Ellery Finch was in my dreams that night, alive then dead, and trying desperately to tell me something. Plumes of red smoke unrolled from his tongue when he opened his mouth. Twice-Killed Katherine whispered in my ear, and the green ground of the Hinterland rose up to meet me. I slammed into waking on a worn-out sleeping bag in front of the fire.
The first thing I did was sit up straight and peel off my shirt. The white had inched up my shoulders some, but it hadn’t reached my neck. I could still hide it away. I stood gingerly, as if moving too quickly might cause the freeze to spill over into my chest. Soon enough it would, I guessed, no matter how carefully I moved. When I pressed two fingers gently to my sternum it made my heart feel like it had brain freeze.
I could hear the companionable sounds of Janet and Ingrid in the next room, making food and talking low, laughing. Ingrid stepped lively when she saw me, handing me a mug of something that looked like coffee but smelled and tasted like kasha. She watched me like I might freeze her heart in her chest, or spit up diamonds.
Janet’s instructions for finding the Spinner were frustratingly vague. “Let it be known that you’re in this world, and the Spinner will find you,” she said. “It’s very likely the Spinner already knows.”
The dodgy pronouns still had me convinced I was walking right into Ron Weasley’s worst nightmare. “So I walk around yelling, ‘It’s me, Alice! I’m back!’?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Ingrid startled at Janet’s tone, watching me like I might take offense. “You just … let your sense of this world take over. It doesn’t matter where you’ve spent your life, you are of this place. Stop thinking of yourself as a tourist.”
She gave me a clean tunic thing to replace my ripped, disgusting sweatshirt, but I refused to part with my jeans. Just slipping them back on made me feel more human. More Earth human. When I finally left the cottage, giving Janet a grateful hug that made Ingrid very nervous, they lingered in the doorway like they were sending me off to school.
I walked toward the trees, shifting and whispering in the rinsed morning light. When I got close their whispering resolved, for a moment, into words.
Not this way.
I stopped short. A sweet release started in my limbs, the feeling a tree must get in spring, when its sap unfreezes and starts to run. When I blinked, I could see faces in the bark—funny ones, wizened ones, lovely ones. I blinked again and it passed, but the feeling remained. Following some inner compass, I turned away from the woods, walking back toward the cottage, then past it.
I didn’t know from acres, but Janet and Ingrid’s cottage backed onto enough cleared land that it took me at least ten minutes to cross it. It was covered in rambling vegetable gardens, an orchard of fruit trees, outbuildings, and long stretches of meadow where goats ripped at grass or watched me with their oblong eyes. I got the feeling they could talk to me if they chose, but they had nothing to say.
At the end of the property was a low white fence, and beyond that a dirt road. I hopped the fence and turned left. A girl in cutoffs passed me on a bicycle. When I turned to watch her go, she was watching me, too, peering back over her shoulder.
The road ambled along between stands of green. I tried to clear my mind and hold on to the feeling that had put me on this path, with mixed luck. I was always shit at meditation, no matter how often Ella made me try it. I smelled salt on the air and almost turned toward it—somewhere, not too far away, was a fairy-tale sea. But the Hinterland sense humming through me said it wasn’t the place I needed to go.
Once, through the trees, I saw a woman who looked like a sleepwalker, beautiful and wearing a blood-colored dress. Her hooded eyes met mine with interest, and she gave a tiny tilt of her head. It filled me with a stupid pleasure. It’s just like one Prius driver nodding to another, I told myself, but it was more than that. Something had changed since yesterday—I wasn’t lost. When the ground suddenly dipped, tipping my step down into a bowl of grass dotted with creamy pink blossoms, I felt like I’d seen it before. And when I came upon a boy all in white lying fast asleep, curled around a silver mirror, I felt like I’d been expecting him. The air around him was thick with magic, shimmering like a mirage over a hot black road. I tiptoed around his body and back up the other side.
I passed a few cottages, an army-green all-weather tent, and a lean-to made of flowering branches. Beneath it sheltered two long-haired children, who watched me pass with hopeless eyes. I hurried my step, thinking they were Stories, but once they were out of sight I wasn’t so sure. When I saw a Tudor-style tavern on a patch of overgrown grass, I couldn’t tell if it was curiosity or instinct that made me stop.
Judging by the sun, it wasn’t even noon yet, but the place was nearly full. When I walked in, less than half the heads bothered turning.
It was, without a doubt, a refugee bar. The crowd looked like the backpackers at a European hostel crossed with the cast of Medieval Times. I saw Converse sneakers and backpacks, peasant skirts and blue jeans. A girl wearing a tunic similar to mine was holding an ancient flip phone in her hand, rubbing a thumb over it like it was a good-luck charm.
The bartender was a massive man wearing a dashiki and an impressive brown beard. When I bellied up to the bar, he was whistling a Beatles song.
“Hi,” he said. “What’ll it be?” His accent was French, I thought. With a touch of Hinterland laid over it.
“What do you have?”
He eyed me hungrily. “New arrival, is it?” His voice carried, and I sensed a ripple of interest in the room. “For you, I’ve got coffee, real coffee, but only if you can pay.”
My hands went automatically to my pockets, empty.
“Not in money,” he said. “In information.”
“About what?” I asked guardedly.
He arched a dark brow and leaned over the bar. This man looked like a Story, but the air around him was thin and breathable, and he smelled like nothing but hops and sweat. “About the world, of course. Ours.”
I had my gloves on and my sleeves pulled down low. “What do you want to know?”
“To start, what year you’re from. Then you get a drink on the house for every post-1972 song you can sing from start to finish. A free meal for each if you let me record you.”
“Leave her be.” A second bartender straightened up from where she’d been crouched behind the bar. “New house rule: no accosting new arrivals till their second time in the bar.”
She smiled at me. Her hair was yellow, and she wore an honest-to-God dirndl that pushed her breasts up. She looked like the St. Pauli girl.
“First drink’s on the house, newbie,” she said.
“But no coffee,” the bearded guy protested. “That’s only for trades.”
“Fine. Tea okay?” She turned and started pouring before I could respond. The tea was a thin brew the color of Mountain Dew. It smelled like pine needles but tasted pleasantly mild.
“Thanks,” I said, trying to peel my eyes off her hoisted chest. The other bartender did not make the same effort. He watched as she hopped over the bar and started gathering mugs and plates from the rickety tables, then spoke to me under his breath.
“Seriously, though. What year is it?”
I told him, and his mouth drew down at the corners. “Oh,” he said bravely. “Well. Did you bring any books with you?”
The other bartender overheard him and rolled her eyes, disappearing through a door behind the bar.
So I told him the plot of Harry Potter. And The Golden Compass. He plied me with free cups of a buttery yellow beer that tasted exactly like kiwis, and I sang rustily for his recorder—“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Landslide,” “Billie Jean.” The recorder looked like something Alexander Graham Bell might’ve used, a jerry-rigged contraption of tubes, exposed wiring, and a skinny arm scribbling over a soft metal plate.
He saw me looking. “I don’t know how it works,” he confessed, flipping it over to show me its empty insides. “It shouldn’t.”
By then a small crowd had gathered around us, including a bronze-skinned woman with a drowsy, just-woken air to her, whom I read immediately as ex-Story. She was accompanied by a boy of about fifteen, wearing hip plastic glasses. An old man in an antique suit sipped endless mugs of bright green tea and listened to my singing attentively, flashing a parchment-colored smile. There were two barefoot dudes who looked like they’d stumbled in straight from Burning Man and put me on edge. They wore twinned expressions of total peace, but the whites of their eyes were shot through with red. The flora might be different here, but something growing nearby could make you high.
People drifted in and out, and the bartender—his name was Alain, and I had it wrong, he was Swiss—served me a plate of flatbread and stew spiced with something that caught at my throat. The shadows grew long over the bar, until finally he sighed and grabbed a leather satchel from the floor.
“I’m off,” he said. “You’re back to Janet’s tonight?” I’d told him where I came from, though not what I was after. He and everyone else in the bar seemed to know Janet.
I shrugged noncommittally and stretched, reaching inward for the otherworldly sense that drove me here. It twitched to life, half-drowned by liquor and talk and human connection. I’d kept my gloves on, and it almost let me forget I didn’t belong with these people. Unless I could figure out how to become ex-Story, this wasn’t my Hinterland. These weren’t my kind.
And if I couldn’t figure it out?
I could stay. The thought ghosted up from the part of my brain that plugged into the Hinterland like it was a mainframe. It carried with it a hard beat of fear, but beneath it, something else: surrender. After a life of running, always running. Meditating and counting and clinging to Ella’s hands in an effort to stay afloat on an oceanic anger.
I could do it, I thought. If I let myself believe Ella wasn’t back there waiting for me.
But if I let myself believe that, I would drown for good.
After Alain left, the blonde bartender put stubby candles out on the tables, like she was in a Brooklyn restaurant preparing for dinner service. But as I watched her, I realized there was more to it. Something was happening around her hands, some trick of the light. As she moved from table to table, putting the candles down, she flicked her fingers in complicated patterns, like she was signing or weaving or moving them into place for cat’s cradle. One by one, the people at the tables got up and left without a word, grabbing their stuff, dropping money, and slipping out into the night.
When the last one left, she sighed and pulled the clip from her hair, massaging her scalp as it fell to her shoulders. She had fairy princess hair, like mine would be if I let it grow out.
She slipped onto the barstool next to mine and tapped the back of my glove with one finger. “Hello, Alice-Three-Times.”
Her voice was throaty and low, and even through the gloves her touch sent a line of pale fire from my fingertips to my shoulders.
I pulled them off, stretched my fingers so the bones cracked. “I’ve been looking for you, I think.”
She laughed. “I’ve been looking for you longer.”
I saw her now that she wasn’t masquerading as a bartender. I felt her tight-packed energy, so fierce it almost distorted the air around her. Her eyes were too close to mine, too focused, two blue saucers that ate up light. I didn’t let myself look away.
“What did you do, to make them all leave? Was it magic?”
“Nothing so unpredictable as that. I just … tweaked the narrative. Made it the right time for them to go.”
“So you control everyone here? Not just the Stories?”
The Story Spinner pushed up on her elbows, pulled herself a pint of something bubbly from across the bar. “I don’t have to control anyone, least of all the Stories. Once I set them going, they’re like clockwork. A self-contained engine.” She looked at me dryly. “Well. Usually. What I do is keep the threads untangled, keep the realms separate, make sure the stories have room to unfold. But you”—she pointed a finger gun at me; I wondered for an aimless moment whether the Hinterland had guns—“are the hitch in the clockwork. Is it too much to hope that you came back to finish your story?”
This, I realized, was Althea’s she. The one who wouldn’t let Althea die, who let her go once and regretted it. She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
“Can I? Finish it, I mean? If that’s all you need me to do before I go, then I’ll do it.” I didn’t know what I was promising, or what it might mean, but what she said made it sound finite. Like maybe I could make a deal.
Her eyes took the measure of me, a quick water-blue assessment that made me feel like a bolt of cloth or a coffee cup. Just for a moment, before they dropped like mercury into soft sympathy.
Don’t trust her, then. Though that was already clear.
“When you finish a story,” she said patiently, “it begins again. Until I stop telling it. And while they’re being told, stories create the energy that makes this world go. They keep our stars in place. They make our grass grow.”
“Are you a Story? Or an ex-Story?”
“I’m not from here. I’m not from there, either,” she added, before I could ask.
A third place, then. The idea plucked at the edges of my brain. I imagined a whole universe of worlds floating in an unfathomable vastness, like lentils scattered through ashes. It was such a lonely vision it made my chest ache.
“Are you going to let me go home?” I whispered.
“Oh, Alice.” The regret in her voice sounded real. “Look at yourself—at your hands. It’ll reach your mind soon, you know. It’ll reach your heart. They’ve been waiting a very long time for you to come back—the queen, the king. And stasis is worse than stories, they say.” She laughed, like what she’d said was funny.
“You say stories run until you stop telling them,” I said wildly. “Can’t you just decide, then? To stop telling mine—to let me go?”
“What about the Hinterland makes you think I’m nice?” She drank half her beer down, leaned in. “I did a favor for a woman once—a spinner in her own way, I have a soft spot for my kind—and look where it got me. Rules exist for a reason. But. But.” She held up a finger. “You can’t finish your story, but you can change it. Technically speaking, you can. You can choose another ending, and destabilize it from the inside. If you fail to close the loop, finish it right, the story might let you go. In theory.”
“I can do that,” I said quickly. “I’ll do that. I could go home, if I manage to do that?”
She rested her chin on her hand, eyes hooked on me like I was an experiment. “It’s a big if. But yes, perhaps you could. If that’s the new ending you chose.”
“How do I do it? Where do I start?”
“Where do all these things start? Once upon a time. And you just … go from there.”
Something struck me—Finch had never finished telling me my story. “But what if I don’t know how it ends? ‘Alice-Three-Times,’ I mean?”
“Maybe your odds will be better that way. Or, more likely, the ending will find you. And then you’ll begin again. Even if you did manage to break it, and leave this place behind, don’t forget—time works differently than you think it does. There’s no guaranteeing you’ll recognize the world you’re trying to return to.”
I flashed on an image of hovercars and robot politicians, Ella long dead and myself a relic of a time known only in books. “There’s some chance I’ll get back to my own time, isn’t there?” I asked, pathetically. “Even if it’s slight?”
The Spinner looked at me like she knew exactly how my story would end—in more ways than one—but was just curious enough to see it unfold for herself. She swallowed the last of her drink, throat working in a python pulse, and stood. “Come with me.”