The bottom of my grave. I wasn’t prepared for the doorway to show up in such a messy form. So I’ll start burrowing, and find myself in my own coffin, considerately vacated by my changeling here. And then—what? I’ll be buried alive with no way to escape, no chance to fight through the crushing pressure of the earth above me? Maybe all I’m doing is setting myself up for an especially gruesome suicide.
My changeling just keeps pointing. Triangles of light perch on her sharp cheekbones, her spiky hair casts needles of shadow across her forehead. “Sennie? They made me. Prince made me, just so I could die in place of you, and dying was the only reason I mattered. And I wanted Josh to protect me, but he didn’t care; he wanted me to die for you too. Even though I loved him! I had to hate you for that.”
I hate you too, I almost say. Except that’s not true anymore. It would be hard to put a name on what I feel for her, exactly. It’s some queasy hash of pity and aversion and—ugh—recognition. “I don’t blame you for being pissed,” I tell her. “You got screwed over pretty hard.”
She shrugs that off. “But you need to remember: they didn’t make everything. Not everything that looks like you.”
I hadn’t thought about it quite this way. I’ve been duplicated in such bizarre ways since I came here, and I hadn’t really bothered to distinguish between them. But I know right away what she means.
“You’re talking about those imp things. This whole second story.” She doesn’t even nod to confirm my guess, but it’s more than a guess. I can feel it. “I’m the one who made those.”
She’s still pointing at the dirt, her pale, bony arm stretched as far as it can go. “You didn’t send me to die, though, Sennie. That wasn’t you. But I don’t know what they’ll do to me, for helping you come back to life.”
That hadn’t hit me either, until she says it. She’s betraying the entities that created her—unless it’s all another lie, designed to trick me into burying myself alive.
Though there’s no point in wondering. It doesn’t change what I’m going to do.
“So I just shove my face in there and start digging?”
She nods. “You just go through.”
I cross the room, heading deeper into the dank, somber stench of that dirt. It’s wet when I touch it, as muddy and inescapable as dreams. I’ll be lucky if I make it as far as my coffin before I suffocate. If it weren’t for everything that might be happening on the far side of that heap—Josh riding around in a trance, Josh maybe murdering the people he ought to defend with his life—I’d stay right where I am, thanks. Roots jut through here and there like malformed bones, and the ends of worms probe at the air. A gray-white larval something drops, wriggling at my feet.
But for all I know, Josh might be about to murder Lexi, or Marissa, while Unselle eggs him on. Compared to that, what else matters?
I reach forward with both hands, ready to plunge in up to my elbows, to push and slam my way into the muck. My changeling is behind me, now, and I can feel that she’s turned to watch. I can feel her gaze like claws hooked into my shoulders.
She’s right, though. However much a thing like she is can suffer, Prince will make sure she goes right to the limit for this.
I twist around. Maybe it’s got something to do with how she was copied from me, but I swear I can feel the way our stares meet and tangle in midair, gray and slippery and full of longing.
“Hey,” I tell her. “Thank you.”
And then I turn back to the dirt, and push in. There’s not a lot of resistance. I feel a bubbling, an oozing, more liquid than solid. I was expecting to claw away at the muck for hours, but almost instantly I’m stuck in it up to my shoulders. My knees buckle, dragged against the slope, and my feet skid out from under me. Sludge shoves at my throat and I rear back instinctively, trying to keep my mouth and nose clear of it.
That won’t be happening. I’m being engulfed in some kind of freakish vertical quicksand. My muscles jerk with contradictory impulses, part of me still determined to dig deeper, the other part desperate to fight my way free. The combined result is panicked, pointless spasms. Chunks of mud fly loose as I thrash.
And then I’m inside the pile, my eyes clenched tight. I feel the cloying, gritty pressure of dirt grinding across my face, but I can’t tell if I’m doing anything to propel myself forward.
It doesn’t feel like I’m moving myself at all. More like the muck is swallowing me. I could be inside the Earth’s own throat, constricted by its slow, wet hunger. It grips me hard around the ribs and all my air bursts out with a hiss. Now I’m struggling for real, but it’s useless. I’m clammy with dirt and terror, my limbs flailing at random angles. Once my shin bangs against something that feels like planed wood. My lungs burn and my diaphragm jerks, ravenous for air. If I give in, though, I’ll fill my lungs with this living filth.
And then, just like that, the earth spews me out. I rupture into air and gasp, and gasp again, crumbles of dirt dropping onto my tongue. My mud-slimed hands paw wildly to clear the muck from my encrusted eyes, my choked mouth. I’m not free all the way, only as far as my waist. Shivers dart at violent speed through my back and arms. Blood roars in my ears.
It takes a while before I’m together enough to risk opening my eyes again. I must have swum straight through my coffin—probably that was the plank I knocked against—and on to the surface, because I’m in the cemetery. I recognize it by the old Methodist church where Mitch and Emma used to go on Easter, with its scaly white paint. The light is yellow and streaky, but I have no way to guess if it’s evening or an hour after dawn.
And right beside me, there’s a very small, plain stone with my name on it, and dates that claim I died a few days short of my eighteenth birthday. About how I’m not so dead after all: I haven’t thought about it much, because I probably don’t care that much, but seeing me is going to come as a terrible shock to a lot of people.
Also, about not being dead: I need to get the hell out of this dirt, pronto, and go find Josh and Lexi.
The dirt was eager to shove me along before, but now it’s behaving more like dirt usually does, grasping my legs in its chill grit. I’m fighting to loosen it enough that I can pull myself out, when I see something running toward me over the dew-speckled grass.
If running is the word for it. The thing coming at me is low on dimensions, so that at certain angles it’s a barely perceptible black line, jarring up and down. Sometimes a third dimension pops out of it, though, and I see a recognizable hip, or a bony shoulder. Sometimes it turns enough that I get a glimpse of its cracked-plate face.
But parts of it are a little thicker, fluffing out in weird bulges, and as it gets closer I see why. It’s wearing clothes. A puffy doll’s dress that in this light is nothing but a yellow smudge.
I don’t much like having one of those things come at me while I’m still trapped, and I thrash harder. But then it comes back to me, what my changeling said.
So Prince made her, a living object with a single, sad purpose. But he didn’t make everything that’s running around with my face on it. Meaning that some of them I have to take responsibility for myself.
Meaning that this little broken-mirror Ksenia-thing, with her grin now leaping out at a right angle to her paper cut of a head: she belongs to me. She’s not Prince’s creature, but mine.
Maybe I can trust her.
“Sennie!” she squeaks as she gets closer. “Oh, Sennie! You thought of it, how to go! You understood! And you see, the stairs stayed for you! They waited, just for you to finally say your name!”
I plant my hands on the grass beside each hip and drive myself upward as hard as I can. Another twist, a fierce thrash, and I start to pull free. My feet peddle at the dislodged soil that drops in beneath me. I make it out as far as my mid-thighs.
I’ve talked to the stairs a lot, sure: hanging around in the dust-colored light, begging them to give me a break already. Addressing one of these things as an individual, though, feels a lot more uncomfortable. But now it seems like that’s what I have to do. “Hey,” I say. “What are you doing—in the real world? I thought you didn’t belong here.”
That is where I am now, right? Everything still feels a little off-kilter.
The Ksenia-shard is close enough now that it turns sideways, showing me her whole flat, fragmentary face. It looks kind of sheepish.
“Lexi climbed the stairs. Grabbed her leg then.”
Ah. So that’s where the dress is from, and the bandages on her knobby little knees. And more important, maybe this thing can take me to Lexi. Another writhing struggle, doubled over so that I can get enough leverage, and I finally pry my legs all the way out. I’m ready to run, hard, wherever she tells me to go.
“Where is Lexi now?”
“Sennie … they took her. And Joshua. Took them away!”
They.
The sad little thing is still prattling at me, but I can’t follow what she’s saying. There’s only enough room in my head for the first words she fired off. They took her. Those words repeat, hissing like embers striking flesh, and every time I think them they burn.
I can’t imagine much worse than going through that crushing earth again, but I’ll do whatever it takes. I swore it. I turn and throw myself back on my grave, and even as I’m falling I see that the hole I came through is gone. The grass is a scarless sheet of green. I smack down, and the ground hits my chest with a brutal, unyielding thud.
“Sennie!” the me-thing chitters. “Not that way! Used it up, that way!”
You don’t say. “So what do I do?” The thought of those inhuman creeps prodding at Lexi, dragging her into their dances, kissing her cheeks—it’s so nauseating that my muscles seize with rage.
And now the second half of what this thing said hits me. And Joshua. Took them away!
Which would seem to imply that he didn’t go voluntarily. “Was Josh fighting back?” I ask. And the Ksenia-imp nods its sliver of a head, its single gray eye wide and solemn.
He finally did it. Josh found the strength to be himself again. If the situation weren’t so desperate, I’d crack up weeping from sheer relief. I knew you could, baby. I knew you were still in there! But there’s also the flip side to his defiance: if Prince has Josh, what monstrous things will he do to him, for daring to turn against his masters?
Josh reclaiming the freedom of his own mind: that would be Prince’s idea of the gravest possible insult.
“Unselle has the hat,” the Ksenia-imp says. I could slap her for picking this moment to blurt nonsense, but then she keeps going. “The hat ate them, Sennie. It ate them all the way through! Josh said no to killing Lexi’s mother, and the hat ate him up! Lexi thought the hat would help, they tricked her with taking it, but when she saw what … she grabbed on.” A pause. “And maybe now, what happens from eating?”
Digestion.
“My hat?” The idea opens up some peculiar questions, but there’s no time for them. “It ate them through? You mean, through to that—other world?” Another nod. “Then could it eat me so I go there too?”
Hope spikes in me: it might be better this way, actually. The hat might take me straight to wherever Josh and Lexi are trapped. If I burrowed back through my grave, how would I track them down?
Another nod. “But Unselle has it! And she is evil, evil, bad.”
“Then we’ll fucking take it from her.” Unselle, with her billowing lace and her bloody script and her metallic simpering. Unselle with the yawning, snapping mink where anyone human would have a heart. Out of all of them she’s the one I’d be happiest to kill, except for maybe Prince, if only killing them was something I could figure out how to do. “So can you help me find her?”
Hesitation. “Don’t know where. Unselle has a horse.”
Right. I should have known that a creature sliced off from me wouldn’t be much use. I look away, trying to stop myself from saying something mean. It’s not actually her fault.
“Sennie? Lexi calls me Kay! She gave me my own, whole, very own name!”
“That’s great,” I snap. I’m not paying much attention, just scanning the tame suburban streets, the bloated spill of blue shadows. The sun is up far enough to launch sparks through the trees. Where in all this bland serenity would Unselle be? We’re on a hill, so I can see the town rambling into the distance: the hot glitter of cars on Grand, the midnight groove of the gorge.
Even if it’s on the dull side, our old town, it’s real. It’s made of car alarms and trees and vinyl siding, people and cats and sprinklers. Not sick, distorted dreams. I’m standing on real ground, even though it feels weirdly light, disconnected from my feet. Still, if only Josh and Lexi were with me, I might fall to my knees and soak the grass with my tears.
But I’ve got to go back. Of course I do. How can I deserve a real life if I don’t save the people I love?
“Unselle can find you, though, Sennie. She has your blood in her. She can tell where you will go.”
The gorge. The clearing where Josh and I first stumbled into them. That’s where. Now that I’ve thought of it, it’s obvious: how Unselle will come sidling through the trees on her cloud-horse, her mouth pitching like a boat in a storm, and curl a cold hand on my neck.
We have a date.