I was feeling more human all the time.
“I’m not going back,” he said, answering my question minutes after I’d asked it.
“Why not?”
“Because this was always what I wanted. Not quite the way I got it, of course. It shouldn’t have been like that. Alice, it shouldn’t have been blood money.” He sounded suddenly, comfortingly unsure.
“I know. You’ve made up for that, don’t you think?”
“I hope so,” he said seriously. “But that wasn’t what this was about. I wanted to see something through to the very end. And I’ve been living here all this time, in this world. It isn’t all bad. It’s beautiful. And strange. And bigger than you’d think. Alice, there’s a whole ocean. And ice caves—oh, you know that. I heard there are pools in the mountains that are a thousand feet deep, and clear as glass.”
“Fairy-tale shit.”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “Fairy-tale shit.”
“And there’s a girl?”
He smiled. It was so kind I almost died of embarrassment. “There might be. But believe me when I say I wouldn’t leave the whole world behind just for a girl.”
“Yeah. You would.” I meant it, too. He’d grown into the sort of man who would do more than that for someone he loved.
He’d done a whole hell of a lot for me.
“So what do I do now?”
“Now you find the Spinner. It shouldn’t be hard—she’ll be on the move since the story broke. Cleaning up messes, looking for you.”
I’m just one big fucking mess, aren’t I. That’s what I wanted to say. But didn’t. Finch deserved better than my self-pity. It felt like he’d become too old for it.
Janet was grilling the redheaded brother on his first escape and my abduction when we returned. “You taught yourself to drive a car and it didn’t kill you,” she said comfortingly. “You’ll do fine without a story. Who needs a story?”
He kept nodding, jittery with cold feet. I got it—life was a big thing to live without a map.
Janet turned her flinty eyes on us. “You off to find your own country?”
“Come with me?” I said impulsively, knowing she’d turn me down.
It still hurt a little when she did, however gently. This was a journey I’d have to take alone.
I hugged Janet, and I shook the brother’s hand. Then I stood in front of Finch. He wrapped his arms around me, and the last burning ember of ice in me melted to nothing.
I was hungry, and so tired the ground moved like waves beneath my feet. But I didn’t trust myself to stop now, to rest. I climbed onto Janet’s red bicycle and set out for the edge of the world.
30
The land beyond the valley was uneven, grass littered with rocky bits where my wheel caught and turned. The sky was a mottled blue, the sunlight strange. I rode for a time alongside a stream that flowed but made no sound. I passed a quarry and crossed a bridge barely wider than a car, stretching over a ravine so deep I couldn’t see the bottom. The earth and sky looked unfinished here, sketches from a restless pen. The air was thick and silent. I wheeled through a tunnel of firs that moved their branches and smelled, disorientingly, like rain on hot pavement. Past them was a dirt road with endless flat plains on either side. Far, far away I saw a glittering line at the horizon. The ocean? I sniffed but smelled no salt.
I rode till the water in my stomach stopped sloshing and I was thirsty again. When I got close enough to see the water more clearly, I realized it was a desert of sparkling sand. At the edge of it sat the Story Spinner, looking like she had the first time I saw her. She wore a baby-doll dress and leggings and sat next to a sprawled-out blue bicycle. She was drinking something from a plastic thermos, and didn’t raise her eyes till I was right in front of her.
She squinted up, head cocked to one side. “You broke your story. It’s not worth being told now.”
“It was never my story,” I said. “It was yours.”
“Not here looking for revenge, I hope?”
The idea made me tired, a fatigue with no bottom. I shook my head.
“Good.” She stood, brushing sand off her leggings. “I can’t make any promises about what you’ll find back there,” she said. “Time works—”
“Differently than I think it does. I know.” I stumbled off the bike, my knees woozy and buckling, and stood in front of her.
Was there a right way to say goodbye to my maker? My captor? The woman who’d funneled me back into my sad and endless story as easily as a wasp led out through an open window?
She smiled at my confusion and gave a two-fingered salute, like a girl in an old movie.
No goodbye needed, I guessed. I turned away from her, knowing her eyes would be the last thing I remembered when all other memories of this place had flattened into photographs.
I stepped onto glittering sand, just over the border of the Hinterland.
The sand was hot as embers. The heat scalded my feet, then scaled my body, hurting worse than the spider sparks. I took a breath in to scream, but the pain was already passing. The sand was glittering white, then dun, then grassy, then just grass. When I looked up I saw an acre of overgrown lawn, running up to the edges of a slumping, tumbledown house. The Hazel Wood.
A terror clawed up out of the tiny part of me that wasn’t too tired to feel. How many years did it take for a place to fall apart like this? From a distance it was picturesque, but as I walked closer I could see its destruction. The great house looked like it had grown up from the ground, and the ground was trying to take it back. Vines grew through cracked windowpanes, and grass crawled over the steps. The swimming pool looked like a frog pond and smelled worse.
When I reached the steps, I lifted the skirts of my princess dress and kicked off the shreds of my slippers. I walked up to the door and knocked.
I waited a long time, but nobody answered. The door was locked, and while I could’ve climbed through a window, there wasn’t any point. The Hazel Wood’s warped clock had finally run down. If Althea was lucky, she was dead.
She wasn’t who I needed to find.
The Hazel Wood’s gates let me out into a normal wood. No ravine, no grove of glittering trees. I walked barefoot to the road, feeling every pebble, every acorn and piece of trash. The first few cars slowed down to look at me in my ragged dress, my hair that fell almost to the tops of my thighs. But none of them stopped. I tried to glean clues about how much time had passed from the make of the cars, without luck. No hovercraft, at least.
Finally a minivan drove by me, stopped, and backed up. In the driver’s seat sat an old woman wearing a rain bonnet over frosted hair. She rolled down the passenger window and peered at me.
“Now why on earth would you wear a dress that lovely into the woods?”
I was out of practice, talking to people. No words came. I tried to smile reassuringly. Don’t be afraid of me, old woman. It probably looked terrifying. I had, until very recently, been a literal fairy-tale monster.
She sniffed. “You don’t need to snarl at me. Either you’ve gotten lost during a costume party or your story is much more interesting than that, but either way—”
“I don’t have a story,” I said. My voice sounded like a rusty hinge.
“Well. Do you need a ride or not?”
I shook my head, then nodded, then walked slowly around the ugly hulk of the car to let myself in. The dashboard lights blinked like insect eyes, and the air inside smelled like nothing that should exist on heaven or earth. New car smell, I remembered. Keep it together, Alice.