Unselle’s not in the glade where we used to gather on summer nights, of course. Deeper in, there’s that second clearing where Josh and I first heard their music; where their bells shimmered down on us and we danced in their arms. I failed Josh then. I let him dance on, didn’t heed the apprehension running through my body. From the moment Prince first said his name they got their hooks in him, and I should have seen it. That his mind was sliding. That he wasn’t right.
So this is the day I make it up to him. And to Lexi too, for all the times I was so walled inside myself that I couldn’t appreciate how she kept trying to reach me, whether I deserved it or not. It’s awful, that I had to go through so much before I could let her kindness cut me to the quick. A familiar, mossy boulder crests out of a green shadow.
Ksenia, trust me. I know how lucky I am, and I’m not complaining, or comparing my life with yours. Lexi said that to me once, on a velvety, endless night when we were perched together on that boulder, a bottle of wine squeezed between us. But I think we both live with the burden of a lot of expectations. Ones that other people have put on us. So, I’m expected to automatically become an economist or something, and you—
Probably I’m supposed to wind up in prison for identity theft. I didn’t say it gently. I thought I knew what she was doing, and I resented it. She’d been going out of her way to confide in me, to flaunt her vulnerability. I thought it was a game, or a trick: to coax me into opening up in return.
But even positive expectations are limiting. That’s my point. We both have to push back at people who think they get to tell us who we’re meant to be. She hesitated. You have such great grades. Why don’t you try applying for scholarships? Why just assume that community college is the best you can do?
I knew she was right, and I seethed. I thought, I’m nothing like you. I thought, no matter how vulnerable Lexi pretended to be, in reality she was safe and happy and strong. Even worse, what she was suggesting: it implied that I should be planning for a life away from Josh, which was enough to start up a burn in my guts. Now who’s putting expectations on me, Lexi? I snapped. And she looked down. I didn’t care that I’d hurt her, or not enough.
I cringe now, thinking of it. Because who else ever believed in me enough to give me advice like that? And all I could do was be rude to her. I stagger a little as I walk, just from the sting of remembering. What a lousy friend I was to her. How she kept giving me more chances anyway.
It was never possible to keep track of time on the other side, but I might have guessed it was more like August there. But here it’s spring; drifts of blossoms whiten the woods. They offer good camouflage for something else white and waving and full of lace. It’s hard to pick out which pale disturbance might be her dress, her cloudy horse. But then I spot a black blotch, pitching against a snow-colored blur. My hat, held brim up in Unselle’s spindly hand.
Of course: she kept the damn hat to lure me here. Bait. Kay squeaks and rustles onto my back. I glance around; there’s nothing to use as a weapon. Just sticks. I pick up the thickest branch I can find, maybe five feet long and full of leaves as small as sequins. I drag it behind me with my left hand, keeping my right free.
“Ksenia, dearling! Poppling, how our Prince weeps for such a naughty. And you will weep too, for your ungratefulness. Sneakitting up such wicked stairs!”
I cut through the trees with my teeth grinding. “You know why I’m here.”
“Ever so, I know. I can taste you on the air, Ksenia, as you are coming. Why put to the trouble of catching you, when I know you catch yourself? Again, and again, and again you will. Bound to what we own.”
She’s up on her snarled-mist horse, towering over me. Her horrible, unbalanced grin gleams in the center of her face, but as I get closer it turns into a rictus, her upper lip hiked almost to her tiny nose. The mink on her chest sniffs dramatically, then starts a sustained, rumbling growl.
I don’t wonder why. They’ve just scented it on me, that I’m free now.
She swings the hat down, wobbles it in my direction, just waiting to yank it back out of my reach. I don’t bother.
“You don’t take, Ksenia? But we wish you to have it, Prince and I! Your own pretty hat, to tipsy onto your pretty head. And be devoured by it, to where we may take of you at our leisure. You think, oh, you are not belonging to us now, you will not eat of our food again? Soon enough you will claw the crawlings from the walls, and eat what you do not see.” She pauses. “So will Alexandra.”
My back goes tight; I should have guessed that was their plan, to starve Lexi into submission. “Just drop it, then.”
“No, no. Perhaps it bounces, perhaps it rolls and flips about. Not for this world anymore, is your hat. Our world, it gives forth; it births and bubbles, goblins and green eyes. Here? One slip upsidesie, and it eats.”
Right: Josh said to be careful to keep the hat brim down, over there, so that nothing would come out of it. Here, even as Unselle flicks my hat from hand to hand, I can tell that she’s being careful to hold it brim up. It makes a weird kind of sense, that it would have the opposite polarity here. That it would flow in a contrary direction.
She proffers the hat again, smiling as sweetly as she can, which isn’t saying much. And I know I need it. Being eaten by my own hat is probably my last hope of rescuing the people I love.
But something tells me, not like this. Not as Unselle’s docile pet, gratefully taking the tidbits she offers me, and nothing more. Nothing that they don’t want me to have. Even the mink is trying to look friendly, welcoming.
I told Kay I would take the hat from Unselle, not let her hand it to me like a cookie.
I reach for it, scowling furiously. Anything less would tip Unselle off. She grins and inclines her body, her lacy sleeve trailing past her sharp-clawed hand. Her skin looks phosphorescent, like an ice-colored corpse reflecting moonlight.
Before my fingers quite touch the black brim, I bring the branch up and around with my left hand, swinging it as hard as I can into the back of Unselle’s neck.
As far as I know, there’s no way to do real damage to these things. But you can take them by surprise. Unselle gives a startled yelp, but—damn her—she still keeps her grip on my hat. Off-balance as she already was, she pitches forward, scrabbling one-handed at her horse’s neck to keep from falling. And just like a real horse might do, it rears. For a moment I see it high above me, beams of sun piercing its heart, rainbow shimmer jetting out like blood.
As it thuds back down, the hat flies free of Unselle’s grasp. She screams: a rusty, grating ribbon of noise, her body lurching off her horse’s side as she snatches at the air. The hat spins through the green twilight of the woods, still brim up but angling dangerously. I dart toward it with the full awareness that I’ll never reach it in time.
If the hat gets knocked with the hole turned down as it lands, what will it do? Eat a crater in the world? Glut that awful parallel world with heaps of mulch and leaves and stone, until magma boils through and streams in fever-bright rivers through the streets?
That would be fine with me. If it weren’t for the risk that Josh and Lexi would be buried alive at the core of it, that is. What’s wrong with me, that I didn’t think of that in time?
The hat lands in a tangle of vines. Still brim up. Unselle is off her horse now, leaping for it in a smear of frills and crimson.
My fingers are three inches ahead of hers, snatching my old black bowler out of the vines. She’s gibbering at me in a voice so warped and metallic I can’t begin to guess if it’s still human language. But I can identify the emotion gurgling through it.
Fear. Ah, she doesn’t like it at all, that I took the hat from her by force. Whatever she was planning, I can tell I’ve messed it up.
It’s the first time I’ve seen one of these creeps truly afraid, and a hard grin breaks through my face. Maybe I couldn’t burn Prince alive, but making Unselle suffer, even a fraction as much as I have?
I’ll take it.
“You blew it, didn’t you? The hat is going to take me exactly where you don’t want me to go.” I drive my stick into her neck so that she staggers back, hissing at me. She’s so light, so brittle. “I’ll be sure to tell Prince, if I see him.” And I bring the hat down on my head. I still half-expect to feel it touch down, but instead it just keeps coming: a black velvet rain that cancels everything else.
I thought I had a pretty good grasp on what darkness is—from going up those stairs, say—but yeah, not really. Not like this. The void inside my bowler hat devours everything, gnaws even the memory of vision from my mind, and the self from inside my skin. I have a momentary sensation of my body as a rag with all the substance sucked out of it. And then the only definite thing I can still hold on to is Unselle’s scream coming from behind me, its terrible scraping-metal echoes.
I touch down. My bowler hat is perched innocently on my head, like it’s through with devouring anyone.
I’m in the same woods, but with the faintest glaze of late-summer gold, and the flowers all vanished. With a palpable sense that every leaf is altered, slightly tinged with something false and wrong. Even the birds’ warbling sounds thinned-out, tinny and frail. Still, on a superficial level, it’s nowhere near as horrible as Unselle was just threatening.
If I’d let her hand me the hat, I’m pretty clear on what would have happened. I would have arrived in this world, but embedded in solid rock, or lost in a maze: someplace where I would have been helpless to find them.
“Josh?” I yell. “Lexi?”
I walk forward ten paces before I remember that I’m not on my own. “Hey, Kay?” I call—softly this time, because now it’s occurred to me that there might be things nearby I’d rather not put on alert. “Can you get any kind of read on where they are?”
Kay rustles out of my vest and sort of pleats around my upper arm. I’m really having trouble getting used to it, her dry scratching against my skin. “Sennie? I don’t like it.”
“Don’t like what?” I ask her, kind of roughly. “We have exactly one reason for being back in this place, okay? Liking anything is beside the point.”
“But—bad things there, Sennie! Where—Josh and Lexi? I don’t like it for you.”
“I don’t care,” I snap. “And that means you can’t either. If I can get them out, then that’s what I need out of life. Whatever happens to me—we both have to let go of giving a damn. Got it?”
Kay is my creature. She better listen to me. She sighs with a shrill, theatrical wheeze. Then: “The gorge. Sennie? In the gorge.”
Maybe I knew that, on some level. I can make out the rocks of the gorge’s rim through the broken darkness of the trunks, and then a shadowed fall into the depths. Violet-black, and it strikes me now that it’s unnaturally dim, considering how bright the day is.
That’s what Unselle was talking about, then. The gorge is what they’re using as a prison, or maybe something deep inside it. Speaking of Unselle, I’d feel a little better if I knew where she was. I’m sure she’ll be coming after me, to fix her screwup while she still can.
Doesn’t matter. None of it matters except what I do. In the real world, there’s a narrow path that winds down the side of the gorge, if you know where to look for it. I’m going to assume it’s here too. I walk over, and as I get closer the shadows down there seem to rise up, gurgling out of the gap in the earth. Once I reach the brink, I can see a few fitful gleams through the murk, but that’s it: not the creek bed that should be a dusty skein at the bottom, not the trees slanting at weird angles from the rocks. A few more minutes of scuffling through the undergrowth, and I catch sight of the path. Thin and slippery, kind of dicey even when you can see where you’re stepping.
Ever since I was a kid, people have complained about me: that I’m cold and withdrawn and unfriendly. That I’m incapable of attachment—except to Josh, and then only in a pathologically extreme form. That I don’t have the first idea of what it means to truly love anyone. Mitch said that once, to Emma, not realizing I could hear him.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe I don’t. Maybe being ready to die for my friend and my brother doesn’t count as love, not in the way that normal people think of it. I’m even ready to stay trapped here forever as Prince’s toy, if that’s the price of Josh and Lexi’s freedom, and to me that seems a lot worse than dying.
Maybe real love is somehow better or gentler or simpler than what I can feel. But if it comes to that, if I never make it out of here again, I hope Josh and Lexi will think my version of love was close enough.
If it counts to them, then that’s all I care about.
“Kay?” I say. “We’re going down.”