“Oh!” he said. In his voice were unshed tears, and I thought he might want me to look away. But he grabbed my hand and brought it to his chest and held it.
I let him. The steady pump of his heart through his shirt made me remember the heart was a muscle. Our most important one. “You were having a nightmare.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Alice.” He said my name like a person putting something precious down on a bed of moss.
“For what? It’s just a dream.”
“No, I…” He looked at me so intently I dropped my eyes, watched our hands rising and falling with his breath. “Alice, let’s go back.”
My head jerked up. His lashes were wet and his cheek was creased. My mind shot an arrow from the first time I saw him in his uniform at Whitechapel to right now, wearing a T-shirt and boxers in this bed.
“Back to what?” I asked.
He let his head dip forward till his forehead touched mine. “There are better fairy tales,” he whispered. “If the Hinterland’s real, maybe all of it’s real. We could look for Neverland. Or Narnia.”
I hadn’t cried since the night Ella announced her engagement, but I felt like crying now. “Ella’s not in Neverland,” I whispered back. “Or in Narnia.”
“Maybe she’s not in the Hazel Wood, either.”
I pulled back, my skin feeling cold where it had touched his. “Maybe not. But this is what we came here to do.”
“We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do. There’s still—we can still turn around.”
“Where is this coming from?” I yanked my hand back and slammed it down on the mattress, feeling like an impotent ass when it made barely a sound. “What did you dream about?”
He shook his head. “I dreamed all of it was real.”
“It is real. We both saw Twice-Killed Katherine.”
“Not that. All of it.”
“All of what?”
He kept shaking his head, looking past me. “Don’t you ever feel like your life is a movie? And you’re playing a part? And you waste all your time watching yourself in that movie, thinking what a good job you’re doing at playing you, until you wake up and remember it’s all actually real? Every person around you is fucking real?” His voice went fast and faster, then cracked.
“Must be nice being rich,” I said, giving it an ugly edge, but I knew that wasn’t it. I felt that way, too. Except I never thought I was doing a very good job in my movie.
“Everything we do has consequences,” he said.
He’d caught me off guard, looking all soft and disturbed in the middle of the night. But now I was getting pissed. “This isn’t an assembly on drugs, Finch. You don’t need to tell me that. The consequence of you agreeing to drive my ass all the way to the Hazel Wood is that you will now follow through on that agreement. I have no money to give you for gas and no way to convince you to help me other than the fact that I will actually kill you if you try to drive me back to the city while we’re this close to maybe finding my mother. Got it?”
We stared at each other.
“I dreamed about the Hinterland,” he said.
“Yeah, I got that. But your dream has nothing to do with what we’re doing.” It tasted like a lie. I tried again. “It was a dream, not a prophecy.”
“How far would you go to find her?”
“Ends of the earth.”
“No farther?” He looked like he wanted me to convince him of—something.
I pressed my hands to my eyes, hard. “You feel like you’re playing a part in a movie? Well, so do I. I feel like I’m playing a part in a movie where all the sets have burned down. And the script got erased. And the cameras have no film, and we’re in a haunted movie lot in the bad part of town. Finch, she’s not just my only family, she’s my only person.”
When I saw acceptance break on his face, I realized what he’d wanted me to convince him of. He wanted to know I had nothing to lose. He wanted to know, maybe, that I would die in pursuit of Ella.
Die like Ness’s friend had died.
I looked at Finch, the solid boyness of him, and I knew I couldn’t let him go all the way with me. Not into the black hole of the Hazel Wood. At some point in the past thirty-six hours, he’d joined the tiniest, saddest clique of people, of which Ella had previously been the only member: people I, Alice Crewe, couldn’t bear to see die.
Hell is caring about other people.
* * *
I woke hours later with a feeling of fleet panic, breathing like I’d just come up from underwater. There was something in my ears, a sense of dying sound. What had woken me?
“Morning.” Finch was awake and watching from the next bed, sitting up with his hands braced behind him.
I fisted the hand he’d held to his chest, remembered how he’d looked with wet lashes in the dark. But his anguish of the night before was ironed away, his veneer of chipper Finchness back in place.
“Morning. I thought I— Did you hear something?”
“Well, yeah. We’ve been having a conversation for the last five minutes.”
“What?”
“You were talking in your sleep. I answered.”
“What did I say?”
He smiled. There was something sly in it. “Nothing. Just nonsense. You know, sleep stuff.”
“Finch. Tell me exactly what I said.”
His amusement faltered at the ice in my voice. I wondered if he was remembering that time I nearly drove a car with him in it into a tree. “Seriously, it was silly stuff. Like you were talking about fishing and toast and crap like that. Please don’t freak out.”
“I hate it when people tell me not to freak out.”
He swung his feet to the floor and looked at me seriously. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I should’ve woken you up. But it was cute. You looked so mellowed out, your voice just sounded so … different from usual. But—”
“But you should’ve woken me up,” I finished.
“Yeah.” He stood and stretched, his T-shirt riding high over his boxers. I switched my gaze to the ceiling, eyes on the mealy yellow circles of plastic stars till he was in the shower. Why hadn’t I believed him just now? What was it in his voice that told me he was lying?
Finch came out fully dressed, and I took his place in the bathroom. After showering I pulled my clothes back on over damp skin, leaving me with a clammy, half-finished feeling. I’d waited too long since my last haircut, and my wet hair brushed down past the tops of my ears. I frowned and mussed it upward. It was thick and corn-colored and wavy, and until I was fourteen it was so long I could sit on it. It was total Disney hair, catnip for every little girl with an itchy braiding finger. Ella had kept it short till I was old enough to put my foot down. And then I’d kept it long till that asshole teacher reminded me it was an invitation. Aren’t you a pretty little house cat.
After that I hated my long hair as much as Ella did. Cutting it off helped make me invisible—no more boys reaching through all that silk to snap the strap of my training bra. No more girls asking if they could touch it, and grabbing a handful before I had time to reply.
“You ready to go?” I asked, walking back into the bedroom.
Finch had ripped open the green foil packet of ground coffee tucked beside the tiny coffeemaker on the dresser. “Yea or nay?” he asked, tipping it toward me.
I dipped my nose toward the anemic smell of packaged Folger’s, and recoiled. “My bosses would go into a coma if they saw me drinking that stuff,” I began, before remembering, for the first time since Ella disappeared, that I’d completely blown off Salty Dog—or was about to. I’d be missing a shift later that day. I thought of Lana, forced to deal with the worst of the regulars on her own. Would she, at least, wonder enough to call me? And how pathetic was it that the only people in New York who might miss me had to pay me to come around?