Not really … “There was a little bit of an earthquake a few minutes ago.”
“Yeah, we felt that one. Seismologists say it was a pretty good one. But you know we get little quakes up here all the time, right?”
“That was little?”
“Pretty little, yeah. Try not to worry, Ms. Norville.”
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks.”
Try not to worry, ha. Next I called Ben again, to tell him exactly where we were waiting. And to hear his voice. “There’s been an earthquake. A tremor, like in Denver.”
“That can’t be good.”
“Apparently earthquakes are pretty common around here.”
“But still.”
“I know.”
“Just hold tight. We’ll be there as fast as we can. I’m glad Sun is there with you.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
Staying still means being a target.
Yeah, it did. “Wolf wants to run.”
“I know. Soon.”
A pot of coffee and plate of bacon had already arrived at the booth Sun had claimed. I was starving and hadn’t even realized it. I’d run to get away from Lightman, but I hadn’t hunted.
Lopez had given me a map of the park, and this was my first chance to spread it out and study it. The Norris Basin was roughly northwest from the middle of the park. The river I’d followed was the Madison. Escaping Lightman, I’d run for some thirty miles. But distance didn’t mean anything to him. He could teleport right into the middle of the diner and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. I wasn’t safe anywhere. Somehow, that was easier—if no place was safe I ought to just stop worrying, right?
Sun sat with both hands wrapped around his mug, sipping coffee while watching me. On the other hand, I was slumped back, staring into space. This was a marathon with no end in sight. Well, there was always the fiery eruption of a world-shattering supervolcano. That was one sort of end.
“What are you thinking?” he said. He didn’t seem worried about anything. He never had.
I sighed, sipped my own coffee because it was there and getting cold. I was still in borrowed sweats and a hoodie. No one seemed to have noticed I was barefoot, because who expected someone to be barefoot in the mountains in spring?
“I need to get shoes, I think,” I said. “And a copy of Revelation. And Paradise Lost. I mean, now that I met the guy. He’ll be coming after me. He has
to, right? He was so pissed off.”
“So you have to get away,” Sun said. “We can do that.”
“No, I have to find Roman.” I set down the mug and leaned my head in my hands. “It’s too much. I’ll never find him.”
“But you’ve already made it so far,” Sun said. “You’re not giving up now, are you?”
Figured, the Monkey King would be the one person more cheerful and optimistic than I was. In some stories, the Monkey King was a trickster figure. Of course he’d be enjoying this.
I turned back to the map. Yellowstone Lake was the park’s most prominent landmark, and you really could roughly follow the shape of the ancient volcanic caldera around much of its edge. When you knew where to look, the caldera was obvious, not just in the lake, but in the ridges and shape of the land around it. It might have been covered with trees and roads, but it was still there. Groups of geysers were clustered around its edge. The lake was large, over 130 square miles, with over a hundred miles of shoreline. That was a lot of ground to cover, searching for Roman. Come nightfall, he’d be out there somewhere, casting the spell. Ashtoreth would be waiting with him, ready to teleport him to safety before the whole thing blew. And Lightman would be in the background, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
I wasn’t any closer to stopping them than when I’d first heard about the Long Game. We were so far past that.
“If you were going to trigger an eruption of a supervolcano,” I said, “what would you do?”
“I’d throw a bomb into the middle of it. You know, like throwing a lighter into a fireworks factory. Kaboom.” He made a bursting motion with his hands. He didn’t even have to think about it, which was vaguely disturbing.