Free Virginia Hamilton by Dustland: The Justice Cycle (Book Two)

was awful to see, and the reason Thomas kept them invisible. He had blisters on his lips from the daytime grinding heat. His mouth hurt, too. Both his eyes and Levi’s were red-rimmed and strained. Lee had lesions on his neck; festering liquid seeped from them, running in stringy rivulets down his chest.
    Thomas wouldn’t let himself think about what was possible, and what was real and not real. Blisters, lesions, dust all over them—what was them? How was it they carried each other’s persona? How to walk or run, the same as they did at home? He knew his skeleton was within his body. But his good sense told him that neither his skeleton nor his body could be here in the future. That went for Levi and the rest of them. Hard enough understanding that their minds were here.
    He shivered at the thought of his mind trapped in Dustland and his real, solid and alive body off in the past. Home. A yearning for home touched him deeply and caused him to strangle a cry.
    But if the body is at home, what is this, blistering and hurting? Stumbling from exhaustion?
    His mind shifting. To die in Dustland? was his next thought. For us, maybe just a feeling of death.
    He opened the mysterious corridor between his mind and Levi’s. It was a one-way conduit from him, through which, his brain waves flowed and summoned the identical brain waves of his brother. They fused as one. The passageway allowed Thomas to connect telepathically with Levi whenever he felt like it and to break the connection at will. Levi could not trace telepathically without Thomas or one of the others to start.
    Thomas repeated what he had been thinking, adding, If there’s no body to die, how does the mind know to stop?
    Then it can’t, Levi traced, not a bit surprised by the intrusion of Thomas’ morbid speculation. For he had become obsessed with similar thoughts. In Dustland we can’t die. Only if something hurt us back home. If our far-real bodies got battered — I mean, our arms and heads and stuff — and our lives came to an end. Would all of us here, whatever there is of us here, go … poof?
    That’s what I think, Thomas traced. That’s how I think it would have to be. That’s the reason I make it so we can’t see ourselves right now. Because, seeing us out here with no food for who knows how long it has been, well, logic has to tell us we’re hurting and losing strength.
    But in the mind, mind-tracing, we’re as strong as ever!
    You got it, Thomas traced quietly.
    So here we have to be only — mind.
    Mind it is and mind it has always been, traced Thomas. Mind your P’s and Q’s, he joked.
    But, Tom-Tom, when you’re not making us invisible, we can see …
    Abruptly, Thomas closed the corridor between them. He erased the sentence fragment as Lee formed it. At once he made them visible so Lee would have something else to occupy him other than what Thomas believed was a dangerous line of thought. Like Justice, he was beginning to uncover a clue to the mystery of Dustland.
    They, all of them, were mind -travelers in Dustland. They knew that.
    Levi shuddered at the sight of his own self. He had always distrusted his body, which grew weaker and more sickly with each time-travel. And now he hollered out as he glimpsed his bloody feet. The grinding quality of the dust had worn away his socks through his sandals. Seeing the wounds, he felt the pain. And moaned softly, done in at last.
    Thomas knew he had to get him holed up somewhere right away. And this was as far as his plans would take Levi.
    There’s some shelter up ahead. Lee? I think I see some rocks. You can rest by them.
    Where … where are they?
    Right up ahead. There!
    Rocks worn smooth and shining dully through the gloom, as if dimly illuminated from within.
    Thomas couldn’t help smiling to himself. He could create the images he needed here in Dustland the same as he could at home. Here his magic was even better. It felt larger and more real than anything he imaged at home. He couldn’t