. Nebraska.” He held him to his chest. “It’s just you and me, buddy. That’s all there is.”
Nebraska led him to a stone the size of a walnut. It was not a pretty stone. He nudged it with his paw. Austin picked it up. It had never been touched by anything living, and he could feel the power coalesced within it, enough to work magic by. “Good job. This will work great. Good job.” He put the stone in the small bag he wore on his belt. Then the fox took off running again, and Austin kept up with the same unnatural speed and soft footfalls as before. This was part of the magic Nebraska had given Austin: the fox’s speed and grace added to Austin’s own.
Within an hour, Austin and his familiar had collected four more stones. Then he sat cross-legged in the desert, the fox curled in his lap. Austin looked out to the east and fell into that strange half sleep elves had, something closer to meditation than to human or orc sleep, though not quite that either.
And he couldn’t put Roan aside, not even then. Not JT neither. But thoughts of those two stayed quiet like the people themselves standing at a respectful distance, and they didn’t pull him off-center so long as he had Nebraska with him.
He watched the stars rise. He watched the planets crawl. He watched the moon pass overhead. He watched the long, slow nuclear bloom of dawn, and every moment of all those things was a quiet celebration.
When the sunlight broke the horizon and warmed him, Austin stirred. The world was all right. Austin was ready.
JT had already prepared the vehicle they’d take. It was a brightly painted pickup truck on oversized wheels. The cab was so high off the ground there were ladders on the side to get to the doors. Written along the side of the bed were the words Country Orc in cursive against a backdrop of airbrushed mesas and deserts, and horses with flowing manes and tails.
Austin’s jaw dropped at the sight of it. “You can’t be serious.”
“This is my baby.”
“This is an operation, not a carnival.”
That earned Austin an icy glare. “This truck has got everything we need. Now get your things and let’s go.”
So much for starting off the day on better footing. From the non-trunk of the Corvette, Austin fetched a gym bag and a second, far larger, complicated-looking bag that carried his bow and arrows. He climbed the ladder to the cab and the door closed after him. The truck’s cab had no controls whatsoever. It was undecorated and looked unfinished. The seat molded itself to Austin—same technology as the ʼVette used.
JT held out his hand to Austin. “Here.”
“What?” But Austin held his hand out without waiting for an answer. JT dropped a rock in it. It was limestone and had a streak of green through it. Malachite probably.
“What’s this?” Austin asked, but he could feel the magic in the rock.
“I couldn’t sleep last night. So I went walking. I found that out in the desert. It was kind of pretty . . . Thought maybe . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I can never tell. Is it magic?”
Austin glanced from the rock to JT, but JT wasn’t looking. Probably he was going through whatever startup systems he needed. “No,” Austin lied, not knowing why he did. Maybe the idea of both of them out on their own in the desert hunting for rocks thinking of each other was too much to believe. Or maybe lying to JT was just a habit Austin couldn’t break. “But it’s a nice rock anyway.” He slipped it into his bag with the five Nebraska had found for him. “Thanks.”
And that was that: apologies and lies all told, they were back where they started. They pulled out of the compound, San Francisco bound.