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All the flowers I'd planted died in yesterday's concussion. After the boom, they floated down from the cave's ceiling in a white petal fall. I'd never seen snow.

On the floor, in the candle light, the petals seemed beautiful. I didn't want to sweep them up. But the stone men called them a portent.

The big one, Mountain, handed me a broom and told me to have at it, to pack up the blossoms and take them outside to her. To the salt woman.

Outside was a misnomer because: still under the ground. Still lit with wax and flame. I had tried to paint a sky on the ceiling before, but some of the blue paint had flecked off. Now, with strips of black peeking through, it looked as though night fought with day for sovereignty of the above. Or that the sky was falling. Or so I imagined. An imagination was one of the few good things I had.

The battle had been going on longer than I'd been alive. To me it felt like a war without a beginning.

And a war without end. Regardless of how often the land above our heads had been taken by either faction, the other always fought to regain it.

Bloodshed had poisoned this place.

Here, where once there had been a thick carpet of grass only clumps remained with their claws dug into crumbs of soil. Where once there had been a circle of palms, only stumps crouched, a reminder that this place had not always been below the surface. In the center of the circle lay a pillar of salt who had once been a woman, inside a crystal coffin.

All the stories the stone men told talked of how she came to them and brought the war with her to our doorstep. But they called her our salvation. Our answer, our end to war. They treated her like a goddess. They said that I'd not yet lived among them long enough to understand.

I half-believed them. They had saved me from certain death, after all. Watched over me, raised me as their own-as if I could ever be more than human. None of them were my father, and all of them were. If I could ever find a way to pay them back for what they'd done for me, I would do whatever was in my power.

This was such a little thing.

So I walked up to the coffin and without ceremony poured out the petals on top. I sat down on the nearest stump and waited patiently for her to speak.

Another concussion swept around me-BOOM!-followed by the pressure wave that filled my ears until I thought my head would burst. Earth shook. The stumps moaned. Grains of salt shimmied and tumbled.

But only a few. What the stone men rendered, no quake had so far torn asunder.

"What was that?" the pillar of salt said in her woman's voice that started tremors in my toes and undulated up my spine. It cleared my ears with a little pop. I reached up instinctively to check for blood. Once before, there had been a trickle.

"A rocket," I said.

"Are you sure?"

How could I be? Who could see such things from down here? I saw none of the metal, none of the fire or the mangled bodies. Those were the kinds of things she'd seen before she became salt.

"Yes. I'm sure." It didn't matter whether it was a rocket or a mortar or the fist of God. "I'm here for your prophecy."

She, like me, made no small talk. "The first strike tomorrow will land just south of here. There is a little boy who will die unless he is brought to me."

"How do you know?"

"I have dreamed of him. As so long ago I dreamed of you."

She had never told me about this dream before. But then, I'd never asked. "What did you dream? What is so special about this boy?"

What was so special about me?

"He's like you, Becca-strong enough to survive down here, away from other humans. Like you, he has the potential to learn the stone men's magic. To cure me."

Funny, but the stone men had never told me that. They had never told me anything about why I had come here, or much about the salt woman aside from what happened to her.

I had never learned a drop of magic.

"I don't understand. How can you be cured?"

She didn't answer the question. "It is your task to retrieve this boy, Becca."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because you're human. He won't be afraid of you."

"But I'd have to go out."

"Yes, you would."

My gut revolted at the thought. I had never left. On most days, I couldn't remember what the sun looked like.

The circumstances under which the stone men took me in flashed behind my eyes. My mother's hand trampled into the ground, cuticles bloody, the jagged tips of her nails filled with soil. My dead mother's hand.

That's what the world above meant to me.

"I don't accept," I said.

"My dear, you have no choice."

She meant that the stone men did what she told them, and so would I. They worshipped her-her knowledge, her supposed beauty before she'd looked back at her burning home and been punished for her lack of faith.

"Time is the enemy, Becca."

"They won't send me out," I said. "Not with a war going on."

But they did.

I told them at dinner, when we all were seated around the table before the flickering hearth with the chimney that drew smoke who-knew-where. They chewed lamb and cool mint while I waited for their verdict, which came over sweetened coffee.

I would go in the morning. My dinner curdled in my stomach. The earth-and the stone men-had always protected me. Going up into the war meant I would feel more than echoes and vibrations of bombs. I would see men, women, and children smeared crimson, and broken, like my mother before them.

"You're only fifteen," Mountain said. In the firelight, he looked more like granite and less like the man he pretended to be around me. Shiny flecks in his skin sparkled. His eyes shone the same crystal as the coffin. "You're too young to venture out alone."

The black one, called Dragon because of the shape of his face, nodded. "I'll go with her."

Mountain hesitated. "When you asked her, Becca, did she say you were to go alone?"

I shook my head.

"Very well."

I pushed away from the table, went to my room, and packed a knapsack with medical supplies, just in case. It took me a long time to fall asleep, and when I did I dreamed fitfully of

bright afternoon sun and stony earth that hurt my feet through the soles of my sandals.

A knock sounded on my door. Yanked me by the throat from my dream.

Dragon spoke. "Let's go."

I met him at the foot of the steps, rough-carved into the rock of our underground. We kept a brisk pace for having such a long way to go. Time was our enemy.

He led the way, silent except for the fall of his feet. I worked hard to keep up, my breath short and labored.

As we climbed, the stone drew close around us. Rivulets started as drops of condensation, trickled down the walls to more porous places that sucked the moisture in.

Dragon cleared his throat. The sound echoed in waves along the shaft. "Did you dream of her last night?"

"I was her last night."

"Me, too," he said.

I tried to picture this man made of stone as a human woman and failed miserably. My imagination had no context. "Has that ever happened to you before?"

"Yes. The last time she sent someone to the surface," he said. Then added, "That was before you came."

"How long ago?"

"You were five," he said.

An eternity. "Who did the salt woman send?"

"Me. To fetch you from your mother."

I shut my eyes tightly against memory. I could no longer see, so I stopped climbing.

"Tell me how that came to pass," I said. I imagined myself barely old enough to sit, toppled into the dirt beside her body. How I would have felt. I wanted him to answer me as much as I didn't want him to. I wanted to know.

"The same way what we do now has come to pass," Dragon said.

Had there been someone with him, someone like me? "Did you take a human with you then?"

"Yes," he said.

"What happened to them?"

"He died."

Saving me? What for? "Why have you never taught me your magic-the magic the salt woman says will cure her?"

Dragon hesitated, as if trying to think what to say. "She is a mother without a daughter. A mother without a son. If we can give her those things, she may become human again."

She may? Dragon didn't know for certain. "Where is the magic in that?" I asked.

"You are the magic," he said.

Me. My very being. And this boy, whoever he was. How could that be?

We got moving again. It took an hour to reach the threshold to the surface. The rock above looked as solid as that around them. Dragon knocked five times in the pattern of his heartbeat (or so he told me) before the stone shifted with a guttural groan and he could just squeeze out of the opening, dragging me behind him.

The sunlight-the crimson dawn glow on the horizon-hurt my eyes. I wanted to stare at it all the same. The air stank of explosives, acrid in my mouth.

Rubble littered the open ground: Shattered rock. Twisted metal. A plastic baby doll head with lifeless painted blue eyes. The building in front of us looked like it had once been apartments. The top half had been sheared off.

There was nothing left here to fight over. And yet men still fought.

Dragon took my hand and stayed low. Dragged me across the-courtyard. It was still a courtyard. With the remains of palm trees.

There should be gunmen out here. But now, no one fired at us. Maybe no one even aimed. Dragon tightened his grip on me. And every single hair on the nape of my neck rose like antennae.

We ran for cover. Found it behind the burnt-out husk of a car.

Still, no one shot at us.

South, the direction in which we'd find the boy, held no real shelter. One shredded tree without enough trunk to hide a lizard let alone one of us. Twenty yards away-an impossible distance-another shell of a car. It backed up to a mountain of twisted debris. I couldn't see a way through it.

We had to go now. To get to the boy before the next strike.

"But it's a dead end."

"You first," Dragon said.

"Where are they, Dragon? The warriors?"

"Out there." He gritted his teeth. "Get behind that thing and wait for me. Hurry, Becca."

I shook my head.

"If something happens to me, you get the boy," he said matter-of-factly.

The boy I knew nothing about. The salt woman's boy.

Dragon crouched. Planted one hand on the earth. His black fingers sank into the ground-they merged with the dirt. I'd never seen anything like that.

"Run," he said.

I couldn't tear my gaze away from him.

"I can't keep this up for long."

His eyes widened. In fear.

I slipped. Fell and caught myself. Dug in and launched through the rubble.

From the corner of my eye I caught a flash of metal. A man with a handgun. He took a step toward me. One foot forward. The other one hung up.

He pulled at it. Lost his bead on me. Lowered the gun. His foot stuck in the earth. No-the earth stuck around his foot.

A hand black like Dragon's enveloped his leg to the knee. Fingers wrapped like cords of muscle. Held him fast.

It happened again. And again. Dragon reaching up through the ground.

I ran for all I was worth. Ten yards to go. Five. Safe.

Dragon took off toward me before I'd squatted in the shadow of the vehicle. When he tore his hand from the dirt, he lost his hold on the men.

The first man overcompensated. He toppled. His gun went off. The round ricocheted off the ruined apartments. Someone else took aim.

I shrieked Dragon's name. He had to see his doom in my eyes. He dove for the dirt.

The bullet grazed his arm. Opened an angry gash that flowered bright red blood. His face contorted with the pain of it. He crawled. His muscles bunched and strained.

He pushed to his hands and knees. To the balls of his feet. Stayed low low low.

He reached my side. Leaned against the car but kept his feet under him. I copied him. Just in case. I couldn't tell whether the men were closing on the car without sticking up my head and presenting a good target.

The heap behind us looked as impenetrable from five feet away as it had from across the clearing. Metal and cloth and pieces of walls.

I couldn't see how I could possibly get past this obstacle. Not without climbing over it. I'd be utterly vulnerable. And dead before I knew what hit me. Like my mother before me. "How -"

He ran over what else I meant to say. "I'll provide cover. You go." He turned away from me. Duck-walked toward the edge of the car. The edge of our shield.

I did what he asked. I didn't look back. Even though I knew what would happen to him.

Striking that hill of trash stole my breath. I grabbed for handholds. Held onto it as if my life depended on it.

But I couldn't find a foothold. Couldn't climb. Everything I stepped on slipped away. Like grains of salt.

Arms and hands reached out of the mess. Wrapped around my waist. My back. My leg. They pulled me in impossibly into the rustle and clink and sticky darkness. I couldn't breathe. Metal scraped my skin. I shut my eyes.

My legs slid first into open air-then the rest of me. People I couldn't see set my feet on the ground. I lashed out before I could steady myself. Before I even looked. My fist connected with someone's palm.

I opened my eyes and stared into the brown-eyed gaze of a boy of my own height who couldn't have been any older than twelve. I opened my mouth to ask who he was, but he shook his head.

"They will hear us," he whispered.

I didn't need him to answer anyway. I knew.

He twined his fingers with mine and headed away from the pile. From the fight. From Dragon. I tried to stop. He yanked my arm and forced me to keep up over a cleared path gouged with bullet holes. Stained with explosives. With blood. Ruined apartments mirrored the ones on the other side of the pile.

I could hear shots fired, where I had been. Shouts. Footfalls pounding the earth. They grew fainter the further we ran. The boy slowed to a fast walk. Pointed us toward the apartments.

"You're from Beneath," he said.

My skin, milky and nearly translucent, marked where I came from. In contrast, his bronzed skin shone warm and bright. "I'm here for you."

"Mother asked to see me once more," he said. "To know that I found you and you found me. We'll go there now, and then I'll go with you. She's right here." He pointed to a sagging doorway the dawn had not yet penetrated. It didn't look safe to enter. But we did.

His mother sat in an empty room by candle light that reminded me of home. She wore her long, black hair in a braid on her back. Her brown eyes lit when she saw her boy. She wrapped him in her arms. Tears welled and spilled over onto her cheeks. She twined her fingers in his hair.

My mother had done that with my hair. I remembered. A better memory than the one of her lifeless hand on the ground.

I hated to interrupt them-and I wanted to. It hurt to watch them like this. "We have to go."

His mother squeezed him tighter. And released him, smoothing his rumpled hair. "You take good care of him," she said to me.

"I will."

"You look just like her, you know."

I almost asked who she meant, to be sure. It never occurred to me that anyone here would know who I was. That anyone would have known my mother. It'd been so long, with so much war. Only people who couldn't leave would still be here. People with no way out, nowhere else to go. Or those passing through.

"How?"

"The way you hold yourself. The way you move," she said.

The boy cocked his head. "Who are you talking about, Ima?"

She shook her head. "Don't worry about it. Go with Becca."

She knew my name.

I wanted to ask her about that. To stay and learn everything she knew about my mother, about me. But that rocket would land here-or near here-sometime soon.

I took the boy's hand and tore him away from his mother and all he had ever known. He didn't cry. But he would. At night, when the stone men and I left him alone and the cold of the underground (of Beneath) seeped through the bedclothes and chilled his skin to goose bumps.

I pulled him down the cleared path. He glanced behind him twice. That reminded me of my dream. Of the salt woman. Except when he looked over his shoulder, he remained wholly human and alive.

The sounds of the battle grew louder and more intimate.

We reached the mound of trash. I let go of him. "Where do we crawl through, boy?"

"Jacob," he said.

"Where, Jacob?"

He showed me. The space between the sheetrock and shredded metal and rags. I feared if I left him that he would turn back and I feared sending him through first into who-knew-what. "Follow me. Right after me," I said.

The gunfire subsided while I pushed through, while Jacob dogged my heels the way I'd asked. We arrived with a clatter into an eerie hush.

Dragon was dead. His body had become earth. Edges blurred, flesh and bone become dirt. The gunmen had gone-presumably to look for me in the only place I could've gone. Which meant Jacob's mother and whomever else they found would be dead. Maybe they already were.

I ran for the way down. Half-carried, half-dragged him across the clearing. Over and around and behind the corpses of this surface world where everything had died or soon would.

It was a long way down, carrying Jacob in my arms. I walked as many stairs as I could and slid down the rest, tears falling without surcease, until a dry-eyed Mountain pried him from me at the landing.

I followed him to the room the stone men had prepared for the boy. I sank down beside the bed and stayed while they treated him for cuts and bruises. They could do little for his heart and mind except warm him with blankets and compresses.

I stayed when they left, while he slept. He woke in the middle of the night, crying for his mother. I couldn't be that for him, but I could hold him, and cry with him, and twine my fingers in his hair.

When he closed his eyes and his breathing slowed, I went outside, under the painted sky.

The salt woman slept in her crystal coffin. The flowers I had offered her yesterday littered the ground. Like snow, I had thought yesterday. I had heard that snow took impressions, and that when more snow fell it erased them as though they'd never been.

I sat on the same stump and breathed through my stuffed nose and my bloodshot eyes and my sore muscles and aching heart. My breath, the only sound. And I dropped my question into the stillness, not expecting an answer. Not knowing what to expect. "Will he be all right?"

"In time," said the salt woman.

Time. The enemy.

How many years would it take before he forgot his mother's face, or the kiss of the sun on his skin, the caress of the wind? Was it worth it to live like this? To be treated as something so precious that your mother would be willing to send you away from everything you knew and loved, away from everything human, to keep you safe?

"Will you be all right?" I asked.

"I don't know, Becca."

This salt woman who the stone men treated like a jewel hadn't wanted to forget. That was all. The sum of her sin. The reason for the war that continued year after year above our heads. Holding on, she had lost everything-her husband, her children.

How could she live again? How could she stand to?

Had she really brought the violence to our doorstep like the stone men said? Maybe. But no more than I. Or Jacob.

Was she our salvation? Were we her cure? I didn't know if there was such a thing. There was only keeping on down here, going on living. Still, I came down off the stump to take a closer look.

I leaned against the coffin, the crystal cool on my cheek. I knew what Dragon and the others wanted of me, what they wanted of Jacob, what the salt woman wanted of us.

They wanted us to mend her heart. To be the children in her dream. To replace those whom she lost.

Whatever magic I might carry inside, I already had a mother. I couldn't be the salt woman's daughter. I couldn't make right what was done to her. But I could sit with her among the petals and remember.