The brother thumped hard to the earth, keening as the wind was knocked out of him. The sparks sizzled, faded away. It was just him again. Me. The dead man on the ground. I felt something begin in my stomach—the ice, gathering itself.
The air in front of us shuddered like bad TV, and—there was a horse. Empty air, then a horse to fill it. Same animal, but wearing blinders this time.
“No,” said the brother, brokenly. “It can’t be.”
It could. It was. Ella Ella Ellaellaellalalala. I said the name till it turned to an aching syllable soup in my head. What did it mean? When I stopped thinking too hard about it, the bright pain behind my eyes went away.
There’s no way out. Not from the inside.
The cold was spreading through me like kudzu. Its fingers crawled up my throat; soon they would reach my black eyes. The sparkling air had faded to gray. I couldn’t remember why the man beside me was crying.
I slumped to the ground, anticipating the bite of rope around my wrists.
And all at once, the air lit up like a Christmas tree. Two shapes were moving fast toward us, setting the grid of the world alight.
A young man and an older woman. On … bicycles. They were on bicycles, one red and one green.
“Get her feet!” the boy yelled. His voice was cracked and strange, like he spoke around burrs caught in his throat. He had dark skin, a cloud of dark hair, and eyes as bright and steady as an animal’s.
A hot thump of recognition cut through the curling cold.
He was the one who’d been following me. Not just today, but all my life. In the yard, in the woods. In my father’s hall, once, before he was dragged away. The somebody who always set my head to aching, woke the sparks waiting at the corners of my sight.
Then he was next to me, grabbing my wrists. His touch drew my senses to the surface. I fought against him instinctively, and against the woman he was with—gray hair, blue tunic—who tried to hold my feet.
“Alice. Goddammit, Alice.” The boy ducked out of the way as I pulled a hand free and swiped at his chin with my nails.
Then I knew him. I went stiff so suddenly they dropped me. “Finch.”
“Yep. No time to catch up, we’ve got to break you out of this thing.”
I had something to say to him. He was somebody I could almost remember—somebody important. I saw blood and trees and a ceiling full of stars.
“But … you were dead. Weren’t you?” When he dipped his head to hear me, I saw the blurred scar across his throat, a narrow brown rope.
“Not quite. If you can … can you stand up? That’ll be easier than dragging you. But I’ll drag you if I have to. If you forget who you are.”
“Finch, it won’t let me go.”
“We’ve had time to look into these things, and it will,” said the woman, her voice severe.
I gaped at her. “Janet?”
She smiled, slightly, and nodded toward the redheaded brother crouching speechless on the ground. “Friend or foe?”
“Friend. I think. Yes, friend.”
Janet helped him to his feet, and still he didn’t speak. The glittering veins of the world had receded; they weren’t close and hot and blinding, they smoldered at a polite distance.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I did some field research,” Janet said triumphantly. “Every ex-Story I spoke to says the stories broke one of two ways: they were wound down by the Spinner, or picked apart by an inciting incident. And that inciting incident always had to do with a refugee wandering in at the wrong time. From there we extrapolated—” She stopped short, looking at me and Finch. “Oh. But you weren’t asking me, were you?”
“Your eyes are black all over,” he said. His crooked, raspy voice was so changed I couldn’t tell how he meant it. He touched his fingers to my chin and hissed.
“God, you’re like … well, like ice. Obviously. But we don’t have time for this, get on the bike.”
He was different from how I remembered him, in the dim memory rising from my wrung-out brain. This boy was thick through the shoulders. His hair was shorter than it used to be, and his arms were flecked with scars—silvery nicks and burns and raised patches of rough tissue. His eyes were what I remembered best, but they looked so tired.
I hiked my skirts and straddled Janet’s bike seat while the brother took Finch’s. As they pedaled away with two Stories weighing down their wheels, I looked back over my shoulder. The horse that shouldn’t have been there went up in a shower of sparks.
We lit out toward the grid of sizzling light. I braced myself, ready for a galactic ripping or the blinding pain of riding a bike through a wall of fire.
But the wall receded as we moved. It stayed ahead of us and beyond our reach, its light just south of blinding. Janet huffed as she pedaled, her wheels slipping in spring mud. We wheeled past a stretch of trees, a run of scraggling bushes, a tree like a weeping willow in bud. We passed them again: trees, bushes, willow. And again, until I realized the woods were repeating themselves on a loop.
We were being given a chance to turn around. Every other minute, the same blue-breasted bird showed itself on the branches of the flowering willow, singing a chastising four-note song.
“Janet,” Finch called back, warningly.
“I see it.”
“Stop!” I cried.
Janet skidded to a halt.
I slipped from the bike, walked a few unsteady steps, and turned. “Don’t follow me.”
I left them behind to walk toward the sparking wall. It was endless, a net hung down from the cool Hinterland sun. It stayed in place, allowing me to meet it. I kept going till I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then stood there bathing in the light it cast.
What would Althea do? The woman who’d built a bridge between two worlds, then brought them together like a hand in a glove?
I thought of her in the dark with her daughter, years ago and a world away, telling a story. I thought of the words she wrote down tripping over tongues and across continents, slicing fissures in the walls of the world.
“Once upon a time,” I whispered, “there was a girl who got away.”
The light burned a little less brightly through my lids. Maybe.
“Once upon a time there was a girl who changed her fate,” I said, louder. The words ran together like beads on a string. Like a story, or a bridge I could climb—up, up, up, like a nursery-rhyme spider.
“She grew up like a fugitive, because her life belonged to another place.” I held my fingertips out, feeling the ice of them meet the wall’s fine, hot fizzing. “She remembered her real mother, far away on an Earth made of particles and elements and, and, and reason. Not stories. And she ripped a hole in the world so she could find her way home.
“And she lived happily ever after in a place far, far from the Hinterland,” I said. I begged. “And the freeze left her skin. And she found her real mother in the world where she had left her.”
Slowly, slowly, I opened my eyes.
There was a hole snagged in the wall. The air around it glittered like the last wandering traces of a firework. It was just the right size for a girl. I put my hand out behind me and beckoned.
The spokes of two rusty bicycles clicked closer, but the wall stayed in place. I kept my hand extended until Finch’s fingers closed around mine, warm and sure. I led him, ducking, through the hole I’d made, Janet and the fairy-tale brother just behind.
When I stepped beyond the borders of the story, I felt it in my teeth and my belly button and the roots of my hair. Behind me the brother groaned, stumbling heavily against Janet. Finch put an arm around me, and his heat neutralized my cold.