Twilight

The Forest of Beginnings kept its own hour, and it was always the same one. The twilight here never finished. It hung at the last blue minute of evening, the one for which Emi used to stand at her bedroom window as a girl, waiting to see which streetlight would give in first, and it would hang there tonight whatever hour it had gotten to anywhere else.

The Atelier’s door shut behind Dawn with a soft, well-fitted click. Behind it was the Atelier itself, whose rooms had shifted around the four of them in the dark as though they were trying not to make a sound. On this side there was only moss.

Emi felt the ground take her weight before her foot was all the way down.

She had never found a better way to say it, so she had mostly stopped saying it to anyone but Andy. The Forest knew where she meant to step. The moss rose a little to meet her heel, and the spiral grass around it turned on its coils toward her, the way a sleeping cat turns toward a hand before it has decided to wake. The trunks went up on every side in their columns, glass from root to sky, and inside each one the slow ribbons of light twisted and folded and caught a new color every time she moved her head. None of it was hers like a room was hers. It was hers like her hands were.

It had been on her skin before it was anywhere else—back at the start, the body-paint challenge, a season down each arm, green going to gold going to a blue exactly like this blue, and Andy telling her she didn’t have to choose between dreaming and being awake. She had chosen to believe him. Arabella had built the rest out of her sketches. Since then it had gone on building itself, a little more each time she came, putting in things she hadn’t known she wanted until she found them waiting for her.

Claire had stopped a step inside the door. The pale-yellow flowers grew thickest there, in low clusters around the foot of the nearest trunk, and they had turned their faces up toward her the moment she arrived, the way they always did. Claire had never given them a name. Emi had never asked her to. Claire’s ears were up and swiveling, and the blue in her eyes was plain even here, two small lamps behind the slitted black. Her eyes moved across the grove in one long, slow sweep and came back and settled. In the Garden she had written that there was something all around them, like shadows. Emi watched her look for it here. Her ears came down a little. She didn’t write anything.

Dawn was standing close at Emi’s shoulder with her arms wrapped around herself. Her ears had gone flat somewhere in the dark of the Hotel and hadn’t come back up, as if they had forgotten how. She was looking past Emi at a young tree standing a little apart from the others, slimmer than the columns, where a small sun with two long ears had been worked into the glass of the bark. It glowed there, warm and a little lopsided, like something drawn by a child who loved the person she was drawing.

“That’s me,” Dawn said. It came out small. “I forgot there was a me in here.”

“There’s a you in here,” Emi said.

Behind them, Mildred had come no farther than the treeline. She stood where the moss gave way to the short grass around the door, her hands folded at her waist, and she had turned all the way around to face the way they had come. She was not looking at the Forest at all. She watched the door as if something might still come through, and she did not blink, and Emi found she didn’t want to ask her what she was waiting for.

“What’s she looking at?” Dawn whispered.

“The door,” Emi said.

“Why?” Dawn asked.

Emi didn’t answer that. She turned back to the other two instead, and after a second Dawn turned with her.

“Okay,” Emi said. “Here’s what I want to do.”

Claire’s face came around. Dawn’s ears lifted a quarter of an inch.

“Emily said it would work anywhere now. Velvet Hours.” Emi held up one hand, and then a second, as if she could show them the size of it. “So we don’t have to be fast. If I turn it on in here, it’s hours for us and minutes for them. For Laura and Myra and Riley out in front, and Sam and everybody on the path behind them. We could take all night in here, and up there it would be ten minutes. Maybe less.” She let out a breath. “And it doesn’t need anything from me anymore. It doesn’t need—you know. It just needs the two of you close.”

Claire already had the notebook open against her forearm. She wrote without looking away from Emi’s face, which she could do, and which Emi had always found faintly alarming.

Then do it now. Before we spend any of their minutes standing here.

“Before we spend any,” Emi agreed.

She took Claire’s wrist first, the left one, the one without the pen, in her lowest left hand. Claire’s pulse was quick under her thumb. Then she found Dawn’s wrist with a hand on the other side, and Dawn’s fingers turned and clutched at hers before she had finished closing them.

Emi had never done it like this.

Every other time there had been skin, and breath, and a bed somewhere, and the transformation had been something that happened at the edge of all of it, a slowness she noticed afterward rather than chose. Now she reached for it on purpose. It sat where it had been sitting since the glade—just under her breastbone, patient as a held note. She asked it to take the two of them with her.

It took more than two.

She felt it close around Claire’s quick pulse and Dawn’s cold fingers, and then it went on past them, back toward the door, and found Mildred standing at the edge of the moss, and folded her in as well, as if it had counted her among the people who were with Emi without asking anyone’s leave. Emi hadn’t known whether it would. She wasn’t sure she had wanted it to. It was done before she could decide.

Then the Forest went slow.

It didn’t stop. Nothing in here ever stopped. But the ribbons of light in the nearest trunk, which had been turning over and over like weed in a current, eased, and turned once, and took the whole of a breath to do it. A petal had come loose from Claire’s flowers, and it hung in the air beside Claire’s knee, rocking slightly, on its way down and in no hurry to get there. The glass leaves overhead had been making their small sound all along, a sound so constant Emi only ever heard it when it changed, and now it changed. Every little chime drew out and sank and ran into the next, until the whole canopy held a single low tone, the kind of note that an organ keeps sounding after the hymn is over and everyone has sat down.

Dawn jumped. “Oh—oh my God.” She looked down at Emi’s hand on her wrist, then up at the petal, then back. “That’s it? That’s all you did? You just…” She blinked. “You held on to us.”

“I held on to you,” Emi said.

“I thought there’d be a sound. Or a glow. Something.” Dawn’s voice wobbled at the edge of a laugh and didn’t go over. “I was bracing for, like, a whole thing.”

“That’s the whole thing,” Emi said.

It wasn’t heavy. That surprised her, too. It was only constant—the held note under her breastbone that she mustn’t let slip, two pulses in her hands, and somewhere out at the edge of her one more person, whose pulse she couldn’t feel at all.

Up there, Laura was on the path. Emi let herself picture it once. Laura, all three of her, with Myra at one shoulder and Riley at the other, a foot lifted for the next stone, and the foot not yet down. It would be a long time coming down now; she had bought them that much. She didn’t know yet whether it would be enough.

Claire had turned to a fresh page. Emi watched the pen move, and waited.

It took a while. Claire wrote the way she did when she was being exact on purpose, stopping, crossing out a word, going on. When she turned the page around, the letters were small and even.

SInce the fighting stopped:

Fear. Going. Mostly gone now. I kept checking.

Anger. Sorrow. A lot of both. Not at us.

And something under the anger I don’t have the word for. Nearest I can get is purpose.

Below that, smaller, as if she had added it for her own sake:

He isn’t lost. I still think that.

Emi read it twice. The anger she could almost feel for herself, not through any bond but through knowing him, the way she knew how he would stand if somebody shoved Laura. Andy angry was a rare thing and a slow one. It didn’t go anywhere it hadn’t decided to go.

“Angry’s good,” she said. “Angry’s better than scared. Angry means there’s something in front of him.” She looked at Claire a moment longer, then turned her head. “Dawn. What’s yours saying?”

Dawn shut her eyes.

Her ears came up off her hair, slowly, and turned, not together the way they did when she heard something, but one toward the grove and one back toward the door. Her whole body followed them a quarter turn and stopped there, caught halfway, the way a weathervane shudders when the wind can’t make up its mind.

“Same as on the path,” Dawn said. “It pulls me toward him, and it pulls me away from him, and it’s the same pull. It’s…” Her eyes opened. “It’s both at once. It’s never been this sure about anything in my life, and what it’s sure about doesn’t make sense.” She swallowed. “It’s louder in here. Clearer. It’s just clearer, and it’s still both.”

Emi felt her hands tighten, every one of them, on wrists and on nothing. Laura had said it that way, at the bell, with all three of her turned toward Sam: “He’s right here… He’s so far away I can’t… Both.” Emi had been near enough to hear it, and she had put it away where she kept the things she couldn’t do anything about. Now here it was again, in Dawn’s mouth, in her own Forest, and she still didn’t know what to do with it.

So she left it there and turned her attention down instead.

This part she had never tried to explain, even to Andy. She wasn’t sure there were words for it that wouldn’t make her sound like she’d come loose from something. She didn’t have to reach for the Forest the way Dawn reached for her alert, or the way Claire went looking down the bond. It was simply there, all of it at once, the way her own body was there when she shut her eyes in the dark. She knew where the pools lay without looking, and where the bluebells hung too heavy for their stems over the path, and where the glass fox sat beside its mushrooms with one paw lifted, because some part of her lay under all of it like a hand under a sheet.

So she stopped looking at the grove, and felt it.

Most of it was as it always was: springy, and cool, and a little drowsy under the long hum of the leaves. But westward, past the first ring of trunks, in toward the middle where the oldest trees stood, something was different. It wasn’t hurt. She would have known hurt. It was thin. It felt the way a page feels when you have rubbed out the same spot on it too many times, until you can see the grain of the paper and, faintly, whatever was drawn on the other side. And when she leaned on it, only a little, it was tender, like a bruise.

She opened her eyes. The petal by Claire’s knee had fallen perhaps an inch.

“There’s somewhere in here that’s thin,” Emi said. In the slowed air her voice sounded strange to her, a little too clear, like a voice in a room with the rugs taken up. “That way. West, in past the first trees, toward the middle.” She nodded at it rather than let go of anyone to point. “The ground runs thin there over something. Something that isn’t the Forest. And when I lean on it, it’s sore.”

Dawn stared at her. “The ground told you that?”

“The ground doesn’t tell me things. It’s just mine. I can feel where it’s thin the way you’d feel it if your own—” Emi stopped. “I don’t know. I just can.”

Claire had already found the page. It was the one she had shown Dawn at the foot of the path, with the two lines drawn at their angle to each other and running on past the edge of the paper toward a crossing she’d had no way to mark. She drew a third line now, lighter, from the side of the page where Emi’s west would be, and tapped the place where all of them would meet if the paper were big enough. Then she wrote underneath it and turned it around.

Where does it open onto? The Hotel?

“No. That’s the thing.” Emi shook her head. “The Forest knows everywhere it opens onto, and I can feel all of them. The Atelier. And the original one, in the corridor, off the lobby. I can feel both.” She hesitated. “It isn’t either of those. It isn’t anywhere the Forest touches. It isn’t anywhere on the island.”

Nobody said anything.

It all leaned toward the same nowhere.

Emi stood with that for a moment and found she didn’t like where it took her. She had walked every inch of this ground. She had lain on it and slept on it and brought Andy here to show it to him as if she were showing him the inside of her own head, and all that time it had been lying over something else, like a rug over a trapdoor, and she had never once felt the draft. Maybe it hadn’t been there to feel until tonight. Maybe it had, and she had never pressed in the right place.

The hum of the leaves went on overhead, low and sweet and slow. Emi could have stood in it for a long time. She knew she couldn’t, and she was gathering herself to say so when Dawn spoke first.

“Can I say something? Before we go?” Dawn’s voice had gone thin and fast. “Because if I don’t say it now I’m going to say it at a worse time, and I’ll hate that more.”

“Say it,” Emi said.

“I’m scared for them.” Dawn wasn’t looking at either of them. She was looking back at the door, past Mildred, as if she could see all the way up through it. “The ones who went up. Chloe. And Laura, and Myra and Riley right out in front where he’ll see them first, and Sam, and all of them. Everybody talked about it on the grass like it was a plan. Ten minutes. Stand there and stall him. Like it’s a thing you can put on a schedule.” Her ears had flattened so hard against her hair that they barely showed. “Myra and Riley are the two in the sand. From the vision. Everybody knows it—Myra said it herself. And they went up the path anyway, and nobody said out loud what’s waiting at the top of it. I think it’s worse than anybody told us. I think it’s worse than we even know how to be told.”

She stopped. She was breathing too fast.

Emi didn’t say anything clever. She didn’t have anything clever. She let go of nothing—she kept her hold on Dawn’s wrist exactly where it was—and reached across with another hand and found Dawn’s free one, and folded it into hers.

The air changed.

It happened slowly, the way everything happened in here now. A warmth came up around the three of them from nowhere in particular, the way the light did, and with it a smell that didn’t belong to the Forest at all: cut grass, and something flowering, and sun on a wall at the end of a long afternoon. Emi knew what it was. It did that sometimes when she loved somebody past the point of keeping it to herself. She hadn’t asked it to. She didn’t take her hand away.

Claire had been writing through all of it. She wrote hard enough that Emi could hear the pen, and when she turned the page toward Dawn, she had underlined it, once, from end to end.

Laura and Andy together can stand against Nergal. And against Ereshkigal as well, if it comes to that.

Dawn read it. Her mouth wobbled.

“But they’re not together,” she said. “That’s the whole—he’s not up there with her, Claire. He’s down in whatever this is, and she’s up there without him. You can’t just underline that.” Her voice cracked on it. “I’m sorry. I know you’re trying. You can’t just underline it.”

Claire didn’t argue. She looked at the page for a long moment with her ears half down. Then she turned to a clean one and wrote again, slower this time, and when she held it up there was no line under any of it.

Whatever else the bond stopped carrying tonight, it has not carried despair. Not once. Not since Nergal came through the doors. I have been checking all night. I would know.

And under that, after a pause:

That has to count for something.

Dawn read it twice. Emi watched it go into her the way a warm drink goes into cold hands, not all at once but from the middle outward. Dawn’s shoulders came down. Her ears lifted off her hair, not far, but some.

“Okay,” Dawn whispered. “Okay. That counts.” She sniffed, and laughed at herself a little for sniffing. “That counts for a lot, actually. You could’ve led with that one.”

Claire’s tail flicked once, which was as close to a shrug as she ever came.

Emi gave both of them a squeeze, a hand on each, and felt the warmth begin to thin out of the air again as slowly as it had come. There was so much she could have said. Most of it would have been true, and none of it would have done anything for Laura.

“The tree,” she said. “Andy’s tree, in the middle. Everything we’ve got is leaning that way, and that’s the heart of the whole Forest. If it’s going to show me anything, it’s going to show me there.” She looked at Dawn, and then at Claire. “I can’t do anything about the path. We can’t. That part’s theirs. Getting to the tree is the part that’s ours.”

Dawn nodded, three times, fast. Claire closed the notebook over her thumb to keep the place.

They went in together, Emi a half step ahead with a hand still on each of them. She didn’t lead by looking. She never had to, in here. The paths curled back on themselves the way they always did, turning toward whoever walked them, and for Emi they curled the way she meant them to go, so that each bend brought the middle of the grove a little nearer instead of farther off. The spiral grass leaned after her. The bluebells, hanging over the path, swung aside for her so slowly that she could watch them decide to.

They passed the glass fox with its paw still lifted, and a stretch of silver grass so fine that it lay over the ground like hair, and then the little clearing where the moss glowed and dimmed and glowed again as if it were breathing. It was breathing slowly now. They crossed the whole clearing inside one breath of it, from the dim through the glow and halfway back, and Dawn made a small sound in her throat and walked a little closer. It was the kind of quiet that makes you want to hold someone’s hand, and Emi was already holding both.

Behind them, Mildred left the door.

Nobody asked her to. She simply fell in at the back, a few paces behind the three of them, and came on at the same steady pace as the rest of them. Every time Emi glanced back, she was walking with her face turned over her shoulder, watching the dark they had come out of, as if she meant to be the first to know if it moved.

The middle of the grove came up on them the way the middle of a dream does, all at once and as if it had been there the whole time.

First there was the pool. It lay in a hollow of moss at the heart of the woods, shallow and perfectly still, and it did not reflect the canopy over it. It held a different sky: no cloud, no twilight, only stars, thousands of them, small and sharp, in shapes that belonged to no sky anybody had ever grown up under. Dawn’s free hand strayed toward it as they passed, and her fingertips just brushed the surface. The water didn’t ripple. Light went out from the place she had touched in slow rings of color, rose and then green and then gold, and the rings were still spreading across the pool, taking their time about it, when the path turned and the trees closed behind them.

“Sorry,” Dawn whispered, to the pool or to Emi, it wasn’t clear which.

“It likes that,” Emi said.

The trunks stood in a wide circle around the clearing, each one a little apart from its neighbors, and each carried a name in the glass of its bark. Emi didn’t need to read them. She knew whose was whose the way she knew which of her hands was which: Laura’s straight across the circle, Dawn’s and Claire’s near together, Erin’s with the mint-green moss thick at its foot. Her own was in there too, somewhere to her left, and after all this time she still couldn’t pass it without a small lurch, like hearing someone say your name in a crowd before you’ve seen who it was.

And in the middle of them all, the tree.

It stood taller than the rest of the grove by half again, broad as a house at the root, its glass so deep that the ribbons of light inside it moved like weather seen from far off. The branches went up and out and wove into the canopy until you couldn’t tell where the tree stopped and the Forest began. Andy’s name ran up the bark at about the height of a man, and all around it, scattered across the trunk from the roots to as high as Emi could see, hung the little lights the Forest had put there on its own: small and steady and shaped like hearts.

Far up, where the canopy thinned, she could see a piece of the sky she had built for him. Most of it was hidden. But the one shape she could make out was his: an open hand, holding everything together. She had climbed this tree with him once, the two of them sitting up in the high branches with their legs dangling while she pointed out who was who in the stars, Chloe’s cradle and Marissa’s piano and Dawn’s little sun with its ears, and saved his for last, because she hadn’t been sure he would like it. He had gone quiet for a long time. Then he had asked if he could stay up there a while longer.

Emi went down on her knees at the roots.

She didn’t have to think about the hands. One stayed around Claire’s wrist. One stayed around Dawn’s. A third came down flat on the ground between two of the great roots, where the moss was thinnest, and the other three rested on her own knees where she could keep them still.

“Okay,” Emi said. “Try again. Both of you. Not the whole grove this time—just here. Just this spot.”

Behind her, Mildred had stopped at the edge of the ring of trunks. Emi could feel her there, cool and quiet inside the slowed hours with the rest of them. She didn’t turn to look.

Dawn went first. She didn’t close her eyes this time. She stood with her head tipped down toward the roots, her ears straight up and not moving at all.

“Same,” Dawn said. “Both ways. Toward him and away from him.” She took a breath. “But it’s closer here. It’s closer here than anywhere tonight. It’s not even close, the difference. It’s like standing at the top of the stairs and knowing somebody’s at the bottom.”

Claire was writing before Dawn finished. She held the page down where Emi could see it without letting go.

The bond agrees. Closer here. Whatever I’m reading from him, it feels close enough to touch.

Then, under it:

It hasn’t felt like that since he disappeared.

Emi let that sit. She could feel both of them through her hands, Claire’s pulse and Dawn’s, and under her palm she could feel the ground, and she paid attention to that last.

It was different here. Out at the door it had been a thinness far off, a tenderness she had to lean on to find. Here she barely had to lean at all. Under her hand, under the moss and the roots and the springy dark the roots went down into, the Forest didn’t come to an end as a floor does. It went thin, and thinner, and then it simply wasn’t there anymore.

She had never felt an edge to it before. Not on the inside. The Forest had borders—the door to the Atelier, the door off the lobby, the places where it simply stopped being interested in going farther—but those were edges akin to the rim of a plate. This was not an edge, and she didn't know how to define it. She didn’t take her hand away.

“It doesn’t stop here,” Emi said. Her voice had gone quiet without her meaning it to. “The ground. It doesn’t end. It just goes thin under the roots. Thinner. And then it’s gone.” She pressed her palm down a little harder, as if she could hold the moss in place. “There’s nothing underneath it. There’s something underneath it. I don’t know how to say it better than that.”

Dawn had gone still all over.

Emi felt it through her hand before she saw it: the pulse under her thumb jumped once and then steadied, and Dawn stopped breathing for a moment and then remembered. When she spoke, she spoke slowly, like someone reading something off a sign she had only just noticed.

“That’s what it means.” Dawn was looking at the roots. “All night. The close-and-far thing. I kept thinking far like—like the-other-side-of-the-world far. Like he’s just really, really far away in a direction. He’s not.” Her ears had begun to come down, one and then the other. “He isn’t only far. He’s somewhere else. He’s right under us, and he’s somewhere else.”

Claire had lowered the notebook. She looked from Dawn’s face to the ground under Emi’s hand, and back, and her tail curled around her own ankle the way it did when she was holding still on purpose. Then she lifted the notebook again, and turned back a long way through it—past the Garden, past pages Emi had seen her fill at the wedding, back to something older—and found what she wanted and wrote beside it and held it out.

Banquet Hall, three days before the wedding. He told us all eight.

The second one: the Hotel. Fallen in. Empty. Half under sand. Nobody in it but him, walking, looking for a glint of blue.

We all heard it. I wrote it down that night.

Emi remembered. Everybody who had been at that table would. Andy had told it in the kind of flat, careful voice that he saved for things he didn’t want to be true, and she had sat there with her hands knotted in her lap and pictured the Hotel with its roof gone and sand drifted across the lobby floor, and had put it away with the rest. She had wondered at the time what he was looking for. What was blue, in a place like that. She still didn’t know.

“The Hotel in ruins,” Emi said. “Under here.”

Claire nodded, once.

At the edge of the ring, Mildred had turned. She was not watching the dark behind them now. She stood between two of the named trunks with her hands folded and her face toward the four of them, and she was listening like she did everything, entirely, without seeming to breathe.

There was one more piece, and Emi was the one holding it, so she set it down.

“Sam’s rule,” Emi said. “At the foot of the path. Herman’s rule.” She could hear Sam saying it, flat and whole, the way she had been given it: “Stay together. Keep moving. And don’t turn around to look at whoever’s walking behind you. Not once. Not till everybody’s back up on the surface.”

“Back up,” Emi said. “On the surface.” She let go of the words one at a time. “Sam said Herman took them through a door into somewhere that wasn’t the Hotel. Somewhere that wasn’t built for us, and knew it.” She looked down at her hand on the moss. “You don’t make a rule like that for somewhere that’s only a long way off. You make it for somewhere going there and getting back doesn’t work the normal way. Somewhere under.”

She stopped there, because that was as far as what she knew would take her. It was a place. It was under them, under the Hotel and under her Forest and under everything, and there were ruins in it, and Andy was walking in them. What it actually was, she had no name for. None of them did.

Claire wrote one word, and looked at it, and crossed it out. Under. She wrote another beside it, more carefully, and left that one standing.

Beneath.

Then her ears went flat against her hair, and stayed there.

Emi felt it before she saw anything. Under her thumb, Claire’s pulse jumped, and jumped again, and then ran.

Claire had gone still. Not the careful stillness from a moment before, with the tail wrapped around her ankle, but all at once, as a cat goes still at a sound nobody else has heard. Her breath caught and didn’t let go. Her eyes were fixed on the ground between the roots, a little to the left of Emi’s hand, and the blue in them had come up bright—brighter than Emi had seen it in the Garden, bright enough that it laid a faint color on the moss where she was looking.

There was nothing there. Emi looked. There was moss, and the dark between two roots, and her own hand.

Claire’s free hand went to her breastbone and pressed flat. Then it came away, and found the pen, and she wrote without looking at the page at all. The letters slanted hard to the right and ran downhill. She didn’t cross anything out.

Walls. Broken walls. In the ground. Through it. On top of the moss and under it at the same time. The sky is wrong. Red. Something is moving.

She stopped. The pen stayed on the paper. Then it moved again, slower.

Him. It’s him. Walking. I would know him anywhere.

She turned the page around, and her hand was shaking so badly that Emi had to lean in to read it.

Dawn made a sound. It wasn’t a word. She leaned over Emi’s shoulder to see the page, and read it, and her fingers clamped down on Emi’s so hard the knuckles ground together.

“Claire,” Dawn whispered. “Claire, you can see him?”

Claire nodded without taking her eyes off the ground.

Then Dawn’s head came up. Her ears snapped straight, both of them together this time, and swung, and stopped. Her whole body went with them. She didn’t turn a quarter and catch. She turned once, all the way, and settled like a needle finding north, and her free hand came out and pointed down past Emi’s shoulder at the roots.

“It stopped,” Dawn said. Her voice cracked in the middle. “It stopped pulling both ways. It’s one line. It’s just one line now, it’s never—Emi, it’s one line, and it goes right where she’s looking.” She was crying, the kind of crying that doesn’t stop to make any sound, and she didn’t seem to know it. “Right there. Down. Where she’s looking.”

Emi looked where Dawn was pointing, where Claire was looking. She couldn’t see what Claire saw. She could feel what her hand felt.

The thin place under her palm had been wide. A patch of it, tender all through, like the whole of a bruise. Now, with Dawn’s line going down through it and Claire’s eyes going down through it, it drew in. It drew in to one place, under her hand.

“I have him,” Emi said.

Nobody breathed.

“I have him. Here.” Her voice wasn’t steady. She didn’t care. “Right under my hand. Down. I have him.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t dare. All six of her hands had gone rigid at once—the two on their wrists, the one on the moss, the three on her knees, clenched into the fabric of her wedding dress—as if one wrong movement would shake it loose. Claire’s pulse was running under her thumb. Dawn’s was running too. Her own was so loud in her ears that for a while it was the only thing she could hear over the long, low hum of the leaves.

Claire hadn’t looked away. Her eyes moved, very slightly: left, and a little farther left, and then they stopped. She wrote without looking down.

Behind a wall now. I can’t see him.

And then, fast, before anyone could be frightened by that:

Still there. Still angry. I can feel him fine.

Emi let her breath out through her teeth.

He was there. Under her hand, under the moss and the roots and the last thin skin of her Forest, Andy was walking through what was left of the Hotel with his fists closed, alone, going somewhere on purpose. It was real. It was real, and it was still the worst place she could think of for him to be, and both of those were true at once, and she didn’t know which one to feel first.

After a while, Dawn let out a breath that shook all the way down.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Okay.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, the one Emi was holding, and Emi let the hand go with it and come back. “So what is it? What’s down there? Because I need—I need a word for it. I can’t keep calling it down there.”

Claire had finally taken her eyes off the ground. They were still glowing. She blinked, twice, slowly, as if she were coming back up out of cold water, and then she wrote, and her letters were almost level again.

Irkalla? Hers. Ereshkigal’s. The underworld in the oldest tablets. They call it the land of no return.

Under that, she wrote something else, looked at it, and put a single line through it. Emi could still read it through the line. I don’t like that I thought of it first.

“My great-aunt’s house,” Emi said. It came out drier than she meant. “Of course it is.”

Claire’s ears twitched. Dawn made a small noise that might, on a better night, have been a laugh.

“Maybe,” Emi said then, more slowly. She could hear how little she believed it, and she wasn’t sure why. It sounded right. It sounded like the name of the place in the stories, and they were in the stories now, all of them. It just didn’t sound like what her hand was touching.

“I don’t think it’s stone,” Emi said. “Or dirt, or a country, or whatever an underworld’s supposed to be made of. It doesn’t feel like a place you could dig down to.” She tried to find it. “You know when you’re dreaming, and you’re almost sure there’s another dream underneath the one you’re in? And if you just let go a little, you’d fall through into it? It feels like that. Like a floor under the floor. A layer of dream more than a layer of ground.”

Dawn was quiet for a moment. Her ears tipped one way and the other, the way they did when she was trying out a thought and didn’t trust it yet.

“I don’t think it’s a place at all,” Dawn said at last. “Either of those. I think it’s more like…” She stopped, and started again. “How much you’re willing to believe something’s real. Like it’s there exactly as much as somebody lets it be. And somebody down there’s letting it be a whole lot.” She shrugged, one shoulder, embarrassed. “I don’t know. That sounds dumb out loud.”

“It doesn’t sound dumb,” Emi said.

Claire didn’t say it sounded dumb either. She looked at Dawn for a long moment with her head tilted, and her tail made one slow curl against the moss, which was what it did when she was filing something to think about later. None of them tried to settle it.

Each guess sounded like the woman who had made it. Claire had gone straight to the oldest tablets she knew. Emi had gone where she always went, down into sleep. Dawn had gone looking for whatever it was that makes a thing real to somebody, which was what Dawn had been doing for other people all her life. Emi didn’t know whether any of them was right. She had a feeling the place didn’t care much either way.

Then Claire turned in place. She turned a fresh page and wrote on it, not quickly, and held it up at arm’s length toward the edge of the ring, where Mildred stood between two of the named trunks with her hands folded at her waist.

Do you know what this is?

It was the plain question. It was the one all three of them had been thinking since the ground went thin.

Mildred looked at the page for a long time, as if it were something she had been expecting all night and had hoped not to be shown.

She did not answer. She did not move. She had stood still all night, at the door and on the path and here, but this was a different stillness, and Emi saw the difference because she was looking for it. Mildred’s hands had tightened on each other at her waist, the knuckles gone pale. Her eyes had gone once to the roots under Emi’s palm and then away, and they didn’t go back. Her lips parted, very slightly, and closed again on nothing. It went on longer than anything she had done all night. It was not the stillness of someone with nothing to say, but of someone standing with her whole weight on a door she had been told to keep shut.

Claire lowered the page, slowly. She didn’t ask again.

“She knows,” Dawn breathed, hardly louder than the leaves.

“She knows something,” Emi said. “Let her be.”

Overhead, the little lights in the bark of Andy’s tree went on shining, small and steady and shaped like hearts, the way they had before any of this started. They didn’t brighten. They didn’t dim. Whatever lay underneath the roots, the lights did not seem to have noticed it, or to care.

Nobody tried to name it again. They had a place now, and nothing to explain it with, and the place was under Emi’s hand.

She knelt there and looked at the moss between her fingers. There was no path from here to there. There had never needed to be one; nobody made paths to places like that. You couldn’t walk down to it. You couldn’t dig. She had the where of him, finally, fixed and certain, and not the first idea of the how, and somewhere above them another minute had gone by for Laura while she found that out. She didn’t let go of it.

In the end it was Emi who took her hand off the moss, because somebody had to, and it was her moss.

She did it slowly. The place stayed where it was. She could still feel it after her palm came up, the way you can still feel where a ring has been for a while after you take it off, and she kept that feeling carefully in the front of her mind and got to her feet with Claire’s wrist still in one hand and Dawn’s in another. The knees of her wedding dress were dark and wet from the moss. She didn’t brush them off.

“We can’t walk to it,” Emi said. “So we don’t walk.”

“Then how do we—” Dawn started.

“A door. I did this once before,” Emi said, mostly to herself. “In the Atelier. Liesa and I were standing on either side of a wall, and we both wanted the rooms to be joined, and the Forest just…” She lifted her free hand toward the bark. “It made a door. Because two places wanted to be one.”

She set her palm against the trunk. It was cool and smooth and faintly alive under her hand, the way it always was. She shut her eyes and asked it, as plainly as she knew how: for a door, here, between this place and that one.

Nothing happened. She waited. The ribbons of light went on turning inside the glass, slow as smoke. Nothing in the bark changed.

It had never refused her before. Sometimes it had made her wait—anything past a first quick draw was a conversation, and conversations took time—but it had always understood what she was asking for, even when she herself had barely known. This wasn’t that. It felt as if she had spoken to it in a language it had never heard, and it was standing politely in front of her, waiting for her to try again in one it knew.

“It doesn’t know where,” Emi said, and heard her own voice go thin. “That’s why. There isn’t a place on the other side for it to open onto. There isn’t a room. There’s just him.” She pressed her hand flatter, uselessly. “It’s never been asked to open onto a person.”

Claire let go of the notebook with one hand long enough to pull her wrist gently out of Emi’s grip, and wrote. She wrote fast, and she turned it around before the ink could have been dry.

Then don’t ask it for a place. Ask it to follow my connection to him. The bond has reached him all night with no door at all. Use it as the address.

Emi read it twice. Then she took Claire’s hand, the one without the pen, and laid it flat against the glass, and put her own over it, fingers between Claire’s fingers. Claire’s hand was cold and absolutely steady. Dawn crowded in close at her other side without being asked.

This time Emi didn’t ask the Forest for a room. She asked it for whatever Claire was pointing at.

The bark answered. The glass under their hands went cloudy, and then pale, and then a line ran up through it from the moss to above their heads and turned and came down again, and the shape of a door stood out of the trunk as if it had always been there, and the trunk had always been broad enough to contain one. A plain door, with a frame. There was a little plate set into it at eye height, the same kind as the one on the Atelier’s side, but there was nothing on the plate. No name at all.

Claire took her hand away. The door swung inward, slowly, all by itself, as if someone on the other side had been waiting for the latch.

On the Atelier’s side of a Forest door there had always been something to see: paneling, a slant of colored light, the edge of a canvas. Here there was only gray. A dark that wasn’t night and wasn’t mist, the whole width of the doorway, and no floor past the sill that Emi could make out. Cold came out of it and lay against her face and her arms, all six of them, and didn’t smell of anything. It was the kind of cold that doesn’t come from weather, the cold of a cellar nobody has opened in a long time.

Dawn went back a step. “It doesn’t have a bottom,” Dawn whispered. Her ears had gone flat. “Emi, look at it. There’s nothing to stand on. It’s the same as the ground at the tree, the same wrong, only it’s right here.” She swallowed. “It’s close enough to walk into.”

Then the voice came out of the gray just past the sill, a little to the left, at about the height a man’s head would be if he were standing there. It was Andy’s voice.

“Hello?” the voice said. “Is somebody there?”

Nobody moved.

“Please.” It cracked. It was him. It was exactly him, the catch in it, the way his voice went rough at the bottom when he was hurt and trying not to say so. “I can’t—I can’t get up. I need help. I need somebody to—” A breath, ragged. “Dawn? Is that you? I heard you. Dawn, please.”

Emi’s own mouth had come open. She shut it.

It wasn’t a good imitation, but a perfect one. It was the voice that used to call her in from the Coopers’ back door on summer evenings, and the voice that had told her at the altar today that she had always been in the middle of his, and every part of her that had known him since before she knew anything else had turned toward it before she could stop it. She held still and didn’t answer. It was the hardest thing she had done all night.

Dawn turned toward it. She didn’t decide to. Emi saw that. Her body went first: shoulders, then hips, her face coming around toward the left side of the door, her free hand coming up and out in front of her the way it had come up on the grass tonight, feeling for something in the dark. All night the thing inside her had been telling her he needed help. Here was the help he needed, asking for her by name.

Halfway round, she stopped.

“No,” Dawn breathed. Her face was wet. She didn’t finish the turn. “No. It’s pointing down. It’s still pointing down, same as at the tree. Way down.” Her hand was still out in the air, shaking. “He isn’t standing right there. It doesn’t point there at all. That isn’t where he is.”

Claire had written at the same moment. She held the page up between Dawn and the door.

Nothing. I get nothing off that voice. No fear, no relief. Nothing in it that is him. He’s still down there. Still angry. That isn’t.

“Dawn,” the voice said, softer. “Dawn, it’s so cold.”

“The rule Harem Queen Collins gave you,” said Mildred, “is for the staff doors.”

She had not raised her voice. She never did. She spoke from a pace behind them, as plainly as she had told them at the foot of the path about the two ways into the Forest, and every one of them turned their eyes to her and not to the door.

“The ones that go all the way down,” Mildred said. “This is not one of those. This is a shortcut. It does not ask the same things of you.” Her folded hands did not move. “But you will keep close together. There are many passages in there. You do not want to see what is at the end of some of them.” She paused. “And you will be quiet. So that you are not heard, and nothing responds.”

She did not say what might hear them.

“It is not far, if you are quiet,” Mildred added, in exactly the same tone, as if it were a kindness. “Most flesh-beings who are quiet come out again.”

In the gray, the voice had stopped. It didn’t call again. It didn’t move off. It was simply not speaking anymore, just past the sill.

Emi didn't take the quiet for an answer. Stopped wasn't gone. Whatever had been behind that voice hadn't left because it went silent; it had only stopped talking. Standing here to find out which wouldn't make it any more gone. It would only make them slower, and louder, and exactly the opposite of what Mildred had just asked of them.

Dawn pressed her free hand over her own mouth, hard, and held it there, and stood where she was.

Emi didn’t look at the gray again. She drew them in instead. She still had Dawn’s wrist, and she found Claire’s again without looking, and she brought them both around in front of her, gently, like you bring children past a dog you don’t trust. Claire first, because the door was Claire’s. Dawn next, close on Claire’s heels, her hand still over her mouth. Emi put a third hand flat between Dawn’s shoulder blades and felt her shaking through the wedding dress, and kept it there. Then she looked back once, only once, at Mildred.

Mildred stepped past her without a word and went through after Dawn. Emi went last. There was no rule anymore that said she had to. She had said she would, at the foot of the path, and she did.

The instant her foot crossed the sill, the hours went out from under her.

She hadn’t let go of the Gift. It simply wasn’t there anymore. The held note under her breastbone, the one she had carried since Laura had given her the upgrade, stopped, like missing a step in the dark. The slowness drained out of everything at once. Whatever time it was on this side of the door, it was the same time now for the four of them as for anybody else, anywhere. Laura’s minutes and theirs were running level. Every step from here on would cost the same on both sides.

Behind her, the door closed.

She didn’t turn around to see it. She didn’t need to. She felt it the way she had felt everything in the Forest all night—the glass closing over the place where the door had been, smooth, with no seam and no mark left in the bark—and then she couldn’t feel it at all.