Six

The morning of the eclipse was warm, with not a cloud in the sky. Eleanor sat on the front porch, where she’d been since before sunrise, unable to sleep. The perfect summer day, and Eleanor couldn’t appreciate one bit of it. The clock in the hall had been silent all week. They had seen more strange roads around town, but no amount of watching them had yielded any clues, and they hadn’t found answers in Bartimaeus Ashford’s books or anywhere else.

The door opened. Jack stepped out, hands in his pockets. “The clock is running backward as always,” he said. “Can you hear it?”

Eleanor shook her head.

“Then perhaps the eclipse is unrelated,” Jack said. “It’s the solstice after all.”

“I’m not going to relax until the eclipse is over, whatever the clock says,” Eleanor replied.

Eleanor’s phone chimed in her pocket. On my way over, Otto texted.

See you soon, she sent back. Pip didn’t reply. She lived farther away, but she was also a lot harder to wake up in the morning, so Eleanor tried not to feel too nervous about the fact that she hadn’t checked in. She’d be here.

Jenny was calling from the kitchen.

“Shall we?” Jack asked.

In the kitchen, Jenny was making a giant pile of waffles. Eleanor looked at the array of fruits and berries and syrups and wished she had even a little bit of an appetite.

“I hope you’re hungry,” Jenny said.

“Ravenous,” said Jack, who had a serious sweet tooth.

Eleanor hmm-ed. Jenny gave her a hard look over her shoulder. “You’re always going around with the weight of the world on your shoulders, Eleanor. And I get it. But don’t forget to enjoy some waffles now and then, too.”

Behind Eleanor, the doorbell rang. Otto already? “I’ll get it,” she said quickly, and hurried back through the hallway before Jenny could expand on her pep talk.

Eleanor opened the door, expecting to find Otto—or even Pip—and blinked in confusion to discover Katie standing on the welcome mat, her pinhole camera carefully cradled in her arms and a cheerful smile rounding her cheeks.

“Good morning!” she chirped. “I know I’m early but I’m just really, really excited.”

Eleanor stared at her. “I—but we—”

“Katie! Good, you made it in time for waffles,” Jenny said, popping out from the kitchen. Jack followed behind, casting a questioning look between Katie and Eleanor.

“I love waffles,” Katie declared, stepping in past Eleanor.

“You knew she was coming?” Eleanor asked.

“Of course. Her mom called to make sure we were okay to host yesterday,” Jenny said, giving Eleanor a puzzled frown.

“Right. Of course,” Eleanor said, mentally cursing herself. Okay, maybe she hadn’t gotten around to telling Katie she couldn’t come over—not when she didn’t have a good excuse. Katie would just think she didn’t want to be friends.

Katie traipsed cheerfully into the kitchen for waffles. Jack dropped his voice as he spoke to Eleanor. “This was not part of the plan.”

“I know, I know,” Eleanor told him. “But I can’t tell her to leave now. There’s no way to do it that isn’t completely awful.”

“Being devoured by umbral hounds would be significantly more awful,” Jack pointed out, raising an eyebrow. Eleanor slumped. Maybe this was what Wander was talking about, when she said to guard your heart. Cold as glass, Eleanor thought. Do what has to be done.

Eleanor took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen. Katie was sitting at the table already, piling up her plate with waffles. The pinhole camera sat on the table beside her. Eleanor paused in the doorway. She looked back at Jack, who gave her a nod.

“Katie, I’m sorry, but we can’t do our observations together,” she said.

Jenny glanced up sharply from where she was tending the waffle iron. Katie looked startled. “Why not?” she asked.

Cold as glass, Eleanor thought. “Pip and Otto and I are doing it together,” she said. “Just the three of us.” She said it firmly, and she didn’t need to say anything else—she knew her meaning was clear. Just us, and not you. Because you aren’t our friend.

“Eleanor,” Jenny said in a dangerous tone, but Katie was already slipping from her seat, her cheeks beet red.

“Oh,” she said, looking down at her feet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’ll go.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” Jenny said, her expression furious. Eleanor flinched and looked away. Jenny thought she was awful. But she had to do this. She had to.

“I’d rather go,” Katie said. “I’m just going to go call my mom.”

Before Jenny could stop her, she stumbled past Eleanor into the hall. Eleanor tried not to notice that there were tears in her eyes, or that the front door slammed loudly on her way out.

“Eleanor Barton, what exactly was that about?” Jenny demanded, a hand on her hip. “Is this what you’re going to be like now that you’re a teenager? Some kind of mean girl?”

Eleanor looked helplessly back at Jack, but he looked as uncomfortable as she felt. She looked back at the abandoned plate of waffles. Katie hadn’t even had time to add the syrup. Her pinhole camera sat next to the plate, forgotten.

“Oh no,” Eleanor said. She hurried forward to grab it. “She’s going to need this. I’ll just . . .” Ducking under Jenny’s steely glare, she hurried out of the kitchen. She felt like the worst person in the world. The least she could do was give Katie her camera back.

She stepped out onto the porch. Her phone was chiming. She pulled it out and glanced down at it as she walked.

Slight complication, have to deal with something, Pip had written.

Guys I glbklrbr, read a message from Otto. Eleanor frowned at the key-smash, but didn’t have time to ask him what he meant. She stepped off the porch and glanced up toward Katie, who had her phone to her ear and was walking up the path toward the driveway.

A path that forked, when it had never forked before. One fork of the walkway led to the driveway just like it was supposed to, but the other bent sharply away, slithering off into the grass where there had never been a walkway before.

“Katie, look out!” Eleanor cried. She ran forward, dropping the pinhole camera, but Katie had already stepped out onto the wrong path. The one that shouldn’t exist. She stopped, stock-still, as if her feet were rooted in place. And then she started forward again. “Katie, stop!” Eleanor said, rushing up to the edge of where the paths split.

“I can’t,” Katie wailed. She twisted, looking over her shoulder. She seemed to strain—and her foot moved forward, one step farther along the road. “Eleanor, what’s happening?”

“Hold on.” Eleanor reached out to try to snatch her arm. Eleanor’s fingers clamped around Katie’s hand, and she let out a cry of triumph—and then Katie jerked forward another step, taking Eleanor with her.

Eleanor’s free hand pinwheeled, trying to get her balance, but it was no use. Her foot hit the false path, and then she was lurching forward, her feet carrying her along behind Katie. Katie craned her neck to look back, face stricken with terror.

“What’s happening?” she cried.

“I don’t know,” Eleanor said. “But it’s going to be okay. I promise.”

They walked at a rapid clip. The path wrapped behind the house, to the orchard, and wriggled between the trees, which stretched farther than they should have with no end in sight.

Eleanor looked desperately at her phone. No signal. Her skin crawled with a strange sensation. She felt like she was brushing through cobwebs.

“E-E-Eleanor?” Katie said, teeth chattering with fear. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Eleanor said. They were heading farther and farther from the house—and the sky was starting to grow dim. She put on a burst of speed to catch up with Katie. She slipped her hand into the other girl’s, giving it a reassuring squeeze, and Katie cast her a startled look.

“It’s almost the eclipse,” Katie whispered. Eleanor nodded.

The dark disk of the moon was steadily gliding in front of the sun, like a lid sliding over a pot. The air grew dimmer. It was already as dark as late afternoon, tilting into evening. That cobweb feeling was getting more intense.

Eleanor tried angling toward the side of the path, but she couldn’t turn, even a tiny bit. Katie checked her watch. “A minute and a half to totality,” she said. “We’re going to flunk our project.”

Eleanor let out a strangled laugh. “I really don’t think we should worry about that right now,” she said. Then she spotted something up ahead.

It was hard to make out in the darkening gloom, but Eleanor could just see the pale ribbons of two more paths, all three meeting in a three-way crossroads. And there were figures on the other paths, too—two people on each.

“Oh no,” she said.

Pip got there first, striding up as soon as she spotted the others, her companion trailing well behind. Then Eleanor and Katie arrived, and Otto and his friend, who looked just as frightened as Katie.

Actually, she looked a lot like Katie, if Katie was two inches taller and a bit skinnier and wore makeup and slinky black tops.

“Otto,” Pip said quietly. Gloaming was in her hand, bare steel glinting softly even in the near-total darkness. “Who is your friend?”

“This is Katie?” he said. “And that’s—” He looked at Eleanor.

“Katie,” she said, edging away from the girl with tear-streaked cheeks who was suddenly looking a lot less terrified.

“And this is Katie, too,” Pip said casually, stepping forward and turning at the same time to put herself between Eleanor and Otto.

Pip’s lab partner was the tallest of the three Katies. Her hair was back in a single, severe braid, and she looked older than the others, more serious. Her head tilted as she examined the three friends, and the other two Katies copied the movement perfectly.

“This worked far better than I’d hoped,” they said in unison, their voices so closely matched it was almost hard to tell there was more than one. The shorter Katies stepped closer to the one in the center, and the air sort of flexed, and then there was only one Katie—a tall woman with colorless white hair that flowed in ringlets down to her waist. She wore a gray dress. At her throat was a black ribbon from which hung a silver pendant: a full moon flanked by two crescents facing in opposite directions.

Pip lifted Gloaming, standing in front of the other two protectively.

“You’re Mr. January’s other sister,” Eleanor said.

“Of course,” Katie replied. “In your world, I go by the name Katie Rhodes. Though sometimes I have been compared to—”

“Hekate,” Pip said. She was an expert in mythology, especially since Halloween. “Goddess of witchcraft and crossroads. Right?”

“But the clock isn’t ticking,” Otto said.

“Isn’t it?” Katie said, and made a twisting gesture with her hand.

All at once, the color bled out of the world. The ticking of the clock became like thunder, and the hairs on the back of Eleanor’s neck stood on end.

“The error my siblings made was in giving you warning. I ensured you had none. You are in my crossroads, and when the totality of the eclipse is over, you will be mine for good.” She wasn’t smiling or gloating, the way her siblings would have. She sounded matter-of-fact.

Eleanor wheeled toward the edge of the path. If they could escape the crossroads, maybe that would be enough to get free of Katie’s grasp.

“I wouldn’t,” Katie said mildly as Eleanor sprinted for the woods.

She’d barely gotten a toe over the edge when something slammed into her, throwing her back to the ground. Otto yelped and hurried to help her back to her feet. Pip launched herself toward another spot at the edge of the road—and then she was being lifted off her feet and tossed back by some unseen force. At least Pip landed nimbly on her feet, scowling. Eleanor stared at the empty air—and suddenly it wasn’t so empty. For a split second, the air shimmered with a strange light.

But she didn’t just see it. She felt it. She felt the roads, the only real thing in this place. She could sense them stretching out, away from the crossroads. They seemed to call to her. They seemed to be waiting for her to answer.

“We have to try to get away from the crossroads,” Otto suggested under his breath.

“You cannot run faster than my hounds,” Katie said. She whistled an eerie two-tone note. Rag-a-bone and Shatterblack slinked out from behind her, as if they had been hidden in her silhouette. They paced a wide circle around the trio, moving in opposite directions until each of them blocked the way down one of the roads, Katie herself barring the third path.

Eleanor looked around wildly in the gloom—and then her eyes fixed on the horizon. At first she thought there was something huge and solid hurtling toward them, and then she realized what she was seeing was pure darkness. The darkness of the total eclipse, moving like a wave over the woods.

Instinctive terror swept through her. She gave a cry and reached for her friends. They caught her hands just as the moon slid over the last sliver of the sun.

Only the candlewick eyes of the umbral hounds broke through the solid dark that fell across them then. Eleanor shivered. The night was so thick she could feel it against her skin.

It felt so strange. She felt strange.

Eleanor’s breath came raggedly. The Story—the world-walker. Is that what she felt, seeping into her skin, making the dark feel alive?

No. She wouldn’t let the Story take her. She couldn’t.

Katie snapped her fingers. A light appeared, floating in the air beside her. Its light was pale and colorless. Everything was colorless—their eyes and hair and skin and clothes, and the road itself. All the color had bled out of the world.

“It won’t be long,” Katie said, almost wearily. “Two minutes, and totality will be over. You can stop running. You will become the keys to open our way home, and we will return.”

She didn’t sound triumphant or mocking, the way Mr. January and Mrs. Prosper had been when they thought themselves on the verge of victory. Instead, her voice held a note of—was it dread? Reluctance?

“You don’t have to do this,” Eleanor said.

Katie’s eyes were tiny pinpricks of light like stars. “It’s everything we’ve been working toward for centuries. We will open the gates of the Pallid Kingdom and our parents’ armies will spill out. This world and all the rest will be drowned in gray, and we will wear our crowns of silver and bone. And I will be the one that made it happen. I will be rewarded.”

Her words were sharp with hunger and longing and fear, and she stalked toward them in the darkness. Shatterblack and Rag-a-bone came, too, and Eleanor and the others drew together. Pip dropped Eleanor’s hand to bring Gloaming up, facing Rag-a-bone in a defensive pose.

Katie stretched out a hand. One fingertip touched Eleanor’s cheek. Her skin was cold. “It won’t hurt,” she said, like it mattered at all.

They were out of time, and there was no one to help them. Nothing that could save them.

Unless . . .

We need more time, Eleanor thought desperately. They had to get away from this place. And there was only one way she could think of to do it. She shut her eyes. You want me, Story? Come on. Open a road with me. Let’s walk between the worlds.

The Story answered. Something cold and poisonous and lovely flowed through her veins. Taking hold. She gasped, her eyes flying open. Strange threads of light gleamed around her like a spiderweb, and the filaments stretched out in all directions.

They were all connected. All the worlds. And she could feel them. Here at the crossroads of the Wending, she could feel every one, all at once, and all she had to do was reach out—

“The sun!” Pip cried in horror. The faintest sliver of light shone at the edge of the moon. Totality was ending.

Eleanor’s heart thudded in her chest. She could do this. She could be the world-walker and she could find a way to get out of this place.

Help us, she thought.

“No!” Katie cried, but it was too late.

Power twined around Eleanor. The world-walker’s power. Her power. She reached out blindly, grabbing at whatever threads she could.

Take us away. Anywhere but here. We need more time, more time, more time, she thought desperately, her words skipping along with her frantic heartbeat.

A road appeared, knitting itself out of nothing beside them. A fourth road, unguarded.

“Run!” Eleanor cried. Otto didn’t hesitate—he dashed for the road, and Pip plunged after him. Eleanor sprinted to follow.

The startled hounds hesitated half a second—and no more. Shatterblack leaped. Eleanor half-turned, flinging out a hand to protect herself from the hound’s leap.

The thread of moonlight around her wrist unknotted itself at her gesture. It arced gracefully through the air and lashed at Shatterblack’s muzzle. The hound shrieked and leaped back, and her sister barked in alarm.

“Where are we going?” Otto called.

The road didn’t lead anywhere. Not yet. Eleanor could sense it the same way she could feel her own hand at the end of her arm. And she could sense the Wending, too. Waiting. But she didn’t know how to tell it where they needed to go. Her mind was a jumble.

We need more time. We need to get away. She’s after us. Katie Rhodes. The People Who Look Away. We need—I need—I want—

All her fear and desire seemed to well up inside of her, swirling together into a storm—

She stretched out her hand.

The forest seemed to tear in two, a new landscape bleeding into the space where it had been. Different trees, a thicket of pale birches. “Go!” Eleanor yelled as the others gaped.

Two steps, three, and they were on the new road. She could feel the way the roads knit together, the way they might come apart. Rag-a-bone and Shatterblack streaked toward them, and on instinct Eleanor raised her hand, and willed the roads apart.

Where the two roads met, the air shimmered, wobbled. Where the edges of the two roads met, they frayed and shrank back. Only a thin seam of dirt and grass divided them, but the hounds rebounded as if they’d struck a wall.

And then Katie and the hounds and the gnarled forest and the eclipse-darkened sky were gone. They stood in the pale light of morning in a forest of white birch trees, a dirt path beneath their feet.

And they weren’t alone.

“What have you done?” a hard voice asked. Eleanor turned, the world still spinning around her and the world-walker’s power like electricity in her blood. For a moment she stared, not understanding what she was seeing. Who she was seeing.

The woman standing a few feet away crossed her arms, looking angry.

“Mom?” Eleanor managed.

And then her legs went out from under her.