There was a crumbling stone wall at the edge of the old property, and Ellis had decided to climb it. On the other side of the wall, the grass felt springy beneath her sneakers, the air around her cool and comforting. The forest around her barely had the right to call itself a forest. Its few trees were thin and pale, bent from the wind like a violin bow. Fog still hung in the air, and Ellis was reminded that it was still morning. She picked at a scab on her chin.
A beetle scuttled across her path. She stopped short. The beetle settled itself on a dead leaf, stretching itself out contentedly. Ellis stood in the middle of the path, hands clasped behind her back, and watched.
It had chosen a spot of sunlight to lie in—a small focused circle of light that had gotten through the early morning fog. The beetle was shimmering blue and gold in the sunlight, its shell a surprising display of color. It shivered. It shook itself out. It unfolded its glittering wings, one after the other. It seemed to be enjoying itself.
Then it disappeared.
Ellis blinked. She spun in a circle around herself. She sneezed.
Then there it was again—its wings, shimmering against the sun. She picked her way across the path, keeping the glinting wings in her line of sight. The beetle hung in the air, just long enough for Ellis to see it clearly. It was the same one, blue and gold. It wasn’t just the same species; it was the same beetle. Ellis knew.
It took off again, zipping through the forest.
That was all the encouragement she needed. She chased after the beetle, eyes glued to the flashes of blue and gold that flew just out of reach. She tore through shrubs and splashed through puddles. Twigs caught in her hair and spiderwebs clung to her jeans. She was seventeen years old, chasing a bug away from the suburbs of Clark County. It was absurd. It was preposterous. It felt right.
Eventually, though, she did have to stop. She leaned against a tree trunk, hands on her knees, and caught her breath. The beetle hovered in front of her, buzzing. It was blue, then gold, then gone for good.
She sighed and dusted off her T-shirt. She was becoming aware now of the mud on her shoes and the way her socks were soaked. Ellis hated wet socks. She hated them so much that it took her a moment to realize she was in a section of the forest she didn’t recognize.
Because it was a real forest now. She was surrounded by old trees, gray and gnarled and rough to the touch, and growing so close together that she couldn’t stretch out her arms without hitting at least one. And the fog was gone, replaced by a soft sunlight that dappled leaves and gave a soft glow to the tips of her Converse sneakers. There was no path.
Had Ellis been younger, she would have run. She would have run back the way she had come, scared out of her mind to be alone in this blue-gray world, and that fear would have been enough to propel her home. She would have found the path, and the path would have led to the wall, and one short climb later she would have been in her own backyard again, not sure if the new forest had been real or imagined.
But Ellis was seventeen. Rational thought said the path, although she couldn’t see it, was within walking distance. And she had a phone in her pocket, with which she could navigate back home when she chose to return. Forests didn’t go on forever. If she walked in the right direction, rational thought said she would end up where she wanted to go.
So with all these rational thoughts in mind, Ellis decided to explore. After all, she was growing curiouser and curiouser.
#
The sign above the door said “The Sisters” in messy cursive. It was barely legible, graffitied with splotches of paint and weathered from age. Whole chunks of it had been torn out and now hung loose, dangling and twisting soundlessly in the air. As Ellis watched, one piece of the sign snapped off and spun away, hitting the wall of the building to which the sign pointed.
And what a building it was. She approached it cautiously at first, then with more wonder than fear. The building was a hodgepodge of different colors, styles, and shapes. A stone castle turret grew from the northern side, and a red-and-white silo grew from the southern side. One flat roof was painted with multicolored flowers, while another pointed one was draped in newsprint. It seemed like it had been built by a committee that had only the vaguest idea of what an inn looked like, never communicated to each other throughout the process of building, and had given up halfway through. And despite the impossibility of it all, Ellis got the sense that the entire building was growing.
Ellis turned away from the door and looked out at the blue forest, wondering how or why such a thing had been built.
“It’s weirder on the inside.”
She spun back around. The door was wide open now. A warm light was coming from inside, along with music from an instrument she had never heard before. But blocking her view was a young man standing in the doorway, a little older than her and a little taller, with dark hair and a wide smile.
“I’m guessing you need a place to stay?” he said.
“Actually,” she said, “I’m just trying to get home.”
“Classic quest. Well, I’m sure you’ll find something you need here. What’s your name?”
He noticed her hesitation. “Don’t worry, we won’t steal it.”
“Ellis O’Hare.”
“Ellis,” he repeated. “I’m Kai. Come inside.”
He turned around to walk back into the inn. A pair of beetle’s wings grew from his back, shimmering blue and gold. Ellis stared at them for a moment. Then she followed.
#
The inside of the Sisters was just as haphazard as the outside. Ellis and Kai walked into a crowded lobby that seemed to also serve as a dining room. None of the furniture matched, and neither did the people. Some of the Sisters’ patrons had lobster claws instead of hands or vipers instead of hair. There were eye patches and bird tattoos and gold teeth. Sipping from a trough in the corner was a unicorn, midnight-black from horn to hoof.
Taking it all in, Ellis steadied herself against the side of a table, which was covered with a tablecloth made of brown fur. At her touch, the tablecloth stiffened and turned gray. She pressed her palm to the tablecloth. It left a handprint made entirely of stone.
“Kai! There you are!”
A tiny businessman zipped past Ellis, smartly dressed in a three-piece suit. He hovered in front of Kai, held aloft by two pairs of emerald-green dragonfly wings.
“There’s a problem with the ogre in the basement,” he said, out of breath. “He refuses to eat anything we serve him. He says it’s all fairy food—”
Kai turned to Ellis. “Listen, I’ve got to go,” he said. “Find Cat. She’ll explain everything.”
“Who’s Cat?”
“You’ll know her when you see her. Now,” he said, turning to the tiny businessman, “what seems to be the problem?”
Kai walked away with him, leaving stone footprints wherever he stepped. Ellis watched him go, then glanced at the handprint she had left on the table.
She turned in a slow circle, trying to take in everything around her. Three children chased each other between and under the tables, blowing raspberries with their forked green tongues. A white-haired man, hunched over with age, clutched a basket of golden twigs in his gnarled fingers. A woman with a pair of cat’s ears on either side of her head, striped ginger and—
“Cat,” Ellis said to herself, and headed toward her.
The woman was sitting at a corner table, playing a dice game with herself. Ellis watched her shuffle. She didn’t seem to notice Ellis was there.
Ellis cleared her throat and, when that didn’t work, tapped her lightly on the shoulder. A fingerprint-sized pebble tumbled down her back. The woman whipped around and hissed, baring a set of sharp fangs. Her eyes flashed golden, pupils narrowing into slits.
Ellis scrambled backward, knocking over a fruit basket. Star-shaped fruit spilled out onto the floor. She bent down apologetically, gathering as many of the fruits as she could. She reached for one, but another hand grabbed it first.
It was another woman, wearing a red apron. Her eyes were the same color as her short-cropped hair, brown with streaks of gray. Her face was lined from years of well-meaning worry, and green shoots were starting to grow from the rivets on her face. They were everywhere, Ellis realized after looking at her for a few seconds—thin green strands crisscrossing her face, sometimes entirely beneath her skin like veins. They decorated the corners of her mouth and softened her hairline. A single clover peeked out from her left nostril.
This, she knew, was Cat.
“You’re new,” Cat said.
Ellis nodded.
Cat extended her hand, and Ellis took it. Her handshake was solid and firm and smelled like grass.
“Come with me,” she said.
She led her through a red curtain patterned in black. They emerged into a small kitchen—too small, Ellis thought as she looked around, to feed all the people she had seen dining. Cat removed her apron and hung it onto a wooden peg on the wall.
As Ellis watched, a sprout grew where Cat’s fingers had touched the peg. Two tiny leaves unfurled, one after the other.
“You’re rather messy,” Cat said, pointing toward the doorway. A trail of gray stone footprints lay on the floor, matching the places where Ellis had stepped.
“It’s alright,” she continued. “You’re not the first person to arrive here shedding stone. We’ll find some way to make you useful. Every mark a person makes on this building is precious, especially after they’ve gone.”
“After they’ve gone?” Ellis repeated.
“What, did you think we all lived here?” Cat said. “These people are all travelers. Every quest begins in an inn, you know.”
Ellis stared at her blankly.
“An inn,” Cat repeated. “Or a tavern, or pub, or lodge, or whatever you elect to call it on that day. It’s where you stock up on supplies, trade your old boots for a lighter pair, meet a mysterious cloaked stranger who slides a treasure map across the table and weighs it down with a tidy sum of gold.”
“So everyone here is a hero.”
“Not necessarily,” Cat said. “The inn has its fair share of ordinary customers, who aren’t heroic at all—older brothers, for instance, or stepmothers and their daughters. Plenty have stumbled in by accident, like you. And a few are permanent residents, if they have no world of their own, or if their world is gone.”
“Gone,” Ellis repeated, a little dazed.
“Destroyed,” Cat said. “Worlds are fragile things. In my opinion, it’s no coincidence that the worlds most likely to be torn through are also the easiest to leave. It’s the difference between a world made of chiffon and one made of corduroy.”
“What’s my world made of?” Ellis said. “I came here from Clark County.”
“That world isn’t familiar to me.”
“It’s not a world, exactly,” she said. “Not the whole world, anyway. It’s just a county. There are a few of them in the state, and fifty states in the country, and hundreds of—”
“Fifty states, you say?” Cat said.
“Yes. Do you know it?”
A tendril peeked out from Cat’s inner wrist. It wound its way slowly around her thumb, until Cat, with surprising violence, tore it out. She crushed it in her fist and let the pieces fall to the kitchen floor.
“I may have heard of your world after all,” she said. “We’ve had travelers from that world come our way before.”
“What happened to them?” Ellis asked. “Where did they go?”
“Nowhere of consequence,” Cat said quickly. “Two found quests, one found a lover, and all of them found a newer world that was much easier to step into than the one they had left.”
“So none of them went back.”
“Oh, they all tried for a time,” Cat said. “But your world is much tougher to poke through than most.”
Then she gathered her apron, gave Ellis a tight-lipped smile, and left the way she had come.
#
Ellis’s room was made almost entirely of wood, except for the bedsheets. She stepped carefully, afraid of splinters digging into her feet.
“I assume you don’t have anything to unpack,” Kai said from the doorway. “But you can stay here for the time being.”
“I can’t stay here. I have to get home.”
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. She didn’t know if there was cell reception here, but she couldn’t imagine there wasn’t. No matter how strange this place was, it was still less than a day’s walk away from her house.
“That won’t work here,” he said.
She rolled her eyes and tapped the screen. Nothing happened. She pressed the home button, then held down the power button, then whacked the phone against her leg. None of it worked.
Slowly, it began to dawn on her just how lost she was.
“Yeah.” He gestured around the room. “So you’ll be staying here.”
“For how long?”
She turned away from him and ran a hand over the rough surface of the wardrobe, feeling phantom splinters drag themselves across her palm. She picked at her elbow.
“However long you need,” he said simply. “I’m down the hall if you need anything.”
The wooden doorknob turned to stone as he closed the door.
Before flipping off the light switch, Ellis took another moment to wonder how a place like this even had electricity. Maybe that had been one traveler’s mark on the inn, she thought. Maybe they had wired sparks through the walls.
#
Ellis woke up to the sound of shouting from the floor above. She stumbled blearily out of bed and into the hallway, heels hanging out of her sneakers—and walked directly into a waist-high vase in the middle of the carpet.
She looked up. A girl was sitting on the pedestal instead of the vase. Her chin-length hair was such a pale shade of silver that it almost looked white. She was all angles and corners, from her collarbone to her knobbly knees. But what shocked the last bits of sleep from Ellis’s brain were the girl’s ears. They were several times larger than her own, pale blue and pointed like the ears of a fox.
“What are you staring at?” she demanded.
“Why are you six feet off the ground?” Ellis replied.
“Why aren’t you?”
She swung her legs over the side of the pedestal, then leaned over and stretched out her hand. After a moment of hesitation, Ellis shook it.
“Quill,” she introduced herself. “Where are you from?”
Ellis blinked. “Sorry?”
“You’re not from here,” Quill said, “or else I would have seen you before. And I haven’t, which means you must be a traveler. So, what world are you from?”
“Clark County.”
“Sounds boring.” Quill stuck out her foot—her toes were just as angular as the rest of her, and painted purple—and tapped the vase in front of her with her big toe.
“Where are you from?” Ellis asked. “What world, I mean.”
“Nowhere.” Quill grinned, showing a metal fang at the corner of her mouth. “I was born here, in the inn in between. My mother disappeared out the window near midnight, leaving behind five gold coins and a baby in a bassinet.”
“That’s terrible.”
Quill tilted her head to one side. “I don’t think so,” she said. “No parents, no school, no rules—isn’t that what everybody wants? Isn’t that what you wanted, before coming here?”
“Yeah, when I was six,” Ellis said. “But—”
She was interrupted by a second voice, joining the first one in shouting. Quill’s ears swiveled toward the stairwell.
“That’s Noah, on the third floor,” she said. “He and his twin are always fighting, and more often than not they need a whole floor to themselves. No idea what they fight about. It’s annoying as hell, if you ask me.”
She hopped down from the pedestal, brushed past Ellis, and disappeared down the stairwell. She left no stone footprints when she walked, or granite trails where her fingers grazed the wall. It seemed like as far as the inn was concerned, Quill didn’t exist at all.
#
As the days passed by, Ellis watched patrons come and go. Perhaps as a product of witnessing the rotating cast of creatures dining at the inn, she found herself growing acquainted with the small crew who remained day in and day out. There was Quill. There were the twins, Noah and Enya—the shouting ones. The more time Ellis spent around the twins, the more she realized they were sickeningly predictable. Enya always shouted first. Then Noah would meet her. And Robin was always caught in the middle.
Robin was always reading by the fireplace, her long hair falling in front of her face. Ellis joined her one night. She had been feeling lonely, and she thought two lonely people might feel better about themselves if they sat together. She set her dinner plate down onto Robin’s bench, which was rough and lumpy.
“You looked like you could use some company.”
Robin’s head shot up, and flinging her curtain of hair violently out of her face. For an awkward moment they stared at each other in mutually shocked silence.
Robin found Ellis sitting on the fifth stair. She sat down next to her quietly.
“Do you want to talk at all?” Ellis asked.
Robin nodded. “Tell me a story,” she said.
Ellis blinked. “What kind of story?”
Robin shrugged. She picked a fragment of stone out of the fireplace and rolled it between her palms. “Anything.”
So Ellis told her a story about a good friend, a heartbreak, and a spilled milkshake, defining words when Robin asked. Robin nodded solemnly when she was done and asked for another. Ellis was a bit lost. She only really had one story.
So she started fishing around in her pockets until she found the story she was looking for. It was a purple plastic frog. She twisted its head and the frog split in half, revealing a compass inside. The needle wavered unevenly from side to side.
“Is it special?” Robin asked.
“Only to me.” Ellis ran a finger along a familiar path down the compass’s edge. The compass had an interesting story. It had been stolen from a natural history museum gift shop in Milwaukee when Ellis had been fourteen, but she hadn’t stolen it. A friend had stolen it and given it to her, the same friend who had thought maybe they were something more and had ended up knocking his milkshake across the table when Ellis had told him they weren’t. The story was mostly true.
“The needle moves when you tilt it, see,” she said. “Usually the needle always points north, but this one is broken.”
Robin stared at the compass for a long moment, watching the needle swing back and forth. She reached out hesitantly.
“You can hold it,” Ellis said. “It’s not dangerous.”
Before she could offer it to her, Robin snatched the compass from Ellis’s hand and ran.
“Robin’s just weird like that,” Quill said when Ellis took her seat at their usual table. “She and the twins have been here for months now. Kai and I have a bet going on about when they’ll leave. So far I’m winning. Whenever he comes back from a quest, she and the twins are still here.”
“What is his world, anyway?” Ellis asked.
Kai wasn’t present to answer the question. He had a habit of disappearing without warning for weeks on end. It was a side effect of having a quest of his own.
“Stone giants,” Quill said. “They’re a sort of… spirit. Kai’s world is very unstable. It gets destroyed and remade over and over. He has a prophecy—defeat the stone giants, stop the world from ending and all that. That’s why he keeps going back.”
“You know a lot about Kai.”
“We’ve known each other for a long time.”
Ellis stabbed at her dinner with her fork. She still hadn’t gotten used to eating with wood. It felt like leaving splinters in her mouth. And wooden forks just didn’t pierce right. She liked foods you could puncture with a pop. This was more of a blunt force and a squishy struggle.
“You’re bothered,” Quill said. “You’re missing something. I think you want to go home.”
“Of course I do. My family—they must be worried about me.”
“Tell me about them.”
“I lived in Clark County,” Ellis began. “I mean, live. It’s shaped like a doughnut—a ring of houses and stores and things around a forest. Well, not really a forest.”
Quill dipped her ring finger into her water glass and traced a circle onto the table.
“Explain to me,” she said, “how something can be not really a forest.”
“There aren’t any real trees,” Ellis said. “So it doesn’t feel like a forest. It doesn’t even look like it’s trying to be a forest. And I don’t think something that doesn’t look or feel like a forest should be called a forest.”
Quill plucked a berry from Ellis’s plate and crushed it between her fingers. “Sounds sad.”
“It’s not sad. It’s my home.”
“Not really,” Quill said. She placed her juice-stained fingers into her mouth and slowly pulled them out clean.
“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
#
In the kitchen, Quill stood on her tiptoes and opened a cabinet door. She pulled herself up onto the counter, reached into the cabinet, and drummed her fingernails on the wood. It sounded like a heartbeat.
With the other hand, she beckoned Ellis closer. Come see, her index finger said.
Ellis saw. Inside the cabinet was a miniature landscape. A tiny cliff overlooked a glassy sea, underneath a night sky sprinkled with stars. The whole thing was perfectly still, like a photograph. She exhaled, and a trail of ripples blew across the sea.
“Come on.” Quill hoisted herself up until she was sitting at the edge of the cabinet. She grinned and let go of the cabinet door, folding her arms.
Then she tipped backward and disappeared.
“Quill!”
Ellis stuck her head inside the cabinet. She could see Quill below her, tiny and very far away, standing and waving for her to jump in too.
In another time or another world, she would have run away. But this time, she didn’t. She took a deep breath and dove headfirst into the cabinet.
Inside the cabinet, the sky was dark and the air was cool. A thin blade of yellow light pointed toward the sky, where the door was hovering with seemingly nothing attached to it.
Quill was standing at the edge of the cliff, looking out toward the sea. Ellis joined her. It scared her a little, how silent the sea was. With no wind to make waves, it might as well have been a sheet of black ice. The air felt still too, unnaturally so. She felt like she had walked into a place suspended in time, untouchable.
“What is it?” she whispered, and she wasn’t sure if she was speaking to Quill or to herself or to the quiet world around her.
“It’s a pocket world,” Quill explained. “I found it some years ago while looking for a snack. I don’t know which visitor made it, or if a visitor made it at all.”
She closed her eyes and exhaled. A phantom breeze rippled across the sea again, disappearing into darkness as it dwindled away.
“Cat calls it an ocean,” she said. “But it’s not really an ocean. There’s no moon here, so there are no waves. And you can’t have an ocean without waves.”
She opened her eyes and grabbed Ellis’s hands. “Is this what your forest feels like?”
Ellis looked out into the black sea. She had no reflection.
“Not at all,” she said. “This is beautiful.”
Quill blinked away tears. “It’s not beautiful to me,” she said. “It just keeps going on forever, all the same. I’ve always wanted to find the end of it. And I think—I think I’m supposed to. I think that’s my quest.”
“Then get a boat,” Ellis said. “Go on your quest.”
“I’m afraid to,” Quill said. “It’s easier to wonder. That way, I can imagine. But I will go one day. I’ll stand on my tiptoes on the prow, and it’ll tip forward and we’ll go into the water together. I have a theory, you know.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath.
“I don’t think I’d be able to sail,” she went on. “This world wouldn’t want me to do that. We’d break in half on the water instead, the boat and me, and half of me would go spinning across the sea and the other half would stay put, and Cat would find us and she’d cry and cover us in flowers and that would be the end of it.”
She took a step toward the edge of the cliff, then another. Ellis wanted to reach out and drag her back to safety, but she couldn’t. She felt rooted to the ground.
Quill looked back at Ellis and there was something so perfect about her, perfectly still, and then she stepped off.
And then they vanished, and they were back outside the cabinet, and Ellis had to reach out and grab Quill’s wrist to be sure they were both still breathing.
#
Ellis was exploring the basement when Cat walked in. She was inspecting the labels on a row of dusty wine bottles. Fifth Floor, Third Sink read the first one. Fifth Floor, Seventh Sink read the next, and that was how she learned that the faucets in The Sisters dripped wine instead of water.
Cat flicked a finger across a bottle. Its ring sounded hollow.
“I saw you with Robin,” she said. “Don’t talk to her anymore.”
A shower of gravel descended from the ceiling and onto Cat’s head.
“Why not?” Ellis asked.
“She ate her own world,” Cat said. “The world that Robin and the twins came from was very fragile, and she was so hungry to get out that she pulled her entire world apart and swallowed it whole. The twins barely got her to The Sisters before their world collapsed entirely.”
“But why would that make her dangerous?” Ellis asked. She worked a finger underneath the label on one bottle and started peeling it off.
Instead of responding, Cat reached into her mouth and slowly began to tug at something instead. Ellis just kept peeling. They were mirror images, she and Cat, and both knew the other was stalling. All that was left was to see whether the sprout or the sticker would pop off first, and who would be forced to talk.
With a final, disappointed tug, a pea sprout popped free from between Cat’s teeth. She put it back in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Ellis ripped off the rest of the sticker and waited.
“She’s a parasite,” Cat said finally. “Robin will destroy any world she finds. So she has to stay here, and the twins do too.”
“Have you considered that she just wants a home?”
Cat ran her fingers through her hair, letting loose a shower of seeds. “There is no better home available to her than here.”
“Clark County.”
The seeds rattled to the floor.
“But why not?” Ellis said. “She asked me to tell her stories. She wants to go there more than anything else. You said my world is tough. Maybe it’s tough enough that she won’t break it. And I—I could go back with her.”
“Your world is tough. You’re right about that,” Cat said. “But no one who’s seen that world ever wants to return.”
“I want to return,” Ellis said.
“You don’t,” Cat said. “You were eager to leave. You followed Kai into the forest without question.”
“Only because I thought I could come back!”
“So did I,” Cat said, and Ellis fell silent.
“Tell me a story, then,” she said. “Tell me about your quest.”
Cat tried to explain it as clearly as she could remember. There had been a green girl with ferns in her hair that went down to her feet. She had left flowers where she had walked and had blown dandelions when she laughed.
They had passed a rose between their lips when they had kissed, and that had been Cat’s first mistake. Her second mistake had been to let the rose grow, to let it sit lodged in her throat until it was too late. It had almost killed her to pull it, and she hadn’t even been able to get all of it out. The rose had taken root in her skin, and now no matter how much of it she plucked out, it would never go away.
She had never understood the rules of this world, but she was convinced that the rules were built on the fact that the universe simply didn’t care what a person deserved. When daisies had started sprouting from her sister’s skin, Cat had thought she was spreading a disease. But hundreds of people had come in and out of the inn since then, and none had left growing flowers. The whole thing felt malicious.
Cat hadn’t been there when her sister had died. She often imagined how things would have gone if she had been able to kneel beside Ruby’s bed and say goodbye.
Ellis left for the garden when Cat finished, tasting roses on her tongue.
#
Ellis found Ruby in the garden. Her eyes traced the arc of an arm, a wrist, five fingers with ivy for nails. She was a living statue. Her cheeks were green and mossy, thin vines spilled down her back instead of hair, and two white daisies grew where her eyes should have been. But even despite the greenery that covered her face—or maybe because of it—the girl’s face was unmistakably a younger version of Cat’s.
“Ruby, meet Ellis. Ellis, meet Ruby.”
Quill emerged from the other side of the green girl, holding a pair of scissors. She snipped away a stray leaf from the girl’s shoulder.
“Cat told me she was dead,” Ellis said, circling the statue.
“Not exactly true,” Quill said. “I mean, as far as we know she’s still alive in the way a plant is alive. She’ll live as long as we give her water and sun and a weekly trim, but it’s not like she can walk around or eat dinner or talk to us, you know?”
“I didn’t know any of this,” Ellis said. “I didn’t know Cat was turning into a plant. I thought it was just a part of her, like your ears or Kai’s wings.”
“It is a part of her, though,” Quill said. “In a manner of speaking. Her plants are like your skeleton. One day, it’s all you’ll have left.”
“But why did it happen?”
“I don’t know,” Quill said. “And if Cat does, she’s never told me. I used to ask her all the time, until I got old enough to realize that wasn’t polite. But Kai thinks it’s because she stayed too long in the wrong world. If you don’t have a quest, this world sticks to you like glue.”
Ellis absentmindedly pulled a jagged fragment of stone from her wrist. It stung a little this time.
“People know,” Quill continued. “Although they don’t say it. That’s why travelers don’t stay.”
She grabbed Ellis’s wrist and turned it over. A thin line of blood welled up. As they watched, a new layer of stone bubbled up from the crack in her skin.
“You’re starting to turn too,” Quill said. “You should be getting on soon. We don’t want you to turn out like Robin.”
Suddenly Ellis felt very cold.
“The people here don’t quest because they’re heroes,” she said to herself. “They quest because they have to. Because if they stay too long in another world, they become… Quill, I have to go home.”
“What?”
“I can’t spend the rest of my life hopping between worlds,” she said. “I’m not a hero. I like staying indoors and taking warm clothes out of the dryer. I can’t stay here.”
She tried to step away. Quill blocked her.
“You can’t go home,” she said. “You’re the only traveler who’s ever given me a second thought and I’m not going to let you just go.”
“I’m not going to stay here until I turn into something I’m not,” she said. “You’ll make new friends.”
Quill wiped her eyes angrily. “You really don’t get it, do you?” she said. “You. Can’t. Go. You need currency. Kai led you here, but you’d need something else to lead you back.”
Currency. Ellis thought of the stories, tales of heroes who had to exchange something for a wish. She realized what currency she had. And she knew who she had given it to.
#
Robin didn’t have much time. The twins would soon notice she was gone, and they would go to Cat, and Cat would know where she had gone. The pocket world was cold and uninviting and she hated it, but she needed it to get to Clark County. She put the compass between her teeth and dug both hands into the sky, pulling out midnight-dark clumps with the consistency of cake.
“Robin!”
Ellis had tumbled head over heels into the pocket world, Quill chasing after her. Robin would have to work faster. She reached into the sky, burying her arm up to the shoulder in it.
The night groaned. It creaked. It sighed.
And then, with an ear-splitting scream, the night split down the middle. Robin tore at the crack, pulling out chunks and tossing them aside. She threw herself at the sky one last time, and finally the hole was large enough to see what lay beyond it. It was a forest—well, not really.
Behind her, Ellis stopped short. Neither she nor Robin moved, both shocked into silence at the appearance of Clark County.
And then Kai was standing next to them, Kai with his wings brushing against her face and Quill didn’t know how he had known to be there, but she was glad nonetheless. He was her friend, she realized. She liked him and maybe he liked her back, like Ellis did. Or used to. She didn’t know what Ellis thought of her now.
Meanwhile, Ellis was running, faster than she ever thought she could. But before she could reach the edge of the cliff, Robin pushed her away. She spat out the compass, and it rolled away. The tear shivered.
They fought, both desperate to reach the tear in the sky first. Robin kicked her in the side, knocking her to the ground. She reached for Clark County with one sky-coated hand, and jumped.
Then something pulled her back.
Robin tumbled to the ground. Her head snapped back, hitting stone with an awful crack. As she fell, Cat fell too, holding the back of Robin’s sweater in her clenched fist.
Ellis grasped the edge of the tear. It felt slick and slippery, like the inside of someone’s cheek. She tightened her grip on the sky and fixed her gaze toward Clark County in the not-so-far distance.
“Ellis.”
She turned around. Cat was kneeling beside Robin. As her chest rose and fell, her eyes darted from Cat to Clark County and back again. Her hand still reached for the sky.
A bud erupted from Cat’s cheek, blooming into a sunflower as big as her hand. Cat tore it away and crushed it in her fist, leaving behind a broken stem and a thin trickle of blood.
“Go,” she said. “You’ve found a way out. We won’t steal it.”
So Ellis walked through the tear, and toward home.
#
Lying at the edge of the cliff, Robin coughed and sputtered. She spasmed once, then twice, then stood. Saliva dribbled down her chin. She blinked slowly, three times in a row.
Kai stared. Was it his imagination, or was Robin bigger now? She was growing as she pulled herself fully upright, skin rupturing as it stretched. Soon she was seven, eight, nine feet tall. She reached up and tugged at another clump of sky. It dissolved in her fingers.
That was when he noticed that her fingers were starting to go gray.
Robin pulled down another fistful of sky and hurled it at Kai, catching him in the shoulder. He crumpled to the ground, his entire arm in agony. Quill dove to his side, catching his head just before it hit the ground.
“Help me up,” he said to Quill.
“I won’t,” she said fiercely. “This isn’t your quest, and you’re my only friend.”
Weakly, he extended his arm, pressing his palm flat to the ground. A rivulet of stone shot out from his fingertips, past the edge of the cliff and above the ocean until it disappeared into the distance.
Quill rushed to the edge of the cliff. She stared out to sea, eyes shining in a way that Kai knew so intimately, the way his eyes looked whenever he faced his own quest. It was the look of a person who had finally found what she was looking for.
She glanced back at him.
Remember me.
Then she ran across the stone pathway, inches above the surface of the sea. Kai watched her go until she vanished into the darkness. She hadn’t needed a boat after all.
Meanwhile, Robin continued to grow. With tremendous effort, Kai pulled himself to his feet. He rose into the air, his wings beating unsteadily. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a slingshot.
It was a move he had practiced dozens of times. All preparing, he realized now, for this very moment. He could do it in his sleep. He could do it with a broken shoulder.
But his pockets were empty now. Robin grabbed another handful of sky and took aim, and that gave him an idea. He bent down and found what he was looking for—a purple plastic frog.
His hands loaded the slingshot without him having to tell them to. He took aim. Closed one eye, then the other. Opened them both. And let go.
The compass lodged in Robin’s throat. She choked, swayed on the spot, then collapsed.
Cat ran to her side and pressed her hand to Robin’s forehead. Where her fingers touched, tiny fissures spread across the stone. Daisies sprouted from between the cracks.
Robin’s eyelids fluttered. “Cat?” she mumbled.
Cat shushed her. “Don’t talk.”
She placed her hand over Robin’s mouth. A dozen tiny dandelions bloomed around her lips.
“I just wanted to go home,” Robin said. “Get—get Noah and Enya.”
You don’t need them, Cat thought.
Robin blinked. “Please.”
Cat grabbed her face. Wherever she touched, flowers bloomed across Robin’s face—faster than they ever should have, out of control. Vines erupted from Robin’s mouth and between the cracks in her skin. Ruby-red flowers blossomed along each vine, and the fragrance made Cat’s eyes water.
Finally, she reached into Robin’s mouth up to the elbow, gouging out her insides with her nails, reaching desperately for the compass, for more flowers, more rubies, more life. Until Robin was nothing but a small bundle under a hill of flowers, and until that bundle stopped breathing and it was all over and everything was quiet.
#
Ellis ran. She ran through the blue forest, so familiar and yet so foreign, all the dusty and dirty things she had grown used to tearing at her clothes and her skin, and she remembered why she hated them. She kept running.
As she ran, she began to feel a curious sensation. It started at the tips of her fingers and crawled up her forearms, and when she looked down at her sleeves she saw that they were turning gray. She remembered what Quill had said about turning into stone.
She threw herself over the wall, climbing up and up and up, and she thought she must be miles above the tree line even though there were no more trees.
She scrambled up the wall, her nails sliding across stone, and she felt herself getting stuck. Stone was racing up her legs now, sprouting from her scabs and knitting itself against the wall. She gave a kick, and the stone shattered. She kept climbing, and when she reached the top she almost fell over the other side.
Clark County was made entirely of stone.
Ellis walked down the main street, right through the middle. She didn’t have to worry about cars. They were all stone too, some parked at the curb and others frozen at intersections. The traffic lights were gray now; she couldn’t tell if they were red or green.
There was little she recognized about Clark County. There was her bus stop, her high school, the diner where her milkshake had spilled. She could name each building, even dredge up a few memories related to each. But she didn’t know these places. Not anymore.
She stopped in front of her house, then realized it was the one next door. Without their usual pastel colors, all the houses on her street looked the same. She stood for a long time on her front doorstep.
Slowly and carefully, she reached for the doorknob. It came off in her hand, letting loose a puff of fine dust. The door cracked down the middle. Each half crashed to the ground.
Behind the door was color—a pulsing light, something that was at once both pure white and hundreds of millions of flickering hues coming together. Ellis’s heartbeat matched it, throbbing in her chest. And her quest—her quest, bought with her own breath and mortgaged with her lungs—lay within the light.
She stepped inside.