He was reaching the end of his rope and I was starting to feel bad about it. Yes, I was flagrantly wasting his time, but I never meant to hurt him. I could if I wanted to. I knew much worse places for us to be. But I tried to take him places he would appreciate. I got us to see the Sequoias and even up to Banff, where I could buy myself a few hours just by pointing out the seasonal changes. He couldn’t resist documenting them. Sometimes he even smiled. But after five(!) misdirections, I knew my time was running out. I had to cinch it.
I kinda regret doing this. It ended up working out, but I’m still sorry I had to do it.
I told him — and I’m being for real this time — that Lola was hiding out by the Colorado River. I was sure of it. He didn’t believe me, I could tell, but I swear he doesn’t know how to argue. We were at the canyon the next morning. We landed very close to the ridge. The altitude change nearly killed me and the view was worse. I could not control myself. I loved the valley.
Ezekiel was stripping off his jacket in the dry heat. We weren’t too far from other people with this jump. Scattered groups of tourists hung around the canyon too, some embarking down on mules. He asked me if that’s what I intended to do. I didn’t. I wanted us to stay up on the plateau until nightfall.
“And that’s when she’ll be here?” Ezekiel asked in a low and tired drawl.
“That’s when it’ll meet us,” I answered.
He leaned in. His eyes were ringed with the same pale blue I sometimes noticed around his fingers. Little droplets of sweat were forming on his temple.
“Are you sure you’re seeing correctly, Micah?” He asked me. My face was burning, but I nodded.
What nobody knew was that I had been practicing relentlessly. Ezekiel himself had put the idea into my brain. It never occurred to me until then that clairvoyance was something I could improve at. He had run little tests on me back at the cabin and I had underperformed. It was so hard to think with Lola around. The thing inside of her swallowed up light. I couldn’t think around the void, let alone through it. Still, I practiced.
It was only after Lola went away that I realized how much my sight had improved. This is why the visions became so intense in the week I was home. I had gotten used to straining to see in the dark. When the lights came back on, my eyes burned and my brain was misfiring on all cylinders. It took me a long time to even out again. I think being around Ezekiel actually helped a lot. Even though he was stressed through that entire trip, I found him to be a really clarifying presence. He had good control of his emotions and he was always patient with me. I was trying to break that, obviously, but I still appreciated it while it lasted. When I was with him, I could see well enough to plan.
We went out onto the Paria Plateau on foot. Since being stranded wasn’t an issue, we were able to take a lot more risks when we went off-road. Ezekiel warned me that the warp bangle, which we’d been using for transit, could malfunction at any time and so we shouldn’t be reliant on it. I could tell that was just the speech he’d been given, not a possibility he actually believed in. We went even further off-road immediately after.
I thought it was a little rocky to be a plateau. I kept waiting for the flat part to come up. I was pretending to look for Lola when I got the funny feeling that she might actually be out here. It was so high and dry that in theory, it was one of the last places I would have expected her. But something about the terrain felt to me monstrous and wild. It was a mythic land. If she had not been here before, she had come from a place just like it.
I had not been to the canyon before and I had tried to brace myself so that the awe would not distract me from my mission. I was hoping it would get Ezekiel, though. I was always trying to appeal to his sense of wonder. But as we crept along the edge, I couldn’t read him at all. It was unsettling.
We were approaching Marble Canyon just as the sun began to set. The sky turned purple at twilight. We had good ground there. The land receded further east, but our stretch of desert was flat and even. Ezekiel’s thoughts were far away from me. When I got the tent from him - a little compact disc he kept in his pocket - he was surprised.
“You don’t want to stay out here?” I asked him, a bit self-consciously. He put one hand up in ambiguous surrender.
“I don’t mind,” he was looking past me, “Just know it’s going to storm soon.”
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he felt it coming on quicker than me. As he spoke, my hair began to stand up on end. The edge of the horizon was yellowing like it was known to do before a sunshower. I pitched the tent while there was still light. Though the clouds were ripe with rain, I began to build a fire.
Ezekiel didn’t help me this time. He was recovering his breath and looking at me sideways. It dawned on me, at that exact instant, that I had lost his trust. When I turned back to the campfire, my hands didn’t work how I wanted them to, and the Arizona air was a little harder to breathe.
The fire was lit by sunset. There were no trees around, nor anything else for that matter, so Ezekiel was sitting up on his backpack and blowing into his harmonica. He didn’t see the humor in that the way I did and always thought I was making fun of him when he brought it out. I wasn’t, really. I thought it was charming.
The cumulonimbus clouds were blocking out the stars. The rain started innocently with a few warning drops until it turned out there would be no further warnings. Then the sky opened up all at once. The dark desert lit up with lightning. There came a noise that at first could be mistaken for thunder, but became the unmistakable sound of gigantic hoofbeats.
The stallion emerged in full gallop, its form strobed against the lightning storm. Each frame of its motion stood captured independently in a second of light before the entire scene was vanished back into the darkness. At the next stroke of lightning, another frame would play about one mile away. The tips of the horse’s ears brushed up against the clouds. Even in the dark, the wild red eyes of the stallion carried on in a perfect and undisrupted line at the top of the sky.
There came fewer intervals in between the bursts of lightning and no cessation at all to the thunder. Eventually they both ran on continuously. The stallion was illuminated as clear as day in the bright blue light of the