The Night Country

12

Everyone felt it.

Sophia and Daphne and Robin and the rest of them. All the fallen kings and eldest sons and cruel queens and maidens cast in colors of ebony and copper, blood and salt. Everyone knew it in their bones when the world we’d abandoned left us for good.

I didn’t know that yet when I woke up, sweat-soaked and thirstier than I’d ever been. Ella lay on the floor beside my bed, watching The Good Place on her laptop with the sound on low.

I watched her for a minute before she noticed I was awake. Her mouth turned down, hair sweaty at the temples. She’d pulled off all her rings, her hands looked undressed.

I wondered if Finch had felt it, wherever he was. Probably not. He was born here, he was of the Earth. I guess he’d feel it if his was the world that drowned its stars and spun out into particles.

“Mom,” I said, my voice a rasp.

She looked at me quickly, and smiled.

My phone was thick with texts from Sophia. The oldest just said my name.

Alice

Are you feeling this

Text me back

Text me back

Text me back

CALL ME

Then one from a number I didn’t recognize.

Sophia’s apartment tonight at 10. We’re having a wake.

It was from Daphne. It had to be. Drawing all of us to one place: me, her, Sophia, the rest. The figure from the subway might be there, too. Maybe they’d bring their rhyme and a hidden knife. Maybe they’d want to finish what they started.

I texted back.

Do you think that’s a good idea?

She never replied. When I called Sophia, her phone was dead, which wasn’t unusual but worried me all the same. I told myself I might not go, that I shouldn’t go, but I knew I would. I had to. I had to grieve for the Hinterland.

After a day spent lying low, drinking chicken broth and watching TV and picking at Thai takeout, I put on black jeans and black high-tops and a black T-shirt. I tried a Zelda Fitzgerald thing with my hair and a New Wave thing with my eyeliner, and I got both of them halfway right. I tucked a pocketknife into my jeans.

When I told Ella about the wake, she nodded, then turned away. We were still being delicate with each other, unsure where we stood after our fight. My sickness had drawn us into a tentative détente.

I stared out the window on the cab ride up, seeing nothing. When I closed my eyes I saw the faces of the stars, the moon in her declining phases. The Hinterland was dead. Hansa, the Prince, and Abigail were dead. I could’ve been dead, too. My brain sputtered, trying to forge a connection among those pieces. It was there, it had to be. But I couldn’t see it. When we got to Sophia’s, the driver had to tell me twice.

She lived in Lower Manhattan in a seedy old building you could tell had once been gorgeous. At some point it had been gutted, mostly rebuilt, then abandoned. It reminded me of those half-finished development projects you find sometimes off the highway. Ella and I used to pull over to explore them: cracked black streets petering to nothing, lonely cul-de-sacs, empty houses looking like they’d been dropped by a neat-fingered tornado.

I let myself in—the street door lock was broken—and climbed to the seventh floor.

The apartment where Sophia lived with five other ex-Stories had good bones, but that was about it. Construction dust clung to the corners, and patches of exposed drywall freckled the rooms. It was a temporary place, loose and rotten. Usually it was empty as an ice rink, but tonight it was haunted by forlorn figures. The long windows were bare and moonlight poured through, casting everyone in silver. Pockets of candles lined the sills and clustered like mushrooms on the ground; if we ended the night not dead in a fire, that’d be ten points for Slytherin.

There were more of us here than I thought still existed. Meetings were usually twenty, twenty-five of us, tops. But there had to be forty Hinterlanders in this room, with more arriving. I felt like a rat lifting its head to watch a tide of other rats running from a storm drain, and shuddering.

The murderer could’ve been anyone. That reedy boy, all deep dimples and curls to his shoulders, stone-cold putting away vodka like a sailor. That woman with the crown of blue-black hair, who looked like a consumptive Snow White and glared at me before I could turn away. Had it been her whispering to me in the dark?

There were cliques here and there—packs of siblings, some pairs—but mainly we were a roomful of loners, unmixed. I saw the three brothers who lived in the pin-neat room next to Sophia’s lined up against the wall drinking beer, T-shirts tucked in and pale hair pasted to their paler skulls. They looked like inbred royal cousins, perishing in the corner of some dusty Flemish painting. Genevieve was there, sitting alone on a windowsill drinking from a bottle of Stoli, her ridiculous Ren Faire sleeves almost dipping into a clutch of candles. Across the room, the Hinterland’s creepiest kid, Jenny, perched on a stool wearing a ruffled dress, eyes ticking back and forth to see who was noticing her.

Even among the loners, I felt out of place. The eyes that met mine were cold, or slid away too fast. I nodded at a few whom I knew, whom I’d talked with sometimes when I was a part of things, and two of them looked right past me. The third stared a moment before spitting through her teeth.

Well, fuck Daphne. Whatever she’d been telling them about me, it had clearly worked.

“Alice.”

I turned and smiled, my first genuine smile of the night. My favorite of Sophia’s roommates had an executioner’s build and the hard hatchet face of a murderess. But Nora’s looks lied. She talked with the prim rhythms of a grammar primer, was fascinated by Earthly religions, and was deeply shy. I liked her a lot.

“My condolences to you on our loss,” she said. Her tone was dry.

“Same to you,” I said carefully. The Spinner had unwound Nora’s story a long time ago. While she wouldn’t talk about it, anyone could look at her and know she’d been built for villainy. It made me hate the Spinner more, to think of Nora’s gentle nature bottled inside a weapon.

“Look at that,” she said, jerking her chin at something over my shoulder. “A bit full out for a funeral, isn’t it?”

Daphne, her lips red, her eyes bedded in sparkling shadow. She wore a brief black dress that made her skin and hair look like something you’d display on velvet in a jewelry shop window. I felt the oddest stab of irresolution, seeing her again in her lipstick and glitter. It struck me that I spent more time than I should deciding whether and how I despised this woman.

“Has she told you yet?”

Nora frowned. “Told me what?”

“Not you, I mean all of you—has she told you what happened to me?”

“She tells us lots of things,” she said evenly. “It’s hard keeping track.”

I glanced at her. “How did she hook us, do you think? How did it get to where she snaps her fingers and we all come running? It’s not really what we are.”

Nora had green eyes clear as spring water. Even in the tarnished glow of moonlight and candles I could see them darken. “What we were. What are we now, but the lost children of a dead world?”

That was a bit too much poetry, even for me. “What does that mean? We already left the Hinterland. So it’s gone now—what does that change?”

Her eyebrows went up, like she’d been stung by my stupid. But it wasn’t rhetorical, I was really asking.

“People in this world have a thing they call god,” she said. “Or gods. Yes?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“And they do good acts and take care to justify their bad ones to please their god or gods.”

“Right.”

“There are some among us who began to think of the promise of a return to the Hinterland as a sort of promise of paradise. They thought of the Hinterland, or the Spinner, perhaps, as a god. With the Hinterland gone, what’s left to serve as our god?”

She looked pointedly at Daphne, and my stomach went cold.

“You understand, I think, why I fear their acts will grow godless.”

I looked around at my kin, the culled-down lot of us. They were capable of such cruelty, such strangeness. They had such a disregard for the rules of this world. Thinking of them gone truly amok—gone godless—made my palms prickle.

“Listen,” I began. “Something happened to me last night on the train.”

Just then the room’s chatter dropped to a hush. Nora turned away.

Daphne stood on a rickety card table in the center of the room, holding up a glinting something. A cup, I thought. No—it was a knife. She waited till the room was silent. Till we could hardly breathe, waiting for her to speak. Then her words cracked the quiet.

“The Hinterland is lost,” she said. “But we are not.”

She stood there a moment, knife still held aloft. All the faces of the Hinterland’s motherless children were turned toward her, painted in flickering light.

“The body is dead, but we are the blood.”

She glared up at the knife, looking like a figure from some other world’s tarot deck. Then she brought it down, slashing it across her fingertips. She held her hand straight out and let the blood fall down, let everyone see the tears streaming over her cheeks. And despite everything, I did believe her sorrow was real.

“I grieve our loss,” she said. “I grieve with you. I bleed with you.”

I could hear other people crying. Even Nora’s face was intent. The man beside us lifted his hand to his mouth and bit the pad of his thumb till it bled, holding it up to Daphne in tribute. A woman copied him. Then another. A rangy guy in blue jeans took out his own knife, used it to cut open his thumb, and passed it.

I flexed my injured hand, bile rising. I had the irrational thought that the killer, if they were here, would be drawn to the blood. That the drifting iron perfume of it would bring them slinking out of the shadows, weapon raised.

An arm came around me, and I jumped.

“Come on,” Sophia whispered. “Let’s go hide in my room.”

She’d told Daphne, I knew. About Red Hook, and what I’d done. She was the only one who could have. But she’d stopped me, too—from killing the man from my tale. On the edge of doing something irrevocable, she’d pulled me back.

There was a bottle of grape soda waiting for us on the fire escape, next to a handle of bottom-shelf gin and a pair of sooty coffee mugs. Sophia poured a slug of gin in our cups and diluted it with grape. We sat so the bars of the fire escape pressed into our thighs and our legs hung down over the city. It was muggy on the street, but up here the air was witchy and restless, stirring itself into our hair. I could breathe again, away from Daphne, and I wanted to talk about anything but the murders, and the subway, and Red Hook. I wanted to remember what it felt like when fear was just the backbeat to my life, not the only thing I could hear.

“Here’s to being orphaned. Well and truly, at last.” Sophia lifted her glass, took a gulp, and gagged. “Ugh. The next wake I spring for the good stuff. When this world goes up in flames, we’ll drink champagne.”

I stuck the tip of my tongue into my cup. “It tastes like unicorn piss.” I felt hyped up and shaky and suddenly soaked in grief. Inside was the wake, and Daphne’s batshit display, but it was out here, with my mercurial, untrustworthy best friend, that I felt I could actually mourn what we’d lost. My skin prickled as I looked down on rooftops and cars and the slow-moving crowns of strangers’ heads. A whole world, gone. It didn’t seem possible. Sophia was looking, too, though I couldn’t guess her thoughts within a mile.

“Robin’s heart is broken. He really thought we’d get back in someday. He really wanted us to.” Her voice was heavy and light at once. “I always thought it would be me that broke his heart.”

I lay my head on her shoulder. I would tell her what happened on the subway. Soon, I’d find the words.

“I saw you on the beach,” she said into my hair. “I watched you watching the stars come down.”

“What?” I pulled back to look at her.

She smiled a little and didn’t respond. Then, “Shut up,” she said, though I wasn’t talking. “I need to do a thing I never do.”

I turned to her and waited. And waited.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You’re what?”

“I know. Don’t tell anyone.”

“For what, though? For loitering outside my bedroom window? Being late for everything ever? Never paying for anything, even though you carry an old-man cash roll in your purse?”

“You think I’d apologize for that?” She looked genuinely offended. “I’m sorry about … about what happened. In Red Hook.”

I arched my foot, let my shoe slip off my heel, daring it to drop to the street. “Which part of it?”

“I knew you just wanted to scare him. I knew you didn’t want to kill him.”

The cocktail in my stomach was turning to acid. “I didn’t kill him. You stopped me.”

“I thought you couldn’t remember.”

“Just tell me. Tell me that’s what happened.”

Her nod was shallow, her voice hoarse. “I didn’t want to, though. I wanted to let you. Because I could almost see him.” She looked at me, pleading. “He was so close, Alice, I could smell him. That burning red-dust smell.”

“See who? Who was close?”

“Death.”

She’d told me her tale when we first met, but we hadn’t talked about it since. It was about a girl who faced off against Death, and the price she paid for it: her death was taken away. She, Sophia, became deathless. I don’t think she slept, either; even that little death was withheld from her. I tried never to think about it, but now it was a knife of cold air sliding between us. Because how did someone live when they knew they’d never die? I guessed I was learning.

“You didn’t, though,” I said. “I mean, you did. You stopped me.”

“Right.” She slopped more cocktail into her cup, then stood abruptly. “But I’ve been thinking. What if things are different for me, now that the Hinterland is gone?

“What do you think?” She kicked off her shoes and put one narrow foot on the first rail of the fire escape, then the other. Her dress was a thin cotton sack. I could see her body inside it, outlined by the city’s lights.

“I think you should sit down and drink with me.”

“I thought I’d find him here one day,” she said. “I thought I’d find Death and convince him. But he never came to any meetings.” Her laugh was fringed with hysteria. She perched on the top rail of the fire escape, looking down at me.

“You still could.” I pushed up onto my knees. “Maybe he’s here tonight.”

“Maybe he’s the one who’s been killing us. Maybe he’s coming for me next.” She kicked a leg over. Seven stories of open city sang beneath her foot, summer smudged and readying its hands to catch her. I had to look straight up to see her face. Her hair hung down and her eyes were empty tunnels and she looked like a corpse already.

“What if I don’t want to wait anymore?”

As she kicked her other leg over, I surged up, locking my arms around her waist. At the same time we heard a thin, nerve-racking scream from inside the apartment. It sent us startling back onto the fire escape, my hip landing hard on metal and the lip of the windowsill catching my shoulder blade. My injured ribs hurt so bad I could only breathe in sickening sips.

Sophia stood, unsteady. “I think that was Jenny. What do you do to make Jenny scream like that?”

Her face was neutral, her posture straight. In the way she turned away, I could tell what just happened was going to be another thing we never talked about.

I wasn’t scared just then. In the relief that followed Sophia’s aborted flirtation with Death—or her successful attempt to fuck with me, I couldn’t know for sure—a scream just seemed like a scream. We followed the rising buzz of voices, past Sophia’s bedroom and toward the next window.

It opened onto a bathroom, big and old-fashioned and kept fastidiously clean by the brothers. Just below the window was a claw-foot tub lined with more lit candles, and dishes holding fat chunks of apothecary soap.

When I saw Genevieve lying in the tub my first thought was that she looked frosted. Her skin veined blue, her mouth hanging open, her legs folded to the side like a mermaid’s tail. The skin around her lips was blackened and the whites of her eyes pocked with broken vessels.

Frozen. She’d been frozen from the inside out.

Jenny stood in the doorway, her face blank, like the scream had scoured the fear from her and left her empty. Hinterlanders pressed into the spaces around her, trying to get a better look. They didn’t see Sophia and me, framed in the window like Lost Boys.

Then Daphne was there. Slipping into the bathroom and crouching beside the tub. She touched Genevieve’s face with careful fingers. Slid them down.

I was cold. Colder even than I’d been when the Hinterland was dying. If I screamed now, I didn’t know if I could stop. “What is she doing?” I whispered.

Sophia crouched beside me like a gargoyle. “Looking for the missing piece.”

She was right. With Genevieve’s body split between moonlight and dark, it was hard to tell. But Daphne’s clever hands found it: Genevieve’s right foot was gone, hacked off at the ankle.

My knees were wet. I looked down and saw that I was kneeling in blood. The windowsill was black with it. Whoever had killed and cut Genevieve must’ve come out this way, the stump of her foot draining as they went. The world fell away and I saw—

Finch. At the edge of the Halfway Wood.

with his throat sliced and

I swallowed, brought a hand up to cover my eyes.

falling forward

onto dirt and grass and

“Death was just here,” Sophia said in my ear, her voice almost dreamy. “He must’ve been laughing at me.”

The figures in the doorway weren’t looking at Genevieve anymore. They were looking at me. Even Daphne, mouth pressed thin and bloody hands steadying herself on the tub’s high side.

“Alice-Three-Times,” one of them hissed. Jenny’s eyes bored into mine.

Grape and gin boiled in my stomach, clawed up my throat. I turned around and vomited through the bars of the fire escape.