The Night Country

40

In her rage the Spinner ran like an animal, loping and low. Without her, I wouldn’t know where to find Finch. Already the Night Country had carried him away from the door.

I chased her, forward and on. Time was elastic, it stretched and contracted. I would’ve killed for a streetlamp, a star. If I lost her, I’d be lost, completely. So I ran through the sandy pain of a stitch in my side, and the distinctive terror of running through the nothing space of an unmade world. Until finally something broke the Night Country’s long, formless plain: Finch. Still too far off. I couldn’t go any faster and she’d almost reached him when something sprang up from the dark.

Trees. Birches elms sycamores, saplings delicate as wrists. The Spinner tried to stop herself but couldn’t, reeling into the place their trunks had been—they were already gone. Stars blinked on like track lighting, then off again. We both stopped, waiting to see what the dark would spit out next.

A golden retriever burst from the air, ran a sloppy circle and vanished. A set table, a newspaper fluttering its pages. There was a pause, darkness bleeding back into the cracks the phantoms had made. I could hear her breathing. Then:

A city. Not all at once, but piece by piece. A yellow cab. A trashcan. A street cart and a cherry blossom tree and a building traced in mist and silver, rising into clouds the color of steamed milk. In a space the size of a single block, blistering the air, the city flashed and faded.

In the middle of it all, Finch kneeled with his head bent down, fingers dug into dirt, flower vines winding from his wrists to his shoulders. His hair was shot through with white, and when he lifted his chin, my heart folded over.

He looked like someone had stirred gray paint into his skin. Tendons stood out at his temples, his lips were scored. His eyes were losing their light.

“Finch,” I said, my voice as cracked as the teacup he held in one hand, squeezed into shards. Blood ran through his fingers.

“It’ll kill him.” The Spinner’s voice was bitter as walnut skin, relentless. “It’ll be a hard death. He’ll be skinned away from himself piece by piece. A new world is a void, it’s a hunger. I withstood it—I shaped my world, poured into it all the things I could afford to lose. He doesn’t know how. It’ll hollow him out like an egg.”

Finch heard her. His chin snapped up. All the swarming, erratic pieces of his city scattered and faded, till nothing was left but me and him and her and the velvety grip of the dark. When he spoke, his words laid themselves against the air.

“Once upon a time.

“Once upon a time there was a monster. She called herself a spinner, and she was. But she destroyed things, too. She made a world and called it hers, but didn’t understand it when the people she filled it with wanted more. More than blood and death and a story they couldn’t change.” He looked at her. “She gave them all the worst parts of being human and none of the things that made it worth it.”

The Spinner stood perfectly still, watching him through hooded eyes.

“So a hero came to the world she’d made.”

She laughed. I did, too, but mine came soft and surprised.

“The hero unraveled a corner of her world, and the whole thing fell to pieces.”

“It won’t work,” she said, her voice wound through with warning.

“So she made another,” he continued, dogged, his eyes desperate points in his weary face. He still gripped the ground. “She did terrible things to make it, but in the end it wasn’t hers. It pledged itself to the hero instead. And the world turned on her.”

Nothing happened. I could feel all three of us waiting, but the dark stayed dark.

“You’ll die,” said the Spinner. “You’ll die killing the world that made you. Oh, this is better than I planned.”

“The world found out her secrets,” he whispered. “It showed her as she really was. It showed her to the light.”

A light snapped on. Not a sun or a lamp but something in between, a molten ball of smokeless fire. By its illumination, the Spinner changed. Her hair shook out in yellow waves, her skin went the color of amber. She looked like me, once upon a time. Like a fairy-tale princess.

But her eyes. Still a frozen blue, they held the weight of centuries in them. Her shell was young, but the eyes peering out of it told the truth. She felt her face, fingers running over its contours. I could hear her thoughts clicking like beads.

Under her hands, her features solidified, strengthened. She looked older now, Ella’s age. Then older still, grown and beautiful, lines at the eyes.

“Oh,” she said. For the first and only time, I saw her look surprised.

Her skin loosened. It dropped at the chin and creased at the mouth. Those frightening eyes faded, wrinkled at the corners, and receded into seamed pockets, clouded over with a milky film.

“Stop it,” she said. Her voice was an old woman’s, but commanding. “Stop it now.”

Her bones warped and contracted, settling into arthritic curves. Her voice creaked like a stair. “If I die, my children go with me. If you kill this body, you’re killing them, too. You’re killing Alice.”

A beat passed.

“Wait,” he said. He didn’t lift his head.

The world waited. The Spinner didn’t die, she stood there in stasis. But I ran.

His hair was white all the way through, and I ran to him. Skidded to a stop in his patch of dirt. Before I could reach for him, a fence grew up between us, glittering with barbed wire.

“Don’t touch me,” he said, ragged. “I might kill you. I might dissolve you. You’re a Story. I’m a Spinner.”

I held on to my own arms. “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay.” Words were meaningless. They were all I could give him.

“Alice,” he said. He’d always liked saying my name. “What should I do?”

I looked at the slope of his shoulders and the soft of his mouth and the faded crackle of his beautiful eyes. “You should finish the story.”

The Spinner waited, vision iced over with cataracts. She didn’t beg.

“A cage,” he said, in his roughed-up voice. “The hero captured the monster, and he caged her. She was so dangerous he used a whole world to hold it. The cage had golden bars, and in it the monster slept. She slept for an eternity. She didn’t hurt anyone, and she dreamed of fairy tales.”

The cage closed her in like a nightingale. The Spinner had no final words. She shuffled forward half a step, then lay down. She didn’t move again.

Finch let out a breath. The fence between us dissolved, the light going out with an audible click. And he fell onto his side.

When I touched him I didn’t die, or dissolve. His breath came shallow as varnish and his skin looked yellowed in the glow of the bars. I worked by their light, peeling his fingers back from the broken china, picking out the shards and wiping the blood away. My own arm had stopped bleeding, now it just hurt. His eyes were half closed and his breath came at odd intervals.

“Finch.” He didn’t answer.

He could die here. He could die here in the dark, and I would be all alone.

So I let myself fall, slowly. I let my head drift to his shoulder and closed my eyes.

“I loved your letters,” I told him. “I’m bad at talking. I’m bad at just about everything. But I loved your letters. I wrote back to you, in my head. I’ve told you so much, I can’t even remember what I’ve really said and what you don’t know yet.”

All my heart was in my words. My bruised, inhuman heart.

“Did you feel it?” I whispered. “Did you hear it, when I talked to you?”

A pause, then his cheek brushed over my hair as he shook his head.

“That’s okay. I can tell you everything again. But we need to … we need to stand up and find the door. Before…”

Before there was nothing left on the other side to find.

“Okay.” I felt his breath as he said it.

Slowly I tilted my chin up. Too shy to look at him till the last moment.

His eyes weren’t soft anymore. They were focused and steady and they held me in their light. In them I could see all the Finches I had known. The fanboy and the wanderer and the traitor and the hero. He said my name again, and raised his hands to cup my face.

A sudden breeze slid over my neck. I reached up and felt the bare length of it, and the shorn ends of my hair.

My body tingled like a bumped funny bone. My hair was shorter, cut right up to my skull, like it was when I’d met him. When I looked down I was wearing tight black jeans with holes over the knees. A blue striped shirt. Things I wore when I was seventeen.

Finch snatched his hands away. “Shit. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know how it works.”

“It’s okay,” I said again, numbly. Lying through my teeth, through the horror of being remade by him. Of being reminded that here, I was nothing but Story stuff.

“No, it’s not. I’m not—I don’t want to change you, I just…”

“Stop,” I said, with more force. “Let’s find the door.”

“I’m the Spinner.” He said it like he was sorry. “This is my world. I can make the door.”

He didn’t look strong enough to make anything, but he stood up slowly, holding his hands out like a conductor.

The door he made was plain, unpainted wood. It wasn’t there, then it was. We stared at it, and we looked back to where the Spinner lay in her cage. She slept on.

Finch reached for my hand, before remembering. “Hold on to my shirt,” he said.

I grabbed him by the T-shirt, and hooked a finger through the frayed loop of his jeans. That was how we walked out of that world.