The Lost Sun by Tessa Gratton Page A

the restrooms and then share a bag of potato fries and a couple of club sandwiches at the small café attached to the museum. Astrid doesn’t finish hers, but insists I take it. I’m hungry enough not to protest. When we’re satisfied, we tour the museum panoramas and watch a movie about the formation and now the preservation of the Badlands. There are fossils and stuffed examples of the ancient equines that used to roam the area, as well as swift foxes and black prairie dogs, which have been reintroduced.
    We’re alone but for a ranger at the information desk. This early in Wildmonth must not be high tourist time here, even when there’s no troll advisory. As always, I keep my left side turned away from the ranger, even as we go straight past him into the gift shop for Astrid to buy a postcard.
    She fills it out quickly, to her uncle Richard, and we drop it into the mail slot by the front doors on our way out. As the sun sets, dark shadows streak toward us and silhouettes of the rocky spires jut up against neon pinks and oranges that should not be natural colors. “It doesn’t look real,” I say, though I’m thinking about what we heard on the radio this morning: now is when Ardo Vassing, prince of Mizizibi, is beginning his televised prayer service. Astrid thought we’d have Baldur by now.
    Coming to stand next to me, her shoulder nearly touching mine, she says, “What I like is how vibrant it is, how the sky burns, and yet it seems calm from this distance. Like a controlled explosion.”
    When I glance at her, she isn’t watching the sunset. She’sstaring at me. My breath shakes, but before I can respond, we’re interrupted. “You kids need anything else? I’m about to lock up,” calls the woman in the striped baseball cap behind the café counter.
    Astrid dashes over. I take a moment to relax, to center the burn in my heart and push it slowly down and down into the desert floor. We meet back at the Spark and Astrid dumps an armful of sandwiches in little plastic boxes onto the rear bench. “For later. I know you’re hungry,” she explains before sliding into the driver’s seat.
    There is just enough light to easily find the Cedar Loop campground: a barren field with short black stumps separating each camp from the next, and tin-roofed picnic tables to provide shade in the afternoon. Only one space is occupied, by a truck hooked to a pop-up trailer. We choose a spot two tables away: near enough not to seem hostile, but not so close that we’ll have to listen to one another snore.
    “Too bad we can’t build a fire,” Astrid says when we’re parked, tapping the visitors’ brochure. “You can only if you have a closed grill or something. Because they don’t want the whole prairie catching fire.”
    “You can set yourself to dream without one, can’t you?”
    “I can chew some anise.”
    “Anise?”
    “It reminds me of my mom.”
    We watch each other; I’m thinking about my mother, too, and how she’d have liked Astrid’s easy way of smiling. My own seriousness was a burden to a Lokiskin like her.
    The sunset catches Astrid’s hair the same way it did this morning, in that expansive moment when I held her in my arms. I remember how her eyes fluttered in her sleep, and ask, “What did you dream this morning, right before you woke up?”
    She laughs once, raising her eyebrows. “Apples!” Dismissing it, she gets out. I follow. We both just stand there on either side of our car. The dusty ground has covered my boots in dirt. My shoulders are stiff and I need to go for a run, or find a place for at least one of my routines. I realize it’s been thirty-six hours since my last workout, and suddenly my fingers are itching to hold a staff or sword. Surely I can find a flat spot tucked behind a rock tower, or just get far enough away that I don’t upset the other campers here.
    “Soren?”
    Astrid has come around the engine to stand in front of me. Her head is cocked quizzically. “Soren?”