Fenris & Mott, page 11
They trudged after her, following her light.
The closer they got to the source of the glow, the worse the devastation around them became. Mott saw things she wished she hadn’t.
She saw bones—human bones—poking out of the clutter.
Random items had been dropped or lost in the ruins: sunglasses, shoes, phones, a wallet open to a picture of a smiling family of a mom and a dad and two girls and a boy. And a charred teddy bear, which was somehow the worst sight of all.
A woman with short silver hair and wire-rim glasses picked through rocks. One of her lenses was cracked. Her eyes were open too wide, like her face had frozen in an expression of fear.
“Bev? From the wolf rescue?”
“That’s right.” She lifted a rock, examined what was beneath it, and sighed. “Do you have any food? I haven’t eaten proper since I left Idaho.”
Mott regretted leaving all her root beer with Thrudi. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Oh. Okay.” Her voice was flat, emotionless, as if whatever she was feeling couldn’t be fully expressed.
“I like meat,” said Gorm.
Mott took the rock out of Bev’s hands and put it down. “You should come with us.”
“What about the wolf pup? Do you know where he is? I don’t want to see him again.”
Fenris was all around them. Fenris was everywhere.
“He’s nearby,” Mott said. “But if you stay brave, I can help get you out of here.”
Bev moved her head. It was less a headshake than a shudder. “I don’t know. . . .”
Mott offered Bev her hand. “Take it. It’ll be okay.”
Bev hesitated. “You promise?”
Mott almost said yes. But it would be lying. “I honestly don’t know how this is going to end. We just have to keep trying and hope for the best.”
“Thank you for being honest,” Bev said. She accepted Mott’s hand.
The party moved on toward the red glow. Even the dead man’s hand followed along, darting in and out of cover.
Mott lost track of time. Had she been inside Fenris for minutes, hours, or days? Her head said minutes, but her tired bones said centuries.
She pushed through the fatigue, one step at a time, one foot after the other, relentless, until finally she found the source of the glow. The light seeped through a field of rocks and charred earth like blood through a bandage. Mott found the brightest spot and fell to her knees. She started digging with her fingers.
Bev knelt beside her to help.
Chris Hevans grabbed handfuls of dirt.
Gorm joined them.
Even the dead man’s hand pitched in, scraping the ground with its fingernails.
After a time, they uncovered something. Mott moved Odin’s eye closer to get a good look. It was a thin rectangle the size of a domino, black as coal except for a design: an eight on its side, the symbol for infinity, with a slash through it, glowing red like steel in a blacksmith’s forge.
Gorm stood and stepped back. “The Annihilation Rune,” he said. Fear put a quaver in his voice.
Mott reached for it.
“Careful!” warned Bev. “It’ll burn you.”
“No,” Gorm said. “When it’s whole, it contains its heat within. But crack it open, and the devastation will be instant.”
“Like an atom?” Mott asked.
“Yes,” said Gorm. He paused. “Actually, I have no idea what an atom is.”
“I know what an atom is,” Chris Hevans announced, proudly puffing his chest. “I defused a nuclear missile when I played special agent Jason Mussel in a little film you may have heard of called Jason Mussel, Special Agent.”
Mott also knew about atoms. They were the building blocks of elements. Every object in the universe was made of them. But if you split an atom apart it released an unbelievable amount of energy. If you split enough atoms apart, you could power an entire city. Or destroy one.
Mott picked up the rune. Even though it wasn’t hot, Mott sensed its danger, as if she was holding a ticking bomb.
“Puppy?” Mott called out. “Can you hear me? I know you’re out there. I found the thing that Tew forced down your throat. If you’ll let me help, I can take it away from you.”
Was there an answer? Maybe there was a change in the background noise. Maybe an increase in the wind, like a breath. Maybe a deep, pulsing thump. Or maybe it was Mott’s own heartbeat.
“It’s up to you, puppy,” Mott said to the sky. “You don’t have to be a destroyer if you don’t want to be. Just like you don’t have to let some old prophecy tell you what you are. You can barf the rune out, and us with it. But I can’t make you. It’s up to you.”
This was the extent of Mott’s plan. The universe had made a promise. Mott had made a promise. She didn’t know if Fenris had ever made a promise. Despite everything that made him powerful and strange, he was still an animal, and she didn’t know if an animal could make a promise.
But maybe he could make a choice.
Now there definitely was a noise.
There was a gurgle.
A slosh.
A roar, rising in intensity.
Rubble clacked and shifted. Pebbles streamed down the hills of wreckage. The ground beneath Mott’s feet trembled, and the world inside Fenris filled with the din of crashing boulders and screaming glass.
Something big was coming.
A tidal wave?
No. It was a lot grosser than that.
Mott clutched the rune tight.
16
MOTT LAY FACEDOWN, SPRAWLED ON the plaza of the Grove mall.
“Ew,” she croaked.
“Ew,” agreed Chris Hevans.
Bev and Gorm the Vicious echoed their “Ew,” and even the dead man’s hand seemed disgusted, flicking Fenris’s inner goop off its fingers.
Mott’s right hand was empty. She’d lost Odin’s eye.
But when she opened her left hand she almost cried with relief. The Rune of Annihilation rested in her palm.
Something wet and rough licked her cheek, and she found herself staring into the face of a dirty, tiny wolf pup.
“Mweep?”
“Good boy, Fenris, good boy,” she said, scritching his chin.
Dizzy and wobbly, she got to her feet.
“Mott, over here!” Mott’s mother was cowering with Hermod behind a big concrete planter. Broken glass glittered amid pulverized bricks and the wreckage of demolished shops. Snowing ash continued to fall.
“Good to see you back, friend Mott!” shouted Thrudi over the clang of her blade against Tew’s ax. “As you can see, the battle goes well.”
Despite her jaunty tone, Thrudi was not, in fact, doing well. Blood striped her cheeks, one of her arms hung awkwardly at her side, and she moved with a limp. Tew and Vidar easily dodged her attempts to cut and stab and slice them.
She wouldn’t last much longer.
Mott thrust her hand in the air. “Stop!” she shouted. “I have the rune.” She opened her hand to show them. The annihilation symbol shone like a lamp in the dark.
Vidar and Tew paused. Exhausted, Thrudi sank to one knee and tried to catch her breath.
“You do, indeed, have the rune,” Vidar said, his voice mild. “That is a feat worthy of song.”
Tew appraised her as if he were trying to decide how to carve a turkey. “I guess we take it from her and shove it back down Fenris’s throat?”
Vidar considered for a moment. “I suppose so. He no longer looks so hungrily at the moon. And he does have to eat the moon before he can kill Odin, and only then can I kill him.”
The two gods were calm. They were unhurt and looked fresh. Thrudi had done her part. The rest was up to Mott.
The rune wasn’t much bigger than a cookie. She placed it between her teeth.
“You wouldn’t dare,” said Tew. But he didn’t sound too certain.
Mott aimed a defiant smile at him.
“You don’t know where that thing’s been,” said Mott’s mom in a stern mom voice. “Spit it out right now.”
Mott’s smile turned apologetic.
Thrudi gazed at her, eyes shining, face grimy with soot and blood. She understood what Mott was going to do, and the admiration in her expression was beautifully clear.
“You have the heart of a Valkyrie, sister.”
Mott beamed.
Vidar turned even whiter. Frost billowed around him with every breath. He pointed the tip of his sword right at the center of Mott’s chest. “So you eat the rune and then what? You are seized with the desire to destroy? You gain power and you finish what Fenris started and ravage the moon? Then the sun?”
“Maybe this is how the prophecy plays out,” Tew suggested. “The girl brings the moon down to Earth in pieces, Fenris eats the crumbs, events continue as promised, and the prophecy is preserved.”
“Buh wah if ah jush bide it im two?” said Mott, her words garbled by the rune in her mouth.
“I didn’t understand that.” Vidar looked around for help. “Did anyone understand that?”
Thrudi translated for him. “She said, ‘But what if I just bite it in two?’”
“Ih wud refweef a forf lig a nookweer bob.”
“It would—” began Thrudi.
“Release a force like a nuclear bomb,” Tew finished. “You’d flatten every building, cook every plant to cinders, kill every living creature within a few dozen miles, and poison the air and the water and the land for thousands of lifetimes. We all know you’re not going to do that.”
“Mebee ah will.”
“You wouldn’t!” Mott’s mom said, scandalized. “You’re a good girl.” She turned to the gods. “Don’t mind my daughter. She’s bluffing.”
Mott shifted the rune in her mouth just enough that she could speak more clearly. “You’re not helping, Mom.”
There was an edge of regret in Vidar’s voice. “You’re just prolonging the worlds’ pain. Delaying this further is simply cruel. Stop it. Give us the rune, and let’s end this tragedy.”
“Mweep,” said Fenris.
Tew brought his ax up high. Red blood glowed beneath his flesh. Vidar gripped his sword in both his hands. His eyes steamed with frost. Once more, Mott’s balance faltered and her brain wobbled with the Grand Canyon sensation.
“You made too many promises,” Tew said, with some sympathy. “And you are out of options.”
“That’s not true.” Mott gathered the last remnants of her courage. She gathered her strength, drawn from Thrudi and her mom and Fenris, and from the certainty that everyone depended on her now.
From Thrudi’s bag, which lay on the ground, she grabbed a bottle of Borbles root beer.
She popped the bottle open.
She pushed the rune onto her tongue and closed her mouth.
She took a swig.
“Don’t you do it,” whispered Vidar. “Don’t you eat that rune.”
Mott did it.
Mott ate that rune.
She felt . . . different.
Not bad.
Not good.
Just hugely different.
She took a step.
It was just a step. Nothing threatening in it, nothing special.
Tew and Vidar watched her, their weapons ready, their eyes narrowed, and their muscles clenched. Thrudi moved to put herself between Mott and the gods, but Mott waved her off. “I’ll be okay.”
Mott wasn’t actually sure that she would be okay. If the gods hurt Thrudi, Mott wasn’t sure what she would do, or what she would become. And anyway, this wasn’t a fight that could be won with swords and axes.
She brought her foot down lightly on the pavement, and a little cloud of ash poofed in the air. There was a soft crunch, like the cracking ice film of a mug of root beer from the back of the fridge. When she lifted her foot, there was a tiny fissure in the concrete.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
She drove her foot down again, harder this time, and the ground cracked like an eggshell. A shudder vibrated through the earth.
Tew flinched. Not a lot, but it was a definite flinch. She had just made a god of war flinch.
“Have you ever seen the Grand Canyon?” she asked him.
“No.”
“It’s a little bit like this.”
She opened her mouth and roared. She roared the immense power of the rune inside her. She roared all her fear, and she roared all her anger, but mostly she roared her love and she roared her resolve to keep her promises.
The air shook with the sound of a mighty horn, a tuba the size of a volcano, a choir of jet engines, a symphony of freight trains. Mott was shocked and frightened when she realized the sound came from her.
Tew and Vidar covered their ears and staggered, trying to stay on their feet while hurricane winds tore at their atoms.
She was a black hole.
She was emptiness.
She was devastation.
She was the death of worlds.
She was Ragnarok.
If she wanted to be.
She shut her mouth, and the gods collapsed to the pavement. They lay there, breathing hard and softly moaning.
After a while, Tew recovered the ability to speak. “Yes, you’re powerful,” he panted. “Now, instead of Fenris being my weapon, it can be you. Do you feel the rage inside? The pressure, like two seismic plates pushing against each other, like magma boiling under your skin?” He pointed at the moon in the sky. “Do it, girl. Become your greatest self and fulfill the destiny you robbed from Fenris. Fulfill the prophecy’s promise.”
Mott had a choice.
Not like the move to Los Angeles. Not like her mom losing the job she’d been promised. Not like living in an apartment complex with a no-dogs policy. Not like having a dad who lied as easily as Loki.
“Are you kidding?” Mott said. “I’m not going to eat an entire moon. I made a promise to save Fenris.” She looked at the two gods, two big men, crawling on the ground. She almost felt sorry for them. “And I promised to save the worlds.”
She parted her lips and let out just a tiny bit more of her Grand Canyon might. Compared to her previous roar, it was hardly a wheeze.
Vidar put his hands up in surrender. “Enough.”
“Enough? What do you mean, ‘Enough’?” Tew snorted. “We don’t get to give up. We don’t get to decide if Ragnarok happens or not.” He gestured at Thrudi and Mott’s mom and Chris Hevans and all the other bystanders. “Gods we may be, but compared to the universe, we’re as small as they are to us. We do our part to fulfill the prophecy, and we can do nothing else.”
Wincing, Vidar stood.
“Yes, my brother-in-arms. You are correct. Ragnarok will happen. The promise of death to all worlds will be kept. The world-spanning serpent will thrash beneath the waves and drown the land. The flaming sword of Surtur will turn worlds to ash. Fenris will eat the moon. There will be an age of axes, and an age of swords, and an age of wolves, till the worlds go down.” He offered his hand to Tew and lifted him to his feet. “But not today.” Vidar dipped his chin in a small bow to Mott. “You have shown courage, and you have my respect.”
“I don’t want your respect,” Mott said.
Vidar allowed himself a smile.
“Come, Tew. Let’s go home. We will rest and feast, and we will prepare for the next final tomorrow.”
Scowling, Tew hefted his ax over his shoulder. “Very well, brother. Until the final tomorrow.” And aiming a glare at Mott, he said, “Which may come much sooner than you think.”
Together, the gods shuffled out of the mall, leaving rubble and ruin behind.
“You better run!” shouted Chris Hevans, long after they had gone.
Mott wasn’t sure how she felt. Relieved? Proud? Or just exhausted? Thrudi came to her side, and they leaned on each other. “Should we go after them, friend Thrudi?”
“That sounds like a very stupid idea, friend Mott. But if you wish, I will stand with you.”
Smoke still billowed in the red sky. Mounds of broken glass and brick and cement still sprawled all around them. Helicopters labored in the air and sirens wailed.
“Let them go,” Mott said. “There’s work to do here.”
Fenris toddled over and booped Mott’s leg until she picked him up.
“Mweep,” he said in total agreement.
17
SCIENTISTS TOOK MEASUREMENTS AND DID math and calculated how much of the moon had been lost. Most of the crumbs had fallen in the ocean, some in a remote Mongolian desert, one in the middle of an empty football stadium in Florida, and a lot of the crumbs burned up in the atmosphere before striking ground. Earth was lucky there weren’t more crumbs and that the crumbs weren’t bigger.
But that didn’t mean Almost-Ragnarok hadn’t done a lot of harm. The fires in Hollywood destroyed homes. Bigger fires in Australia burned millions of acres. Floods in India took lives, and even now, in the middle of summer, parts of Europe grappled with a strange winter storm. Los Angeles was still as warm and dry as the inside of a toaster and felt ready to burst into flames again.
Mott didn’t know how much Almost-Ragnarok was to blame for the deadly weather and how much was due to stuff people had been doing for more than a century: the products built in factories and shipped across oceans, the things power plants burned to generate electricity. It didn’t take a prophecy to break a world.
Things done could not be undone. Things destroyed could not be undestroyed. But sometimes they could be fixed. Tomorrow Mott was volunteering to help clean up storm debris on the beach. The day after that, she was going to the library to talk about starting a neighborhood environmental sustainability club.
She knew she had power. Maybe not the power to get her mom a better-paying job. Or the power to change the apartment’s anti-dog policy. But she had power to make things better. She supposed everybody did.
For now she sat on the couch with Thrudi, watching the end credits of a Chris Hevans movie.
“He’s actually a good actor,” Mott judged. “Four out of five bubbles.”
The dead man’s hand sat on Thrudi’s shoulder, reaching for the popcorn. “I agree, though I think a human sacrifice would have improved the story. Want some?”
Thrudi offered Mott popcorn, but the dead man’s hand had put her off her appetite. Instead she gave it to the hamster on her knee, who happily munched it.
