by Anne Nesbet
Linny looked up from her lourka. Something had changed in the air right before her. She could see through the pine tree’s branches, as if they had all of a sudden gone transparent. Through them was another place, larger and wilder than “here.” Still a little blurry, but each note of her song made the blue of that place beyond the branches brighter and more vivid. There was a log there, under a blue sky. And someone was sitting on the log.
Linny stood up and stepped into that picture, simple as that.
The sounds around her changed, instantly.
In one way it was quiet (no birds), but far away, something very large roared and sighed and murmured.
But she was running already . . .
And crying out, “Sayra! Sayra!” as she ran . . .
Because it was surely Sayra, a somewhat blurry Sayra, sitting on the log. Not looking in Linny’s direction at all, but gazing out over the edge of the bluff—they were on a bluff—and at the churning waves of the ocean beyond.
(So much wilder, this ocean, than the Plain Sea at the other end of the world.)
Even as Linny ran to that log on the bluff in Away, however, a tiny thread of doubt curled into her joy.
For one thing, she could see the log and even the ocean waves right through the girl’s body, which was disconcerting.
For another thing, the almost-transparent girl on the log hadn’t jumped up to greet her or even spun around with joy—as Sayra surely, surely, would have done. She was only now beginning to turn her head, only now, as Linny, struck by sudden shyness, stopped in her tracks a step or two away.
“Sayra,” said Linny. “I came back for you. Sayra!”
“Sayra,” echoed the wispy girl on the log, and her head had pivoted around enough that Linny could see her strange, wild eyes.
Linny couldn’t help it; she gasped. Sayra’s eyes had always been green, green, beautiful shining-leaf green, as green as a story about emeralds or the sea. But this girl’s eyes were not just green like the sea, but filled with the very sea itself.
In those eyes, the sea spilled back and forth, crashing and rolling. It was as if this ghostly version of Sayra had been staring so long at the ocean that the image of those waves had just taken over her eyes, like ink rubbing off a picture onto your hands.
The worst of it was, Sayra’s ocean-filled eyes showed no signs of knowing who Linny was.
“Sayra,” she said again, in a wondering and wispy voice.
“That’s you,” said Linny. “I’m not Sayra—I’m Linny.”
The girl on the log stared at her, and the waves crashed and curled in her eyes.
They stood in silence for a while, staring at each other.
“Stop this. Come back,” said Linny finally. “It’s my fault you’re here, and I can’t stand it being my fault.”
And because the girl on the log didn’t move a muscle, just stared at Linny with the ocean washing through her eyes, Linny said, “Scoot over” and plopped herself down on the log beside Sayra, shoulder to shoulder, just like all those thousands of days in the woods, back when they were children tethered together in the village of Lourka. Only Sayra’s shoulder was almost not there. It was the strangest thing. Linny had the impression that if she didn’t focus like crazy, if she let her eyes close or her mind drift away, she might open her eyes and find no Sayra-like girl beside her at all.
At the edge of her vision she saw that there was the tiniest, most insubstantial of threads spinning out from Sayra to the sea. That’s why she’s so faint, thought Linny. She must have been unraveling here already a very, very long time.
Everything backward: the ocean like an enormous web, sucking all the little spiders dry. (Linny and Sayra had always liked spiders—Sayra for their spinning, and Linny for their plotting and planning.) And what was left, when you had unraveled into the endless sea?
The thought made Linny very tired. She had been running, it felt like, for practically ever. And now here was Sayra and yet no Sayra at all, somehow.
What were you supposed to do, when you got to Away, and the person you had come for was already gone?
But when Linny’s eyes, defeated, fell away from the sky beyond the bluff, she saw, resting in the girl’s ghostly hand, the ghostly silk butterfly-flower, still rippling through its wrinkled changes. The wings shivered and became petals. The petals changed color and suddenly were once again wings. It had found its way back to its maker.
There once had been a Sayra who had living, leaf-green eyes, and who cared enough about Linny to create something as wonderful as that flower, as a gift.
“You know, you made that,” said Linny, and to her surprise the girl’s hand trembled a little and closed around the silk.
Linny forced herself to look back into those ocean-filled eyes again. This time they seemed not just empty, but puzzled. Perhaps the girl was trying to figure something out. Perhaps she was simply staring for the sake of staring. It was hard to tell, so Linny turned back, with the lourka on her lap, to face the wild ocean of Away.
The Plain Sea, at the other end of the world, had oozed forward and seeped back again, offering something astonishingly simple and simply wonderful: the Plainness of water. She remembered that, watching the Plain Sea, she had become something more abstract and more perfect than her messy, muddy self. Something numbers and equations could probably have described.
That Plainness had held her. What was holding Sayra here?
Here they were on a green bluff, and down below them the impossible ocean romped and played. It was the opposite of plain; it carried a frothy speckling of seaweed and shells on the backs of its waves. It came from somewhere and was going off to somewhere else, all of that complicated water. When Linny looked left and right, she saw the rocky green bluff continuing in the great distance, until the saltwater mist sent up by the waves blurred all the edges. It was a far and untamed place, and every now and then what seemed like the shadow of a melody or whisper went sailing by on its way out toward the sea, to join the wild song and dance there, and make it even wilder and more glorious.
Sayra’s unraveling must also feed that sea. Linny twitched on the log. The little thread spinning off from the wispy edges of her friend—she couldn’t stand it.
“You know you’ve got a loose thread there,” said Linny. “You used to hate loose threads.”
She nudged the almost-not-there shoulder next to hers, but it was like nudging a cloud.
And suddenly Linny just simply couldn’t take it anymore. She jumped up, caught that unraveling thread in her hands, and snapped it free.
Linny hadn’t thought anything through, of course; she didn’t have a clue in her head what might happen next—just that Sayra, her Sayra, was unraveling before her eyes, and it was more than she could bear.
So she was caught by surprise when the half-transparent Sayra gave a high, thin wail of distress and flung herself after the vanishing thread—tripping toward the edge of that bluff like a balloon about to float away.
The bluff. The edge. The ocean beyond.
No!
Before she had time to think or reason or feel, Linny had already sprung so hard in Sayra’s direction that both of them—one wispy pale, one battered, brown, and solid—tripped over each other’s feet or over a lumpy bit of earth or who knows what, and they fell in a surprised heap of two to the ground.
32
COMPLICATIONS
“No! No! No!” Linny was shouting as she tried to pin the ghostly remnants of Sayra down, and Sayra—or the girl who had been Sayra, once long ago—wriggled inchwise toward the edge of the cliff, but already with just a little less conviction.
“What are you thinking, anyway?” said Linny, hanging on to her friend for dear life. “Don’t you even care that there are people that can’t stand losing you? Don’t you even care?”
The girl with the ocean in her eyes looked up with doubt.
“Who are you?” she asked, and it was a little bit like the wind speaking.
“I’m Linny, Linny, Linny—don’t you remember?” said Linny, almost as wild as that sea, and definitely grubbier. “I’m Linny, your friend, your mismatched twin. I told you to wait, and I know you tried. I know you tried. I went all the way down into the Plain to find a cure for you, because it was all my fault, and I, and I—”
Linny got a little stuck there, remembering the awfulness of that empty vial.
She had gone down into the Plain for medicines, and she had failed. She had brought nothing back. Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
For a long time she lay there, hanging on to the almost-nothing-at-all that used to be her twin and friend, and she cried and cried and cried into Sayra’s transparent and insubstantial shoulder. She had wanted so much to save her.
Then she lay there quietly with her eyes closed, sniffling a little, and dreamed of being a tiny child again, whose mother could make all the bad dreams go away, just by patting her on the back.
No, wait. Some faint hand really was patting her back, so gently it was almost nothing, almost just the breeze along the green bluff’s edge.
Linny lay there frozen, as still as could be. Ghosts might be like wild rabbits, she figured: hard to tame and quick to startle. I’ll lie here forever, she thought, and then eventually I’ll just open maybe the corner of one eye—
But that was when a strange yowling hiss split the air in half, so near by that Linny forgot everything else and sat bolt upright and wide-eyed, breathing hard.
“Oh!” said someone’s startled and familiar voice.
Just there to the left, the air had been torn, and through that impossible rip she could see the silver-golden face of the Half-Cat, hovering there in midair and midyowl.
“Help it! Oh!” pleaded that someone who sounded so much like Sayra.
And Linny, worn out, could not think of anything cleverer to do than to hold out the hand that was not holding on to Sayra and say, like any empty-headed fool, “Here, kitty kitty . . .”
Foolish as they were, the words worked like magic, just as if Linny had actually stepped forward and yanked the cat toward her by its mismatched ears. The Half-Cat suddenly tumbled forward, right into Away.
For the briefest of moments, there was half of a Half-Cat visible in the air—some tiny piece of Linny’s brain was amused by that—and then the cat, all of it, was rolling on the ground, hissing and spitting and clearly very unhappy.
When it rose to its feet, the fur on both its golden and its silver sides was standing straight up. For a moment it looked more like an enormous, skinny, multicolored hedgehog than a cat.
Then Linny noticed, with a quick jolt of alarm, that a rope was tied to its frizzed-out tail, and the rope ran up and away and vanished in thin air.
The ghost of Sayra was pointing a half-transparent hand toward the place where the Half-Cat had popped into the world and where the rope now vanished. “What?” she asked.
“You’re talking!” said Linny, but then she saw what Sayra had seen and fell silent, while her heart rattled and banged.
A hand had appeared out of nowhere, holding on to the rope. Around it, the air rippled and sparked.
For the smallest part of a second, she had thought Elias, but the hand was too long-fingered and pale to belong to him, so Elias’s name turned to ice in her mouth.
Now another hand joined the first, feeling its way along the thread. Around the hands, the air whined in protest, and then gave way, and a body pulled itself into Away, while the Half-Cat yowled, and while Linny and Sayra huddled together, watching in horror.
“What is that? Who is that?” said Sayra, her arm trembling under Linny’s hand.
“Shh,” said Linny, but she had already recognized the man who had torn his way so rudely into this place. It was, of course, the Tinkerman.
The Tinkerman was pushing himself up, a little shakily, from the ground. His eyes were wide and triumphant, but his breath was ragged.
“Away!” he was saying to himself. “Did I do it? Is this Away? The cat is there—”
Only then did he turn his head far enough to see Linny and Sayra.
“That girl!” he said. “That girl who led us in. Thought it would work! Cat always follows the girl. And here I am.” He seemed a little shell-shocked, but his cheeks were still unfairly ruddy, and his lungs unreasonably strong.
“He shouldn’t be here,” said the ghost of Sayra. She sounded uneasy.
“Quick, quick, quick, quick . . . ,” the Tinkerman was saying as he turned to grab something out of his shoulder bag. “No time to waste. I’m here, here, really here!”
He was already digging more of those needles out of his pack, and unreeling a length of wire. Now Linny could see the wire vanishing into the air, as the rope leading back from the Half-Cat had done.
He still looked strong and hearty, which made the rage in Linny boil again. “What do you think you’re doing? And what did you do to Elias?”
“Hush, girl,” said the Tinkerman. “The boy attacked me—I had to defend myself. And you’ve done your part already. You called the cat. It heard you singing; it heard you calling; it came.” He pounded one of his needles into the ground, and the earth trembled a little underfoot.
Next to Linny, Sayra gasped.
“Stop that!” said Linny to the Tinkerman. “I said, what are you doing? You can’t do your experiments here—it’s too dangerous.”
“Complexity, like water, flows downhill,” said Arthur Vix in a whispered singsong of a voice, and he tapped another needle into the ground, slightly closer to the edge of the bluff where Away looked out over the wild, wild sea. “Doesn’t it though? Doesn’t it though? Can’t you feel it?”
“He’s hurting the ground,” said the ghost of Sayra in a small voice at Linny’s elbow. The transparent silk blossom, which had tucked itself into Sayra’s equally transparent hair, fluttered a little, as if it had had a fright.
“Stop that!” said Linny again to that awful man, and something in her was getting so mad that she couldn’t help it; she took a great risk. She let go of Sayra’s half-transparent arm and ran across the springy turf of that bluff toward the Tinkerman and his needles and the machine made of copper wires and tubing that he was now fetching out of the depths of his backpack.
She hadn’t decided whether to grab the machine or try to shove him onto the ground, and in the millisecond before she made up her mind, Mr. Vix jumped out of the way and bounded a few yards closer to the edge of the bluff, bending slightly again, to pound another of his little stakes into the ground.
Under his breath ran a singsong hum: “Runs downhill! Runs downhill! And even the hills will be made Plain!”
“It’s burning,” said a whisper from where Sayra was still crouching, a few yards behind Linny’s back.
The ground was indeed smoking slightly, from each of the places where he had planted a stake. And the smell of the smoke was sour and bitter, both at once, as if someone had sliced rancid almonds very thin and was letting them burn. He had pounded in his last stake. He stood there, fastening the last wires to the strange machine in his hand.
“Now we’ll see!” he said. “Water conducts! Water conducts! When this hits the ocean, the circuit will close!”
“I won’t let you,” said Linny, slowly inching her way closer to the Tinkerman. She didn’t like the smoke seeping out of the ground, all of those places where the man’s needle stakes had pierced it. “Mina said . . . too dangerous . . . the universe . . . the soap bubble . . . it might all go po—”
But the Tinkerman didn’t wait for Linny to finish her thought or her sentence. He just turned his back to her and, with a great heaving throw, lobbed the machine right over the cliff. It arced up into the sky—almost lazily, at first, as if it were considering sprouting wings and spending the rest of its life in the air—and then plunged out of sight beyond the bluff, down toward the roiling, complicated sea.
33
OUCH!
For a moment no one moved. The Ti
nkerman’s thin wire hissed across the grass as the machine fell (the cliff must be taller than it looked), and the little puncture wounds where the stakes went into the turf of Away continued to send up their small tendrils of smoke, and everything and everyone was listening for the distant slap of a metal sphere, that might or might not bring the end of the world, hitting rocks or sand or the rolling surface of the sea.
Then the Half-Cat yowled and flung itself at the old man’s back. He had been watching his spherical machine plummet toward the water, and to get a good look he had gotten very close—very close—to the true edge of the cliff.
“Hey!” said Arthur Vix, his hands going all windmillish as he struggled to keep his balance in the place where the bluff came to its abrupt green end.
And then, as if the air or the sea had simply reached up and grabbed him, Arthur Vix slipped right over the edge, with the Half-Cat still clinging to him, and he was gone.
Gone!
The ghost of Sayra made a scared little sound.
But that whimper was drowned out by a dreadful commotion rising up from the sea—that awful machine must have finally reached the water—and the needles stuck into the ground twitched in response.
That was when Linny got her mind back, or some percentage of it. She dove to the ground, close to the edge of the bluff, and yanked out the nearest of those strange smoking needle stakes, but just as she did so a brilliant, sparkling, burning, dreadful brightness came up over the edge of the cliff, running along the wire, right toward her hand.
“Linny!” said the half-transparent Sayra.
Linny hardly had enough time even to brace herself before the strange fire was engulfing her hand.
It hurt like the dickens.
It hurt a lot.
It hurt.
But it wasn’t just pain. It also felt very odd. The hugeness of the ocean, the complexity of everything in Away, the wrinkledness of this part of the world—all of that was flooding into or over Linny.
It tickled at least as much as it hurt, and it made her gasp, and almost as soon as it broke over her, she felt she couldn’t stand it, not one second more. But she hung on anyway.