“Let’s not be hasty,” she said.
“Hasty?” A man pushed to the front of the crowd, blond eyebrows scaling his bald head. Finch had known his type back in New York: he was the guy who composted and canvassed and spent his weekends gathering signatures for a petition to save an endangered beetle, then called the cops on kids being too loud on the sidewalk. “We’re dying out here, and you’re talking about don’t be hasty?”
Janet sized him up. “Thank you, Leon. We can always count on you for the dissenting opinion. If you’re volunteering to go first, please, be my guest.”
Leon’s eyebrows climbed even higher. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”
“I’d like it tremendously. I think most of us would.”
Even Janet was getting ruffled these days.
But it was Alain who got to his knees and opened the door. Half the room gasped, and Leon ducked and covered.
All you could see through it was gray fog, like it opened straight into a cloud. Then a wind came through, a bracing, whistling thing that lapped the room and left them in silence.
“Perfume,” Alain breathed. “Isobel’s perfume.”
Leon’s face was red; he looked like he was hardly breathing. “Baby powder,” he choked out. “And grilled cheese. Did you smell that?”
Everyone was murmuring now, their faces lit up or shut down, naming the promises that had blown through the door. Finch looked to Janet; she said nothing, but her face was stricken.
They were all wrong anyway. The wind had smelled like his mother’s coconut oil, and the gingery spice mix she’d kept on the kitchen counter. It smelled like the lace of overdone waffles, the very last meal he’d eaten on Earth.
* * *
Within a few hours, people started leaving through the door. Whatever was on the other side of it, they’d decided it was better than what lay through the sinkholes. Finch figured they were probably right.
But he remembered something he’d read once, about the door to the kingdom of Heaven being so low you had to enter it kneeling. This didn’t feel like that. It felt like the Spinner being petty, making them crawl their asses out through a doggy door. The sheer cuteness of it felt sinister as fuck.
He was still waiting for her to show up and show him what she thought of idiot Earthlings who messed with the works. But if she blamed him for her falling-apart world, she hadn’t said so. Some days he thought that was deliberate, that she knew it was worse for him this way: forever bracing for the hammer to come down. And some days he thought the worst thing she could do was to just let him leave. Maybe the door in the tavern wall would drop him in New York. He’d move back in with his dad and stepmom. Get his GED, let his dad pay his way into a good college. Ring a buzzer somewhere, wait for Alice to open the door.
Part of him wanted to go home, but none of him wanted it to be like this: raw, scarred, pared down. If he went back, he wanted to be like a king in exile returned. Someone who had seen things, and wasn’t shit at processing them.
But as the days passed and the population dropped, he started to think it wouldn’t happen that way. On a humid morning, with nowhere at all to be, Finch sat at a table in the tavern. It had lost its heart when Alain left the morning after the door first appeared, and had practically become a bus station since then. People walked through with their packs tied tight, alone or in pairs, said tearful goodbyes by the bar or slipped through without a word.
And always the place smelled like memories. Every time the door was opened, that antic wind sprang free, teeming with lost things. The sugar cloud of baked ice cream cone at the sundae shop a few blocks from his apartment on the Upper East Side. The rubber-and-sweat scent of indoor basketball practice. His dad’s clovey cologne. He marinated in the scents of home, watching people disappear forever into the back of the bar. While he did it, he toyed with the little metal fox he’d taken from Hansa’s cottage.
There was a trick to it. He was sure there was. It had big eyes and three twitching tails, like those creepy vintage cat clocks, and it made a chittering sound in its throat. The points of its ears and tails were tipped in gold, but the rest of it was red metal. If you put your ear up to its belly, you could hear the faintest hum.
It took time for him to notice the girl watching him from another table. Early twenties, hair bleached out and tied back into Heidi braids, wearing three different shades of faded black. She had an unflappable vibe that reminded him of Janet. When Finch finally looked at her, she smiled brightly and stood, like being noticed was as good as an invitation.
“Hey,” she said, sitting down across from him. “Come here often?”
Finch nodded at the weak joke and said nothing.
The girl pulled out a red glass bottle and set it between them. “I think we missed last call, so I brought my own. You want?”
He put down the fox. “Look, do I know you?”
“I doubt it. I just got into town.”
Reluctantly, he was interested. “From where?”
“I’ve been on walkabout. Well, sailabout, I guess. I wanted to check out the islands, see what came after the edge of the sea.”
Finch’s heart twanged. He’d always planned to do that. “How far did you get? What did you find?”
Her voice fell into the easy cadence of a storyteller’s. “I found a tale that played out on an island the size of this bar. I saw mermaids singing down storms and stirring them into the water. There’s a square of sea that’s always stormy, with a ship tossing inside it. There’s a place where you can take a staircase down to the bottom of the sea and walk in a garden there, with the water just over your head.” Her voice stalled out. “It was beautiful. But it wasn’t home.”
The way she said the word caught at him. Like home meant just one place to her, and she knew exactly where to find it. “Where’s home?”
“It’ll take more than one drink to get me to tell you that.” She smiled, but he didn’t think she was joking. “I came over here to ask you about that thing you’re messing with. That—” She squinted. “What is it, a fox? Mind if I take a look?”
Finch took his hands off it, like, be my guest.
“Tale-made, right?”
He nodded grudgingly. It was the first time he’d heard the term.
“I thought so.” She picked it up, inspected it. With a jerk, she yanked its central tail.
The fox gave a whirring shudder as she placed it in the center of the table. They watched it rearrange itself, the tails elongating, becoming two arms and a pair of molded-together legs, the eyes transforming, disconcertingly, into breasts, and a head sprouting from the body of the thing as it went from apple to hourglass.
It had become a metal woman, with a sly, foxy face.
Finch picked it up, held it to his ear to see if he could still hear the hum. “How did you know it could do that?”
“Better question is, what else can it do?” She flicked the thing onto its side. “Do you have any more like it?”
Finch thought of the glass rose, the fish scales, the rest of the cache he kept under his bed. “I might. Who’s asking?”
The girl put out a hand. “Iolanthe. Happy to meet you.”
He shook it, taking in her ice-haired prettiness, the shallow bowls of her clavicles and the unearthly planes of her face. He was starting to think she might come from someplace farther than New York.
“Ellery,” he said. “Finch.”
“Well, Ellery, the truth is I don’t want to die here. And I think you and I might be able to help each other, if”—she pointed at the metal figure—“you’ve got more tale-made treasures like that.”
“Nobody wants to die here,” he said. “Everyone’s trying to escape. What does the fox have to do with it?”
“Think. What do you need to escape?”
“A door.”
“Money and a door. I know a place where we can make some coin off that fox and anything else you might’ve picked up. How’s this: I get forty percent for taking yo
u there and making the introduction. And for giving you the idea in the first place.”
“Is your buyer in the Hinterland?”
She smiled, relaxed but with a hint of the shark beneath it. “My buyer is not.”
“Meaning you can get us out of here? You know a safe way out, a guaranteed way?”
“I do.”
“You get thirty percent.” Finch took the red bottle and drank. The liquid inside tasted like rum made out of electrocuted sugarcane. “And I get to bring two people out with me.”
Iolanthe pulled out a pocket watch on a long chain and consulted its face. From where Finch sat, it looked completely blank. “Forty percent, and I can personally guarantee the safe passage out of your two people. But they can’t come with us.”
Her hand, when Finch shook it, felt rough and solid, the hand of a woman who’d navigated alien waters in search of tales to tell.
She held his fast. “Meet me here tomorrow at sunrise. Bring your two friends and anything you’ve got to sell. And say your goodbyes. It’ll be the last you’ll see of this place.”
17
A twenty-four-hour diner held down a corner two blocks from the apartment, serving bottomless drip coffee and cheap breakfast combos to construction workers and old people in jogging suits. I knew Sophia would be late, so I skimmed a few chapters of The Changeling while I waited. When she finally showed, she looked small, the larger-than-life outline of her rubbed down. She still wore the dress she’d had on at the party, the fabric so dark I couldn’t tell if it had bloodstains.
“Trip,” she said, falling into the seat across from me. It was her nickname for me—Alice-Three-Times, Triple, Trip—and I always felt a blend of affection and irritation when she used it. When the waitress came, Sophia revived a little, ordering chocolate-chip waffles and mushroom omelets and Canadian bacon for the both of us. I could already see her calculating how to get away without paying the bill.
“We are paying for this breakfast.”
She winked, but it was half-hearted. “Is it breakfast if the sun’s not up?”
The food came, and it looked to me like pieces of a plastic playset. I watched the chipped glitter of her nails around fork and knife, too up in my head to swallow more than milky coffee.
What was Finch doing right now? Where was he doing it? Outsized possibilities played across my eyelids. Sometimes the image of you hits me so hard and sudden I believe the only explanation is you’re thinking of me at that exact moment, too.
“Hey.”
My focus snapped, breath drawn in like I’d been caught at something.
There were half-moons in her lip where she’d bitten it. The skin around her eyes was blue paper. “You got me here. Why aren’t you talking?”
“Jesus, Sophia.” The words slipped out sideways as I focused, really focused, on her face. “You look like shit.”
“Back at you.”
“Sorry. I just … I wish you could sleep.”
“Don’t. I don’t even remember how it feels.”
I was raw, eroded down to skin and nerve. My eyes filled before I could check myself. “Oh, Soph. What do you do all night?”
“You know, I’ve known you a while now, and this is the first time you’ve ever asked me that.” She said it without judgment, but it still felt like a cut.
“I’m sorry.”
“Does that help me?” She sighed, put down her fork. “It’s harder now. With the Hinterland gone, it feels harder. This world is so dim, I can hardly see. Sometimes when I look at people their death is all I can see.”
“You’ve never told me how I’m gonna die.” Saying the words felt like passing my fingers through flame, daring it to burn me. “Do you know? Can you see it?”
“Ask me instead if I can see your life.”
“Can you—”
“Yes.” Her golden eyes held mine. “It’s the color of oil. Black until you look close, then every color. Sometimes it looks so dark. Sometimes it looks like a pearl.”
“Can you see everyone’s life and death, all the Hinterlanders?”
She tensed. “Are you asking about the murders? If I knew?”
“Not because I’m blaming you. Not because I think it was your fault.”
“Of course it wasn’t my fault. Was it yours?”
She asked the question so lightly. It’ll be okay if it is, her voice said. I’ll like you anyway.
I squared up and looked at her, hands resting on the table. “I’ve got nothing to do with this.”
After a moment she nodded, and returned to her waffle.
“I’ve got proof if you want it,” I went on. “Someone tried to kill me, too. A couple nights ago, on the subway.”
“It’s weird more people don’t die on the subway,” she said equably. Then, “Wait. Are you serious?”
I pointed at my chin, scabbing over. Then I told her everything, right up through my conversation with Daphne in her hotel room.
“So it is one of us,” she said. “I figured. Shit, what if it’s Robin? He loves rhymes, all that high fairy-tale formality. And he’s mad as a hatter, besides.”
“Right, but can Robin freeze people alive?”
“Oh, yeah. Damn. It would’ve made him so much more interesting.” She shuddered, her expression bright. I felt perversely pleased that I’d thrilled her with the story of my own near-death.
“So I’m right? They did all die that way—like Genevieve?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“I didn’t hear about any of it till after Hansa died. Then you showed up at a meeting out of nowhere, and … I wondered. I guess I was waiting, maybe, to see if you had something to tell me.”
“You really thought…” I sighed, laying my head back against the seat. “If you thought I did it, they must all be thinking it.”
“Some of them. Maybe.”
I remembered Robin, all the shuttered faces at the wake. That whisper in the bloody bathroom. Alice-Three-Times. “Some of them, definitely.”
“Let me take care of it,” she said. “I’ll tell them it wasn’t you. They’ll believe it, coming from me.”
I swallowed it down, that little stab of nonbelonging. I’d chosen to walk away. “Who else could it be? Can anyone else do what I can do? Does anyone else have a reason to want, you know, body parts?”
She gestured dismissively with her fork. “Fairy tale something something. You know how it goes.”
“Right—exactly. It’s like something in a fairy tale. This isn’t just violent, it’s specific. There’s got to be, like, some ice king who used to collect his wives’ ankles running around the city.”
“Their ankles?” She ran a finger through a comet scatter of spilled sugar crystals. “What the fuck would you do with a bunch of ankles?”
“I don’t know,” I said, impatient. “But I can’t go home till I figure it out.”
“Till you figure out—”
“Not the fucking ankles.” I wiped a hand over my mouth, frustration rising. “Did you not see what I saw tonight? Are you not scared?”
“Scared.” She said it thoughtfully, like it was a word she was looking up in a dictionary. “To die, you mean? No, I’m not scared.”
“Well, it’s different for you. You can’t, you know. Die.”
“Yes, I do know,” she said dryly.
I thought about Finch, somewhere far away, remembering a better version of me. Ella on the couch, dreaming of a land of red rocks, where we could see the whole curve of the galaxy from our backyard.
“You told me,” I said carefully, “that I should be sure.”
“Don’t,” she said swiftly.
“Soph. I can’t even go home. Someone tried to kill me, they might try it again. And I always hurt her. My mother. Again and again. I never mean it, but what does that matter? After this, after I figure this out, I think I’ve gotta go. For real this time. Leave the Hinterland behind.”
&
nbsp; She nodded, and for a moment I thought she understood. Then her lip curled back like a cat’s. “Do you really think that’s how it works? The Hinterland was never a place, it was always us. Wherever you go, that’s the Hinterland.”
Hearing my fears spoken aloud made my anger rise. “I grew up here. I spent my whole life here, I was raised here.”
“How many lives did you spend in the Hinterland? How many dozens? You think you’re special just because somebody from this world loves you? That’s not how it works.”
“That’s exactly how it works,” I spat. “That’s the point of the whole goddamn world.”
“It’s not our world.”
“It’s not yours.”
A waitress came by with a coffee carafe, looked at us pitching toward each other over the tabletop, and kept walking.
“You said I had a choice,” I hissed. “You said I was the only one who did.”
“That’s right. And you made it.”
“I almost killed a man. Here, where it counts. I saw a dead girl in a bathtub, her body frozen. Mutilated. I almost got killed myself. Don’t you care that I could’ve died? I thought you were my friend!”
Her hand shot out and gripped my wrist. “I am your friend. Your fucking friend, your only friend. You ungrateful ass.”
I tried to pull away, but she squeezed tighter, the bones of my wrist bowing like saplings. “You asked me what I do all night. Ask yourself what all of us do. Daphne and Robin and Jenny and the rest of us, do you think we sit around wondering who we are, how to live? Go to funny little part-time jobs, like you? Do you really think we don’t use what we’ve got to live the best we can live, and have fun however we want to have fun, because we can? We don’t have mothers waiting at home for us, making us tea. We don’t have years and years of life in this place behind us and a future ahead.”
She leaned close to me, as close as she could get across the table. Her empty eyes were fathomless, nothing and nothing and nothing all the way down.
“I’m not getting any older. Death will never come for me. Instead I’ll just rot. I can feel the rot coming. It’ll start here.” She pointed at her forehead, at her heart. “I’ll go black and green. I’ve got nothing in my life but time, and I still don’t have time for this: one foot in, one foot out, poor me. How come, with more than any of the rest of us have got, you always make out like you’ve got so much less?”
The Night Country Page 10