Page 31 of The Salt-Black Tree
It didn’t matter. Baby knew the way to go.
Her back began to complain near the California border, after the wet green blur of Humboldt and the slight turn inland past Crescent City. At Smith River the road lunged back towards the coast again, and a moving band of silvery rain beaded on Baby’s hood, tracing veinlike fingers down her crystalline windows, now fully rolled up. It was chilly enough to need the heater; Nat turned a dial and was rewarded with deep hay-scented warmth. Still, getting out to stretch seemed like a good idea, and the malevolent crimson dot had vanished from the rearview mirror.
She had a little breathing room. The highway never veered too far from the shore now, but sometimes the ocean’s glitter hid behind wind-twisted trees, their backs turned and their limbs companionably interlinked, heads bent together like old women conferring about coupons.
WELCOME TOOREGON, a green-painted sign called hurriedly before vanishing, and she stroked the steering wheel absently, as if petting a stray dog who didn’t mind a little affection. “Let’s find a gas station,” she murmured, and was rewarded with Baby’s deep mechanical chuckle of agreement. There was no fuel gauge, and Nat had the idea there wouldn’t be a hatch for a tank, either.
If she achieved full divinity status, she’d probably figure out what the cars ran on. It might even be something that wouldn’t give her nightmares.
Baby veered to the right and slowed. The rain intensified; there was none of California’s gold here, just gray and taupe. Winter was back with a vengeance, though far milder than the snow of her hometown. There was a bright-green BP station at the end of a long gradual rise—Nat tapped the brakes and Baby jolted back into regular-mortal speed, her engine’s hum rising to a purely normal pitch.
Parked with her nose towards a white metal box proclaimingFRESH ICE & NIGHTCRAWLERS, Baby settled into somnolence, metal pop-ticking as it cooled. Now Nat was faced with walking into a store on her own and maybe getting some snacks.
How on earth was she going to talk to normal people again after all this?
Digging in her backpack for her wallet, her fingertips brushed the Cup. Electricity zinged up her arm and she gasped, snatching her hand back.What the hell?
Carefully, cautiously, she peered into the backpack’s depths. The unicorn mug glowed golden, casting a thin dappled light against the car’s roof; Nat squinted disbelievingly, a laugh caught in her throat.
Nestled in the mug, a roll of crisp green lurked. She had to dig a bit, but eventually came up with a handful of what appeared to be perfectly ordinary twenty-dollar bills. Even their serial numbers looked entirely legitimate.
Holy shit. Better than an ATM.Wouldn’t Dima like to get his hands onthis—or would it work for him? Was this why Mom had always been so worried about money?
Nat folded the bills in her palm. She made a fist, stared at the back of her hand for a few moments, and when her fingers fell open again, the twenties had turned to fifties, ol’ Unconditional Surrender Grant looking dyspeptic as usual.
World wants to obey,zaika. Just ask it nice.
“Holyshit,” she breathed aloud. There was nobody around to mock her; hell, there was nobody around tosee. A tan-and-brown Chevy Silverado sat at the pumps, its owner probably inside; the world was a blur of silvery rain, dripping green, gray stone, bright electric light from the convenience store windows, and the shock of a small miracle trembling paperlike in her hands.
It took a few moments of breathing deep, her forehead resting against Baby’s sky-blue steering wheel, before Nat could gather the courage to zip up her bag and reach for the door handle.
A portly middle-aged man with a blue baseball cap exited the store, cast an incurious glance in her direction, and headed for the truck with long swinging steps.
Nat waited until he was gone in a cloud of rumbling exhaust before getting out, stretching and taking a deep lungful of fresh, chilly air. Tiny beads of water caressed her hair—she hadn’t bothered to braid it, and the humidity would bring out all the stubborn curl her mother disliked so much.
Had Maria Drozdova liked anything at all about her daughter?
Nat swung the door closed, a good solid heavy sound. Would the car still be here when she came back out? It was a risk she had to take—but Marisol didn’t seem like the kind to retract a gift.
It didn’t matter. If Baby vanished, she’d find another way to travel. There was no going back.
There hadn’t ever been, and maybe figuring out as much was whatgrowing upreally meant.
THE MAKERS
Buying lemonade and cheese curls from a monosyllabic minimum-wage employee in a green polyester vest was oddly anticlimactic, and southern Oregon passed in a gray blur afterward as the sun sank towards the Pacific’s cauldron, reddening as it descended. The forest reached down to swallow the highway, and each vista—pounding surf, wind-gnarled trees, great stacked masses of rock—was more beautiful than the last as a short winter afternoon drained away. Baby’s headlights pierced gathering gloom as she hummed along at more-than-mortal speed, the road curved back and forth like a lazy snake, and when Nat cracked her window the roaring breeze was full of cold moss, driftwood salt, and dripping.
The butterfly-flutter of flickering through traffic returned, though there weren’t many pairs of bright white diamonds or ruby-red taillights to be found even as towns thickened on either side of the highway, streetlamps guttering into life. Golden windows glowed, mortals going about their winter evenings; it was lonely until the trees returned and the pavement became the floor of a tunnel between black-wet trunks. The curves would have frightened Nat at this speed if Baby hadn’t taken them so surely; the tugging intensified, a twitching in Nat’s middle.
“It’s getting closer,” she murmured, reaching for the radio dial.
Baby didn’t disagree. Her speakers began to throb softly withStevie Wonder singing about superstition, and Nat was startled into a laugh. The sun dropped below the horizon in a glory of crimson, orange, and indigo, a show she might have enjoyed watching but had to settle for glimpses of.
Full dark fell, broken only by song changes. Whatever station the blue Mustang was tuned to didn’t have ad breaks; there was no DJ gabbling. Still, in the hush between song-fade and opening bars a murmur often rose, like a busy coffee shop on a weekday morning.
Maybe she should have felt dejected, or creeped-out. Instead, a soft sure glow ignited in Nat’s belly, driving the chill damp away.
An orange spark lit in the wet, tree-tangled distance. Baby left Highway 101 on a nameless ribbon of pavement, turning unerringly inland towards that small flickering light. The gleam flitted out of sight behind a series of hills, returned as the road curved, and vanished again.
