The air smelled wrong.
Not the normal wrong of New York City subways, a unique pungency composed of a mixture of noxious aromas – sweltering trash, old urine, and something unidentifiable that made Ivy think of rat sweat. Not that she had ever had the opportunity to smell a particularly sweaty rat, but she imagined that was what one would smell like.
This was a different sort of wrong, hard to put a finger on. It was the nasal equivalent of staring at two nearly identical images full of nonsensical clutter and trying to find the slight variations – the discrepancies difficult to find at first, but once the eye saw them, they couldn’t be unseen.
Or, in this case, unsmelled.
The cocoa in Ivy’s hand grew less and less appetizing the more she tried to puzzle out exactly what was off about their surroundings. The subway platform was as quotidian as ever. She and Helios had migrated to the far end, where they were least likely to draw attention to themselves. That left the entirety of the station open to her inquisitive gaze. The crowd was of the usual sort: professionals coming home from a long day at the office; a cluster of high school students wearing blue blazers and khakis, probably only just leaving whatever fancy academy they attended after practicing some sport or studying for whatever standardized test plagued their existence. Ivy didn’t know what went on at human schools, but from all she had gathered, it was unpleasant. There was an artist with a large rectangular portfolio hanging over her shoulder, reeking of something that smelled like skunk but probably wasn’t. A woman taking a nap surrounded by worn shopping bags, an empty coffee cup sitting in front of her with a few coins in it. An elderly man muttering to himself as he worked his way through a book of crossword puzzles. More than a few souls still wearing scrubs, which made sense this close to the hospital.
None of them seemed perturbed by the wrongness of the air. None but Helios, who was scrunching his nose as he peered over the top of his sunglasses and looked up and down the tracks.
“Do you feel that too?” Ivy asked.
He nodded. A mostly empty coffee cup dangled from his fingertips. She wondered if he’d also lost his appetite.
“What is it?” Ivy took a step toward him, closing the distance between them until only a few inches separated the fabric of their sleeves. The air felt slightly less wrong this close to him, as if the magic innate to his presence counteracted whatever was causing the disturbance they both felt.
“I’m not sure,” said Helios. “It feels like …”
The remainder of his sentence was cut off by the rumbling of a train entering the station at their end of the platform, the wind in its wake sending the ends of Ivy’s scarf fluttering about her neck. She held the scarf in place with one hand. A weird vibe in the air would be the least of her problems if she were unmasked and her feathers revealed to a platform full of humans.
The feeling of wrong swelled suddenly, stealing the breath from Ivy’s lungs. She dropped her cup of cocoa. Her knees went wobbly and she reached for Helios just as he was reaching for her. Instinct made him push Ivy behind him, to protect her from whatever onslaught was about to occur, but none came.
The wrongness coalesced into something she recognized, as if it was rearranging itself into a semblance of order for a few frenzied seconds.
The in-between. Its acrid ozone scent sizzled around them, stronger than Ivy had ever felt it before. The air shuddered with the force of it.
Ivy peered around Helios’s torso just in time to see the train barrel through a gash of ink-black darkness that had sliced right through the tracks. As suddenly as it appeared, the tear in the in-between disappeared. And that was exactly what it was: a tear. A rip along a seam that never should have been there.
All was silent for a long, horrible moment.
Then one person screamed, and another. Some people stared dumbly at the tracks, at the space where a train – a train full of living, breathing people – had just been, their minds refusing to process what their eyes had just seen. Others stampeded toward the stairs leading to the street. The artist dropped her portfolio and ran. The woman with the bags and the cup of coins blinked at the now-empty tracks, shrugged, and went back to her nap.
The train was gone. The entire length of it. Every single car. Swallowed up by a gash in the in-between that had opened of its own accord. It was impossible. It should have been impossible. And yet.
A tremor worked its way through Ivy’s body, starting at the top of her head and moving down to her toes. Her entire body shook and her stomach roiled, threatening to expel its contents. She thought she might be in shock, but the notion was a distant one, as if her brain couldn’t quite grasp the enormity of what had just occurred.
Helios was as still as stone, his gaze fixed on the point where the train had disappeared.
He said Ivy’s name twice before she reacted.
Slowly, she raised her face to look at him. She felt as though she were moving underwater, her body oddly weightless.
The wrongness in the air began to dissipate until it was little more than a memory. Helios had removed his sunglasses and was peering at Ivy with eyes a touch too wide, just this side of terrified.
“We have to go,” he said, one hand coming up to cup her elbow. Already, the booted feet of police officers were clomping down the stairs at the other end of the platform. One of the people who’d fled the station must have found them, alerting them to the fact that something had just gone drastically awry. When the police hit the platform, they slowed. There were two of them, and they wore matching expressions of bewilderment. Ivy wondered what they’d heard from the mouths of frightened commuters or what they’d expected to find. An explosion maybe. Or some other disaster that would align with the idea of a train disappearing.
But they found nothing, for there was nothing for them to see.
“Ivy,” Helios said, tugging on her arm. His sunglasses were still off. Weird yellow eyes were probably less suspicious in that moment than two people wearing shades underground and at night.
The first step Ivy took felt like she was pulling her feet free from clinging muck. Each subsequent step was easier as the primitive part of her brain screamed at her to flee in the face of danger. A solid instinct.
Helios ushered her past the befuddled police officers, who were muttering something about drug-induced hallucinations. A mad giggle clawed its way up Ivy’s throat, but she swallowed it before it could escape. The last thing she and Helios needed was to draw attention to themselves. The stage makeup Ivy had plastered over Helios’s scales before they left Avalon was enough to fool a casual glance, but it wouldn’t hold up under intense scrutiny, which they were sure to experience if the cops saw a laughing madwoman fleeing the scene of a potential crime.
The woman with the shopping bags woke with a start when Ivy passed her. Their eyes met and Ivy’s steps floundered. The woman looked at her as though she could see right through Ivy’s tinted sunglasses and her silk scarf to the distinctly avian eyes and feathers that marked her as decidedly inhuman. A gap-toothed grin cracked across the woman’s lips.
“It’s breaking apart,” said the woman. “Breaking down.”
“What is?” Ivy asked, ignoring Helios’s impatient tug on her arm.
The woman raised her hands and spread her fingers wide in an all-encompassing gesture. “The world,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. Then she clapped her hands over her eyes and began muttering to herself in a language that seemed to be made up of nothing but garbled nonsense.
Before Ivy could ask any more questions, Helios dragged her away, past the police officers who were starting to question the people still on the platform. Their dubious expressions indicated they didn’t believe what they were hearing – and why would they? – but the obvious distress of the people they spoke to merited an investigation, even if just an obligatory one.
Ivy stumbled as Helios all but hauled her up the steps. The woman’s words rang in her head and she spared a glance over her shoulder, trusting Helios to make sure she didn’t plummet down the stairs. The woman had uncovered her eyes and met Ivy’s gaze with a piercing look. She smiled that gap-toothed grin again and mimicked an explosion with her hands. She laughed, then fell into a fit of coughing. One of the officers looked at her for a second, then shrugged and turned away, evidently writing her off as just another questionably sane itinerant.
Madness and magic were not so distant from one another. In humans, the former was often a sign of sensitivity to the latter. It was as though the human mind was incapable of adapting to the presence of magic in other races, ones whose life’s blood was full of it, like Ivy’s kind. The woman knew something. And it was driving her mad.
Before Ivy knew it, she and Helios had reached the surface. Never had Ivy been so glad to gulp down stale city air. Compared with the stifling wrongness of the subway platform and the sickening sensation of the in-between tearing itself open and slamming itself closed, the city air felt as fresh as a meadow.
Helios guided her a block and a half away and she let him, glad not to have to think beyond the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other. She was still trying to come to terms with what they had just seen.
The in-between wasn’t supposed to open on its own. That was why they needed shadow dust. It was a key. That door wasn’t supposed to open without one.
And yet.
And yet.
Their frantic pace slowed. Helios released his hold on Ivy’s arm reluctantly, like he didn’t want to lose her solidity. He looked back in the direction they had come. A crowd was beginning to gather around the station entrance, drawn by curiosity like moths to a flame.
“What just happened?” It didn’t sound like Helios was asking Ivy specifically. There was an awestruck quality to his question that made it seem like it was simply something he needed to vocalize for the sake of his own sanity. After all, it wasn’t like Ivy understood any better than he did.
The in-between had been acting strangely recently, but this … this was something else entirely. It was the difference between taking the wrong exit off the highway, and ending up in a bottomless abyss.
All those people. Ivy clamped down on the thought. If she went there, she wouldn’t be able to come back. It was too horrible to consider. Hundreds of people, lost to the void. No. Don’t think about it.
“I don’t know,” Ivy said helplessly. The woman’s words echoed in her ears.
It’s breaking apart. Breaking down.
The problem of the in-between was larger than any of them had ever dreamed.
“We have to tell the Ala,” Ivy said. It was the only thing that made sense. The Ala would know what to do; she always knew what to do. Ivy felt the need to cling to the Ala’s skirts in a way she hadn’t done since childhood. The Ala would know. The Ala would help. “Come on.” Now it was her turn to tug on Helios’s arm. “We have to go home.”
Helios stayed rooted to the spot. He peered at Ivy with a look of such supreme puzzlement, she would have laughed if not for the horror threatening to choke her. His voice was plaintive and deadly serious when he asked, “How?”
Ivy lost the battle against the hysterical laughter that had been threatening to spill out. It tumbled from her lips in a crazed cackle.
How?
They’d been taking the train because the in-between had been acting too unpredictable, and now this.
Ivy doubled over, clutching her gut, unsure whether the tears tracking down her face were from laughter or sadness, and not quite sure whether it mattered.
Madness and magic. Not far from each other indeed.