He saw me looking. “I don’t know how it works,” he confessed, flipping it over to show me its empty insides. “It shouldn’t.”
By then a small crowd had gathered around us, including a bronze-skinned woman with a drowsy, just-woken air to her, whom I read immediately as ex-Story. She was accompanied by a boy of about fifteen, wearing hip plastic glasses. An old man in an antique suit sipped endless mugs of bright green tea and listened to my singing attentively, flashing a parchment-colored smile. There were two barefoot dudes who looked like they’d stumbled in straight from Burning Man and put me on edge. They wore twinned expressions of total peace, but the whites of their eyes were shot through with red. The flora might be different here, but something growing nearby could make you high.
People drifted in and out, and the bartender—his name was Alain, and I had it wrong, he was Swiss—served me a plate of flatbread and stew spiced with something that caught at my throat. The shadows grew long over the bar, until finally he sighed and grabbed a leather satchel from the floor.
“I’m off,” he said. “You’re back to Janet’s tonight?” I’d told him where I came from, though not what I was after. He and everyone else in the bar seemed to know Janet.
I shrugged noncommittally and stretched, reaching inward for the otherworldly sense that drove me here. It twitched to life, half-drowned by liquor and talk and human connection. I’d kept my gloves on, and it almost let me forget I didn’t belong with these people. Unless I could figure out how to become ex-Story, this wasn’t my Hinterland. These weren’t my kind.
And if I couldn’t figure it out?
I could stay. The thought ghosted up from the part of my brain that plugged into the Hinterland like it was a mainframe. It carried with it a hard beat of fear, but beneath it, something else: surrender. After a life of running, always running. Meditating and counting and clinging to Ella’s hands in an effort to stay afloat on an oceanic anger.
I could do it, I thought. If I let myself believe Ella wasn’t back there waiting for me.
But if I let myself believe that, I would drown for good.
After Alain left, the blonde bartender put stubby candles out on the tables, like she was in a Brooklyn restaurant preparing for dinner service. But as I watched her, I realized there was more to it. Something was happening around her hands, some trick of the light. As she moved from table to table, putting the candles down, she flicked her fingers in complicated patterns, like she was signing or weaving or moving them into place for cat’s cradle. One by one, the people at the tables got up and left without a word, grabbing their stuff, dropping money, and slipping out into the night.
When the last one left, she sighed and pulled the clip from her hair, massaging her scalp as it fell to her shoulders. She had fairy princess hair, like mine would be if I let it grow out.
She slipped onto the barstool next to mine and tapped the back of my glove with one finger. “Hello, Alice-Three-Times.”
Her voice was throaty and low, and even through the gloves her touch sent a line of pale fire from my fingertips to my shoulders.
I pulled them off, stretched my fingers so the bones cracked. “I’ve been looking for you, I think.”
She laughed. “I’ve been looking for you longer.”
I saw her now that she wasn’t masquerading as a bartender. I felt her tight-packed energy, so fierce it almost distorted the air around her. Her eyes were too close to mine, too focused, two blue saucers that ate up light. I didn’t let myself look away.
“What did you do, to make them all leave? Was it magic?”
“Nothing so unpredictable as that. I just … tweaked the narrative. Made it the right time for them to go.”
“So you control everyone here? Not just the Stories?”
The Story Spinner pushed up on her elbows, pulled herself a pint of something bubbly from across the bar. “I don’t have to control anyone, least of all the Stories. Once I set them going, they’re like clockwork. A self-contained engine.” She looked at me dryly. “Well. Usually. What I do is keep the threads untangled, keep the realms separate, make sure the stories have room to unfold. But you”—she pointed a finger gun at me; I wondered for an aimless moment whether the Hinterland had guns—“are the hitch in the clockwork. Is it too much to hope that you came back to finish your story?”
This, I realized, was Althea’s she. The one who wouldn’t let Althea die, who let her go once and regretted it. She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
“Can I? Finish it, I mean? If that’s all you need me to do before I go, then I’ll do it.” I didn’t know what I was promising, or what it might mean, but what she said made it sound finite. Like maybe I could make a deal.
Her eyes took the measure of me, a quick water-blue assessment that made me feel like a bolt of cloth or a coffee cup. Just for a moment, before they dropped like mercury into soft sympathy.
Don’t trust her, then. Though that was already clear.
“When you finish a story,” she said patiently, “it begins again. Until I stop telling it. And while they’re being told, stories create the energy that makes this world go. They keep our stars in place. They make our grass grow.”
“Are you a Story? Or an ex-Story?”
“I’m not from here. I’m not from there, either,” she added, before I could ask.
A third place, then. The idea plucked at the edges of my brain. I imagined a whole universe of worlds floating in an unfathomable vastness, like lentils scattered through ashes. It was such a lonely vision it made my chest ache.
“Are you going to let me go home?” I whispered.
“Oh, Alice.” The regret in her voice sounded real. “Look at yourself—at your hands. It’ll reach your mind soon, you know. It’ll reach your heart. They’ve been waiting a very long time for you to come back—the queen, the king. And stasis is worse than stories, they say.” She laughed, like what she’d said was funny.
“You say stories run until you stop telling them,” I said wildly. “Can’t you just decide, then? To stop telling mine—to let me go?”
“What about the Hinterland makes you think I’m nice?” She drank half her beer down, leaned in. “I did a favor for a woman once—a spinner in her own way, I have a soft spot for my kind—and look where it got me. Rules exist for a reason. But. But.” She held up a finger. “You can’t finish your story, but you can change it. Technically speaking, you can. You can choose another ending, and destabilize it from the inside. If you fail to close the loop, finish it right, the story might let you go. In theory.”
“I can do that,” I said quickly. “I’ll do that. I could go home, if I manage to do that?”
She rested her chin on her hand, eyes hooked on me like I was an experiment. “It’s a big if. But yes, perhaps you could. If that’s the new ending you chose.”
“How do I do it? Where do I start?”
“Where do all these things start? Once upon a time. And you just … go from there.”
Something struck me—Finch had never finished telling me my story. “But what if I don’t know how it ends? ‘Alice-Three-Times,’ I mean?”
“Maybe your odds will be better that way. Or, more likely, the ending will find you. And then you’ll begin again. Even if you did manage to break it, and leave this place behind, don’t forget—time works differently than you think it does. There’s no guaranteeing you’ll recognize the world you’re trying to return to.”