by Anne Nesbet
The world had become very large, and Linny felt almost as large as the world.
Even though the wire was narrow, a whole ocean’s worth of story and magic and complexity was coming along it, sucked up as if by a very thirsty straw, freed to—what was it the Tinkerman had kept saying? “Flow downhill.”
And only Linny blocked it: Linny, standing there with the little spike burning in her hand. Linny, with tears of pain and amazement rolling down her cheeks, because the essence of Away was wrinkling through her, trying to get past her, and she could only stand there and hold on, like the flimsiest dam of leaves and twigs she and Sayra used to make together in the woods above Lourka. She held on and said no. If she did not hold on, all of Away’s complicated magic would flow down this wire, flow right down into the Plain, and be used as power, to unmake the wrinkled places of the world.
Away fed itself through that wire and burned her hand trying to push itself through, and Linny stood her ground as well as she could. It was hopeless, of course. It was like trying to hold an ocean back with her arms. But in that long, hopeless moment, she caught a glimpse of what a wrinkled world really meant: every drop of what passed for water in that ocean, every blade of grass growing on that bluff, every inch of Away, was itself a universe, and contained universes. If you squinted at those drops of water properly, you saw that all the stories of the world were here, all the stories and all the songs.
Even the Voices were part of that richness, stories within stories—Linny saw that now, in this moment when she could see all the wrinkled sides of everything.
But it was too much. The world was spinning and her ears were ringing and black fireworks were going off before her eyes—
And then there was a sudden zip of a sound, and the wire went slack, and Linny, all that pressure released, found herself rolling across the bumpy, cool, grass-scented ground. For a moment she couldn’t see anything, and then the world began to form itself in front of her eyes.
Somewhere nearby, someone gasped.
“You’re hurt!” said that voice, an echo of Sayra’s real voice, quite close to Linny’s ear. And kind fingers (like the echo of real fingers) brushed across Linny’s arm.
“What happened?” said Linny. She felt like she had just fallen out of a tree.
“Oh, Linny, you’re hurt,” said the ghost, the echo, of Sayra. “Your poor hand.”
Her hand? One hand was pressed at an awkward angle into the ground. The other one she couldn’t feel at all.
“I think you closed the window,” said that voice. An echo, an echo, but an echo that could talk! “How did you even do that?”
Linny forced her eyes open. The ghost of Sayra was looking down at her, a pale and worried face that shifted suddenly, when Linny blinked, into the echo of a grin. For the tiniest moment, Linny let herself think they were back in the hills above Lourka, back in the familiar woods, and falling out of familiar trees. Then she heard the sound of waves crashing not so far away, and saw the sky shining through Sayra’s still-transparent shoulder, and she remembered where she was.
“What window?” she said, beginning to scramble back to her feet. And then: “Ow!”
Her right hand.
It had been numb until she tried to open it, and then it hurt so much she squeaked. She caught a glimpse of a dark slash across her palm, and then her hand was squeezing itself shut again against the pain.
“The wire burned you,” said the ghost of Sayra. “You stopped the fire. But that window in the sky you all came through—it’s gone.”
She waved a transparent hand over Linny’s shoulder, pointing away from the edge of the bluff.
Linny turned to look and saw . . . nothing.
There was no shimmering anymore of any invisible edge. The grass of the bluff went on back and back, under the strange trees.
She took a few steps toward where that edge, that window, had been, and the bizarre thing was, she felt no tugs in her, no whisper of direction anywhere. And for a moment, that made her feel dizzy and disoriented. They were truly stuck in Away, then.
And she had no idea at all which way might lead home.
She looked at the ghost of Sayra, which was watching her with those unreadable, ocean-filled eyes.
“Oh, Sayra,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I wanted so much to save you. I went all the way to the Plain Sea, at the other end of the world, looking for the medicines that would cure you—”
She was so unbelievably sorry. It was her fault Sayra had been taken off to Away, and she had tried so hard to make it right, and it had all come to nothing anyway, and she was sorry to the bone about all of it.
“I waited and waited,” said the ghost of Sayra. “And you came back!”
Linny looked at her again. It was the tone of voice that threw her for a moment. She was so miserable herself that she half expected Sayra, who was the one who had had to suffer all this lonely unraveling, to sound miserable, too. So it caught Linny by surprise, here at the end of hope and the end of the world, to hear that thrum of joy rising up under each one of Sayra’s words.
“You did! You came back!” said half-transparent Sayra, and something more human than ocean smiled out of her green, green eyes.
It’s not always what happens that is the most important thing. Sometimes it’s how you tell the story.
“Sayra—” said Linny in wonder. Something enormous had just shifted a little in her. Something defeated and bitter and hard had cracked and was beginning to crumble away.
And at that very moment, there came a crushed, charming racket from the bluff nearest them, and the most bedraggled Half-Cat ever in the universe hauled itself over the edge of the cliff. Its fur managed to look both singed and dripping wet (smoking and steaming, both at once). All in all the Half-Cat looked very much as you would expect a cat to look, that had gone flying over the edge of a cliff. But it limped up to Linny with its tail held gracefully high, and at Linny’s feet it paused to make some gagging, retching sounds until it spat up a mass of little shards of metal.
The Half-Cat must have bitten through the old man’s awful wire. If Linny had had to hold on much longer, the whole of her would probably have been as burned and blackened as her poor hand.
Linny looked at it and felt that enormous shift continuing to happen in her. In her, and in all the world.
“You fell off the cliff!” she said to the Half-Cat. “I thought you must be squashed or drowned.”
“Only eight lives left,” said the ghost of Sayra, and she actually laughed.
“Not nearly that many,” said Linny. “That Tinkerman did some terrible things to this cat.”
“Six, then,” said the ghost of Sayra, and she scratched it kindly with one of her transparent hands. The Half-Cat let her do it, too.
I’m stuck in Away with a Half-Cat and a half Sayra, thought Linny, looking up and down the bluff as she did so. It was so odd, not knowing which way to go. That part of her was muffled, or gone, or blind.
“Well,” she said to the ghost of Sayra. “I guess we better get moving, if we’re ever going to find our way home.”
The ghost of Sayra smiled willingly and took the lightest of steps forward, but the wind came swooping in to catch her and float her right away. Linny grabbed that transparent arm in the nick of time.
“I’ll have to carry you,” said Linny. She could see she was going to have to be selfish about this. And stubborn. Because one thing was clear—sorry, ocean!—she was not letting Sayra go.
The ghost of your best friend in the world turns out to weigh almost nothing. Linny cradled the half-transparent Sayra as easily in her arms as if she were made of air and light, which perhaps she sort of was, and the ghost of Sayra tucked her head cozily against Linny’s shoulder, not minding too much, apparently, about the ocean.
“Tell me a story,” said Sayra drowsily. “How you went all that way . . . down to the Plain—”
“Because it was my turn to save you. Don’t you remember? That wolf you fo
ught off! Then the snake bit you—my turn—and then I fell right out of the tree. And you carried me all the way home from the woods. How’d you even do that? So, my turn now.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” said Sayra, shifting her nonweight in Linny’s arms. “I sewed you that wolf once.”
“Look,” said Linny, and she balanced the ghost of Sayra in the crook of her right arm for a moment, so she could fish around in her pocket with her unwounded hand. The birthday sash was there where it had been all along, a little battered, perhaps, but you could still read the pictures there: wolf, snake, tree.
“Oh, but that tree looks like a cabbage on a stick!” said Sayra. “I remember now. And I worked so hard on the wolf. The legs of the wolf. It’s not right. It’s not quite right.”
“It’s perfect,” said Linny.
The ghost of Sayra turned the sash over and over in her hands, and then she reached up and tied it with her nimble, fragile fingers around Linny’s head, so she could see the embroidered pictures on it even while resting against Linny’s shoulder there.
“Then what happened?” she said.
So Linny walked along the bluffs, holding Sayra in her arms, while she told the whole story, how she went down into the Plain and to the other end of the world to look for medicine for Sayra, and the Tinkerman had swallowed the antidote . . .
“But I waited and you came back to me,” added Sayra, with a sleepy smile, “and then . . .”
And then the Half-Cat had gone over the cliff but somehow climbed back up to them again.
“And then . . .”
And then they walked and walked along the green bluffs at the end of the world.
“And then . . .”
And then they walked so far they finally, finally found their way home.
Stories can remake the world.
“Again!” said the ghost of Sayra, as greedy as one of the twins. “Tell it again!”
So Linny shifted her over to the other shoulder and told the whole story all over again, leaving nothing out, not the labyrinth, not the crown that she had found and then given away to the crowd to keep safe, not even the tomatoes on the way to the Plain Sea, and when she got back to them walking along the green bluffs of Away until finally, finally they found their way home, Sayra smiled and said the exact same thing, pummeling Linny a little, just to make the point, with one of her not-very-solid fists. “Again!”
And they went on that way for almost ever, telling and retelling the story, and eventually Sayra got too heavy for Linny’s arms, and she had to put her down, but that was all right now, and they walked on along those endless bluffs, hand in hand, and under their feet a path formed in the world . . .
Until finally—
“Again!”
Finally—
“Again!”
They found their way—
Sayra and Linny saw it both at the same moment: the path brightening as if someone had thrown a door wide open. And they squeezed each other’s hands and grinned mischief at each other and ran forward, singing out the end of the story as a glorious, mismatched chord:
“HOME
AGAIN!”
34
HOME AGAIN
Going through the door that led back into the world was like running into an enormous spiderweb in the air: it resisted, resisted, resisted. But Linny was stubborner than the air, and a moment later something had given way with a pop, and she had hit a different, rockier patch of ground with a splintering thud.
“Ouch!” said the ground. And the nearest tree hissed like a cat.
Because (Linny saw as she groggily pushed herself upright) the Half-Cat was clinging to that tree with its battered claws, and the ground that Linny had plummeted into was not ordinary leaf-and-turf ground at all, but rather Elias, who looked shocked as he scrabbled backward to get away from the person who had just clobbered him.
“What?” he said. “Linny! How’d you—”
But it wasn’t Elias Linny was worried about.
The Half-Cat was through; Linny had come through; where was—
“Can you please scootch off my leg?” said Sayra, and indeed, there she was. Sayra, herself, and not a ghost, pushing Linny off her ankle and grinning at everything in the world.
“Well, how about that!” said Elias. “This time I seem to have gone and rescued you both!”
“You rescued us?” said Linny. She was feeling very bruised and sore; the splintering sound when she landed had come from the bag with the lourka in it, and her hand was now throbbing with the sort of pain that makes your ears ring. She opened her mouth to say something sarcastic, and then she remembered Elias tackling the Tinkerman, and she snapped her mouth right back shut again.
Which was just as well, because when she looked again, there was light dancing in Elias’s eyes and actual tears on his eyelashes, and she saw, as any more reasonable person would have seen right away, that of course he had been kidding, about the rescuing thing.
She was so very glad he was alive, despite the Tinkerman’s darts.
“Is that Elias?” said Sayra, and then she shook herself. “He looks strange.”
She turned around and looked at Linny.
“So do you. You’re both sort of stretched out and ragged. What did they do to you? You look older. You both look older.”
She looked around at the tiny, very wrinkled valley, where red, feathery leaves were falling through the air like glowing ashes, and her eyes narrowed.
“What happened to me? How long was I gone?”
“Too long,” said Elias. “I mean, actually I have no idea how long it’s been. The Tinkerman jabbed me with one of his sleep needles, so I lost a bunch of time. And then I was looking for you up here—seemed like forever.”
He paused, and then smiled, a very sweet smile, without even a dash of lummox in it.
“So I guess we’re all a little older than we were.”
“And hungrier!” said Linny. “Aren’t you hungry, all of a sudden? Let’s go home.”
For a long moment Sayra and Elias just stood there staring at her.
“Don’t you know what that means, home?” said Linny again. “What’s wrong with you two?”
“You’ll have to show us the way, you know,” said Sayra gently.
So Linny took their hands and led them down the wrinkled valleys until they came to a bend in the hills that was already softer than the tight twists and strange turns near the edge of Away, and there below them were the familiar roofs of Lourka.
The sun was low in the sky, and they had to shade their eyes to look down at the village.
“Look!” whispered Sayra, tugging on Linny’s arm.
A woman (very tiny indeed, from this distance) had just come around the corner of the house at the top of the village and was beckoning to someone—to two medium-little boys, running around like wild things, out there in the center of the lower meadow. Just the way that woman moved her hand through the air was as familiar to Linny as her own heartbeat.
And then she turned and looked up the slope, for all the world as if she had heard Sayra’s whisper, which was impossible. She gazed right up the hill at them, and a gulp of a sob hiccuped its way out of Linny’s throat.
The woman didn’t even wave, exactly. She turned toward them, and straightened up in recognition, and held out her arms.
That’s what joy looks like! If anyone ever asks you, now you know: it’s your own mother standing at the end of the lower meadow, still quite far away, holding out her arms to welcome you home.
They were all running down the hill by this point, even the Half-Cat, though, being a cat, it was trying to make its run look leisurely, unhurried, engaged in by choice.
The wrinkled country must have wriggled itself a little to make the path down the hill shorter than usual. After all that long way, it was only a few seconds until Linny was in the fierce, strong arms of her mother, and the people of Lourka gathering all around.
35
&nb
sp; GIRL WITH LOURKA
In the wrinkled parts of the world, people know how stories shape everything, so of course when the three children who had gone off to Away came dancing down out of the hills again, there was not only rejoicing. There was a pulling up of chairs and stools and a leaning in of the happy crowds and a posing of the old, powerful demand.
“Tell us what happened!”
They brought food, of course, as well as chairs, not to mention bandages for Linny’s poor wounded hand (she impressed the twins with that black stripe across her palm), and they set everything up very comfortably on the village green, and the littlest children ran about in the grass, trying to catch blue and pink and brightest-gold fireflies with their pudgy hands.
Sayra sat on her mother’s lap, her arms around her mother’s neck. Her mother was still too much in the grip of shock and joy to say much in her own right, but the neighbors said what had been left of Sayra had finally faded completely away, just some hours before. That very day. And Sayra’s poor mother had slipped to the floor, as if she, too, could think of nothing better to do than to fade away . . . only that was when the shouts had come from outside her cottage, and when she had opened her door—
But words alone have trouble with such things.
Each one of the three who had come down out of the wrinkled hills told the story as it had played out for her or for him, and the villagers hung on every word. They wanted to know more about Away, which was the strangeness that was nearest to them, and they were very curious, too, about the people, like Linny’s aunt, who lived out their lives down on the Plain. And there was much headshaking and worry about the way the two halves of the Broken City kept trying to do harm to each other.
“Madji and Surveyors!” said Elias’s mother in disgust. “Madmen and surlyfaces, more like!”
But they liked the description of the Bridge House (Linny’s mother turned her head away, though, and Linny remembered that that was the house her own mother had grown up in, so long ago); they approved of the fair; they admired the wrinkled/machine-driven Half-Cat, frizzle-frazzled though it was by its encounter with the old man’s dreadful wire. It wound through the legs of the crowd, showing off its gorgeous, bedraggled halfness, and pretending not to need or notice human beings of any kind.