Vivienne’s arrow whistled past Tuesday’s ear. She couldn’t see where it struck, but she knew it changed nothing because the bird still had her firmly in its grasp. Vivienne was swift on the reload, and Tuesday watched as another arrow, and another, and another, came flying at the bird. With every one, Tuesday grimaced, hoping it wouldn’t strike her, but each hit the bird and had no effect at all. In fact, it appeared to delight in teasing Vivienne. It swooped back over Vivacious.
Pulling against the talons that had closed, viselike, around her shoulders, Tuesday wriggled and kicked in an attempt to get free. It was no use. The vercaka had her in its clutches. Its skin was leathery and tough, and no arrow was going to pierce it. Beneath her, Tuesday could hear Baxterr barking. She watched, helpless, as Baxterr, on the deck of Vivacious, flared his golden-brown wings and prepared to take flight. She knew that he wanted to protect her, but she could also see that his movements had attracted the attention of at least three vercaka nearby. They wheeled on their tatty wings and headed straight for him, their serrated beaks opening in anticipation.
“Your little pet is dead meat,” wheezed the vercaka that had hold of her, and Tuesday felt her blood turn icy.
“No, doggo, no! You mustn’t!” Tuesday yelled. “Vivienne, stop him!”
Down below, Vivienne hurled herself on top of Baxterr, pinning his wings with her arms.
“Stay … with … Vivienne!” Tuesday called to Baxterr. “Be a good dog. Stay. Stay!”
And Baxterr, hearing Tuesday even across the distance that separated them, retracted his wings, though he continued to bark and snarl, his lips drawn back angrily over his teeth.
“We’ll get him anyway,” said the vercaka, its voice echoing inside her head as well as grating on her ears.
Tuesday winced with the pain of the talons in her shoulders and watched in terror as a vercaka shredded Vivacious’s sails with a single swipe of its talons.
On board, Vivienne reached for her Lucretian blowpipe with its poisoned darts that would instantly put to sleep any foe. With luck, she thought, the birds would fall in the river and drown. One, two, three vercaka screeched as Vivienne’s needle-sharp darts struck them—up the nostril, in the gullet, in the softer skin beneath the wing—but the poison had no effect. The birds kept flying.
“She’s lost,” one cried to Baxterr.
“Never coming back,” said another.
“You’re a coward,” said another, and it took all Vivienne’s strength to stop Baxterr from taking to the air.
With its sail in ribbons, Vivacious was caught in the swirling floodwaters and heading for the open sea. From high in the sky, Tuesday had a view of the ocean beyond, spotted here and there with sand-rimmed islands, but there was nothing she could do to help Vivienne and Baxterr, and nothing they could do to help her. To make matters worse, a pack of vercaka had spied her dangling in the vercaka’s claws.
“Meat!” screamed the vercaka as they came for her.
To them, she realized, she was nothing more than a morsel. She might easily have been a crust of white bread thrown by a small child to ducks on the lake at City Park. The vercaka that held her, sensing the threat from its companions, flapped its wings with all the energy it could muster. It rose up and up, higher and higher. Tuesday shivered in a gust of freezing wind that was coming through the rip in the surface of the other world. The vercaka was making for the place where the ocean of that world continued to pour through into the Mabanquo River, and for a moment, Tuesday’s feet were dragging in the torrent of water.
In the other world she glimpsed a large, pale sun riding high in the sky and another smaller sun beyond it. She saw the strange angle of the watery horizon and the twin arcs of the two skies colliding. She realized that she was going to be dragged into another world entirely, one in which there were aqua-blue icebergs floating in a milky sea. No, thought Tuesday. Her heart hammered in her chest. I can’t go there. I’ll never get back. I can’t. It’s not where I’m meant to be.
“Let me go!” she screamed at the bird. Then, realizing how high up she was, she decided this wasn’t such a clever thing to suggest.
“Take me back!” she cried. “You have to take me back.”
“You’ll be dead in a minute,” hissed the bird, and its claws clenched her shoulders even harder.
At the sound of a sharp beak snapping right beneath her, Tuesday screamed. The other vercaka were upon them. The vercaka that held her in its grip barrel-rolled in an effort to lose its competitors, but it was outnumbered. Whichever way the bird turned, the would-be thieves were there, jostling, squawking, and hassling, coming at her with their terrible beaks. Tuesday’s bird, under immense pressure, could no longer keep hold of her. It loosened its grip ever so slightly, and as it did so, Tuesday felt herself slip. The vercaka had hold of her only by her jacket. She heard the sound of fabric tearing and saw her precious ball of silver thread, her only way of getting home, the one thing that a writer should never lose, fall.
“No!” she screamed. Then she was falling. Too fast. It was as if she were being sucked downward.
“No!” she screamed again, though nobody was listening. Not even the vercaka. She was outpacing them. Somehow she was falling even faster than they were flying.
It was then that Tuesday realized she was falling not toward the thousand spires of the City of Clocks that glinted in the morning sun, nor toward the slanted icy ocean, although she could see into both worlds. She was falling into a wedge of a dark, starry sky in between them. She couldn’t hear anything but the strange effect of her falling, which sounded a little like the empty sound in an elevator going down.
Everything slowed. She was falling past a world of pink sand and towering pyramids. And then past another world of amber deserts and herds of painted horses. There was a world of gloomy streets and people scurrying away in cloaks. There was a world of high, icy mountains and a cliff path, goats, and girls with head scarves. There was a world where people dressed in red and white were playing a game of croquet. There was a man in a boat with a school of flying fish fluttering past. She saw a cat walking on the skyline of a city, and a giant accompanied by a girl, and two children in a beautiful walled garden, and a wizard with a fire-breathing dragon. She saw a world like a jewelry box and another like a windmill.
Still Tuesday fell, and the worlds about her grew very big and very small all at once, so that she couldn’t tell if she was enormous or actually quite tiny. She thought that she hadn’t breathed in a long time, which was absolutely true and always led to trouble. Dots formed in front of her eyes, so she closed them. She wondered if she would ever land anywhere or if she would keep falling forever. She thought maybe she’d sleep, because this falling might take a very long time. She was, she thought, immensely tired.
Worlds continued to slide past her, and Tuesday past them, and she would have been fascinated by how familiar some of them were, but by then she had closed her eyes and fallen into a deep, quiet place that wasn’t sleeping nor was it dreaming, and from that place she saw nothing, heard nothing, and felt nothing, as she continued to fall.