A Way between Worlds

by Melanie Crowder

  Nothing happened. He lay flat on the ground, wrapping his arms and legs around the railing. “You get my family out of this, or I swear I am coming through that portal and I am going to—”

  “Griffin!”

  He crawled across the floor and peered over the edge. His mom and dad sprinted up the spiral stairs. They didn’t have time to wait out the worst of the rocking like Griffin had—they were thrown all over the staircase as they climbed, knocked into the brick wall and then the wrought iron railing as the lighthouse swung back and forth.

  “Hurry!” he yelled.

  Not ten steps behind them, the soldiers pounded up the stairs. Griffin faced the bull’s-eye, ready to scream again for the Levitator. But he didn’t need to. The lens had stopped swiveling—which it never did, day or night, unless someone was opening the portal. The brick walls began to hum, then rattle, and finally the bull’s-eye began to spin in a viscous swirl.

  The Levitator had heard them.

  Katherine made it to the lantern room and lunged for Griffin’s hand. She reached the other down toward Philip. “Now!” she yelled.

  Philip strained, wincing in pain as he leaped up the last few steps. He clasped Katherine’s hand and together the three of them dove straight toward the open portal even as it reached out to draw them in. Philip’s skin fizzled translucent, and then Katherine’s, but before the portal grabbed Griffin, he was tackled in midair, his hand wrenched out of his mom’s grip. He smacked against the floor. The soldier who’d brought him down shoved Griffin’s face into the cold, hard steel.

  26

  FI

  IT WAS ALWAYS dizzying, every single time Fi shot through the portal. When she found her feet, she knew without opening her eyes that she’d landed on Somni. She could smell it—the dry air catching in her mouth and sucking away all the moisture. But more than that, she could feel the absence of the green like a hitch in her breath, a hole in her chest. A moan slipped through her lips as the ache of being without it settled into its familiar place.

  When her eyes fluttered open, she darted back, her hands braced against the gallery windows. Guards filled the watch room below, lining the stairs leading up to where she stood, weapons trained on her. But those weren’t soldiers’ stolas they wore. And something else was different, though it took her a moment to place what, exactly, had changed. The peppery remnant of the priests’ magic that had always clung to the air was gone, and in its place wafted the heady scent of sap.

  The guard directly in front of Fi propped his staff against the railing and raised his arms in a gesture of goodwill. “We have no fight with Vinea. We’re not going to hurt you.”

  Fi wasn’t often shocked into silence—but after years spent alternately loathing and fearing the Somnite guards, welcome was the last thing she’d expected. Her eyes dropped to his chest. Oh. Glass pendants hung around each of the guards’ necks. They weren’t soldiers at all.

  The guards were ordinary citizens of Somni, the sjel tree essence inside the glass shielding them from the priests’ control. Either Griffin or his dad had made those pendants. A wave of gratitude washed over Fi. Even though he was worlds away, Griffin was still here with her, in a way.

  She straightened out of her defensive crouch. “I’ve come back for the raze crews.”

  The guards exchanged a look, and finally the one who’d spoken before crossed to the gallery door and opened it, motioning for Fi to step through. “See for yourself. After the priests left, the raze crews made their way to the temple.”

  Fi stepped onto the gallery, and out into the sharp yellow air. She leaned against the railing and peered down into the amphitheater below. Hundreds of Vineans huddled together. Fi’s heart caught in her throat. Hundreds. “What are they waiting for? Why didn’t they go home as soon as they were free?”

  The guard shrugged. “I guess they’re waiting for someone to come get them. So many are elderly, and all of them are weak. The priests worked those raze crews near to death. We didn’t want to send them through the portal into the thick of the fighting.”

  The guard fidgeted, his eyes finding anything but her own.

  “What is it?”

  “Somni is running out of food. The priests cut off shipments from the aquaculture beds on Maris, and our gardens can only produce so much. They’re trying to starve us out.” The guard’s face went tight. “The raze crews have suffered terribly at Somnite hands. It doesn’t feel right, wishing for them to go. But if we had hundreds fewer mouths to feed, we might be able to hang on.”

  Fi turned back to the lantern room. Even if her family was among the prisoners below—even if she’d finally found them—was she too late? “Then let me down there. I’ve come to take them home.”

  Again, the soldier raised his arms, almost pleading this time. “We have no fight with you, but we can’t let you pass either.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You understand—we must take precautions. We just got our world back, and we’re barely hanging on to it. We can’t let you pass.”

  Fi fumed. She’d come too far to let this be the end. It must have felt like this for Griffin, when all he’d wanted was to save his dad but he kept slamming up against one “no” after another. But he’d shown them, in the end. He’d forced Arvid to—

  Wait.

  “Send someone for Arvid. He’ll vouch for me.”

  The Somnite guards exchanged a puzzled look, but they didn’t move.

  “What are you waiting for? Go!”

  Fi whirled around. She darted back inside and hurried in the opposite direction of the lens’s slow spin, searching for the bull’s-eye to Caligo. When she found it, she slapped her hands against the greenish glass and shouted, “Hey! Are you listening to this?”

  She pressed her face close to the glass, keeping pace with the swiveling lens. “We’re coming, hundreds of us. And you’d better be ready.”

  When she stepped away, the guards were all staring.

  “The mists on Caligo are healing. And I’m not saying that eggy stuff they eat is any good, but they’ve got lots of it.”

  * * *

  Arvid didn’t look pleased to be hauled out of the dream caves below the city. When he was hustled to the top of the stairs, he sagged back against the railing. “I should have known,” he said between breaths. He clapped the shoulder of the nearest guard. “She’s a troublemaker all right, but it’s the good kind of trouble, I suppose.”

  The guard backed out of Fi’s way, extending an arm toward the stairs. “My apologies for the delay.”

  “Come on,” Arvid called over his shoulder as he started back down the spiral stairs.

  Fi shook her head as she followed close behind him, the guards stepping aside to let her pass. It was too strange—those faces had been her enemies for so long. And now they were helping her?

  The temple looked nothing like the last time Fi had been there. The nave was silent except for the shushing of sandaled feet on worn brick. Half of the stone pews were overturned, some split down the middle. The alcoves that used to hold the stolen dreamers were empty, the tubes shredded so they could never be used again. Fi’s breath caught in her throat and she looked away from the deep red stains in the brick.

  Eb.

  What had they done with all the dead?

  Before she had the chance to ask, the temple doors were thrown wide. Yellow light streamed into the nave and Fi dashed toward it, the guards falling back as she broke into the open air and hurried down the temple steps.

  Vineans filled the amphitheater. They looked lost, like refugees, unsure if they’d ever see home again. Together they swiveled to face her in an eerie echo of the priests’ ceremony. Their stolas were filthy, the skin around their ankles scarred and angry. They had suffered so much for so long. Tears pricked Fi’s eyes and anger boiled her insides, white-hot steam filling her lungs until she thought she would scream.

  Whispers scattered across the crowd. “Look. Look at her veins.”

&nb
sp; “A greenwitch! A young greenwitch has come for us!”

  And, then, from far away, “Fi?”

  The whispers stopped.

  “Fionna, is that you?”

  The crowd parted and a small cluster of people approached. They moved slowly, holding one another up as they stumbled forward. Fi shielded her eyes as hope tamped down her anger, like a tight-fitting lid over a pot of simmering water. Their faces were drawn, their proud backs hunched. But it was them—her great-uncles Fin and Ira, her great-aunt Ela, and her aunts Gee and Nan.

  The tears that had been jabbing at her eyelids burst out. Fi dropped her face into her hands and sobbed. Five. Before the soldiers tore her family apart, twelve of them had lived in the cave back on Somni. But somehow, impossibly, five of them were standing right in front of her.

  They were alive.

  Fi lurched forward, into their arms. They held her to them, one after another, and Fi felt with each embrace that she was holding them upright as much as they were holding her tight. When she pulled herself back at last, each one of her aunts and uncles wiped away tears.

  “You’re all right?” One by one she laid her palms against their weathered cheeks, peering into their eyes.

  “We are now, child,” Great-Aunt Ela’s voice trembled.

  “Come with me. Please? I’ll take you somewhere you can rest.”

  Great-Uncle Fin’s eyes hardened. “We can’t rest, not yet—not until Vinea is free.”

  “Shouldn’t we go straight there?” Aunt Gee asked.

  Fi swallowed. “Yes, they need you on Vinea. But you can’t help if you’re this weak. We have to take care of you first.”

  Aunt Nan cupped a hand over Fi’s cheek. “We trust you, Fionna dear.”

  Fi wrested herself away. She looked over her shoulder to the tower high above. There was no way they’d make it up the spiral stairs leading all the way to the lantern room. Fi called over to where the Somnite guards watched. “Can you carry them? We’ve got to get them to the portal.”

  Arvid shouted instructions and the guards hefted the frail raze crews onto their backs, then disappeared inside the temple. Fi darted ahead, sprinting up the tower stairs. Already, the bricks hummed with the opening of the portal. Fi leaped up the last flight, two at a time. When she reached the lantern room, the lens had stopped turning on its pedestal. The glass in the middle of the panel leading to Caligo stretched and began to twist.

  Fi leaned over the railing. The spiral stairs were filled with people streaming steadily upward. “The portal’s open!” she shouted. “Hurry!”

  The next thing she knew, the spiral of liquid glass reached out toward her, thinning the edges of her skin until it glowed, translucent. With a tug at her insides and a roar of light, she left Somni behind.

  27

  FI

  FI LANDED ON Caligo, the mists nipping at her arms like an old friend scolding her for falling out of touch. She shooed them away, but only enough so she had a good view of the portal. She stepped back, making room for the others who should be following her through at any moment.

  “Come on,” she breathed. Or rather, she didn’t breathe, not for the long, anxious seconds while she waited for something to happen. And then, suddenly, she wasn’t alone in the lantern room anymore.

  The Vineans landed on Caligo one by one. They stared in astonishment at the city in the sky. In turn, the mists welcomed them, spilling through cracks in the brick and seams in the window glazing to swirl around their broken bodies. Those with enough energy to descend the stairs followed Fi down and outside to the platform, where a steady stream of boats approached through the mists. Fi settled her family in the first two boats and hopped in after. The moment she was seated, the boat skipped gently forward, careful not to jostle its passengers.

  Fi watched as her family took in the strange beauty of Caligo. Great-Uncle Fin leaned over the boat’s edge, crying out in astonishment as a flying lizard, its scales shimmering green to gold, dove straight down, disappearing behind a layer of mist. Great-Aunt Ela peered around her, gripping the edges of the boat as if it might flip upside down at any moment.

  Fi leaned forward, placing a gentle hand between her shoulder blades. “You’re safe. Nothing can hurt you here.”

  Ela reached back and clasped Fi’s hand in both of her own. “Bless you, child.”

  The people of Caligo had always seemed aloof to Fi, too accustomed to their thin air to care what happened on less fortunate worlds. But as the boats carrying the raze crews neared the aerie’s broad platform, the entire fleet awaited them, ready to welcome the refugees. Maybe Fi had been too quick to judge them after all.

  When the boats sidled up beside the platform, she hopped out, helping her aunts and uncles to find their footing, and over to a table weighed down by food. The Levitator and his fleet scurried around, until every last Vinean had been seen to.

  She kneeled at their feet, happy to watch their faces alight in wonder, to see them eat and drink, to know the mists were healing them with every passing second.

  Aunt Gee fixed Fi with a knowing look. “Go on. Ask.”

  “How did you survive all those years? How can you smile, even now?” She shook her head. “It must have been terrible.”

  There was a long pause when no one answered. And then, softly, “It was.”

  Fi sat up straight. “Tell me.”

  Aunt Gee sighed. “We were captured, and then separated. That was the first horrible part. We didn’t know what had happened to any of the others. We were each alone, wrecked by grief. When they first sent me to Somni, it felt like someone had sucked the marrow from my bones. I was broken, and not just my heart. All of me.

  “But if you endure it long enough, even the worst place on all the worlds can seem normal. We got used to the soldiers. We adjusted to the chains around our ankles. We came to understand the barren ground.”

  “You weren’t a servant, not even in the beginning?”

  “No—those of us who fought capture were sent straight to the raze crews. They didn’t trust us near their priests.”

  Fi twisted her hands in her lap. “But how did you bear it?”

  The older woman looked down at her hands, scarred from years spent digging in unforgiving soil. “Sometimes things happen to a person—terrible, soul-crushing things. You’d never wish it on anyone, not even your enemies. But the upside to all that pain? You find a strength you never knew was possible. You learn things about yourself you’ll only discover on the other side of suffering.”

  “Aunt Gee?”

  “Yes, love?”

  Fi bit her lip. It suddenly seemed foolish, how much hope she’d hung on a single recollection. “I have this memory. About you—about the raze crews. I think… Aunt Gee, is it possible that the raze crews know something the greenwitches don’t?”

  Aunt Gee raised an eyebrow, and she tilted her head to the side. She paused a long moment before she spoke. “It is.”

  A breath Fi hadn’t realized she’d been holding rushed out of her. “But—how? How is that possible?”

  Aunt Gee leaned forward, brushing empty eggshells out of the way and planting her elbows on the low table. She turned Fi’s palm up, drawing a finger along the faintly glowing veins cutting across her wrist. “It isn’t only you greenwitches who wield power. Every Vinean has a little green in their veins, do they not?”

  Fi nodded, barely breathing.

  “Because there was next to no green around us, we became more attuned to the little we held within us. After a time we discovered that we could use that tiny bit of green. On Somni, we were like seeds, gone dormant to protect ourselves. We found that we could ask small things of the seeds we encountered.”

  “But—not even greenwitches can do that. Not with seeds.”

  Aunt Gee nodded. “Those years on Somni changed us. They ground us down. We became feeble. But even so, we fought back, in our own way; in the only way we could. Do you know how many seeds we planted?”

  Fi
shook her head.

  “Millions. Yes, we ripped up the plants like they told us to. But we also snipped off seed pods, stored them in our sashes, and breathed our wishes over them each night. The following day, when we dug our spades into the soil to rip a plant from the ground, we spilled a dozen seeds in its place.”

  “And?”

  “We waited. Then, one day, we saw a signal flashing out of the tower—”

  Fi smirked.

  “That was you, wasn’t it?” Aunt Gee chuckled. “We saw the signal, though we didn’t know who had sent it, or why, and we called in our favor. As one, all those seeds burst through their hulls, sprouts climbing out of the ground, reaching for the air, searching out those who held us captive. Vines grew out of cracked soil, swallowing the soldiers and entombing them where they stood. We unlocked the horrid shackles around our ankles and simply walked free.”

  Fi breathed as hard as if she’d just finished sprinting up the tower steps. “Do you think—is it possible—if you come back to Vinea with me, could you do the same thing?”

  A wry smile curved across Aunt Gee’s lips. “I don’t see why not.”

  28

  FI

  THE LEVITATOR INSISTED the weakest of the raze crews remain on Caligo to allow the mists to do their healing work. It was the right decision, of course, but when it came time to leave her family behind, Fi wept, her tears half joy and half sorrow. Their suffering was behind them, but she didn’t know how she’d bear leaving them again so soon.

  Aunt Gee and Aunt Nan, along with twenty others, traveled with her through the portal to Vinea. When they arrived on their home world, Fi’s half-and-half tears were nothing compared to theirs. The Vinea they’d left had been under occupation by Somnite soldiers, but beyond the fort, the green had stubbornly held its own.

  Not anymore. The line between what was left of the wildlands and the burned ground stretched out before them, clear to the horizon. Fi gulped back the taste of bile on the back of her tongue and gritted her teeth against the headache that pounded between her temples.