They’d had years to learn the movements of the Stories and steer clear. It should’ve been easy. But ten days after Alice left, Finch woke up in his sleeping bag on the cove’s cold sand, in the silvery, predawn hour, with a girl crouching beside him.
He didn’t speak. Neither did she. She was younger than he was—twelve or thirteen, he’d guess—with dark blue eyes and a solemn little face. In one hand, she held a compass.
She was a Story. That enervating Story scent came off her, and her skin had the radiant tackiness of a makeup ad. She shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t have noticed him, certainly shouldn’t be hanging over him like she was waiting for him to speak. If his friends were awake, too, those cowards sure weren’t showing it. Finally he became too nervous to stay quiet.
“Hi,” he breathed.
“Hello.” She had a scratchy little voice, like Peppermint Patty.
“Um. Did you … want something from me?”
She shrugged. Nothing to say, and no apparent intention of leaving. Finch had the most inappropriate flare of social anxiety.
“My name’s Ellery. Finch.” She didn’t seem like she wanted to kill him, but still. Maybe it would be harder for her to do it if he had a name.
“My name’s Hansa,” she replied. “I’m meant to be somewhere else today. But I decided I didn’t want to go.” She looked a little bit proud of herself, a little bit astonished. “My grandmother will be mad at me, I suppose.”
Hansa. Hansa the Traveler. The moon’s granddaughter, heroine of one of Althea Proserpine’s tales. Finch bit down hard on a helium panic.
“Where are you supposed to be?”
She shook off the question like she was shaking off a fly. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said cryptically, and stood, the rising sun slicing sharply over her shoulder. “Well. Goodbye.”
Now that she was actually going, Finch was oddly frantic for her to stay.
“Wait! Are you—I mean. This is weird, right?” He looked around, at the quiet sand and lightening sky and the corroded metal of the water. “That you’re here? That you’re—” Free. Outside. Of your tale. He wanted to say it, but he didn’t want to piss her off.
The little girl was already looking away, bored. “I’ve never swum in the sea before,” she told him. Then she took off, legs scurrying toward the water like a sandpiper’s.
Finch watched her for a minute, his jaw feeling slack yet tense, like he’d been clenching it all night.
Lev whistled from the sleeping bag behind him. “Look at that. Another one of the Spinner’s birds flown free.”
“Another?”
“Her, your Alice.” He looked at Finch, the sun on his glasses making his eyes into silver circles. “I think you’ve started something.”
Neither spoke for a moment, watching the unlatched Story splashing at the water’s edge. Behind them, Alain was still asleep.
“I wonder.” Lev’s voice was quiet, amused. “If this is because of you, I wonder if the Spinner’s mad. I wonder if she’s the vengeful type. I’d bet she was, wouldn’t you?”
She is, Finch could’ve told him. She’d shown her face to him—one of her faces—just once, back when he was trying to break Alice free. She’d been amused, flirtatious, and frightening by turns. He figured it was just a matter of time before she showed up again. That was one more reason he couldn’t sleep.
Finch was pissed at Lev as they packed up their stuff. Pissed as they both agreed without talking not to say anything to Alain. Still pissed as they set off on foot toward home.
Alain was talking about some new invention he’d made, an amplification system Finch knew without knowing more was a bad idea. It didn’t do to call too much attention to yourself here. They were walking through a quiet stretch of trees on the edge of a pretty town when Lev spoke up.
“Hansa lives there,” he said.
Alain, interrupted, frowned. “Hansa who? From-the-story Hansa? Who cares?”
Lev just smiled like a goddamned sphinx. “We should walk through it. Nobody’ll be awake yet, come on.”
He was like that. Quiet and chill, then suddenly an anarchist, basically daring you not to have the guts.
For once Finch was a step ahead: he’d walked through that town before. He’d dared far stupider shit since landing in the Hinterland. Almost dying will do that to you. And besides, Althea had done it when she was collecting her tales. For a while he’d tried to follow in her footsteps, just to see if he could survive that, too.
“Let’s go,” was all he said, turning toward the town.
If Norman Rockwell ever illustrated a fairy-tale book, he’d have painted this town. A blue haze hung over it, like the steam that sometimes came up off the sea. The houses had thatched tops and candy-colored doors and secretive windows roosting in ivy. Finch could see a woman through one of them, running a brush through her heavy hair.
Alain was afraid, Finch could tell by the way he walked. Lev, though. That fucker was cocky.
They were coming up on a small yellow cottage that seemed a little more solid than the rest, though Finch couldn’t have explained why. Then he saw it: a blackness ran around the cottage’s base. It looked ephemeral at first, a trick of your eyes or the light, the kind of thing you should be able to blink away. It resolved, as they came closer, into a thin layer of simmering mist. It made the house look like it was a countdown away from taking off.
“What is that?” Lev muttered. He looked at Finch, sly. “Must be Hansa’s house.”
He walked toward it in his enviable leather hiking boots. They were still in excellent shape, though he’d been in the Hinterland longer than Finch had. He bent over just beside the mist, hands on his knees. “Huh.”
“Don’t,” Finch said sharply, as Lev nudged the mist with his boot.
He spoke the word to no one. In the moment between opening his mouth and speaking, the mist claimed Lev. It wicked him into itself like a sponge taking in water. Mischief managed.
* * *
The Hinterland was a clock, perfectly weighted and balanced and spinning in time. The refugees lived tucked among the cogs, learning when to duck and what parts of their borrowed world to avoid.
Finch, it turned out, had fucked with that clock. Alice’s removal wasn’t smooth and surgical. It was a fist plunging into the guts of what the Spinner had made, and ripping out a handful of smoking pieces. The center could not hold.
After Lev disappeared, Finch got drunk. He and Alain, shaken, sick, run through with guilt—Finch’s worse for having been halfway hoping something would happen to shake Lev’s infuriating cool, but not something like this—holed up in the tavern. Lights off, doors locked, they sat at the bar in companionable horror and drank. There was no one to tell, no one to report this to, no next of kin to notify. There was just them, trying and failing to fathom what the hell had happened to their friend.
The shadows were long and Alain asleep when Finch had a hypothesis.
He’d spent hours in Alice’s castle before her tale broke. Sneaking in through its many doors, circling its grounds. He’d moved among its footmen and handmaids and cooks, all the nearly invisible figures that kept a fairy tale afloat.
He’d breached it first at night, and then, when he got a little braver, during the day. The whole place fizzed like a fishbowl full of magic, but it was only where Alice was, where the air got woozy, that it was dangerous. It was a weird and winding place, full of doors that wouldn’t open, staircases that led nowhere, odd rooms that had no place in her tale. There was a courtyard at the castle’s heart where it never stopped snowing, a nestled globe of permanent winter.
Even inside a nightmare, the Hinterland could be beautiful.
Now he left Alain sleeping behind the bar and walked out into the alarmingly sweet evening air. He’d bicycled drunk before, more times than he cared to count. But the dizziness he felt wheeling away on his bike couldn’t be blamed on intoxication. He pulled over, checked the bike’s chain, squeezed the tires.
The slight vertigo that made him list to the side, that pressed down on him funny from above, wasn’t confined to biking: it was systemic. It was atmospheric. There was something off-kilter in the very air of the Hinterland.
He pushed the bike the rest of the way. Alice’s castle should’ve been showing itself through the trees, slices of darker dark between branches. The white stone path broadened and still he didn’t see it. He thought he might’ve gotten lost somehow, until he came to the familiar dip in the road, the half-circle of honeysuckle bushes, and the open plot of land on which the castle crouched.
On which it had crouched: the castle was gone. All of it. Gates and stables and mossy stone walls. Hidden rooms and corridors and all the other odd fancies of the Spinner. It wasn’t burned to ash or left in ruins—it was gone. In its place was a low, swirling mist, an eye-aching emptiness that shimmered in places like lights on water.
It was the same blackness that had hooked its fingers around Hansa’s cottage. But it had spread, and consumed. Alice’s tale had broken, and in its wake was annihilation; Hansa stepped off the path of her own story, and the destruction of it had just begun.
His hypothesis had proved correct.
* * *
In the deep dark middle of the night, he went back to Hansa’s. For a long time he watched the place where Lev was lost. When nothing happened, he walked away, ten long steps. Then he turned and ran at the cottage, throwing himself over the blackness at its roots. Safe on the other side, he let himself in.
He walked through the cottage’s quiet rooms, running his eyes over its beds and curtains, its dishes and chairs. Moving through one of the upper bedrooms, he paused. There, on a low table, sat a little spyglass made out of a rosy metal. For a long moment, he looked at it.
He took it. From the kitchen he took a wooden spoon with a ship’s silhouette burned into its bowl. From a windowsill, a little mechanical fox that twitched its anime eyes and its three tails and made a whirring sound. He couldn’t say why he did it, just that these particular objects made his fingers itch and he knew that soon enough they’d be lost, along with the cottage and whatever was left of Hansa’s tale, to the spreading fog.
He dropped them into his old leather bag, jumped to safety, and ran all the way home.
15
I pulled out Persuasion and read the letter again. Then the second letter, the one that proved it. How had he done it? That mattered less than that he’d done it at all. Wherever Finch was, he was thinking of me. Missing me. My eyes were wet, my lips felt nervy under my touch. The air tasted heady and my whole life looked different under the spotlight of knowing this one incredible thing: he was reaching out for me.
I’d thumbed over the brief story of me and Ellery Finch so many times it was falling to pieces. The boy I’d used without telling myself I was using him. The boy who’d betrayed me, saved me, then abandoned me to this world, alone.
Not alone. I’d come home to Ella. He’d gone on, following the thread he’d tugged when he learned about the Hinterland, that led him on a journey to other places. That boy has other worlds to explore, I’d been told. We’re not always born to the right one.
I’d asked myself the question a thousand times, and I asked it again now: Who was Ellery Finch? I hadn’t paid enough attention when he was right beside me. The possibility that I might get another chance to find out glowed in me, electric.
I rolled onto my back and pulled up his sleeping Instagram. Mostly it was shots of street art and squares of sunlit water, pretentious quotes written on dirty windows and pictures of his friends, good-looking people with shining faces who made me feel jealous years too late. But there were a few of just him: lying in the curves of a snow angel, drinking beer on the ferry. Backlit on a rooftop, sun setting behind him.
Something else was keeping me up, filling me with a fine white fire, pushing away thoughts of silent attackers and blood in bathtubs and the death wish that followed my best friend around like her shadow.
Magic. That letter, written by a lost boy and delivered here by unseen hands, it was magic. There were other worlds out there, I’d almost forgotten that. And all enchantment hadn’t died with the Hinterland. I had a feeling I hadn’t had in a very long time: of possibility. Of the world, the worlds, as a vast place, where the cost of magic wasn’t always so horribly high. Where it could take the shape of something simple and beautiful. Like a perfect paper flower.
I sat up in bed and called Sophia. She picked up on the third ring, and said nothing.
“You left me,” I said. “On the fire escape.”
More silence.
“It wasn’t me. You know that, right?”
The connection was bad, her voice sounded far away. “I know you,” she said.
I didn’t know what that meant, or whether it was meant to be comforting. I guess I didn’t care. “We need to talk. Meet me at the diner in half an hour.”
It would’ve been a whole thing getting out if Ella was still awake. But she’d crashed on the couch, her feet slung up over the back and our old afghan thrown over her legs. I wanted to kiss her forehead, take the crack-spined copy of Tender Morsels off her chest. But if I tried that she’d pop out of sleep like a jack-in-the-box.
So I just watched her. Watched the dark mass itself over her head like the gathered detritus of her dreams. There was a time when I could’ve guessed at their contents, but that time had passed. I’d been holding myself back, letting her grow strange to me.
And tonight, I’d done something worse: I’d come home to her. Even after what happened on the subway, even after seeing Genevieve dead in the dark, I’d traced my steps back to Brooklyn. Not knowing who was watching me, whether they’d try one more time to hurt me, whether I was leading death to her door.
The annihilating anger that made me reckless in Red Hook, that saved my life on the train, was folded away. What I felt now was clinical and bright, more promise than threat.
I wasn’t going to be a victim anymore. A monster, either. I was going to find the creature who’d turned me into both, in that subway car in the dark.
16
The breaking of “Hansa the Traveler” was an end, and it was a beginning. It was the start of Finch’s new career: he was a scavenger. A thief. As the tales kept breaking and people started panicking and the roads and trees and even the tavern were crawling with recent ex-Stories, confused and enraged and stinking of burnt sugar and exploded flashbulbs, Finch was moving through the cracked landscapes they left behind. Before the tales and everything in them could turn into black holes, he walked their disintegrating halls.
From a fading farmhouse he took a blown glass rose and a child’s leather boot. From the bottom of an abandoned coracle he took a bone fishing hook, a little tarnished mirror, and a handful of iridescent fish scales, big as his palm and diamond hard. In an overgrown pear grove he found a dancing slipper, worn through. It looked like one of the beat-up Capezios his junior high girlfriend used to wear with her jeans. Deep in the trees, from a murder cabin straight out of The Evil Dead, he took what looked like a ginger root, colored a deep, burnished maroon. But the thing felt so vile, even through the old leather of his bag, he ended up throwing it out his window in the middle of the night.
When I wake up there’s gonna be an evil beanstalk out there, he thought, lying back in bed. It’s like I’ve never read a fairy tale.
The beanstalk didn’t show, but he still had things to worry about.
He was living with Janet and Ingrid in their cottage, which smelled like rosemary and soil and a tinge of the goat pen Ingrid was bad about wiping off her boots. It drove Janet nuts. They’d given him a home, helped make the Hinterland feel like a home, and now they were talking about leaving.
Everyone was, those days. The Stories were shaking loose and the sinkholes were getting worse and Lev was only the first death—the first disappearance. It was possible, Alain liked to say hopefully, that he was still alive. Maybe he’d slipped right back through to Eart
h. Maybe that was what everyone should do: show a little faith that the sinkholes worked like doors. It was a popular theory nobody ever tested on purpose.
No, their continued survival depended on the Spinner. They were waiting for her to step in, to rebuild her world, tale by tale. Surely the wound Finch had made in it wasn’t mortal. Surely she’d show herself at last, and open a door. The ex-Stories had their own ways out of the Hinterland, but none of them seemed inclined to talk. The refugees were trapped together like rats on a splintering ship.
Everyone had a theory about the Spinner: that she was an ex-Story herself. That she was just another human, or had been, once upon a time. Someone swore she was the Empress Josephine. There was an old straight-edge dude who hung around the tavern sipping water, who claimed the Spinner used to send him to Earth for cases of gin, satin pajamas, paperbacks and chocolate bars and black tea. Finch believed it.
“She’s not human, not Story, and not to be trifled with or depended upon,” Janet said briskly. “We need a contingency plan.”
But that was just talk. Even Janet couldn’t muscle up an escape route where none existed.
People were starting to lose faith. There were town hall meetings almost daily, and patrols were set up around some of the bigger sinkholes. Janet did her best to impose a curfew. Still, people were lost. The Hinterland’s refugees were wanderers by nature; Finch wasn’t the only one pressing his luck, poking around the changing land.
Then came the night when they were packed into the tavern, sardine-tight and hiding out from a rare rainstorm. The weather had gone off since the Stories started to break. Alain was in the back checking on a batch of home brew when he gave a holler, and Finch knew.
* * *
It was a rounded little hobbit door set in a place that had been solid wall, the top of it coming to Finch’s thigh. Janet looked at it with her hands on her hips.
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