"I know what it means," said Silverdun. "He wants to use Gray Mave as a crowbar. Except instead of a packing crate, he's going to open a space between two worlds."
Chapter 28
blue sky of earth
Night fell. Hereg continued to speak, sometimes veering into heavily accented High Fae that Satterly could not decipher. Eventually, he gave up listening and wandered to the edge of the enclosure. As much as he hated to admit it, none of it made sense to him. The nuts and bolts of Fae magic sounded more like an alien differential calculus than the storybook finger twiddling he'd once imagined. And it always came back to the equally alien concept of re, the magical essence, or sense, or power, or whatever it was that let the Fae do what they did. Trying to understand how Fae magic worked without being able to sense re was like trying to understand music theory without being able to hear.
It was unspoken among his fellows, but obvious, that the presence of iron in the bars was beginning to affect them unfavorably. It was bad luck even to speak of iron, so no one said it, but no one needed to. The mere proximity of it seemed to act as a depressant, dulling even Mauritane's reactions almost to the point of stupor.
Satterly stood at the edge of the cage and looked at the guard. He was a young man, no more than thirty, his long greasy hair tied back into a ponytail. He was so tall he had a tendency to hunch forward; his head was permanently angled outward like a turtle's. He leaned against the back of one of the huts, a shotgun within easy reach.
"How'd you get mixed up with them?" the man asked, out of nowhere.
"Me?" said Satterly, surprised. "Oh, well, it's a long story. My name's Brian Satterly."
"So y'all are all together? Like, you're friendly?"
Satterly puffed out his cheeks in thought. "Well, we're not enemies, but I wouldn't go as far as to call us friends, either. Let's say we're joined by circumstance."
"Joined by circumstance," the man repeated, enunciating each word. "Huh."
Satterly frowned and changed the subject. "So, uh, what are all you people doing here? How did you get to this world?"
The man laughed. "We drove," he said.
The woman named Linda skirted around the huts and joined the guard at his post. Back near the fire, some of the children peered in their direction, but most of the adults looked studiously away, as though trying to ignore them. Linda whispered quietly with the guard for a few seconds, pointing and gesturing.
She stuffed her hands in the pockets of a pair of threadbare jeans and approached the cage. "You," she said, pointing at Satterly. "What's your name?"
"Brian Satterly," he said. "I just went through this with your friend."
"My name is Linda Grossman," she said. "I want to apologize for all of this."
"I'd feel better about that if I knew what `all of this' was," said Satterly.
"Come on out," she said. "Just you, none of the others. We'll talk."
Satterly glanced back at Mauritane, who'd noticed Linda's approach and now was staring hard in her direction. "She says she wants me to go with her," said Satterly.
Mauritane's face was cold. "Go, find out what you can," he said. "We're having a bad time of it. I don't know how Hereg has survived so long in this cell."
Satterly nodded.
"Just reach around and undo the latch," Linda said, backing up. She turned to the young man. "Give me the Browning," she said. He scowled but reached into his coat and handed her a pistol without protest.
Satterly reached around and unhooked the latch, stepping carefully into the open clearing. Moonlight dyed the night a pale blue; it reflected from the snow at the forest's edge and caught in Linda's dark eyes.
"Come on," she said. "Let's talk."
She led him past the huts and continued walking, past the clearing and into the forest.
"See that hill over there?" she pointed.
Satterly nodded.
"That's where we're headed."
They walked in silence for a few seconds. Despite his confusion, Satterly felt comforted by Linda's presence. She was normal. She was a bridge back to the world he assumed he'd never see again. He imagined that if he were to lean in and smell her neck, he might begin to cry.
"I was elected to talk to you," she said, walking with her hands in the pockets of a too-large brown cloak. The butt of the pistol protruded alongside her right wrist. "I need you to understand a few things, and I want to know some things about you."
"Okay," Satterly said.
"Mainly, I want you to understand that we don't mean you any harm, not really. All we want is to get home. No one's going to get hurt if I have anything to say about it."
"That's fine, depending on how much say you have."
"I have almost enough." She scowled. "I need to know if you're willing to help us."
"I might be under different circumstances," Satterly said. "I don't appreciate being held prisoner. And my friends aren't doing so well in that cage of yours."
"We didn't… well, I didn't mean for that to happen. So, they are your friends then?"
"Why does everyone keep asking me that?"
"You're human, and you speak their language. We could use you to help us get back, and in return we'd be willing to take you with us. We just want to know what side you're on."
Satterly stopped short. "So you really have a way out of here?"
"Yes."
"I… I don't know. Most of the time I'm not even sure what I'm doing with those guys. I mean, I've been through a lot already with them, but… I don't know. Sometimes I don't even think they want me around."
"So you'll help us?"
Satterly thought. "I have to think. I said I'd go with them; we're on a mission, sort of."
"I can't tell you what to do," said Linda. "But we're leaving this place tomorrow, one way or the other. Like I said, I just don't want anyone to get hurt. If you help us, you can do whatever you want. Come with us, ride off with your Fae friends. I don't care. But I do know this: if you don't cooperate, Jim will force you. And I can't control him."
"I have a question," said Satterly. "Why didn't you just ask? Maybe we would have helped anyway. I don't understand why I would even need to choose sides."
"I guess Hereg hasn't explained the spell to you yet."
"No, not to me."
"The way I understand it, in order to create the way out, he needs the full premonition essence from a catalyst Fae. I have no idea what that means, but whatever it is, it's apparently quite painful."
"I see."
"Do you?" said Linda. She folded her arms across her chest. "Understand, Mister Satterly. Your companion might very well die tomorrow. There's nothing you can do about it. I didn't want it to happen this way, but there it is."
Satterly raised his voice. "You keep saying that things aren't the way you want them, so why don't you do something about it instead of forcing it all on me?"
"Because I was outvoted, Mister Satterly. I have children, and the people who outvoted me have guns. And they don't really like me very much as it is. That's my reality."
He followed her up a steep wooded trail. Halfway up the hillside, she stopped and walked away from the trail, beckoning him to follow. Something metal glinted in the filtered moonlight. A truck.
"What the hell?" said Satterly. It was a flatbed truck, mostly buried in drifting snow but recognizable. The bed of the truck held a number of open containers filled with metal rods in varying quantities.
"That explains the rebar everywhere," Satterly said.
"This stuff has saved our lives a dozen times," she said. "It's strong, it's durable, and the Fae avoid it like the plague."
"How did this thing get here?" said Satterly, baffled.
"I'm getting to that," said Linda.
They continued up the hill. Farther along, a yellow tow truck was wrapped around the trunk of a stout pine, its exposed edges mottled with old rust.
"We never found out what that guy's name was," said Linda, pointing at the truck
. "No wallet." She shrugged. "When we buried him, we called him Joe, because that's what it said on the side of the truck, but he didn't look like a Joe to me."
Satterly said nothing, only goggled at the truck as he walked past it.
"This is my car," she said, pointing. A Volvo station wagon rested on its end in a ravine, its taillights pointing skyward. From where Satterly stood, he could reach out and touch the rear bumper.
"You're from Georgia," he said stupidly, pointing to the license plate. Then he noticed the registration tag on the plate. It had expired in June of 1994.
"How long have you been here?" he said, turning toward her.
"Fifteen years," she muttered. "We've been here fifteen years."
As they neared the top of the hill, Satterly began to notice a light emanating from there, steady and blue. It cast long shadows through the tree trunks. Glancing to the left, Satterly noticed that the ravine that held Linda's Volvo continued up the hillside, carving an ever-narrower depression into the earth. Curiously, as the ravine neared the top of the hill, it grew more rounded, more regular, smaller, until Satterly would have sworn it was a drainage ditch, something man-made. The source of the light was at the top of the ravine.
It was a blue sphere of light embedded in the ground, the size of a softball. It glowed with its own radiance, its makeup uncertain. Satterly took a step back and tried to comprehend what he was seeing.
The ravine narrowed even further, becoming shallower as it ascended the slope, finally diminishing in size to a perfectly rounded trench the size and shape of the blue patch of light. The glowing circle was nestled at the top of the depression, as though someone had been rolling it through the mud, leaving the ravine in its wake.
"There it is," said Linda simply. Satterly reached forward to touch the circle and she grabbed his hand. "Careful of the boundary," she said. "It's sharp; it'll take off your finger if you're not careful."
"What the hell is this thing?" said Satterly, kneeling and peering into the circle. He looked back at the ravine. "Did this little thing dig out that huge hole?"
She nodded. "It used to be much bigger," she said.
"What is it?"
"That, Mr. Satterly, is the blue sky of the planet Earth," said Linda. She knelt next to him, laying the pistol across her knees. "Or at least what you can see of it from here."
Chapter 28
convertible
"Why couldn't you just walk back through?" said Satterly, gazing into the blue orb. "When it was bigger, I mean."
"I'll show you," she said. She picked up a stick from the ground, illuminated by the sphere's light. She poked the end of the stick into the light and they watched as it was torn to splinters by an unseen force.
"According to Hereg," she said, "the same force that's causing it to contract is distorting the membrane between the worlds. His spell is going to enlarge and smooth out the boundary." She dropped the stick and wiped her hands on her pant legs. "That's what he says, anyway. Who knows how much of it is true?"
"He's been in that cage a long time, I gather."
"Yes, we caught him trying to steal food from us about eighteen months ago. We'd built the cage to hold some of our more precious belongings, but with the storms and the cold weather, we had to move them. Again, locking him up like that wasn't my choice, but without him, we'd probably be dead by now."
"I gather that you and Jim Broward don't always see eye to eye," said Satterly, turning away from the light.
"You gather correctly," she said. "I don't think he's a bad man, we're just… very different. He's got his people, his son Chris, who was guarding you just now, and Meyer and jenny, they're a younger couple. My son and I, we tend to see things differently from them."
"Sounds like it's been a long fifteen years," said Satterly.
"You can't even begin to imagine. There have been bad times. My husband was… he died in an argument with Jim about five years ago. Some times the Fae come; there's a city about a day's ride from here, you know. A place called Sylvan, in Seelie territory."
"Yes," said Satterly. "That's where we're headed."
"And the girls, the children." She bit her lip. "I worry about the children, the ones that were born here. All the time."
"Why do the girls all have bandages on their ears?" Satterly asked.
"I don't want to talk about that," said Linda.
"Tell me how you got here," said Satterly.
"It's a long story," she said. "Ancient history now."
"Up to you."
She leaned back on the ground, her hands stretched out behind her. "It was June," she said. "My husband and I were driving our son Jamie to camp in Tallulah Falls, Georgia. We'd just moved to Atlanta from Rochester, New York. We thought maybe Jamie would meet some other kids, you know. Do some archery, whatever kids do at those places. He was thirteen, it was an awkward age for him." She stopped and peered at Satterly in the darkness. "Why are you smiling?"
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's just that I haven't seen another human being or spoken English in so long, it actually seems more strange than my life does now. It's just bizarre, that's all."
"Anyway," she continued. "We got lost heading out to the camp. My husband was driving. We were following the signs out to Lake Rabun, just like the directions said, then we hit a fork that wasn't on the map. We went the wrong way, we doubled back, got lost. Next thing I knew we were on this little dirt road and I was afraid the Volvo was going to bottom out any second.
"I don't know what happened next. One second, we were on a tiny dirt road near Tallulah Falls, Georgia. The next second, there was no road. It just disappeared. Like that." She snapped her fingers. "The trees changed, the goddamn mountains changed. All around us. All at once. David lost control of the wheel and we pitched into that big ditch.
"In those days, the hole was huge. Big enough for Paul to drive a semi through, at least. He was the first one through, or at least the first one who stuck around. He'd been here almost a year when we showed up. He was on his way to a construction site, just minding his own business, then boom! He crashed his truck, landed in some godforsaken alternate dimension or whatever the hell this place is, and he was alone. For a year. I don't know how he survived, I honestly don't.
"When we got here, Paul kept trying to convince us that we somehow weren't in Georgia anymore. I mean, as far as we knew, we'd just taken a really wrong turn. We couldn't figure out why this truck driver had been living in a lean-to for a year when he could have just walked down to the interstate and hitched a ride. I was never a Girl Scout, but even I know that if you walk in one direction long enough, you're gonna hit road sooner or later."
"But there was no road," said Satterly.
"No, there was no road. Just the path you were coming along when they… you know."
"Yeah." Satterly scratched his nose. "They call them shifting places," he said. "They spring up spontaneously; they do all kinds of weird things."
Linda stood suddenly, wiping the dirt from her back. "None of that matters anymore," she said. "Let's get back."
Satterly walked in front of her back the way they'd come. Neither of them spoke. When they passed the huge fire in the center of the encampment on their way to the cage, all the humans sitting there watched them pass. The girls, their eyes glinting in the firelight, looked on somberly as they walked by.
"Think about it," said Linda. "If you want to come with us, we could use the help."
Satterly sat in the cage, leaning against the bars. They were cold to the touch. In the center, his friends huddled together, sleeping fitfully. Were they his friends? Satterly closed his eyes and thought about home.
The next morning dawned bright and crisp. A breeze blew in from the north, raising the temperature to something approximating comfort. Satterly awoke to the sounds of breakfast being cooked around the fire. He knelt by Mauritane and gently shook him awake. Mauritane's eyes were bloodshot, underlined with dark circles. Wordlessly, the two of them roused Raieve
, Silverdun, and Gray Mave. Mave's wound had come open again during the night, and Mauritane tore off another length of his cloak to use as a bandage. Mave refused to stand and would not eat when food was finally brought to them. Satterly helped replace Mave's bandages. He was beginning to understand how Mave was able to do what he'd done to them, and the thought chilled him to his bones.
Jim Broward came and rattled the cage. "Well, Satterly, are you with us?"
Satterly stood, his stomach clenching in his chest. He walked to the bars and nodded. "I'm with you," he said.
Broward nodded and opened the door of the cage.
From outside, the cave was invisible. Over time, the humans had encouraged trees and shrubs to grow over the opening, giving no indication that the opening existed. Its mouth was low, no more than six feet high, overhung with damp rock and fuzzy moss. Inside, though, the space was enormous; their torches glinted off far walls and slowly filled the cavernous room with light. There were two dark shapes huddled in the back of the space, black oblongs that were oddly familiar to Satterly as they entered the cave.
Meyer Schrabe was about Satterly's age, somewhere in his thirties; he had long, curly hair and a prominent nose that looked either broken or permanently swollen. According to Linda, he was on Jim Broward's side of things, though to Satterly he seemed like a perfectly decent person, all things considered. The two girls, Polly and jasmine, were his. They tagged along beside the men while their mother, jenny, lagged, talking with Linda and Linda's daughter Rachel.
There were torches evenly spaced along the wall, set into sconces fashioned from the omnipresent rebar. Meyer left Satterly with the girls to go light them.
"That's our daddy," said Polly, the older of the two. She watched her father, a sweet loving look on her face.
"We love our daddy," said jasmine. "We'll miss him."
Satterly kneeled next to jasmine. "Why will you miss him?" he said, humoring her. "Aren't you going with us?"
"No," said jasmine. "We're not going anywhere."
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