“Of course she found you. You are a walking, talking bridge to the Hinterland. Anywhere you go, the wall between the worlds grows thin. They get through. They do damage.”
“She tried to kill me. She tried to make me cut my own wrists in the woods. Why?”
“Ah.” Her eyes turned bright. “Clever Katherine. There’d be a grave cost to pay if they killed you themselves, but if you spilled your own blood in those woods? Alice-Three-Times? It would burn a door between worlds that would never fade. Their vicious holidays out there would never end.”
Alice-Three-Times. The name seared and burrowed into me.
She looked at me with something approaching respect. “So you made it through the woods without a guide. Life out there hasn’t rendered you completely helpless. You must be a bit like her—like Ella.”
“I am,” I said, biting off the words.
She sucked on the cigarette I’d forgotten she was holding. “Ella never could resist a lost lamb—especially not you in your basket, with those awful black eyes. I tried to return you myself, before they killed her getting you back.” Her eyes darkened. “But Ella hated me for it, and she took you away. Far from them, far from me. Like I was a boogeyman, too.”
“But they’re not black. My eyes. They’re brown.” I said it stupid and hopeful. Like it was a loophole I could use to slip back into my real life.
“That happened after you left the Hazel Wood. It was enough to make Ella believe she did the right thing. She wrote to me, back when letters still washed up here once in a while—she said it was the Hinterland draining out of you. Saving you, giving you a real life, became her purpose. Did it work? Did you get one?” Her voice swerved sharply from desolation to hope—stunted and sad, but hope nonetheless.
I remembered the rootlessness, the travel, the cursed incidents that followed us from place to place. I felt in my back the bars of every sofa bed we ever crashed on, the heavy gaze of our hosts when we’d outstayed our welcome, and the ache of sleeping in our car for days on end, pretending I didn’t know we were homeless.
I saw Ella. Gripping my arms and counting down with me from one hundred, bringing my anger back within its borders. The blanket forts she built for me in guest rooms, resigning herself to sleeping without a pillow so I could forget we were a burden for a night. The crow’s-feet starting at the corners of her eyes, so out of place on a woman who never really grew up. Who chose saving me, running with me, over having a real life of her own.
“Yes,” I said. “It worked. I’ve had a wonderful life. I have a wonderful life.”
Althea tilted her head back, looked at me through lowered lashes. “And did she—did Ella ever talk about me?”
My first instinct was to hurt her. But I looked at the taut white knobs of her knuckles, the drawn-tight pouch of her mouth around the cigarette, and couldn’t. “All the time.”
“Liar,” she said softly, smoke sifting through her lips. “I won’t make excuses for my life, but I can tell you it wasn’t my choice to lose her. She thought—I don’t know what she thought. That I was the Hinterland’s dogcatcher, maybe.”
“Aren’t you? The letter—wasn’t that a trap?”
“Hmm.” She stubbed her cigarette against the bedframe, dropped the butt on the floor. “Not a very effective one.”
“She thought it was over. When you died—when the letter told us you’d died. She thought we were safe.”
Althea looked at me, eyes bleak. “She knew I was a bridge. She didn’t know you were one, too.”
It hit me like delayed pain. It had always been me. My black energy leaking into the air like blood, and the Hinterland like sharks on its trail. All the years we’d spent running, we were running from me.
“So they’ll always find me?” I whispered. “No matter where I go?”
“They are you. You’re all made of the same stuff.” Her voice was almost sympathetic. “It’s hard, isn’t it, to find you’re not at all the thing you thought you were?” She pointed at herself, her words poison-tipped. “Intrepid adventurer.” Then at me. “Real live girl.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t believe in a world outside of that room. “So what happens to a girl like me?” I asked dully. “If the letter had worked, if she’d brought me back. What would you have done with me?”
“But it did work after all, didn’t it? It just worked slow. It made you stand still, long enough for those monsters to corral you into the Halfway Wood. But—you survived it. And you came here, to me, of your own free will. Did you not?”
The sharpened look in her eyes made me wary. “I … don’t know. I wanted to come here. But I didn’t want it like this.”
“We never do, do we? When we get what we want?” Then she peeled off her gloves and seized my hands. Her grip burned worse than Katherine’s, and I gasped, trying to wrench myself free.
“This is what happens to girls like you.” Her words were half curse, half plea. “She’s tried so long to get you back, Alice-Three-Times. And as long as you’re on the wrong side of the woods, she won’t let me die.”
“Who?” I could barely hear my own voice over the pain. “Who won’t let you die?”
She ignored me, looking up like the ceiling was the sky, and a vengeful god was watching her. “I’m giving her back to you!” she cried. “Now will you let me go?”
The heat spread up over my arms and down my chest, squeezing me in its fist till my vision burst open and swung with stars. I felt the tremor in Althea’s fingers, saw the wide yellows of her eyes, and her mouth shaping itself around some final words I couldn’t hear. A plea, an apology. A promise, a lie.
Then I was falling end over end like Carroll’s Alice, through space or water or clouds or atoms. The pain passed, and I felt alive, breath in my chest and blood in my muscles and nothing hurting. The room was gone, Althea was gone, and I was rushing through bracing air. When I landed with a numbing jolt, I was in the Hinterland.
24
I was back in the forest. But this was a forest that made the Halfway Wood feel like a Polaroid. It made the woods on Earth seem like the pencil sketches of a blind man who’d read about trees but never seen them.
In the Halfway Wood I wondered whether the trees could hear me, whether they could speak. Here they seemed practically to breathe. I’d landed with my back against a trunk as wide as a car, front to back, its bark covered in knots that suggested an implacable face. It dropped a rain of seeds into my lap. They were crescent-shaped and pinkie nail–sized, burnished the color of a harvest moon.
I looked up at the sky like I might see Althea’s face there, watching me through a rip in the blue. Then I stood up and started walking. What else was there to do? I was numb. Three degrees removed from the world I’d grown up in—a world that wasn’t even mine.
Finch is here. I remembered it with a feeling like jerking back from the brink of sleep. The Halfway Wood had tried to make me forget. Althea’s junk drawer of a house and the woman herself, going mad in a yellow room. But Finch was here. He’d lived, and he’d bled out in an in-between forest, and now his corpse was cooling in a world he’d wished for.
Was he buried? Was he burned? What did a place like this do with its dead? Thoughts of him made my fingers curl and ache. I shoved them into my pockets and walked through a world where everything—everything—seemed alive.