“‘Carriage’?” I asked.
“Sorry.” Eliana looked back at Hanna for help. “What did you call it?”
“It’s a Jeep,” Hanna supplied.
“Yeah, sorry, I’m not fully adapted to your vernacular.” Eliana went over and sat down beside Hanna again. “We don’t have Jeeps where I come from.”
I cast a glance over at Dagny, whose expression of confused skepticism mirrored my own. When I looked back at Eliana, I tried to keep my voice neutral, casual, and I sat down on the battered old recliner. “Do you have cars?”
Eliana nodded rapidly. “We have a few steam-powered carriages, yeah.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly.” Eliana shook her head, and over her shoulder I saw Dagny rolling her eyes. “It’s far away, and I can’t remember how to get back there, so it doesn’t really matter.”
“Don’t you want to get back home?” I pressed. “I’m sure you have family or friends who miss you and are worried about you.”
“Of course I do,” Eliana agreed with a shrug. “Or I presume that I do. I seem likable enough that at least someone would miss me.”
“Yeah, I like you,” Hanna piped up.
Eliana grinned at her. “So, yes, I do.”
“Don’t you want to contact them to let them know you’re okay? Do you want to check in and see how they’re doing?” I asked.
“Not really.” Eliana shook her head again. “Since I don’t remember them, I don’t have anything to miss.”
“Um . . . okay?” I didn’t know how to reply to that, so I fumbled to come at the topic from another angle. “Don’t you have a mom?”
“That is a thornier answer, because I can’t say that I know one way or the other,” Eliana said, sounding unruffled about the whole thing. “But all living beings that I know of have some kind of parent—every flower started as a seed from another flower.”
Then she tilted her head, squinting up at the ceiling as she considered it more. “Although, I suppose if you go back to the beginning of time, eventually there had to be something that existed before everything else, but all that is to say, which came first, the morning or the night?”
“Okay, well, I . . . I didn’t expect things to get so philosophical,” I said.
“Buckle up, because that’s all you get from her,” Dagny said to me, speaking as if Eliana weren’t right there listening to us. “Try and ask her anything. The most basic question you can imagine. And she’ll give you that weird riddle and dance.”
Now it was Eliana’s turn to look confused, her smooth tawny skin wrinkling. “That wasn’t a riddle, and I’m not dancing.”
“You don’t have family back home,” I said, doing my best to figure out who—or what—exactly Eliana was.
“No, I didn’t say that,” she corrected me politely. “I said that I don’t know who they are and I don’t know how to reach them, so why does it matter?”
“Right, okay, sorry,” I said. “What about here, then? Do you have friends? Where are you staying?”
“Of course I have friends.” Eliana motioned to Hanna. “Hanna is my friend.”
“Anybody else?” I pressed.
“Yes, Zinnia,” she replied. “Zinnia sells reasonably priced cloth diapers and cloudberry jam.”
“Because those are things that go together, obviously,” Dagny muttered under her breath. She stood at my shoulder, as if egging me on to prove that Eliana was . . . different? Lying? Dangerous?
“How long have you known Zinnia?” I asked.
“Hmm.” Eliana thought for a second. “Almost as long as I’ve been here.”
“Okay, how long have you been here?”
“Um, maybe . . . two or three times as long as I’ve known Hanna.”
“So, what is that?” I paused, doing quick math in my head. “Six days? Ten days? Somewhere in between?”
Eliana nodded. “Yes, that sounds fair.”
Dagny scoffed. “To which one?”
“One of them,” Eliana said. “It was almost certainly one of them. Or maybe a little more or a little less.”
“I don’t mean this to sound harsh, because I’m really trying to understand here,” I said as gently as I could. “Are you deliberately being this obtuse?”
“How do you mean?” Eliana asked, innocently enough.
“I told you,” Dagny said, her voice lilting in a singsong way.
“Do you understand how to tell time?” I asked Eliana.
“Of course I do. First it’s light, then it’s dark, and when it gets light again, that’s another day.”
“You guys, stop grilling her,” Hanna interjected plaintively. “She’s confused, and you’re making it worse.”
“No, they’re fine. I swear,” Eliana insisted with a smile. “You’ll know when I’m annoyed, and I’m as happy as a duzee.”
“When it gets dark, where do you sleep?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t sleep much when it’s dark. This place has very intense vibrations, and in the dark they seem so much more mercurial.”
“Mercurial?”
“I don’t know.” Her brow furrowed again. “Uncertain? Unsafe? When you’re walking through the forest, and you know that somewhere in the trees, a kuguar is watching, stalking you. You can’t see it, and you know you can’t hide, but you can’t be sure which way to run.”
“‘Kuguar’?” I repeated.
“I think she means cougar,” Hanna suggested.
“The really big cat with velvety dark brown and honey patches.” Eliana held her hands several feet up, indicating a cat at least as large as a golden retriever.
“Could be a cougar,” I agreed.
“Could be a leopard,” Dagny suggested.
Hanna gave us both an irritated glare. “I don’t think it really matters to the story.”
“Let’s circle back.” I folded a leg underneath me and leaned toward Eliana. “If you don’t sleep in the dark, do you sleep in the day?”
“I usually climb up to the roofs and I nap when the sun is at its warmest.”
“Why roofs?” I asked.
“It’s safer in the trees,” Eliana said, like the answer should be obvious.
“Where you are from are there lots of dangerous big cats and kuguars around?”
“Are you a cat?” Dagny asked, with a level of such seriousness and intensity that I had to struggle not to laugh.
Hanna rolled her eyes. “She’s obviously not a cat.”
“Maybe it was a body-swapping spell or something,” Dagny persisted, undeterred. “I don’t know what kind of magical experimentation goes on at the Mimirin.”
“I’m not a cat, and as far as I know, I never was one,” Eliana assured us.
“As far as you know,” Dagny echoed.
Hanna threw her hands up in frustration. “She’s not a cat!”
“What do you do for fun?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood some.
“Oh, today we had so much fun!” Eliana clapped her hands. “We checked out all the vendors, and Hanna bought some food. We had the most delicious little cherry tomatoes!”
“Actually, they were just cherries, but they were really tasty,” Hanna corrected her.
“Then we watched the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen! It was like this electronic play—”
“Television show,” Hanna supplied again.
“Right, show. The colors were so bright, and everyone was so beautiful, and the music was beyond anything I’d ever heard. Everything that happened was all so . . . visceral.”
“It was Riverdale,” Hanna explained once Eliana had finished her effusive praise. “I downloaded the series on my laptop before we left, so I’d have something to watch at my grandparents’, and that worked out for me, since we have zero Wi-Fi here.”
“You should have her watch Planet Earth episodes,” I said. “That’ll blow her mind.”
“What’s that?” Eliana asked.
“It�
��s a nature documentary that shows real footage and close-ups of the plants and animals on Earth in ways that we don’t usually get to see them,” Hanna elaborated.
“What’s Earth?” Eliana asked.
For a moment we were all speechless, Dagny, Hanna, and I sharing a series of very uneasy, bewildered looks.
“Where . . .” I took a fortifying breath. “Where do you think we are?”
“Isn’t this your apartment?” Eliana looked around. “Hanna told me it was.”
“No, yeah, this is, but I mean, what do you think is outside of the apartment?” I asked.
“The city of Merellä?”
“And what’s beyond that?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Some water and some trees. Probably.”
“What is it that we live on?” Dagny asked, trying to be more specific. “The dirt ball beneath everything? What do you call the world?”
“Oh, that’s easy. Why didn’t you ask?” Eliana grinned. “It’s Adlrivellir.”
22
Helping
An hour later, after many, many circular bouts of conversation, we hadn’t really learned much of anything about Eliana. As best we could gather, she had simply appeared here sometime between a week and a week and a half ago. She believed that she came here for a reason, but she couldn’t remember what it was.
Despite all that, she was utterly convinced that she’d find what she was looking for and that all of this would work out fine for her.
Then, somewhat abruptly, she’d declared that she’d had enough talking and she wanted to go into the city. We’d tried to talk her into staying, but we weren’t about to hold her hostage, so we had to let her leave.
“You guys!” Hanna whirled on me and Dagny the second she closed the door behind Eliana. “You scared her away!”
“We did not!” Dagny sounded genuinely offended. “She left because she was done hanging out here. She didn’t seem at all flustered by us.”
“Yeah, you said she seemed scared before too, but that’s not the vibe I got from her,” I chimed in. “She seemed really relaxed. It could be because she was so spacey, but she genuinely didn’t seem to mind talking to us.”
Hanna’s anger was immediately replaced with an excited smile. “So you liked her?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I answered as carefully as I could.
“Well, what did you think of her?” Hanna asked, her eyes bouncing between me and Dagny.
This was not the first time I’d seen Hanna react this way. Such as three springs ago, when she found an injured fawn in the forest that she had to nurse back to health. Or last fall, when a changeling came home early and Hanna immediately took her under her wing and became her best friend. Heck, even six weeks ago, when a bird’s nest fell out of a tree in a storm, Hanna set the little robin nestlings up in her room.
Hanna loved to rescue things. Even if she usually ended up way over her head and needed her parents and me to step in and sort things out. Especially with the baby birds—that ended up being a brutal three weeks, but two of the three babies survived long enough to fly away, so I considered that a win.
Usually Hanna gravitated to adorable, helpless animals, and I guess Eliana did seem to sort of check those boxes. Plus, she had the added bonus of being mysterious, fun, and exotic, and she’d shown up just when Hanna was wasting away from boredom. “I don’t know what to think,” I replied honestly.
“I don’t know about the dream girl, but she’s definitely got the manic pixie part down,” Dagny muttered, and I laughed, drawing a glare from Hanna.
“What do you think she is? Really?” Hanna asked.
“Honestly?” Dagny puffed out her cheeks as she exhaled. “My money would be on either some type of dissociative disorder or an extraterrestrial.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on, she can’t be an alien.”
“Why not?” Hanna asked.
“It seems far more likely that it’s something we’ve already had evidence of—like a psychological disorder or something,” I said. “Or it could be a mutation or even a new manifestation of some of the psychokinetic abilities trolls usually have.”
Dagny seemed to consider this for a few seconds before saying, “We also can’t rule out the third possibility. That she’s messing with us for fun.”
“That doesn’t explain her otherworldly hair,” Hanna argued.
I scoffed. “You’re pushing your alien bias now.”
“No, she could have really high-quality wigs,” Dagny said.
“For wigs that nice, the price would be very high,” I said, causing both of them to give me odd looks. “What? In middle school, I toyed with shaving my head and going with wigs, but the cost of a really nice one plus the shipping up to Iskyla was murder, so I stayed au naturel.”
“Oh, but you have such nice hair,” Hanna said with a sympathetic frown.
“Thank you,” I said, then cleared my throat. “We can’t agree on what exactly Eliana is, but I do think we can all agree that she is most likely an alien, a lying criminal, or she’s very ill.”
Dagny nodded. “Yeah, that seems likely.”
“I think we should add ‘in danger’ or ‘on the run,’ but I would agree that she seems sick,” Hanna said.
“I’ll concede to that,” I said. “In any one of those three scenarios, our correct course of action would be to go to some kind of authority in town.”
“No way!” Hanna yelled instantly. “We can’t do that.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“What do you mean, ‘why not’?” Hanna looked at me like I had suddenly sprouted a new head, and she motioned wildly with her hands as she grew more appalled. “We all saw how uncomfortable she got when you brought up taking her to meet Elof!”
“Yeah, because she’s afraid that the häxdoktor might want to steal her life force!” I said. “That is one of the worst possible reasons to not go get help, honestly.”
That had been one of the stranger tangents she’d gone on during our conversation, when we suggested medical help and Dagny had mentioned meeting with Elof might be a less-threatening avenue to help, since he had some medical training but was not actually a doctor. Eliana insisted she would never trust any häxdoktors because they steal life forces. When I tried to get her to define häxdoktor, the best I could get was that it was some type of doctor or healer or shaman, and she did not like them.
“She’ll be so freaked out, though.” Hanna’s shoulders slumped, and her voice pitched toward a whine. “It’d be so much better if you gave me some time to get to know her better and get her to understand your docent isn’t practicing witchcraft.”
Dagny stepped over to stand beside Hanna. “I’m going to have to side with Hanna on this one.”
“What?” I asked, incredulous. “Why?”
“If she’s scared, she’ll fight us, and if she fights us, we’ll have to go to security instead of Mimirin faculty,” Dagny reasoned. “If security gets her, they’ll most likely eject her, and then she’ll be gone. Maybe forever. With time, even a short amount, I’m certain that we could get her to willingly visit Elof, and he might be able to gather a lot of information from her.”
“We could find out who she really is and where her home is?” Hanna asked hopefully.
“Possibly.” Dagny shrugged indifferently. “But more importantly, we can find out if she’s an alien or a new type of troll.”
“And we’ll get her someplace safe to stay that’s not living on the streets,” Hanna said.
“Yes, if that’s what motivates you, go ahead and focus on that part,” Dagny said. “As for myself, I’ll focus on the discoveries we could make with her blood.”
“Dagny.” I gave her side-eye. “I know we haven’t known each other that long, but I gotta say that sometimes you really sound like a comic-book villain.”
“Comic-book villains are usually very intelligent, so I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Yeah, like the Kille
r Croc was known for his wits,” I said.
“I’m not familiar.”
“Never mind.”
23
Bazaar
After another long, exhausting morning working in the archives, I was in dire need of a break. Instead of spending the forty-five minutes I was allotted for lunch cooped inside the basement with Calder and eating stale zucchini chips, I decided to head to the bazaar.
The bazaar on Wapiti Way was a loud, bright explosion. It was one part flea market, one part farmers’ market, one part carnival, but it somehow added up to a complete spectacle. There were flashes of color everywhere, vibrant fresh vegetables, and bold fabrics and jewelry, everyone haggling over prices and a street artist performing an old troll sailing song and accompanying himself on the mandolin. The scent of sweet fruits, savory herbs, and fermented elk milk all mixed together to create a strange but not entirely unpleasant aroma.
Hanna had asked me for cloudberries to make a crumble, and I was poking through small jute baskets to find the tart honey-colored berries. I’d finally found a basketful that seemed pretty good, so I picked it up and waited my turn to pay the vendor.
“You know how to tell if they’re ripe?” A young guy had strolled up beside me, and now he plucked a berry out of the basket in my hand. He was lithe and lean, with enchantingly fluid movements, giving him a swarthy David Bowie vibe.
“Um . . .” I floundered for a moment, suddenly flushed and stammering as he looked at me.
A charming smile played on his lips, smooth and sharp as a blade, and it cut through me as easily as a knife. Dark deep-set bedroom eyes under heavy lashes and thick eyebrows, above pronounced broad cheekbones. His black hair was somehow both lush and unkempt, and it landed at his shoulder.
“When they’re more of a yellow-orange than red?” I said finally in a voice that sounded like my own but at the same time far away and a little coy.
“You gotta squeeze them.” He held a berry between two fingers. “When they’re ready, they’re soft and tender in your hand.”
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