The Night Country

41

We stepped through into cold and the smell of dust and a flare of white light I tried to blink away, before realizing it wasn’t light, it was color. The warehouse wasn’t the place we’d left, fluorescent-lit and enunciated. It was smudged out, a pale ruin. We stepped over a clatter of little bones: all that was left of the creature the Spinner had made, who’d scratched at the Night Country door and let us in.

“How far do you think it goes?” His voice was as wrung-out as the room.

My phone was dead in my pocket. I wrapped my hand around it anyway. “I don’t know.”

“I did this,” Finch said. He spun in place slowly. “I did this.”

“Don’t you dare. Anything that’s left, it’s because of you. You did that.”

His bones pressed too close to the surface of his skin. Both of us were filthy, we stank of blood. I reached up and peeled away a petal that had stuck to his cheek, and thought of the letter he’d sent in the heart of a flower.

“You need to end it. You need to close the door.”

“End it?”

He looked so confused my heart spiked. “What’s wrong? Don’t you think you can? Do you not know how?”

“I know how to do it,” he said, sharp and certain. “I can feel how to do it. But … you heard what the Spinner said.”

The Spinner. Daphne. The monster and the woman who never existed. They blurred in my mind, a double image. “She said a lot of things.”

“You know what I’m talking about. If I end it—if I kill the world, and the Spinner in it—what happens to you?”

Not just me, but all of us. If the Spinner died along with Finch’s world, would her children really go with her? My throat ached thinking of Sophia, already gone.

“We know she’s a liar,” I said.

“I don’t think she was lying about that. And what if it’s too late anyway? What if I’ve already made too much? And I close the door and you die, too, and it’s just me, all alone here, like some shitty episode of The Twilight Zone?”

His rising panic made me calmer. I thought of the silver tracings of his city, the soil and flowers and the sizzling golden cage. I weighed it against the entirety of this world.

I thought of Ella. I closed my eyes and reached for her, feeling for that thread that connected us. I couldn’t feel it, but that didn’t mean it was gone. I though it just meant we were untwining, growing into two distinct people, in the way that moms and daughters do. Maybe that was the most human thing that could happen to me.

“I don’t think it’s too late,” I told him. “It’s not too late.”

“What if we just leave it? For now. Go out, see how far this spreads. Then we decide what to do.”

“Finch,” I said quietly.

“You can’t make me,” he said, just as quiet. “You can’t ask me to do this. What’ll it be like, if you die? How will you go? Do you melt? Disintegrate? Fuck. Why am I saying this to you?”

He straightened, like something had struck him. “I bet there’s another world we could go to. Iolanthe”—his face flashed something complex—“Iolanthe showed me. There are whole shelves of worlds, too many to fit in a letter. Alice, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go to another world.”

His eyes widened, before he understood. I reached for him. I felt the scars over his knuckles and wondered about their stories. We looked at each other over our clasped hands, and the words we didn’t say were hello, and goodbye, and a love song with no words to it.

Maybe in another world they spoke a language you could sing it in. Maybe I could find it. Alone, with Ella, with Finch. Maybe I’d stay right here, and live. Maybe I’d unwind altogether, dissipate into strands of story stuff, unpack myself like a Roman candle glittering with every last thing my mother had ever done for me, and the brown eyes of a boy who walked worlds, and the fast-working fingers of the creature who’d shaped me, so arrogant she’d nearly made herself a god.

Finch pressed his lips to my hands, one then the other. He looked at me and I remembered you could slice a moment into a million million stories, a million ways it could go. I figured this could be my very last page.

And it was the way his chest rose and fell. The shift of his Adam’s apple beneath the scar on his throat. I had the weirdest feeling like I was swimming, held weightless by a bubble of enchanted air. I leaned closer and it was like stepping, one more time, into the winds of another world. When I pressed my lips to the old scar over his throat I realized how cold I must’ve been, how warm he was by contrast. He breathed out and swallowed hard under my lips and it was

it was

My mind was never quiet. It was always full of words, always teeming with them, often the wrong ones and never silent even when I slept.

But when I pressed my lips to Ellery Finch’s throat and felt his hand come up to cup my neck, to tangle in my hair, all the words fell away. And when I moved my mouth up to his, my mind was finally quiet.

I don’t know how long we held each other. But I know the moment came when we let go. When he moved away from me, toward the door to the Night Country. All that impossible possibility. All that endless, devouring want. On this side the door looked waterlogged. I watched him press his hands to it, and closed my eyes.

I didn’t think about dying. I couldn’t think about how I might be leaving Ella behind. I dreamed instead of another world. A place that could reach out and catch the people I loved. The broken and the frail of them. The solid and the already gone.

I heard Finch curse, then a distant, submarine howling, and the creak of wood below his palms. I squeezed my eyes tighter.

There was a world where this could work. There was a world where all of it fell into place. There was a world. There was a world. There was a world.