The Night Country

17

A twenty-four-hour diner held down a corner two blocks from the apartment, serving bottomless drip coffee and cheap breakfast combos to construction workers and old people in jogging suits. I knew Sophia would be late, so I skimmed a few chapters of The Changeling while I waited. When she finally showed, she looked small, the larger-than-life outline of her rubbed down. She still wore the dress she’d had on at the party, the fabric so dark I couldn’t tell if it had bloodstains.

“Trip,” she said, falling into the seat across from me. It was her nickname for me—Alice-Three-Times, Triple, Trip—and I always felt a blend of affection and irritation when she used it. When the waitress came, Sophia revived a little, ordering chocolate-chip waffles and mushroom omelets and Canadian bacon for the both of us. I could already see her calculating how to get away without paying the bill.

“We are paying for this breakfast.”

She winked, but it was half-hearted. “Is it breakfast if the sun’s not up?”

The food came, and it looked to me like pieces of a plastic playset. I watched the chipped glitter of her nails around fork and knife, too up in my head to swallow more than milky coffee.

What was Finch doing right now? Where was he doing it? Outsized possibilities played across my eyelids. Sometimes the image of you hits me so hard and sudden I believe the only explanation is you’re thinking of me at that exact moment, too.

“Hey.”

My focus snapped, breath drawn in like I’d been caught at something.

There were half-moons in her lip where she’d bitten it. The skin around her eyes was blue paper. “You got me here. Why aren’t you talking?”

“Jesus, Sophia.” The words slipped out sideways as I focused, really focused, on her face. “You look like shit.”

“Back at you.”

“Sorry. I just … I wish you could sleep.”

“Don’t. I don’t even remember how it feels.”

I was raw, eroded down to skin and nerve. My eyes filled before I could check myself. “Oh, Soph. What do you do all night?”

“You know, I’ve known you a while now, and this is the first time you’ve ever asked me that.” She said it without judgment, but it still felt like a cut.

“I’m sorry.”

“Does that help me?” She sighed, put down her fork. “It’s harder now. With the Hinterland gone, it feels harder. This world is so dim, I can hardly see. Sometimes when I look at people their death is all I can see.”

“You’ve never told me how I’m gonna die.” Saying the words felt like passing my fingers through flame, daring it to burn me. “Do you know? Can you see it?”

“Ask me instead if I can see your life.”

“Can you—”

“Yes.” Her golden eyes held mine. “It’s the color of oil. Black until you look close, then every color. Sometimes it looks so dark. Sometimes it looks like a pearl.”

“Can you see everyone’s life and death, all the Hinterlanders?”

She tensed. “Are you asking about the murders? If I knew?”

“Not because I’m blaming you. Not because I think it was your fault.”

“Of course it wasn’t my fault. Was it yours?”

She asked the question so lightly. It’ll be okay if it is, her voice said. I’ll like you anyway.

I squared up and looked at her, hands resting on the table. “I’ve got nothing to do with this.”

After a moment she nodded, and returned to her waffle.

“I’ve got proof if you want it,” I went on. “Someone tried to kill me, too. A couple nights ago, on the subway.”

“It’s weird more people don’t die on the subway,” she said equably. Then, “Wait. Are you serious?”

I pointed at my chin, scabbing over. Then I told her everything, right up through my conversation with Daphne in her hotel room.

“So it is one of us,” she said. “I figured. Shit, what if it’s Robin? He loves rhymes, all that high fairy-tale formality. And he’s mad as a hatter, besides.”

“Right, but can Robin freeze people alive?”

“Oh, yeah. Damn. It would’ve made him so much more interesting.” She shuddered, her expression bright. I felt perversely pleased that I’d thrilled her with the story of my own near-death.

“So I’m right? They did all die that way—like Genevieve?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me?”

“I didn’t hear about any of it till after Hansa died. Then you showed up at a meeting out of nowhere, and … I wondered. I guess I was waiting, maybe, to see if you had something to tell me.”

“You really thought…” I sighed, laying my head back against the seat. “If you thought I did it, they must all be thinking it.”

“Some of them. Maybe.”

I remembered Robin, all the shuttered faces at the wake. That whisper in the bloody bathroom. Alice-Three-Times. “Some of them, definitely.”

“Let me take care of it,” she said. “I’ll tell them it wasn’t you. They’ll believe it, coming from me.”

I swallowed it down, that little stab of nonbelonging. I’d chosen to walk away. “Who else could it be? Can anyone else do what I can do? Does anyone else have a reason to want, you know, body parts?”

She gestured dismissively with her fork. “Fairy tale something something. You know how it goes.”

“Right—exactly. It’s like something in a fairy tale. This isn’t just violent, it’s specific. There’s got to be, like, some ice king who used to collect his wives’ ankles running around the city.”

“Their ankles?” She ran a finger through a comet scatter of spilled sugar crystals. “What the fuck would you do with a bunch of ankles?”

“I don’t know,” I said, impatient. “But I can’t go home till I figure it out.”

“Till you figure out—”

“Not the fucking ankles.” I wiped a hand over my mouth, frustration rising. “Did you not see what I saw tonight? Are you not scared?”

“Scared.” She said it thoughtfully, like it was a word she was looking up in a dictionary. “To die, you mean? No, I’m not scared.”

“Well, it’s different for you. You can’t, you know. Die.”

“Yes, I do know,” she said dryly.

I thought about Finch, somewhere far away, remembering a better version of me. Ella on the couch, dreaming of a land of red rocks, where we could see the whole curve of the galaxy from our backyard.

“You told me,” I said carefully, “that I should be sure.”

“Don’t,” she said swiftly.

“Soph. I can’t even go home. Someone tried to kill me, they might try it again. And I always hurt her. My mother. Again and again. I never mean it, but what does that matter? After this, after I figure this out, I think I’ve gotta go. For real this time. Leave the Hinterland behind.”

She nodded, and for a moment I thought she understood. Then her lip curled back like a cat’s. “Do you really think that’s how it works? The Hinterland was never a place, it was always us. Wherever you go, that’s the Hinterland.”

Hearing my fears spoken aloud made my anger rise. “I grew up here. I spent my whole life here, I was raised here.”

“How many lives did you spend in the Hinterland? How many dozens? You think you’re special just because somebody from this world loves you? That’s not how it works.”

“That’s exactly how it works,” I spat. “That’s the point of the whole goddamn world.”

“It’s not our world.”

“It’s not yours.”

A waitress came by with a coffee carafe, looked at us pitching toward each other over the tabletop, and kept walking.

“You said I had a choice,” I hissed. “You said I was the only one who did.”

“That’s right. And you made it.”

“I almost killed a man. Here, where it counts. I saw a dead girl in a bathtub, her body frozen. Mutilated. I almost got killed myself. Don’t you care that I could’ve died? I thought you were my friend!”

Her hand shot out and gripped my wrist. “I am your friend. Your fucking friend, your only friend. You ungrateful ass.”

I tried to pull away, but she squeezed tighter, the bones of my wrist bowing like saplings. “You asked me what I do all night. Ask yourself what all of us do. Daphne and Robin and Jenny and the rest of us, do you think we sit around wondering who we are, how to live? Go to funny little part-time jobs, like you? Do you really think we don’t use what we’ve got to live the best we can live, and have fun however we want to have fun, because we can? We don’t have mothers waiting at home for us, making us tea. We don’t have years and years of life in this place behind us and a future ahead.”

She leaned close to me, as close as she could get across the table. Her empty eyes were fathomless, nothing and nothing and nothing all the way down.

“I’m not getting any older. Death will never come for me. Instead I’ll just rot. I can feel the rot coming. It’ll start here.” She pointed at her forehead, at her heart. “I’ll go black and green. I’ve got nothing in my life but time, and I still don’t have time for this: one foot in, one foot out, poor me. How come, with more than any of the rest of us have got, you always make out like you’ve got so much less?”

When I said nothing, she fell back in disgust. She plucked the untouched waffle off my plate and slid out of the booth. “Thanks for breakfast.”

I watched her go. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think of what to say. I sat there in the grainy diner light, breathing in the smell of hash browns and coffee and hot batter, thinking of the day I learned her tale. The day I learned she was deathless.

We were lying in Prospect Park in the shifting shade of a blackgum tree. It was one of those endless late fall afternoons, breezes mixing cool and cold, everything you could see stuck on the bright edge of dying. And I was happy. Really, uncomplicatedly happy. Watching the hours drift by with my friend, my first real friend, who wasn’t Finch or some kid briefly foisted on me by coincidence—same apartment complex, same lunch period, same need for protective social cover. I felt settled in my skin.

“Dogs in strollers,” she was saying. “Dating people you met on a phone. Coupons.”

She was naming Earthly shit that didn’t make sense to make me laugh. After about the twentieth thing (“Vending machine hamburgers. Why?”) she fell quiet a while, long enough that I thought she was asleep. Then she spoke.

“I want to tell you something.”

Her voice was so serious I started to sit up.

“No. Just let me say it like this.”

I lay back down. I listened to her fingers stripping fallen leaves, the wind imitating the ocean.

“I want to tell you my tale. Of the time when I was called Ilsa, and the night I fell in love with Death.”

I looked straight up into the tree’s skittish leaves, and the pieces of hard sky between them, and listened.