by Juman Malouf
Alexandria pulled a matchbox out of her coat. She slid it open and shook out a handful of tiny cocoons. A flock of little insects with wings emerged, buzzing and hovering. Their tails glowed brightly, illuminating a long tunnel ahead. The walls were smeared with garbage, and dirty water dripped from the rusty ceiling. The smell of trash filled the air.
Charlotte pinched her nose. “Are we in a sewer?”
“I thought you’d be used to the smell, living in the Outskirts,” remarked Alexandria. She jumped down. Her boots landed on the metal floor with a heavy twang. The sound reverberated. She stood over Sonja, examining her bloody ankle. “Hold on a second.” She pulled out a tooth from the wound. “Strange,” she muttered.
Sonja scrunched her face in pain. “That hurts!”
Alexandria dropped the tooth into her coat pocket and took out an old tin flask. She swigged a gulp and gasped. “I hate to waste this stuff.” She poured half the flask’s contents over Sonja’s open wound. It sizzled and bubbled. Sonja yelped. Charlotte squeezed her hand.
Alexandria yanked off Sonja’s jacket, wrapped it three times around her wounded ankle, and knotted it tight. Sonja whimpered pathetically.
“Try to be gentler.” Charlotte snapped at Alexandria.
Alexandria sighed deeply and climbed back onto Moritz’s back. Moritz followed the lightning bugs down the tunnel. Rats scurried past his hooves as he splashed through dark puddles.
A flickering orange light appeared up ahead. Moritz shook his mane and huffed.
“Tunnel People,” murmured Alexandria. “Slow down, Moritz.”
At the center of a junction with another massive drainpipe, a little tribe was huddled around a fire. The men jolted to their feet with spears in their hands. The women stopped turning skewers of hairy rats. The children stared, frozen. They were sweaty and covered in dirt, and their clothes hung off their scrawny bodies. Charlotte had seen people in miserable places before, but never as miserable as this.
The people were dead silent and dead still as Moritz trotted through the camp, and they did not stir again until the intruders were a great distance away.
“Next time we cross paths with a family of starving homeless people,” Alexandria said, fumbling for something in her pocket, “try not to look so shocked. It’s insulting.” She pulled out a half-smoked cigarette and inhaled. The tip lit up by itself.
“Smoking turns your lungs black,” Charlotte retorted.
Alexandria took another puff and looked away.
Charlotte frowned. Alexandria did not say much, and what she did say, she said rudely. It was just their luck to be stuck with her.
A circle of night sky appeared at the end of the tunnel ahead of them. They caught a faint sniff of fresh air. They emerged from the pipe onto the side of a hill overgrown with nettles. It overlooked a wide, murky swamp. Bits of trash bobbed up and down on its surface.
Alexandria handed them each a snail shell from her pocket. “These are for breathing.”
Sonja sat up anxiously. “Breathing?”
An instant later, they were descending the hill at a full gallop. Moritz gathered momentum with every step. Blood rushed through his thick veins, and the ground churned under his hooves. At the edge of the swamp, he leapt broadly, pedaling his legs in the air. Sonja screamed. Charlotte pressed her eyes shut as they crashed into the water.
Everything went silent around them. A stinging cold soaked through their clothes. Charlotte struggled for breath and remembered the shell clenched in her fist. She pressed it to her mouth. A thick slug slithered out, clamped onto her lips, and blew air down her throat. Gross, she thought. She looked to Sonja. She was sucking on her own shell.
They both looked to Alexandria. Strangely, she did not seem to need anything to breathe.
Moritz pulled them deeper. The lightning bugs flew alongside them, illuminating floating plastic bags, empty cans, and a headless doll. Schools of silver fish with needle-sharp teeth nibbled on the garbage. They broke it up into minuscule pieces, which smaller fish with skinny, pencil-like bodies and long snouts snorted up and flushed out through their gills in a watery mist.
Charlotte looked all around as darting bodies glittered and glowed, as metallic scales, striped and dotted, whizzed to and fro. A box-shaped fish hovered, staring curiously at her with its flat black eyes. She had never seen a living fish before.
A rumble shook the swamp. The fish scattered all at once. Out of the darkness, a powerful undertow pulled Moritz like a vacuum.
“Hold on!” gurgled Alexandria. The lightning bugs zipped back into her pocket.
The current whipped the twins off Moritz’s back and sucked them into an abyss. They swung their arms and kicked their legs, but they could not fight the powerful current. A handful of fish were swept up with them, and they tumbled together deeper and deeper into the cold, dodging old shoes, broken bottles, and a bicycle wheel spinning in the fray.
Charlotte’s wide eyes searched all around in the dimming light. If they drowned, maybe their mother and father would dream about them: two girls drifting, ragged, underwater like a pair of identical seaweeds.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Underwater
THE CURRENT DELIVERED SONJA INTO A COLD EDDY. Her jacket tourniquet had come loose. Her leg ached. She had lost sight of Charlotte a few seconds earlier. Panic set in. Where was Alexandria? Why didn’t she try to save them?
Two cloudy figures appeared over her. Sonja could barely make out their blurry features, but they were reaching out to her. Whispered voices in her ears said: “We never stopped wanting you back.”
Sonja’s eyes widened. She reached out to the man and the woman—but her trembling fingers found, instead, the end of a dangling rope dancing in the swirling water. She gripped it, and it pulled her hard and fast. She looked back over her shoulder for the figures, but there was only a watery cloud of nothing behind her.
A moment later, shafts of light split the darkness. Sonja looked up to see Moritz’s legs paddling above. The water was clear and blue. Just as she began to puzzle out the question about which direction she was going and where the bottom of the swamp might be, she burst through the surface and into the fresh air.
The shell dropped from her mouth. She gasped for air and treaded water. The sun shone on her face. There was birdsong in her ears. The smell of leaves and earth and mushrooms filled her nostrils.
They were in the middle of a lake, in broad daylight, surrounded by gigantic ancient trees. Everything was green—green moss, green leaves, green ferns. Even a green mist filled the air.
Sonja knew the place immediately. It was tattooed on Tatty’s skin.
“The Forlorn Forest,” muttered Charlotte, suddenly beside her. “It’s more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.”
Within an ancient forest,
Stalks a Changeling among the trees.
First a man, then a beast, either shape he’d like to be.
With two lives to be liv’d he growls, “You’ll never conquer me!”
A voice yelled from shore. “I told you to hold on!” Alexandria stood with her hands on her hips. Her hair was unraveled. It fell past the ground and disappeared into the lake. Sonja realized the rope she was holding was actually a fifty-foot-long braid of Alexandria’s hair.
Alexandria reeled it in as Charlotte helped her sister to shore, and Moritz followed. He collapsed next to them on the mossy bank. Out of the water, Alexandria’s hair seemed to magically shrink. She pinned it up haphazardly and knelt down beside Sonja.
“Why are we here?” asked Charlotte. “I thought we were supposed to meet Uncle Tell in the Land Where the Plants Reign.”
“We’re picking up a friend along the way. We need help.”
“But he’ll be waiting for us. We’re in the wrong place. I don’t understand.”
Alexandria stared at Charlotte. �
��Let’s just assume I know what I’m doing, Sonja. At all times.”
“She’s Sonja. I’m Charlotte.”
“I saw our parents, I think,” Sonja murmured. “In the water.”
“You were hallucinating,” said Alexandria. “You must be sensitive to the Pathways. It happens.” She examined Sonja’s ankle. It was blue and swollen. “That doesn’t look good.”
Sonja rubbed her eyes. Her vision dimmed. Was she going blind? Maybe it was worse. What if she was dying? She grabbed Alexandria’s wrist. “Am I going to die?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Charlotte.”
“Once again. She’s Sonja. I’m Charlotte.”
“That’s not important.”
“Of course it is. They’re our names.”
“Come on, Moritz,” ordered Alexandria. “There’s no time to lose.”
Moritz’s legs wobbled as he stood up. Alexandria lifted the twins onto his back and climbed up in front of them. Sonja sat in the middle. “It’s your turn to wear the locket.”
Charlotte said softly, “You can wear it for another day.”
Moritz strode among the giant, towering trees. Their branches and leaves shaded and dappled the underbrush. Burly roots roped the forest floor. Creaking wood echoed as the high trunks swayed in the wind.
“It sounds like the trees are whispering to one another,” Sonja said. She imagined they were tiny beings traveling across Tatty’s skin. The thought comforted her. “What do they look like?”
“A thousand years old. Each one’s as wide as our caravan. The ground is covered in furry green moss. There are mushrooms everywhere.”
A herd of antelope with brilliant blue coats and tall spiral horns burst out of the foliage. They froze when they saw the strangers, and blinked their almond-shaped eyes.
Charlotte gasped. “Blue Bucks! A dozen of them! Just like on Tatty’s shoulder!”
Sonja knew the ones.
A whoosh of air fluttered through Charlotte’s hair. She looked up. A flock of tiny emerald-green birds circled a tree netted with blooming vines and dipped their long, thin beaks into the centers of purple trumpet-shaped flowers. Their fast-beating wings whirred like miniature motors.
“Sweet Dippers!” Charlotte exclaimed. “They’re like little flying jewels.”
Sonja smiled. “The birds strung around Tatty’s neck.”
Charlotte nodded enthusiastically. “And over there!” She pointed to the middle distance through a gap in the trees. A pack of yellow dogs with black stripes down their backs chased one another in a clearing. “Burrup Hounds!”
Sonja could almost smell Tatty’s vanilla scent as she remembered the playful animals pictured running across her chest.
Alexandria groaned. “Can’t you two do this in your heads or something? I thought twins were telepathic.”
“You say that every time we see you,” complained Charlotte. “The answer’s always the same: no, we’re not telepathic!”
“Who knows? You might be someday. Want to bet on it?”
“I don’t gamble.”
Alexandria shrugged. “Too bad. You’re missing one of the joys in life.”
Moritz followed the path of a wide, winding river. Its banks were littered with plump red birds preening their small, useless wings with large, hooked beaks. He waded into the shallows of the river. The tops of the twins’ shoes made stripes through the green algae. A fish with wings somersaulted out of the river and dove back in again. The water deepened, and Moritz began to kick and paddle.
Up ahead, a wooded island split the river in two. When he reached its edge, Moritz leapt up onto the shore and clip-clopped up a narrow path.
Alexandria slid to the ground and walked alongside Moritz and the twins.
The trees on the island were short and wide. Their leaves were black and shaped like little crowns. Woven sacks hung from their trunks and collected a thick amber liquid that oozed out of cracks in the bark. Insect traps were scattered all over the underbrush and buried in the crooks of branches. High up in the canopy above, they saw tree houses with bridges and ladders connecting them.
They emerged into a bright clearing and stood in the center of a ring of trees. The only sound was the current circling the island.
“Changelings of the Forlorn Forest!” Alexandria cried out. “We come to ask for your help!”
There was a spontaneous chorus of howling, growling, and barking. A large stag trotted out from the trees, followed by a black wolf with green eyes.
The stag stopped in front of Alexandria and lowered his enormous headdress of antlers. A scar marked his forehead, and a large amber pendant hung around his neck. Bears, foxes, and porcupines left their hiding places and approached behind the stag.
Alexandria grinned. “You sure know how to make an entrance, Staghart.”
The stag’s nostrils flared as he sniffed Alexandria’s hair. He frowned. “Still smoking those city-sticks? I know it’s hard to break human habits, but they’ll kill you in the end.” He looked at the girls with gentle brown eyes. “These must be the daughters of the Key. Smaller than I expected.”
Alexandria lifted Sonja off the horse and helped her down to the leaf-strewn ground. “This one was bitten by a hyena,” she said. “The wound’s infected.”
Sonja could only see shadows now. “It’s all right,” Sonja heard her sister whisper. “I’m right here.”
Charlotte’s voice sounded miles away. Other distant voices spoke. Sonja could not make out the words. What if Alexandria was lying? What if she really was dying? She squinted, looking for her sister. Spotlights cut through the darkness. She was back at the circus. She stood alone in the ring in front of a large audience. She looked down at her hands, but they were empty. Where was her flute? In fact, where were her fingers? They seemed to have fallen off.
Staghart turned to the black wolf standing next to him. “Get some brew and a bowl of ointment.”
“Yes, sir,” said the wolf, and dashed into the trees.
The stag lowered his head and studied the teeth marks that circled Sonja’s ankle like a bracelet. “That’s a nasty one.”
Alexandria pulled out the tooth from her coat pocket. “It was stuck in her leg.”
“Looks more like a dog’s tooth than a hyena’s.”
Sonja was floating above the circus tent into a thick white sky. She stared down at the caravans below. There was Tatty and Uncle Tell and Charlotte. She tried to shout to them, but her voice was a raspy whisper. She trembled, and said to herself, Where am I going?
A black figure rose up through the mist, flying toward her. He cocked his hat and grinned. “I want you to meet Mother,” he crooned. “She’s a real darling.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Staghart and the Changelings
CHARLOTTE CROUCHED OVER HER SISTER. SONJA’S FACE WAS pale. A thin blue film lined her lips. Charlotte pressed her ear against her sister’s chest. “Sonja’s heart,” she said, barely audible. “It’s beating so slowly.”
A big-boned teenaged boy knelt beside Charlotte. He looked to be about thirteen. He was wrapped in a fur cloak the same brownish-red as the hair that flopped in his face. “Don’t worry, Charlotte, she’ll be fine.”
“Who are you?” Charlotte asked, alarmed.
The boy gave her a confused look. “I’m Moritz. You rode on my back for the last few hours.” He rotated his shoulders. “I’m gonna feel it for days.”
Charlotte stared in stunned silence. “You’re a Changeling?” she finally asked.
“We all are,” said Staghart. His snout shrank into his face. The bones shifted underneath his skin, and his fur began to recede into its follicles. Charlotte looked up as the other Changelings began to transform. Arms grew out of legs. Necks grew out of chests. Feet grew out of ankles. Ears shrank, eyes narrowed, mouths lengthened. Blood ran down newly formed
fingers and mouths as nails and teeth emerged. Coats became capes over naked bodies.
The animals were transforming into humans right before their eyes.
Charlotte had learned about the Changelings. She knew they had two forms: human and animal. She knew they had two lives. She knew they ate bugs and lived in the Forlorn Forest. What she had never thought about was what it would be like to see them make the change. She felt a little sick. She stumbled.
“Are you all right?” asked Moritz.
“I don’t feel well,” she muttered, and then promptly fainted.
After a few minutes, Charlotte snapped open her eyes, startled. Thirty human faces stared down at her.
“See what I’ve been dealing with?” complained Alexandria. “Both of them out cold at once.”
Staghart’s antlers crossed against his chest like a breastplate, and his ragged fur hung over his old, muscular body. He had white hair and a creased olive face. “I remember when you first came to the Edens,” he chuckled, kneeling. “You were scared of your own shadow.”
“Can’t stand humans,” groused a teenager draped in a cape of peacock feathers.
A girl in a silky black fox coat frowned. “Me neither.”
Staghart helped Charlotte sit up. She kept her eyes lowered. How had they already made enemies? They had only just arrived.
Staghart patted her shoulder. “Don’t let them bother you. They’re just puffing-up their chests.” He turned to Sonja. “Now, let’s see about your sister.”
A boy with scruffy black hair and green eyes pushed through the other Changelings. He carried two wooden bowls stacked on top of each other. He handed them to Staghart and crouched on the ground beside him.
Charlotte eyed the boy. He looked a little older than the twins. He had strong features and caramel-colored skin. His eyes were striking: two smoky-green emeralds. Charlotte turned away and held on to Jack Cross’ pin. She would not fall in love with another boy, however handsome he was.