I grabbed Finch’s hand, ignoring his cry of pain at the burn of my fingers, and we ran.
We ran away from the trees, toward the highway. I had a dim idea of jumping in front of the next car when I got there. Idiotic. The world had paused like a tape deck; I couldn’t even hear birdsong.
“Alice!” The Hinterland boy’s voice was a savage yelp. It sounded like something that didn’t come from a human throat. I couldn’t help it; I turned.
He threw up his arm and … the ground folded like a fan. Or maybe it was the trees that moved, shivering over the pavement like a horror movie cut, distant then there, all around us.
My chest was a bellows with the air squeezed out, but I tried to run anyway. The breaths I sucked in were bitter as helicopter seeds. Trees surrounded us, and we ran over tumbled green ground. But the world wasn’t working right, and suddenly we were running toward them, the boy and Twice-Killed Katherine, hiding behind her fading hair. She held a knife, and I was running too fast to do anything but pitch myself forward. I skidded to a stop at her feet, Finch tumbling down beside me.
The knife glinted at the level of my eyes. I opened them as wide as I could, because suddenly the worst thing that could happen was for death to take me unaware. But she didn’t strike—she handed the knife to me, her gloved fingers pressing it into my palm. But careful, careful not to touch me too long. Even under the leather I could feel the way she startled back from my skin.
“Kill. Yourself,” she hissed, before stepping out of range.
“What?”
The boy’s mouth hung open, and I saw something terrible in his eyes. The shadows of toothy, waiting things, like all of him was hungry. “Kill yourself, Alice,” he said, like it was a chant. “Kill yourself.”
I had a vision of the knife’s tip piercing my wrist, letting out the fire burning under my skin in a shining flood. I shook it away.
“Alice, no, no, please, oh, please.” Finch was almost praying, down on the ground.
“Why would I do that?” I asked dully. The question was real. I wanted to know.
“It’s you or it’s both of you,” Katherine said. “You or both of you. You or both of you!”
“Alice, they can’t make you do anything,” Finch said, his voice harsh and smoky with fear. “They can’t even touch you!”
“Shut your mouth,” Katherine hissed. Her foot flashed as she kicked him with the bladed side of her boot, leaving a thin line of blood running over his cheek.
Finch fell back with a cry, curling in around his wound. Katherine and the boy flanked me, standing just out of reach. No part of their skin was bare but their faces.
When my hand hit Katherine’s face, it had burned me—it still burned—but it hurt her, too. Why?
“Why can’t you touch me?” I asked.
Katherine sneered down at me, unmoving. The boy was the weak link. His eyes flicked to her face and back to mine.
“Wait. You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”
“Scared?” she said, furious and low. “Of you? You’re next to nothing. You’re almost as bad as him.” She pointed at Finch. “All you’re good for now is to spill your blood and make us a damned door. Now kill yourself, or he gets it, and your mother next.”
A door? I lunged at her with the knife awkward in my hand, held like I was about to slice bread. She moved lightly out of my way, kicking my hand so it sang with pain and the knife arced up and away. It clattered at the boy’s feet. He picked it up and looked at Katherine.
“Kill the lamb,” she said.
I saw the horrible confusion in Finch’s eyes. They went dumb with animal terror as the dark-haired boy forced him to his knees. One hand peeled back Finch’s chin, the other held the knife.
I had no weapon but my bare skin and Katherine’s cold fire running through it, so I launched myself at the boy’s uncovered face.
He recoiled from me with a shout, drawing the knife over Finch’s throat in one convulsive sweep.
Fear dropped from Finch’s eyes, replaced with blank shock.
The blood was a line then a smear then a red curtain falling.
“There goes our bargaining chip,” Katherine said, her voice distant. “Ever heard of a bluff?”
Time slowed. Finch was a spilled cup, just before it hit the ground. A precious something dropped into the dark beneath a subway grate. A tangled mess of infinite possibilities, countless threads, cut at the quick by silver scissors.
He was down.
I screamed, crawling forward to press my hands over his opened throat.
“Your fault, Alice,” Katherine said. It was almost a whisper. She took the bloody knife and dropped it at my side. “Kill yourself.”
I thought about it for a moment. I did. But Finch’s eyes held mine, bright and questioning. Not dead yet, but dying.
“It’s okay,” I said, stupidly.
The boy who’d cut Finch’s throat was pacing beside us. “Katherine?” He said it like a question before crouching to lift Finch, hoisting him over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I cried out and reached for Finch’s dangling hand, but the boy jerked him away. He lifted the knife from the dirt and twisted it in the air like a conductor’s baton. The air shifted and lightened where he stabbed, peeling back from itself to reveal a rift as livid as Green River soda.
Finch’s body was limp over the boy’s shoulder as he stepped into the bright green gloaming. Then he was gone, and the boy with him. The last spatter of his blood hit the grass when he’d already disappeared.
I stared at the place where I’d seen Finch dying and screamed. It took a while for the sound to come. When it did, Katherine leaned over me and I screamed again, holding up palms painted in blood, trying to press them to her face.
She made a frustrated sound and flicked her hand. Something came winging toward me: her cruel little bird, unfolding from empty air. It darted at my eyes and I threw out an arm. I felt a tug at the edge of my … it was hard to explain. The edge of my self. Like my soul was pressing against the walls of my body, ready to be sucked out like a yolk through a pierced eggshell. The sun tilted down, as if someone had thrown it off course with a baseball bat.
The last thing I heard was the rasp of Katherine’s voice, so close it seemed to be coming from inside my head. “By your hand,” she said, “you’ll die tonight.” Then I fell into a numb black sea.
20
Ella drove. Her face was lost in shadow, her hands lit white spiders on the wheel. She hummed a song that at first seemed tuneless, before it resolved into something that lilted and spun back on itself in an eerie round.
“Mom,” I said.
She flinched. “I thought you were sleeping.”
“What’s that song?”
After a long pause, “A nursery rhyme. My friend taught it to me when I was little.”
My mom didn’t talk about her childhood, not ever. I held my breath, then dared a question. “Were you a little girl like me?”
I was very young. Six at the oldest.
“What do you mean?”
I tried to put into words what I meant. Did her insides match her outsides? Was the way my life dripped off me like water, barely leaving a mark, normal? Did the bad luck chase her, too, or had it only come around after she’d had me?
But I couldn’t say any of that, because I didn’t want to see her cry. She wanted me to be happy. Each new place was a fresh chance, a field of unmarked snow she gave me to run through. And maybe everyone felt this way when they moved on—that everything they’d left behind smeared together like watercolors and washed away.