The Night Country

5

Since leaving school, Sophia had stopped messing with New York boys. I understood now that being human, being with humans, was something she’d tried on like clothes. They’d never fit her right. Now she had a sort of boyfriend among the ex-Stories. Or he might’ve just been who she called when I wasn’t answering her texts.

Robin lived in a low-ceilinged Crown Heights apartment with a business school dropout named Eric, a rock-thick bro who thought his roommate was weird because he was from Iceland. They slept in twin beds shoved into a single room, so they could give their second bedroom over to a growing operation.

It was nearly three in the morning when Sophia let us in. Eric was slumped in front of their flat-screen playing a first-person shooter game, pit stains yellowing his Pussy Riot T-shirt.

“Ladies,” he said, pausing the game. That was a sign of great respect in Eric’s world.

Sophia inspected the desiccated pile of pizza crusts on the coffee table. “Where’s Robin?”

“You know. Messing around back there.” He darted a look at me and unpaused the game. “Tell him I ate his pizza.”

I think Sophia liked Robin because he never slept, either. We found him crouched in the back bedroom, fiddling with something I couldn’t see. Plants slumbered beneath the singed halo of grow lights, lined up in tidy green rows.

“Ilsa!” he said when he saw Sophia. He always used her Hinterland name, and she always corrected him.

“Sophia.” She nudged him with the toe of her shoe. “Alice is here, too.”

He unfolded from the ground, all six and a half wiry feet of him. Everything he felt beamed directly out of his face, and right now he was watching me with an uncharacteristic wariness. “You’re all right?”

“I’m good. You?”

“I’m well.” His jaw was tight. “Better than some. Aren’t I breathing?”

“Robin.” Sophia voice snapped like a rubber band.

It’s hard to stare down a beanstalk, but I tried it. “Do we have a problem?”

He shook his head, turning away. The way he did it hurt a little. I’d always thought he liked me.

Sophia ran a careful finger over a plant with spade-shaped leaves. “What’s wrong with this guy?”

Robin’s eloquent face darkened. “Not just that one.” He swept a hand over his sleeping garden. “All of them.”

I leaned in, throat thickening in the mossy air. The plants were limp. Dropping dead leaves. Some were speckled gray and white, some were as brown as my mother’s underfed rosemary bush. These were the plants Robin dried, ground, baked, and steeped, to be smoked, inhaled, eaten, or drunk—Hinterland plants, every one. He’d harvested them in a seam of trees that used to be in the Halfway Wood, where the door the ex-Stories escaped through once stood. I’d never tried any of them, but I’d heard what they could do to your body, to your head.

“Poor things,” Sophia murmured, her face almost tender. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. I’ve tried everything, but each day more succumb to it. I cannot turn them from dying.”

He still lapsed, sometimes, into talking like an extra in Game of Thrones. At least he came by it honestly.

Sophia crumpled a leaf into powder. “So get some more.”

“There aren’t any more. The ones in the woods, those are dying, too.”

“Strange,” Sophia murmured, and stood. “Tell me you’ve at least got something for Alice.”

“Alice.” The way he said it was halfway to a curse. “What does Alice need?”

The question pricked the wrong places of me. “Nothing from you. Soph, let’s go.”

She ignored me. “Something that’ll help her remember what it was like. What it felt like, in the Hinterland.”

“It seems to me she’s the last one who needs it.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. At the same time, Sophia reached way up and slapped him, midway between a joke and a knockout.

“Cut it out,” she said sharply. “If you want me coming back at all, stop being a shit.”

After a long moment he bowed to me slightly, looking harassed. “Fine. I’ve been rude.” His eyes slid over to Sophia. “I’ve got something that’ll make it up to you.”

We sat on Robin’s stoop in the quiet of the city in the middle of the night. Streetlight trapped itself inside the old Popov bottle in his hands, half filled with a viscous green liquid.

He tilted it. “The plants I used for this grew everywhere back home. They didn’t feed on sun. This works better under starlight.”

“What happens when I drink it?”

He grinned, looking like the devil he might’ve been in the Hinterland. “Only one way to know.”

I didn’t love altered states. I’d already lived in one. The most I went for now was the fuzz of one drink, the clarifying burr of caffeine. But I’d already run from the Hinterland once today. I wasn’t about to do it again.

I took the bottle. Sophia was gimlet-eyed, her hands under her thighs like she was trying to restrain them. The liquor smelled like the hills in The Sound of Music and shimmered over my tongue. It was bubbles in my bloodstream, helium in my head. “Damn,” I whispered.

Robin laughed, took the bottle and drank. He’d loosened up after Sophia slapped him. We passed it around, sitting on the steps, the liquid flashing through me like lights over water.

“Good to feel alive,” Sophia said, tilting her head way back. “While we still can.”

“Don’t,” said Robin, low.

The drink went coppery on my tongue. “She had parents, didn’t she?” I said abruptly. “Hansa?”

Sophia shrugged. “She had some people she lived with. I guess they were raising her.”

“Right. That’s parents. Do they go to meetings? Has anyone talked to them?”

“It’s bad luck to speak of sad things when you drink,” Robin said.

I opened my mouth to respond, and gasped.

I think we all felt it at once, the moment the magic hit our systems. Whatever they felt, for me it was a cold uprush, a scouring wind that came from below my heart. I squeezed my eyes shut, and opened them on a new world.

Brooklyn was still bath-warm and hazy, still concrete and iron and slabs of brown- and red- and cream-colored stone. It was still perched in that formless, deadly deep part of the night. But it was more. The trees stood out in 4D, some extra dimension making them denser, vivid, more articulate. Everything was as stark-edged as a Man Ray photograph, but it was flattened, too, its depth of field all out of whack. The waving buds of a magnolia tree and the town car idling half a block down looked as close to me as Sophia. The world seemed infinitely touchable, manipulable, the street a night-lit realm we could swim through like water.

Robin held up a palm like he was weighing the air, and began to sing.

Red bird black bird

Damselfly bee

Weave a gown as fine as silk

To cover me

A few seconds passed, then a trio of starlings swept over the roof of the adjacent apartment building, making a beeline for Robin. I ducked as they executed a dizzy circle around our heads, looking as surprised as birds can look, before flying up and shooting off in three directions.

“Holy shit!” I said.

“Lazy damned birds.” Sophia leaned back on her elbows. “No dress.”

Robin’s face was dreamy and sharp at once. “I’ll weave one for you myself, my love. If you will it, I’ll give you anything you want.”

“But never the thing I need.” She put a hand to his face, fingers gently crooked, so they made five fine lines down his cheek as she stroked. “I promise you, one day you’ll love someone who can be won with dresses.”

Ignoring his expression, she turned to me. She’d lit a cigarette and was tangling her fingers in the smoke as it drifted, shaping it into ribbons and daggers and icicles. I blinked and they were gone. She stuck the cigarette in Robin’s mouth, then dug with both hands inside her gigantic street-stall purse, heavy with half-drunk bottles of juice and books I’d given her and makeup shoplifted from the Duane Reade. After a minute, she unearthed a liquid eyeliner pen.

“Sit still,” she said, holding it up.

“Why?”

“Shh.” She crouched in front of me, knees on the concrete steps, smelling of tobacco and coffee and shoplifted soap. Her brows winged out like a silent film star’s, and her eyes tilted toward the golden side of brown. Rays of ochre and whiskey and sand, with nothing behind them. Even when I loved her best, I was chilled by the impenetrable flats of her eyes.

The liner licked over my cheeks. Robin watched us, and said nothing. After a few minutes she capped the pen, blowing lightly on my skin. “There,” she murmured. “That’s perfect.”

She pulled out a little heart-shaped hand mirror, held it up. I heard my breath halt and restart.

Vines. She’d painted my face with vines, in an intricate, swirling freehand.

“Sophia. Are these … these are…”

“Power.” She spoke into my ear. “That fear you felt when you ran away from that man today? That’s the power you’re giving away. But we could make this world fear us, Alice. We could make them so afraid.”

She’d painted my face with the twining tattoos of the Briar King. He was the one who’d let himself into my stepdad’s apartment and stolen Ella away from me when I was seventeen. He might’ve been dead, or he might’ve been anywhere. There was a time when my nightmares wore his face. I’d told her all of this. Sophia knew this.

As I tilted my head from side to side, my mirror self moved a half beat behind me. I was remembering something. Something I’d spent all my months back in New York pushing down and away.

It hadn’t always felt bad to be a monster.

The girl in the mirror was smirking at me. Vines swirled around her eyes like the mask of a robber bridegroom. Beside her, Soph’s gold eyes glittered. We looked right together, like this. We looked like a pair of avenging—well. Not angels.

“I know where he lives,” she whispered.

“Who?”

She stood up. She knew I was bluffing.

The path that forked at my feet was dark and bright. I could walk on with Ella, down the road my diploma had started to pave. Or I could stumble off it, into the briars. Sophia waited for me there, among the thorns and the dark.

“Alice,” she said, and held out her hand.

Be sure.

I took it.