For the first few steps I can make out the path. It’s muddy and eroded on the right side, where it plunges into purplish vacancy. One wrong step, and as far as I can tell there will be nothing to break my fall. Whatever it is that fills the gorge, it’s thicker than ordinary darkness. More like a dense vapor, spindling around my legs, hiding the rocks behind heavy whorls. The consistency varies enough that I can distinguish the shapes it makes: lethargic spirals, eddies as sluggish as glue.
My feet and ankles disappear inside it first. I go cautiously, testing the ground at each step before I shift my weight forward. Then there’s an unsettling moment where I’m in it past my waist, and my hands seem to float like sickly leaves on a violet stream. A few seconds after that and I can’t see anything at all, apart from the murk. I keep my left hand on the dripping wall, though now and then sharp chips in the rock gouge my skin. Kay still clings to my right bicep, sometimes rustling in a dead-leaf way when the wind hits her.
“Josh?” I try calling; my voice doesn’t seem to go anywhere. “Lexi?” But I know it’s futile. I won’t find them until I reach the deepest recesses of this place.
All at once my right foot skids out from under me; my body tilts off its axis. I let out a gagged shriek, sure I’m about to go down—then my left foot catches on something. I wind up splayed in the mud, my right leg kicking into emptiness, my body swinging on the lip between solid ground and the drop. I roll back toward the gorge’s wall with my heart hammering, and reach down to feel what saved me. My boot’s heel is snagged on a gnarled elbow of wood, probably an exposed root.
I feel for my bowler hat. Luckily it’s wedged on pretty well and didn’t go hurtling into space.
Fine. I get up and go on. In all this vaguely purple confusion, the sensory deprivation is starting to get to me. Every distant drip of water seems to tap down, muffled and dull, in every direction at once. Each breath keeps rasping long after it leaves my lungs, then goes on muttering in circles around my head.
Soon it starts to sound like more than just breath.
Kezzer, aren’t these just amazing? That was what Josh said when he held up the boots that just kept me from plunging into nothing. Shiny, pointy, slick-soled things with lots of weird little crisscrossing straps, not exactly meant for clambering around in sludge. Remember how I used to get so upset with you for stealing? But now it isn’t stealing anymore, because everything here exists just for us! Well, for us and the kids, anyway. Like, there are ten pairs of these boots piled up back here, but we’re their whole reason for being! Even the pairs that won’t fit! Every last thing in this mall. It all literally revolves around us, like we could blast all this crap into space and make it into a new ring. Like Saturn’s. Can you imagine?
The price on the box was upward of a grand. Josh swung the boots by their straps, waiting for me to be impressed. I like them, I told him, but not right off. I let him wait, let him feel the grudge in my reply.
I don’t mean to say that you don’t look awesome in your thrift-store stuff, Josh pursued. But it makes no sense, where we were before? That all the really cool things go to people who have nothing going on but money. Not to the people who could actually, like, bring out the magic in them. That is so totally unjust!
I’m wavering into the unreality of our voices, is the problem. Logically, this whole conversation must be just a memory replaying in my head, but I’m hearing it. Josh’s warm tenor hovers like a breathy ache in my ears. “Baby?” I try, but I know—I think I know—that I’m talking to nothing.
So that’s how we know this is a better world, Kezzer. Because everything you deserve, you can have now.
The boots were beautiful, stunning even, like everything Josh had picked out for me. I did want them, with a sharpness like pain, but that only made me pissier. I’m not sure anybody deserves anything, I snapped. Except for maybe a kick in the ass.
I almost slip again. My heart slams into my throat and I halt for a moment, leaning on the wall and breathing as deeply as I can. I can’t let these garbled, chattering memories distract me from the here and now: from step after step after step, placed precisely in the purple blindness.
“Careful, Sennie!” Kay chirps. I almost forgot she’s still here.
“Kay?” I say. “Maybe you should keep talking to me. To keep me, like, anchored to where we are? I’m starting to hear things.”
And then I hear Josh sob. Tender and openhearted and totally without calculation. The way he used to sound when we were both kids, long before we ever came to this place. Back when we were both—more innocent than we are now, anyway, though I would have spit at anyone who’d called me that. The sob sounds both close by, so close it whirls around inside my skull, and terribly distant. It’s really only that, the lack of a location I can point to, that tells me it can’t be real.
But knowing that isn’t enough to keep longing from whipping through my body. And it’s not enough for me to keep my mouth shut.
“Josh?” I shout. “It’s me. I’m coming for you.”
“Sennie,” Kay is babbling, right in my ear, “Sennie, talk about what? You don’t be listening to the not-things! Make you fall!”
I totally get that, in theory. But in practice Josh is calling for me.
Kezzer, Kezzer, you came! We’re so lost here, so alone. It’s like the air is tearing us apart. I know Lexi is here too, but I can’t even see her. Kezzer, please hurry!
I hear him. Or maybe I know in my heart that the voice is too drifty, too scattered to be him. Maybe even the intonation is a shade off, like a decent imitation of the real thing, but with just a tiny clang of wrongness.
Still, even the idea of Josh, of Lexi, lost and calling to me in this dimness: it fires through my body in percussive blasts. I don’t make a decision to run. I can’t see a damned thing and I’m on a slippery, nine-inch-wide path adjacent to a precipitous drop. Charging blindly into purple-smeared nothing would be too idiotic to contemplate.
I don’t decide to run, because I’m already doing it.
“Sennie, Sennie, stop!” Kay is squeaking. “Nice and slow, no hurry, no hurry at all!”
I ignore her, like I ignore the pain where that knife was lodged in my hip. I do have the sense, at least, to keep my left hand skimming along the wall, so that I don’t just veer clear off the path. But that doesn’t stop the loose, greasy mud from catching me in a long forward slide, horribly fast. My fingertips scrape over the wet stone, but there’s nothing to grab, no way to stop myself. I can barely focus on what’s happening, though, because I still hear Josh.
Kezzer, I can think now. But they’ll steal me from myself again, soon. Please come!
Steal me from myself. Isn’t that pretty much what I said to my changeling, up in our forbidden second story? And Prince and them, they always seemed to hear everything we said in that house.
It’s almost enough to halt the momentum driving me, because I can’t help realizing: it’s not Josh at all. Josh probably didn’t overhear that conversation, and even if he did, he wouldn’t swipe the words out of my mouth that way. He has his problems, he’s done some messed-up things. Whatever. But he’s not some damned parrot.
The realization would be enough to stop me. At least make me think about what I’m doing. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m already falling.
I can’t tell if I missed the path, or if it just vanished from under me. All I know is that I’m wheeling in midair—not crashing down a steep and ragged slope, which is what I would have expected. I feel my hat go flying off my head and grab for it at random, but I miss it. It seemed important to hold on to it—it was the most powerful thing I had—but there’s nothing I can do.
I should be terrified, but I’m not, really. I don’t seem to be falling that quickly, and I have time to wonder if the unreality of this place means that we can’t actually die here either. It’s an experiment I haven’t tried, though I won’t pretend I didn’t think about it, back when it seemed like the only possible way to escape. I just couldn’t do that to Josh.
That’s the real reason I don’t think this fall will kill me. Death is nowhere near cruel enough to keep Prince happy.
Then—in this cloying, obliterating fog where I can’t even see my own hand in front of my face—I see someone else. Josh, falling exactly parallel to me, his face vivid and defined and his brown eyes wide open. His garnet bangs flutter in the gust of our descent. He’s stretching out his hands to catch mine, and I strain to reach him in return, but the tips of his fingers stay just an inch beyond my reach. It seems so bitterly long since the last time I saw him, when he crawled up on that cloud-horse and turned his back on me.
“Baby,” I say, “I found you! I’ll do anything it takes to get you and Lexi out of here. I promise!”
Maybe it’s a hollow promise, considering the situation. Maybe I’m going to fail him again. But no, I won’t accept that as a possibility. I won’t even consider it.
“Not him,” Kay squeaks in my ear. God, what is she still doing here? “Sennie, not him, not him, not him!”
Kezzer! Why do you think we won’t die here? Don’t you remember what I told you? His smile is sweet but his eyes well with tears. I told you I wouldn’t live that long!
I’m just not that kind of boy, he had said. But that was literally in another world. That was before the kind of boring, stubborn reality I’d taken for granted all my life became more valuable than life itself.
“Prince wants us to suffer more than that,” I say. “And he wants to keep playing with our emotions. Feeding on them, I think. Killing us would ruin his fun.”
And how could he make you suffer most, Kezzer? Josh says—but is it him? Is there something a touch shifty, maybe a touch inhuman, in the way his mouth is curling? By making you watch me die. And then wonder forever if it was really me.
A pale hand appears out of nowhere, holding a brilliant silver knife to Josh’s throat.
“Josh!” I scream, and lunge to grab that hand. But there’s nothing to push against, no way to get traction. I flail pointlessly, shrieking, precisely the same distance from him, while the knife draws a crimson gash across Josh’s throat.
And the whole time he’s smiling.
“Not him, Sennie! Not nothing, not nobody, not to cry, not to crush your heart!”
Somehow this time I really hear Kay, trilling away in my ear. Even with Prince and them turning his brain inside out, Josh never would have smiled like that at my grief.
“You’re not him,” I say to the thing falling with me. It’s not even close to passing now. It looks deformed, inflated, with smears of glitter over painted-on eyes. The blood streaming down its chest has a theatrical cast, like a red velvet scarf dropped in as a prop. “You pretend to be Josh, but you don’t understand him at all.”
What don’t I understand, then?
“You thought you could change him into one of you. And you almost did. But then he fought back, and he broke free of your bullshit. Because he’s way too good to be one of you freaks.”
I owe Kay another thank-you. I was on the brink of letting my mind slide. Of believing it. How could I have come so close to letting this leering balloon-boy take me in?
Ah, well, maybe. But you’re right that we won’t let him die. Joshua will live for an eternity, in a tomb of his own making. So will you. Because there’s only one way he can be free, Ksenia Adderley, and it’s not within your power. And as long as we have him, we’ll keep you too.
I’m almost enough of a sucker to ask what the way Josh can get free is, like this thing would ever tell me the truth. But it vanishes before I can speak.
With that, I hit the ground. Hard enough that I go stumbling forward, bent at the waist, with pain shooting up my calves. But not hard enough to break anything. The purple murk is a shade lighter here, enough that I get a glimpse of the dried-up creek bed drumming under my feet, before I trip on something, and fall to my knees.
Maybe it’s because I ate those potato chips, but even the ground here looks fake to me. Just because it can bruise me, it doesn’t mean I have to believe in it.
I’ll set my own criteria for reality, thanks. And nothing Prince can come up with is even close.