Falling Up

ALICE’S SMALL FIST POUNDED AGAINST the scratched-up window from inside, but Stella didn’t have time to think—just react. Racing after the car, she managed to catch the handle of the rear door. She hauled herself up to hook the edge of the doorway with her feet and clung there, spiderlike, as the train picked up speed.

“This is going well,” said a voice from her pocket.

“Shut up,” Stella growled at Anyway.

Stella could hear Alice banging away inside, like a bumper car in a junkyard. Alice wasn’t the screaming type. “Alice!” Stella shouted.

Spuddle, who had been riding on top of the train car, zipped down and clung to the handle. “Um, excuse me—”

“Not a good time, Spuddle,” Stella told him.

“Oh, sorry, okay.” He zoomed back to the roof of the car.

“Alice!” Stella shouted again. “I’m here! I’ll help you!”

The crashing stopped for a moment. Then Alice cried, “Well, what’s the plan, then?”

“Working on it!” Stella said.

“It’s almost as if she isn’t grateful,” Anyway said.

“Could you please be quiet unless you have something helpful to say?”

“Why don’t you grab some of these vines?” Anyway suggested.

Stella grabbed one. It crumbled in her grip. “Next?” she grunted.

“I’m sorry to interrupt.” Spuddle dipped and landed on Stella’s shoulder.

“Still not a good time,” Stella told him.

“All right.” He zipped back up to the top of the train.

Her fingers strained at the edge of the door ledge; her toes ached in the tiny crevasse that held them. She could hear a furious Alice cursing inside the car. She had a very creative vocabulary. “Grab the emergency brake!” Stella shouted.

“There isn’t an emergency brake!” Alice screamed back.

“Of course there is!” Stella cried. “There has to be!”

“This is a subway car in the middle of a Nightmare Forest on the Nightmare Line!” Alice countered. “It doesn’t have a brake! I feel like that’s kind of the point!”

Spuddle chose that moment to land once again on Stella’s shoulder. “I’m afraid that what I have to tell you really can’t wait,” he announced.

Stella blinked at him. “Go ahead.”

“Um, the tracks end in about a hundred yards,” he said. “At the edge of a cliff.”

Stella gaped at him.

“I thought you should know.”

“Thank you, Spuddle,” Anyway said from her pocket. “That was very helpful.”

Spuddle smiled and curled his tail at the compliment. Then he darted away.

Stella’s mind spun. There had to be an emergency brake. All subway cars had an emergency brake, and so far, every one she had traveled in on the Dreamway had been like the ones in real life. They were made of scraps from her mind, after all, pieces of her imagination. And, while Stella didn’t care much for stories, she understood mechanical things. All trains need an emergency brake, she told herself. Even a Nightmare train doesn’t want to get into a smashup. Not on purpose, anyway.

Every fiber of Stella’s body was concentrated on clinging to the exterior of the Nightmare train as it rattled and bucked over the tracks. A stray branch tottered off the roof, nicking her on the cheek. But Stella paid no attention. She ignored the grasping trees as they reached out for her. Her mind was in a different place entirely: she was inside the subway car; she was remembering what an emergency brake looks like. There had to be one. There had to be.

“Fifty yards!” Spuddle shouted.

It’s red, Stella thought, bright, like a fire engine. And rectangular, made of metal, and with a handle wide enough to fit all your fingers through. STOP was painted in white block letters about an inch high. She held this in her mind, held it there with as much strength as she held on to the car with her fingers.

Alice let out a shout, and a moment later, the universe began to scream. The brakes engaged and the subway car convulsed, bucking like a cat that someone has forced into a costume. Light flickered on the dead branches on either side as the brakes screeched, sending up sparks in a silver shower that looked like a fiery lawn sprinkler.

“We’re not stopping!” Spuddle shouted. “Twenty yards!”

Still, Stella clung to the end of the car. In her mind, she knew that tracks did not simply end. There would be a safety stop—a pylon, something concrete, something that would keep a train from going over the edge. . . .

“Ten yards!”

“We’re slowing down!” Anyway cried.

“Not enough!” Spuddle screeched.

Anyway burrowed down into her pocket, but Stella did not cover or even close her eyes. She looked around, frantically searching the edge of the forest for a solution, some way to slow the train. That is why her eyes were open to see a figure move in a tree twenty yards ahead. A moment later, a large black branch crashed onto the tracks. The train car slammed into it, and the wood jammed between the wheels and the rails.

The train car screech trailed to a scraping wail and suddenly bucked, sending Stella flying. She landed on her shoulder between the tracks. Gravel scraped her skin as she scrambled to her knees.

The subway car squatted, motionless, before her.

“What happened?” Spuddle asked. He looked out over the vast cliff before them. “Is this heaven?”

“Owwww,” groaned a voice from the other side of the subway door.

“Alice! Are you okay?” Stella shouted.

In response, the rear emergency exit door slid open. Alice stood in the doorway looking like someone who had just arm-wrestled a tornado. Her eyes closed slowly, then snapped open. “I’m trying to think of a witty reply to that question,” Alice admitted, “but I think my brain got scrambled.”

“Oh, you’re so lucky!” Spuddle announced, flitting over to Alice. “Thank goodness for that branch!”

But it wasn’t luck. Stella knew it wasn’t. She turned her gaze toward the tree and saw the dark shape crawling down the trunk.

Anyway noticed her expression. “What is it?” he asked as the large, dark shape landed at the base of the tree and started to move away.

“Who’s there?” Stella shouted, and the figure froze. “Who is that?”

The figure stepped out of the shadows, and Stella saw him clearly for the first time. It was a man wearing jeans and a filthy hooded sweatshirt. His dark eyes flashed with intelligence, not anger, as they gazed out from beneath long gray curls. “It’s nobody,” the man said. “Nobody to be afraid of, anyway,” he added.

“Angry Pete?” Stella asked slowly.

He didn’t reply.

She tried again. “Pedro?”

He studied her face, his expression a question mark.

“You know my librarian,” Stella explained. “Nancy Slaughter.”

“Oh.” Pedro looked confused.

“You—saved us. Thank you.”

Pedro shrugged. “Nobody deserves to be on that train,” he said simply.

“How long have you—been here?” Stella asked.

Pedro looked around. “Long time,” he said finally. “A very long time, I think.”

“How did you get here?” Anyway asked. “You’re not even properly in a dream, and you’re not on a train—”

“I found a way out of my dream,” Pedro said slowly. “But I can’t seem to find my way out of here. Been in the forest, seems like . . . forever. No way out.”

“It’s that way.” Alice pointed toward the Memory Line, the direction they had come from.

Pedro’s eyes held hers for a moment. Then he glanced over her shoulder and shuddered. “No.”

“She’s right,” Anyway assured him. “The only way for you to get out is through the Memory Line. . . .”

“I’m not going that way,” Pedro said simply.

“You have to,” Stella said softly. “You don’t want to stay here, do you?”

Angry Pete glared at her. “Of course I don’t want to stay here.”

“All right, so then—” she prompted.

“There’s things worse than this,” Angry Pete replied. His voice was a low growl, a warning. “Plenty worse.”

The forest around them was silent, as if it were watching them. Stella wondered what horrors lurked in its depths and how it could possibly be less frightening than what Pedro might find on the Memory Line. Whatever that was, she realized, it must be horrible.

Her heart ached for Pedro, and she realized that she could never be afraid of him again—not when he was so full of fear himself.

“Do you know about the new Nightmare Line?” Stella asked, making her voice as gentle as she could. “Have you seen it?”

His dark eyes grew guarded. “I’ve seen something,” he told them. “Don’t know what it is. But I’m not going in that direction, either. I’d rather stick to the woods.”

“How do we get there?” Stella asked.

“Don’t know how you get there,” Angry Pete replied. He turned away from her slowly and pointed toward the horizon. “But if you’re looking for it, there it is.”