Author: Wildbow

Gone and Done It – 17.10 | Pale

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“Rook?” Avery called out.  She closed the door to Sootsleeves’ convertible, walking over from the side of the road to a ledge where the rocky core of hills had been cut away to let the road pass through.  The layers of rock were visible in hues ranging from red to black, moist and on the verge of becoming icy.

Rook’s posture was stiff, less upright than usual.  She sat cross-legged on moss and grass at the upper edge of the cliff, above the crushed rock by the side of the road, and the road itself, where no cars were coming or going.

“Are you hurt?”

“They keep coming,” Rook spoke aloud.  “Practitioners, bound together by family, alliance.  There’s little I can do.”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t stay for long,” Rook said.  “Another Lordship claim is being made to the far north.  I would rather not lose that ground, and I must be back to find a way to foil Musser when he makes his attempt.”

“Yeah.  I hear you,” Avery remarked.  “I wish I could help, but I think I really need to get to Miss.”

“There’s no helping this,” Rook said.  “What we’re doing, it won’t eject them.  It gives us favorable ground, but it won’t win the confrontation.”

Avery looked back at Snowdrop, who had climbed out of Sootsleeves’ car, then past Snowdrop back to Kennet.  Now that she was past the periphery, the wheel in the sky was barely visible.  As she’d traveled further from Kennet, the wheel had got disproportionately harder to see.  Riding the car for thirty seconds made it fade from view as if she’d ridden for five minutes instead.

“Don’t mind me, Avery.  You wanted to see me for a reason.”

“Before that- have you been keeping tabs on my friends?”

“I have.”

“And are they managing?  How is it, here?  Because I keep seeing signs that things aren’t- that they’re struggling.  Changing.”

“We all change.  Given a chance, they grow, they adapt, they even find small moments to thrive.”

Avery nodded a bit.  “Okay.”

“There won’t be enough chances.”

Rook seemed as dejected as Avery had seen her.  More than even after the Carmine contest.

“I wish I could do more to help you, Rook,” Avery said.  “I’d come with you to fight the Lordship stuff, or stay to try to help the others with the situation here, but-”

“But you came to talk to me for a reason.”

“Miss?  She left already?”

“At my urging.  Musser will arrive soon.  It could be tonight, it could be early tomorrow.  It depends on his choice of transportation.  If he feels brave or has a way of circumventing the Carmine Exile’s gainsayings, he could use practice to come.  If he drives or flies, he could be here early tomorrow.  Now we have a sequence of events.  Three rituals with their own intent are in play.  And the order?”

“Matthew first.”

“Matthew’s Demesne, if he is successful in holding out against the tide of practitioners, will complete first.  Had Miss waited, we’d run the risk that Musser’s ritual would be next.  The Lordship claim would start, tonight or early tomorrow, and it would finish after Matthew’s claim.”

“And he’d decide what happened with the ritual?”

“He would influence it.  Now perhaps there’s a chance the ritual could affect the outcome of his Lordship claim.  Matthew’s ritual finishes first, then we face the moment a new Kennet is Founded, and after that Musser’s Lordship claim wraps up- any one of those could have any outcome.  Matthew could fail, we could fail to bring Miss to Kennet, or the Founding could breach the boundaries your ritual attempts to set, swallowing up Kennet above and Kennet below.”

“No pressure,” Snowdrop told Avery.

“Yeah.”

“And, most telling, Musser could succeed.  If he does, then Kennet will always have a Lord.”

“Should we handle things in that order?  Can we handle things in that order?” Avery asked.  “Can we help Matthew?  He’s kind of locked into that ritual.”

“I’ve already taken some steps.  He faces a much steeper climb than Verona did, but he has the advantage of a clear and overwhelming claim.  It’s my understanding that he’s succeeded in a little more than half of of the contests he’s faced.”

“That’s a lot,” Snowdrop remarked.

“Yeah, uh, gotta agree with Snow.  That doesn’t sound high.”

“It’s my understanding he’s conserving strength for later.  Musser has not sent many of his best assets yet.  However, because Matthew’s claim is strong, the costs of a loss are minor.  That may change if Musser stops in before his Lordship claim, or if Musser makes answering Matthew part of the Lordship claim.  He would have much greater reason to complain about a Demesne in his territory.”

“He can do that?”

“Yes.  Alternatively, it may be that he doesn’t care, or views Matthew’s claim as a hole in our defenses, which it is.”

“But you think Matthew will be okay?” Avery asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ve taken steps to try and help.  We’ll see.  I haven’t been properly inside Kennet recently.  Is the diagram for the ritual finished?”

“No.  Verona and Lucy are handling that.”

“And the efforts to fight off the practitioners?”

“They’re, uh- Marlen got out.  The ghouls are hurt.  I was actually thinking – should I go to Miss?”

“She thought you might want to.”

Rook reached inside the bent cast iron panel she wore strapped to her chest, and pulled out a folded collection of papers.  She reached down, holding it out.

Avery stepped forward, but Snowdrop beat her to it, running forward, setting foot on the rock face, and finding enough foothold to step up and snatch the papers.

She brought it back to Avery, biting her top lip, looking sort of pleased with herself.  Avery reached over to rub Snowdrop’s hood against her head as she took the paper with the other hand.

Avery read it, holding the main page so Snowdrop could see too.  It was a general map, with written instructions.  There was more on the back.

“From any path, I can enter Falling Oak Avenue.  From there, there’s a route, either through a chest of drawers with the drawers pulled out, or through the back of a wardrobe, both to be entered upside down.  That takes me to the Commons Thread.  From there, I have three possible Paths to take.  The Wind Down, the Stretched Truth, or the Burning Daylight.  The first two have ways for me to get to Cinderella Run.  From Burning Daylight or Cinderella Run, I can get to the Watched Way.  From there, I can reach the Stuck-In Place.”

“Those two are easy,” Snowdrop remarked, pointing to Burning Daylight and Cinderella Run.

“You know?” Avery asked, surprised.

“Yeah.  Ignore those markings on the page.”

Avery looked.  Beneath the names was a series of small notes.  A short description and X marks, which Snowdrop seemed to think were representative of difficulty.  There were symbols, a foot for the Falling Oak Avenue and Wind Down.  A speech bubble for the Commons Thread.  Then there were the dashes- she turned the page over and saw the note.  Dashes were how long she had to travel down that Path to reach the detour.

There was a fast, dangerous way, and a tougher way.

“Rook, do you know anything about these?”

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t explored those reaches.”

“Sootsleeves?” Avery asked.

Sootsleeves motioned.  Avery went over, and showed her the map and papers.

“Falling Oak Avenue, as it’s called here, is well known, and often visited,” Sootsleeves noted.  “It requires a certain bravery or recklessness, or a comfort in moving in unusual ways.  I know what your Miss is calling the Wind Down, but we always called it the Wending Fences.  I would avoid the Burning Daylight.”

“High danger, low time, so it’s fast, if I’m in a hurry for some reason.  Like, if we needed to cancel the ritual.”

“Yes.  There’s not too much here that I couldn’t tell you.  Pen?”

Avery handed one over.

“I could maybe call Jude, see what he thinks.  I don’t want to offend you, Queen Sootsleeves, I know you have no love for the Garricks that bound you…”

“I do not,” Queen Sootsleeves said, as she made edits to the pages.

“Jude was indirectly someone who helped me get you free.”

Sootsleeves took a drag on her cigarette, then blew off to her left, away from Avery.  “Call him.”

“Thank you,” Avery murmured.  She dialed.

The phone rang twice.

“Oh no.”

“Stop saying that every time I call!”

“Is that Avery?” Jude’s mom asked in the background.

“Oh man.  Yeah, it’s Avery.”

“Put her on speakerphone.”

“Actually, this is for you only, Jude.  I’ve got Queen Sootsleeves on the call, and considering your family bound her…”

Sootsleeves took another long drag on her cigarette, expression neutral.

Jude relayed that to his mom.

“What do you need?” he asked.  “I was going to watch a movie with my friend and his sister later, chill out after our intense family-wide study session, but now I’m getting the feeling that won’t happen.”

Jude’s mom said something Avery couldn’t make out, admonishing Jude.  She wasn’t listening to the call, but she was listening to Jude’s end of things.

“How can I help?” Jude asked, in an artificially bright way.

“I’m looking at running a few partial paths, to navigate my way to a certain spot.”

“Oh, just a few?” Jude asked.  “Why?”

“To set things up, make sure it’s aimed right, escort a specific Lost there, make sure she doesn’t get stalled or interrupted.  She’s pretty good at holding her own, but if something stalls her or if she gets caught in a fight…”

“Right.  Are these paths you’ve run before?”

“Usually it’s a good idea to take them one at a time, then get fancy later,” he said.  His tone was almost a forced sort of reasonableness.  Avery could imagine him sitting in his living room or kitchen, while his mom stared daggers at him from the other end of the room.

“There’s too much at stake,” Avery told him.

“Yes, well, that big ritual you’re doing, that does raise the stakes.”

“That’s only part of it.”

“I get that.  But I’m glad you won’t be in the blast radius.”

“I was planning on escorting her, get her set, secure the one end of the ritual, then shortcut home to be there for when the Founding happens.”

“Oh, of course.  Okay, sure.  Why am I surprised?  Do that.  How can I help?”

“The route I’m taking.  Help me figure out what I’m missing?  I’ve got directions.”

“Okay,” Jude said.  He sounded interested.  “These directions came from the same source as the Promenade solve?”

Jude’s mom made a sound in the background that was almost a yelp.

“Yeah.  I… help me out, you can take away whatever useful information you want from that.  Okay?  I know I was kind of hard on your family with the negotiations…”

“Not hard.”

“I needed what I got, the resources, the tools, the books, all that.  I still need that stuff.  My initial instinct was to work with you on that, and be open with it.  I’m willing to lean that way.  If you’ll meet me halfway?  Don’t take it for granted, respect my friend?”

“Couple questions,” Jude said.

“Go for it.”

“This Other who provided the information, she wasn’t ever the cornerstone of a Path, was she?”

Sootsleeves shook her head.

“No.  Why?” Avery asked.

“If she was, I’d be worried about how much she set this up, how much she might be setting you up for a fall- her founding, I guess.  It’s happened before.”

“She wasn’t ever, and she’s not that cruel,” Sootsleeves said.

“Did you catch that?” Avery asked.

“Yeah.  That’s Queen Sootsleeves?”

“Yeah.  Um, also, like, the idea was Verona’s.”

“Right.  Toothpicks and bubble gum.  Right, sure.  Also, just saying, if she did have experience with being a cornerstone- a culmination or final boss of a Path, like Sootsleeves was, it’d make the outcome better.  She’d have experience as the controlling force of a realm.”

Sootsleeves nodded at that.

“Sootsleeves agrees, I think.  You had another question?”

“Can I ask who this Lost with the information is?  The one who’s participating in the Founding?  How does she have this much information?”

Avery drew in a breath.  Sootsleeves hadn’t reacted, except to watch Avery very carefully.

“She was stuck on a Path.  She escaped it, and wandered until she found a way to Earth.”

“So this information comes from her wanderings.”

“Yeah.  Partially.  For a while, she was enslaved by a practitioner, she might’ve learned some stuff, looking over his shoulder.”

“And some might be intuitive.”

Sootsleeves nodded at that, too.

“Okay.  What are the Paths you’d be on?”

“First, Falling Oak Avenue.  Three ‘x’ marks for difficulty.  Two dashes for length.  I quote, ‘A fall through a neighborhood in perpetual freefall.  Don’t touch anything you would normally set the underside of your foot down on, or you will experience the consequences of a minutes-long descent’.”

“Splat,” Jude added.  “Three out of what ‘x’ marks?”

“I don’t know, but there’s one later with seven ‘x’ marks.”

“Fuck.  Okay.  Walk me through things.”

Avery hung up.  “Thanks for putting up with that.  I’ve got to get onto the Paths, and then I’ll signal him.  He’s coming.”

“Want a ride?” Sootsleeves asked.

“To…”

“To the Paths.”

“That would help a lot.”

Sootsleeves gave the passenger seat a pat.

Avery picked up Snowdrop, putting her on a shoulder, then hurdled the door, landing in the seat.  She plopped her bag down between her feet.

“See you, Rook!”

Crooked Rook nodded.

Sootsleeves peeled out, then put the gas all the way to the floor.

Avery hurried to belt in, watching as their speed picked up.  The trees on either side of the road zooped by, with more and more of a rhythm, more and more of a ‘whoosh’ as they passed.

Sootsleeves put her hand with the cigarette past the window, and the cigarette burned, as if it was drinking up the oxygen of the rushing wind.  The speedometer read 150 km/hr and kept rising.

The cigarette caught fire, the heat and burn at the end of it intensifying until it couldn’t be contained.  It billowed out like smoke from a smoke grenade or smoke from a flare, and it kept intensifying.

The speedometer hit 200 km/hr.  The car met a faint rise in the road, and the tires left ground.  It hit the road a few seconds later, leaving Avery’s stomach what felt like ten stories above and two miles behind her.

Then a bend in the road, alongside a rise.  The speedometer had hit 300.  Avery grabbed the car door and, because it was the only thing in reach she could grab, Sootsleeves’ sleeve.  Realizing Snowdrop was still at her shoulder, she turned her head, pinning Snowdrop to the car seat with cheek and shoulder.

Her stomach hadn’t ever come back after that feeling a few seconds ago, and it was a rush to feel the experience multiply as they left the road, turning slightly in the air as they prepared to hit the far end of the curve in the road.

The landing was intensified by a blast of Sootsleeves’ smoke, momentarily swallowing them.  The trees that swept past weren’t ones of the area, and, with the smoke and burning ashes from of the cigarette flare, they all appeared to be on fire.

“Ready!?” Sootsleeves called out.

“Not especially!” Avery shouted.

“It’s a rare person who is truly ready for the Falling Oak Avenue.  Here.”

Sootsleeves steered with her knee pressed against the bottom of the steering wheel, while she reached over, tying a scrap of cloth around Avery’s wrist, where it joined friendship bracelet, barometer, black rope, charm bracelets, and her wooden spy-detection bracelet.  The cloth was tattered, with burns at the edges, and it had a warm, deep gray color.  The parts that weren’t burnt were very soft.

“What’s this?”

“It should earn you a bit of status in the Commons.”

“Thank you.”

Two tires left the road as Sootsleeves served to pass a car.

Avery turned, looking, wondering if the force of Sootsleeves’ vehicle passing at this speed had sent the car into a tailspin.  But there was too much smoke behind.  That would be its own problem for anyone behind them.

Snowdrop had found a painfully firm perch on Avery’s shoulder, and had her mouth open, letting the wind pull back on her cheeks, exposing her many teeth.

“You’re sure you want to go?”

“Yeah.”

Sootsleeves turned sharply.  The two tires that still hadn’t touched road did, and the other two tires lifted up at the same time.  Avery’s stomach, now about ten miles behind her and somewhere in the stratosphere, rocketed off somewhere to the horizon on the left side of the road, while Sootsleeves’ steed left pavement and went over a ledge, flipping slowly nose over back bumper.

The water to the one side of the road was blue as sky- and as Avery came to terms with the fact they were still falling after five or so seconds, she realized it was sky.  Smoke from the flare was cloud, and the only thing keeping her in the car as they fell was the seatbelt.

Sootsleeves hit the buckle.  The seatbelt came undone, and Avery was essentially ejected from the seat, wind whipping at her hair and clothes.

“Falling Oak Avenue!” Sootsleeves shouted.  She grabbed Avery’s bag and tossed it into the air.  Avery caught it, then put it on.  Snowdrop launched herself from Avery’s shoulder, becoming human.  She wore a dress with a hood and an oversized army jacket that had ‘ass over aaaa-hole’ printed on the back, with an opossum hanging from a branch by its tail as the accompanying graphic.

“Thanks for the ride!  Go help our guys, okay!?” Avery asked, as she found her orientation, going spread-eagle, facing ‘down’.  Snowdrop dropped a little ways, then did the same, holding the back of Avery’s bag.

The response, as the car pulled away, was a light honk.

“Jude Garrick, Jude Garrick, Jude Garrick!”

There was a sound of shattering glass.

“Here!”

It was Jude, with Luca, Finn, and a girl Garrick accompanying him.  It looked like a girl that had teased Jude on the Promenade, a couple years older than Jude.

“You brought people!?” Avery shouted up.

“My parents pushed for it!  More eyes on any problems, they said!”

And more chances for you guys to pick up Path knowledge.

She didn’t really begrudge them that.  Her only real worry was that Finn and Luca were younger than Jude, and really, someone younger than fourteen probably shouldn’t be hurtling through endless sky and deathtraps like this.

“You gotta look after your family, okay!?  I’ve got a lot going on!” Avery shouted.

“Got it!  Knew that coming in!  It was pushed on me, for the record!”

The Avenue was falling slower than everything else.  Houses, bits of street, bits of lawn.  They found themselves falling through the midst of it.

Below them, a group of children in school uniforms leaped from buildings and chunks of street, falling in formation.  Avery had seen them on the Promenade.

They were ‘native’ to Falling Oak Avenue, like the Ballerina was.

There was a girl with a twenty foot ponytail who looked like she’d been split into horizontal cross-sections around the torso, shoulders and upper arms as one section, chest as another, lower ribs as another, then stomach, with gaps of a few inches between each.  Her arms were similar around the bicep, elbow, and the forearms near the elbow.  The discs kept rough alignment with the rest of her, only periodically catching the wind wrong and flipping around some before falling back into alignment.  She dove with intent, glancing over her shoulder at them.

Snowdrop waved.

And there was an Other that didn’t look like it belonged to the Paths.  It defied easy explanation.  A crimson orb with glowing gold slashes in it for the eyes, a tiny slash for the mouth, and ornate painting around the slashes for ‘eyeshadow’ and lip definition was inset into a massive, hard growth of carved black stone, that formed about ten horns and spikes that could’ve been carved to resemble long hair.  Two thin black arms extended from that beard.

That was just the ‘head’, and that body part alone looked the size of a typical car.  The upper body was hunched, crimson, heavily tattooed, with drooping shoulders, with five limp arms on one side and an orb like its ‘face’ inset in the shoulder, and one arm on the other.  Its back half was about thirty feet of an uncountable number of tentacles as big around as Avery was, each black, entangled, with suckers on the one side and black feathers on the other.  When they bent, the feathers that lifted away became wings at the joints.

It didn’t look like it knew how to control its fall very well.

There was a man on a bike, in similar straits, pedaling madly.

That’s local number two.

There were always three locals and three non-locals.  She’d seen two of each.  She looked back at Jude, and held up two fingers on each hand.  He nodded.

“Aaaaaaaaa!” Snowdrop screamed, without panic.

Avery leaned, hand at the corner of her jacket to create a flap and steer herself and Snowdrop away from a bit of lawn.

Touch ground and our ass is grass.

Newspaper came flying up.  Avery blocked it with her hand, to keep it from smacking her in the face, and the back pages fluttered out on all sides.  She read the weather page the paper had been open to.

Meteor to strike town.  Dark days ahead.

“Fuuuuck!” Jude shouted.

She pushed it away, and saw that while the pages had blocked her view of the sky, things had gone dark.

Starless, sunless, moonless night.

The only thing shedding any light at all on the Avenue now were the porch and interior lights of the houses, streetlamps, and a single car with flickering headlights.

Jude twisted around.  He veered hard right, glancing over his shoulder, then balled up.  “Sorry Luca!”

“What are you doing?” Luca shouted, as Jude bumped into him.

Jude pulled the escape rope.  Luca was yanked out of the Avenue.

“What are you doing?” Avery asked.  She passed the newspaper back to Snowdrop, who stuffed it into her backpack for her.  With hands free, Avery found and threw a spell card.  It illuminated a tract of road in her way she hadn’t remembered was there.

“Finn, don’t pull away!  Cooperate!  I’m your senior, damn it!”

Snowdrop passed Avery her mask.  Avery quickly scribbled the light runes on it, and put it on.

It helped illuminate the area, but it was narrow, and it worked much like a strong flashlight beam.

Snowdrop wasn’t as bothered by the darkness, Avery realized.  Avery pushed the mask to one side, so the eyehole of the left eye was over her right eye, and used Opossum sight.

A bit of nocturnal vision.  It helped.

Snowdrop put the piece of antler by Avery’s head.  Suspending it in air.

“Finn!” Jude called out.

“Jude, you guys really need to get it together!” Avery called out.  She was a bit pissed now.

“They shouldn’t be here!  Not if we’re getting a bad omen like this!  This makes the rest of the Avenue way harder!  It’s supposed to be rare!”

“Thirty seconds until the next set of weather pages hit us,” the girl said.

“Finn, let me- don’t avoid me!”

“My dad said under no conditions am I to let you go on alone!”

“That’s moronic!”

“If things keep going like they are, your dad might end up head of the family!”

“That’s even more moronic!  You’re making us look bad in front of Avery!”

“It’s better than you guys as the only ones looking good!”

“Moron!” Jude shouted.

“Stop fighting please!” Avery called out.  “This is hard enough!  You’ll screw things up!”

The girl swooped down closer to Avery.  “You kinda asked for this when you wanted Jude and his family the only ones helping you the last few days.  It’s got everyone paranoid.”

“I didn’t ask for that at all!  Can we focus!?  Seriously!?”

“Go home, Finn!”

“Stop fighting, or you all need to go home!” Avery called out.  “And I seriously reconsider working with you guys on paths in the future.”

A damp newspaper caught her in the side of the face.

They were diving through darkness that was made all the more oppressive by rain, fog, and darkness, now.

They’d stopped fighting, at least.

“Falling Oak Avenue, let’s go!” Avery called out.  “First leg, we’re looking for a door or window we can get through!”

The Falling Oak Avenue was broken up into segments.

“Water tower, bell, birds, post office-”

“Water tower, bell, birds, big house,” Avery said, reading the page.

“Big house?” Jude asked.

“Yeah.”

“Talk me through the steps.  Because what I know is water tower, bell, birds, post office, bridge, bookstore, school grounds, hallways, and the classroom with the F.O.A.’s teacher as its cornerstone,” Jude recited.

“Water tower, navigate as fast as I can, expect changing weather and environment effects on a set timer, announced with the weather edition.  Get myself through a door or window, as soon as I can while also avoiding touching the ground.”

“Because splat.  With you.”

“The bell tower-”

“Schoolbell, sure.”

“Brings some Others with it.  There’s about six Others who’ll show, three of whom are native to the area.  Three are random.  The Ballerina in Blue is sometimes one of the three.  Saw her on the Promenade.”

“You know how the Cakewalk is a Finder killer and we’re kinda on edge, hoping for a solve for that?  The Ballerina is a Finder killer two steps above that.”

“Sure.  She seemed nice though.”

“She’ll be tame right then, probably, but when you get further down, the Others around you can turn hostile, and of the twenty times we know of where a Finder was around her when she went off, there were seventeen casualties.”

“Okay.  Well, I will keep that in mind if I see her again,” Avery noted, a bit mollified.

“Okay, so… you’re at the bell, you see those guys.  Watch out for the schoolkids, by the way.  They don’t wait to be aggressive.”

“Yeah.  Um, ring the bell, catch a bird immediately after.”

“Okay,” Jude said.

“Is that wrong?  Is there- Jude, you gotta tell me if I’m telling you something you didn’t know.”

“We ring the bell and get reoriented and hurled through a danger zone.”

“Okay.”

“And that takes us to the post office.”

“Apparently catching the bird takes you to the house.  I don’t have notes for the post office.”

“Okay.  Starting to see why your way is rated only a three out of ten or a three out of seven.”

“I grab a chest of drawers or wardrobe and bring it with me.  Pull out the drawers, go through, and I’m out.”

“Out.  Right.”

“Being very very careful not to touch the floor.”

Jude’s female cousin drew legs to chest, contorting in the air.  “Shit!  Shit shit shit!”

They were passing through a house, but the falling house was turning slightly in the air- bringing floor closer, closer-

“Escape rope, Adorea!” Jude shouted.  “Before-!”

The rug caught in the wind and flipped up, swatting Adorea.

She pulled the rope- getting yanked out of existence as the rope went taut and cutting off her fall.

A half-second later, a section of building that wasn’t falling speared through the building, splitting it in half.  Adorea had barely avoided being turned into tomato paste.

Avery was just past the building, focused on what was happening beyond it, when Snowdrop warned her with an unspoken signal.

Avery turned, saw one of the schoolkids at the side of a chunk, launching herself to a point below Avery.  Avery quickly went spread-eagled, slowing her descent, putting distance between them.

The kid had glue, and squeezed two bottles.  The streams of white squirted out, filling the air below Avery, so that Avery would fall into them.

Avery used her jacket to maneuver away.

The kid threw something she couldn’t see- but she felt it, squeezing eyes shut as she was dusted in glitter.  It felt like sand in her eyes.

“I’m blinded!  Guide me, Snow!”

“More kids!” Snowdrop shouted.  She shoved a hand in Avery’s bag.

The schoolbell rang.  It was an old one, big, and loud, meant to be heard across a vast playground, signaling the end of recess.

Here, it signaled something worse.

The bell meant the Others became hostile.  The schoolkids went from a dangerous nuisance to an organized force, the Ballerina, if she was around, started murdering people, the guy on the bike shouted a lot.

“Archer sighted!” Jude shouted.

So, of the top three dangerous others on the Avenue, they had two.

The Archer didn’t fall, but showed up in black rope style, standing on platforms and vantage points, nocking and shooting arrows for as long as they were hostile.  If passed, they had a good chance of showing up again, usually after thirty seconds or so.

Snowdrop flipped Avery over, and put fingers around Avery’s eye.  Avery expected a rinse with her water, but got the eyeliner pencil instead.

“Ave!  Archer’s on you!” Jude shouted.

Avery used her jacket as a wing-flap again.  It was harder with Snowdrop on the one side.  She changed direction, then changed direction again, being unpredictable.  While getting a pencil around the eye.

Snowdrop finished the one eye, then quickly scribbled more around the eye of the mask Avery was keeping on the one side of her face.  She flipped Avery around.

The eyeliner helped.  It was one of the gifts from the Garricks, meant to help with seeing through dust and smoke.

The schoolkids had formed one group of four and another group of three.  The Four were on Jude and Finn.  The three were preparing for Avery.  One had two box-cutters, there was a girl with a metal ruler and a chunk of rubble she was vigorously rubbing it against while giving Avery a death stare, and there was the girl who’d had the glue.

This hostile ‘bell’ phase lasted until someone rang the bell.

Arms and legs out, belly ‘down’, Avery tried to fall to her right, but the kid with the box knives was leaning to guide his fall, moving him closer to her.  She couldn’t go in the direction her feet were because that got dangerously close to a stretch of lawn.

She swooped left, then balled up to go ‘down’, falling faster so the edge of that stretch of lawn couldn’t clip her.  Snowdrop contributed by turning opossum-sized, still holding onto Avery’s bag.

The girl with the long ruler swept in, slashing and swatting with the ruler.  She’d sharpened its edge, but half the hits weren’t even meant to cut.  They just hurt, swung full force into thigh, hip, stomach.  A swipe caught the seat of Avery’s pants, too sharp to be a slap, and another caught her stomach where the wind had pulled her shirt up.  That one felt like a slap but when Avery’s hand touched there, her hand stuck to skin, blood oozing between fingertips.

The others converged.

They knew what they were doing.  Limiting her movements.

The archer was down there.  A figure dressed in black, androgynous, with a short black ponytail and a crossbow.  They took their time, aiming at Avery and Snowdrop.

The girl swatted at Avery’s shin with the ruler.  That one just stung.

And the one below released another two fistfuls of glitter.  That didn’t do much except make Snowdrop sneeze twice.

She sent Avery a signal.

Partway through that second sneeze, Snowdrop became human, holding onto Avery as an anchor while kicking the ruler girl away.  Avery leaned into that direction, avoiding an arrow that probably wouldn’t have hit her anyway.  The archer quickly reloaded, and Avery reversed direction, aiming to use the patch of fenced-in lawn as cover.

Holding onto the soil below the patch of lawn, Avery flung herself over to the one side, grabbing at old, trailing roots for leverage and then casting herself off to the side, toward where Jude and Finn were.

She saw the overlong ponytail before she saw the cross-section girl.  The girl spotted her, too, and started to move toward Avery by the same mechanism, grabbing roots and dry soil to ‘fall-crawl’ over.

Avery took advantage of a craggy bit of ground, moved out of sight, and black roped to a better spot, behind the girl.  Grabbing the girl by the back of her shirt, fingertips digging into the meat of the cross section, Avery hurled her back and away.  The ponytail swatted her, and Avery caught it, using it to steer herself relative to the cross section girl, holding ponytail in one hand, putting foot in the girl’s head, and then kicking off.

The girl wasn’t good enough at navigating to really chase after that.

She had to edit her spell cards so they’d get ‘down’ enough, with a marker for direction signaling ‘down’.  Once she’d done three, she threw them.

Two wind detonations, to send the kids flying off to the side, and one fiery explosion.

The fourth kid over here was a girl with a plastic jar of colorful thumbtacks.  She reached in, pulled a hand out with about eight to ten thumbtacks pressed between fingers or between thumb and hand, and slapped Finn in the side of the head.  The things raked him for about a quarter-inch before sticking in the side of his head, his ear, and face.  There were about twenty stuck in there, his face, and his neck, in bright primary school red, blue, yellow, and green.

Jude did the work to get the girl off Finn, catching her, pushing her off and away, and getting a few tacks in his hand for his trouble.  The girl turned, saw Avery, and swiped the jar through the air, emptying the remaining tacks into the air, so Avery’s descent would send her into them.

Avery tried to avoid them, but some caught in her hair and clothes.

“How’s your aim?” Jude called out.  He pointed at the bell.

“Been working on it!” Avery called out.  She reached for her charm bracelet, and got her lacrosse stick and a ball.

Snowdrop warned her.  Avery made an abrupt change in direction.

The Archer.  The arrow whooshed through the air, past Avery.

She reoriented, aware that the schoolchildren were regrouping, centered herself as best as she could, and then used the lacrosse stick to whip the ball.

A miss.  The movement had altered her position in the air.

The bell continued to jangle its overloud, obnoxious, nerve-destroying ring as Avery got another ball.  Hard wood, painted red.

This time she drew some runework on it.

Adjust, maintain form…

She chucked the ball.  A miss.

“Balls Falls!” Avery shouted, as the ball got as close as it would get.

The command word detonated the ball.  Fragments flew out.

The bell rang.

Wind intensified, flecking Avery with the ambient light rain.  And they were hurled into the third length.

The hostile Others didn’t come with.  Avery avoided the feathered tentacle that had been cast out into the air when the big spirit-thing had hit solid ground and gone splat.

People were stepping outside their houses now.  Waving and shouting greetings.

“Falling isn’t what kills you, it’s the ground hitting you!” one called out.

“If you ask questions at the bookstore, they might have answers for you!” a woman called out.

Avery ignored them.

A falling car that was flipping through the air hit a tree.  Crows were scattered, black as night, in a lightless dark illuminated only by cars and streetlights.  The open doors of the houses at least provided a bit more illumination.

Avery put a hand out and simply dove through the flock.  When her hand hit something solid, she grabbed, and quickly transitioned to a hold that was less painful or awkward for the bird.

“Got one!”

“Already!?” Jude asked.

“Got one!” Finn shouted.

Jude caught one after another twenty or so seconds.

“Snow, close your eyes, hold on tight.”

Snowdrop nodded.

“Hi bird,” Avery said.

“Watch out!” bystanders shouted.

“Be careful, you’re going to crash!”

“Take us to the big house?” Avery asked.

Normally, recognizing the bystanders or birds meant moving on to the Post Office, according to Jude.  But it was a dangerous transition- there would be a warning, and then instant death by collision, if the person warned wasn’t careful.  Turning one’s head would mean the direction of the ‘fall’ would change abruptly, and this was often very dangerous.

But it was the bird that turned its head.

The bird dictated the change.

And they started to fall toward the big house.  The crow looking around meant the direction of the fall kept changing.

Navigating them readily past the intervening obstacles.

The house was in shambles, partially destroyed, but the sheer number of fragments made it dangerous.  If any of those were floor-

Avery moved carefully, using a number of spell cards she’d have considered wasteful before, to blow away and get rid of dreck.

She spotted a chest of drawers, went to it, and hauled the drawers out.  It created an aperture, dark inside.

Turning upside down, relative to the aperture, Avery glanced at Jude, then climbed through.

“Next leg.  Commons Thread,” Jude noted.  “I’ve heard of it.”

“A town suspended in more ways than one.  You will be told the rules, and you will be told more for every three steps you take thereafter.  Obey those rules, or you may find yourself in stitches, hanging, or Lost,” Avery recited.  “One ‘x’ of difficulty, one dash.”

“Hard,” Snowdrop said.

“The first Lost you meet there get to dictate the rules.  Try to make that meeting a positive one,” Sootsleeves said.  “Even when I visited, I was prominent enough they didn’t dare get on my bad side with cruel rules.”

“I was curious how that works,” Avery remarked.  “Did you leave your kingdom?”

“Sometimes, but this was a place I visited on my way to forging my kingdom.”

“Same deal as Founding,” Jude explained.  “A Lost collects enough Lost stuff, develops a kind of gravity…”

“Right.  Except wait, I thought a Lost had trouble holding onto a lot of stuff.”

“They do.  It’s my understanding it helps if they collect fitting allies or people in your orbit, and if they collect items that group together or form little collections with a theme.  Those that are bigger and more powerful tend to get a headstart.”

“Just so,” Sootsleeves said.  “I rode out of my mother’s womb with a kingdom behind me, and even then I was not so large as some.  Still, it earned me the respect I needed to not be tied to too many rules.  If you expect to spend any time there, get a visitor’s pass.  But expect that to be costly.  The typical price is forfeiting something of great power and allowing one of your body parts to be stitched.  Hand stitched over heart with fishing line, mouth stitched shut with copper wire, eye socket stitched close with boot laces.”

“Yeah, let’s not,” Avery replied.

“It’s only if you expect to stay.  The Commons is a serviceable rest stop if you’re on a long journey through the Paths.  You, however, are aiming for a short journey.”

“Yeah, right, so, we get to the Commons Thread, and we gotta waste zero time in getting to one of three locations.  Ideally, we cover a lot of ground before running into a Lost of the Commons, and we make the Lost who gives us our initial batch one that seems nice.”

“A granny baking pies or something,” Jude said.

“I’ve got bad experiences with grannies and grandpas,” Avery told him.  She thought of the Wolf, of her Grumble, and Odis’ menacing aura.  “But something in that direction, maybe.  There’s three Paths we can get to from there.  So we try to make this fast and simple.”

Avery climbed out of the space between crates in an alley.  Snowdrop climbed through first, benefitting from being small, and changed to human size to better catch and stabilize crates and keep them from falling.

Avery wormed her way through, then lay on solid ground for about thirty seconds, staring down the length of the alleyway, watching Lost walk by on the street beyond.  She realized the ground wasn’t that solid.  Everything here was suspended on threads.  Or on a singular, endless thread that served to tie most of the Commons together, apparently.  It felt like being on a rope bridge on a windy day.  Here and there, ivy had been grown as a kind of natural way of holding things together, or other materials were used to tie to the thread where people seemed to think that maybe if it snapped, it wouldn’t unravel everything in one fell swoop.

Half of the alley was painted in graffiti, and the other half was ivy.  The ivy extended up to clotheslines that threaded through the view above, across a line of cord where two kids on opposite sides of the alley had set up cans on ropes to talk to one another, and across an archway.

Her stomach was bleeding and the blood had reached her waistband.  Her top was ruined.  It was a shallow cut, though.  The other cut had been at her shin, shallow, it only hurt a lot because it was close to the bone, and there was a cut at the seat of her pants.  It had cut past the layer of cloth on her pocket, but not the layer beneath that.  She had spell cards in there, and had to redistribute them.

Avery got settled, making her first priority a bit of first aid, while she waited for Jude and the others.  The kit was deep in her bag, which necessitated taking out a lot of stuff.

Not great, in retrospect, but there wasn’t a super great way to stow stuff where she could have her spell things and books in easy reach, while also having her first aid kit there.

“They’re right behind us,” Snowdrop murmured.

“What do you think happened?” Avery asked, keeping her voice quiet.

“I don’t know how he got it wrong.  It’s very simple, we all go through the same hole and we exit out the same hole.”

“Shit.  Got it.”

She applied bandages to her injuries, washed her hands, and began to get the things necessary to camouflage herself from view.

“Heya.”

Avery cussed under her breath, and looked up.

Over where the cans had hung from strings, a boy wearing an old-fashioned gas mask was with his friend, who had eyebrows stitched to scalp and cheekbones stitched to jawline, in a way that held his eyes permanently open, eyelids unable to meet in the middle.  On the opposite end of the alley was a girl with buttons stitched over her eyes, each large enough to cover the entire eye socket.  Her mouth was stitched shut.

“You’re new,” the boy with the gas mask said, voice muffled.  “And pretty.”

The girl with the button eyes ducked into her room, then hurled a wooden block at the boy.  It bounced off the goggle part of the gas mask.  She mumbled something with a mix of humming sounds.

“She is, though.  You’ll be prettier, but for right now you’re too young to be properly pretty.”

The girl mumbled something.

“Right.  The rules.  Each of us make up one?” gas mask boy asked.

“Yeah,” the boy with the wide-open eyes said.  “If we bind her properly with impossible rules, we can just take her stuff.  Visitors always have great stuff.”

“We can take her,” the boy with the gas mask said.

It’s like being at Declan’s complete mercy.

Button-Eyes mumbled.

“Can you understand?” Snowdrop asked, quiet.

“Not her.”

Snowdrop pushed a sense into Avery.

“-allowed to leave.  We’d get in trouble,” Button-Eyes mumbled.

“We’d be rich.”

Gas Mask grabbed the cord that connected the two cans, one of which was dangling between the bars of the little grille that was threaded to the window, and Button-Eyes took hold of the other end, holding firm while he slid down the length of it.  Wide-Eyes climbed down the ivy at the side of the building.  Just as he arrived, Button-Eyes leaped from the second floor window, into the waiting arms of Gas Mask.  She seemed overly light.

“You have to follow our rules.  One from each of us,” Gas Mask said.

“Snowdrop and I are a matched set.  Practitioner and familiar.”

“Sure.  Doesn’t matter.  This’ll be fun.”

Bad situation.

Wide-Eyes turned to Gas Mask.  “What do we do?  Rules have to be fair, on their own, so do the consequences.  But if we work together, they’ll be a snarl.”

Could go along with it, try to find an escape into one of the three paths.  That separates me from Jude.

Button-Eyes was emanating raw hostility, as much as someone could when her expression was halfway hidden behind giant buttons.

And if this kid gets to make a rule, she’ll make it something mean.  She hates me.

“I’ll get us started,” Gas Mask said.  The apparent leader.

What would Lucy or Ronnie do?

She had spell cards.  That would be a mess, though.  But the consequences of threatening a kid with fire would be roughly the same as the consequences for breaking a rule, and if they made an impossible set of rules to follow…

“I’m Gasp, it’s nice to meet you,” Gas Mask said.  Gasp.  “We have rules here.”

“I know.”

“And there are rules about the rules and rules for how those are managed, and somewhere in the middle of a riddle of those rules, we find peace.”

“I come in peace, intentions good, for a short stay.  I have somewhere to be.”

“Anytime you want to do anything that isn’t breathing, answering a question, or following an order, you have to ask permission,” Gasp told her.  “And if you don’t get permission, you can’t, or you get stitches.”

“Turnabout is fair play, isn’t it?” Avery asked.  “I can set you the challenge of following your own rule.”

“Sure.  For a day.  And you can’t do anything in the meantime, and if I can prove I can handle the rule, I get to set three more rules on you.  Want to try?”

I can’t afford a day.

“So I do something like, for every time she speaks, she has to give the nearest Lost that isn’t that opossum something?” Wide-Eyes murmured.  “Something she’s carrying or something she’s wearing.  And if she can’t or doesn’t, she hangs?”

What would Hazel do?  Avery thought.  The veteran walker of the Paths.

She folded her arms, and she thumbed the gray strip of cloth that Sootsleeves had tied on.

Gasp noticed.

Button-Eyes mumbled, “And I make a rule that she has to hand over her stuff to me, for temporary safekeeping?  And…”

Here comes the mean bit.

“Hold on,” Gasp said.  “I’m not finished with my rule.  Haven’t set it.”

Avery unfolded her arms and stood straighter, and when her arm moved, Gasp’s gaze moved with it, following the little twisted scrap of cloth.

“…If you want to do something, you have to ask permission, blink, or keep your eyes open.  If you ask permission and you don’t get it, but do the thing anyway, or if you don’t blink or if you don’t keep your eyes open, stitches, blah blah blah.”

“Sure,” Avery replied.  “I understand the rule.  Well met, Gasp.”

“Sure, yeah.  Well met.”

“What are you doing?” Button Eyes asked.

“She’s with Sootsleeves.”

“That shouldn’t matter much,” Button eyes said.

“You want to have to answer if someone comes asking why an ally of hers got on the wrong end of our rules?” Gasp asked her.

Button Eyes looked a bit like she did want to try things.

Kids and crushes and jealousy.  If she was going to be like this to everyone who looked the wrong way at Gasp, or had Gasp look the wrong way at her… ugh.

Wide-Eyes shook his head, looking closer at the scrap.  “Aw, damn.  Uh.  I’m Awesome Boy.  For every hundred steps you walk here, you have to breathe, or don’t breathe, or think of something else.  Or you hang.”

“I understand the rule, Awesome Boy.  Well met.”

“Well met.  Obey the rules of the commons.  That should be your second rule.”

“Buttons,” Gasp urged.

“I’m Buttons, if you’re here for more than half an hour on this visit, you’re past curfew and you’ll be Lost.”

“If she turns that back on you-”

“If she does then I’m telling people and they can decide what to do.  You said you were only here for a short stay.”

“Yeah.”

“How’s that, then?”

“Sure,” Avery said.

“Then get going or get lost.”

“What you were thinking about doing?  Binding me with rules?  Don’t ever do that.  I hope to be running Paths for a long time.  If I come back this way and investigate…”

Gasp nodded.

“Don’t let anyone else do it.  You don’t want this place to become the sort of place where that happens.”

The three were silent and still.

“Pass me that can?” Avery asked, pointing to the can on the string.

Avery took hold of it, tested its strength, then collected Snowdrop.  She swung down the length of the alley, catching the ivy as she reached.

The rules here accumulated to a ridiculous degree as she set foot here, with room for one more rule for every few steps she took.  So she didn’t ‘step’.  She scaled the ivy to the opening of the alley, then dropped into a sitting position on a barrel.

The narrow street teemed with about fifty Others, with houses on either side, shops inset into some building faces.

She spotted Finn, who walked down the street, holding a pie and a fork.  A woman followed, prattling, going on at length.  She was pretty, but she was big around the middle, or she was supposed to be, and laces running through skin pulled her corset-tight, creating an exaggerated hourglass frame that went from three feet wide to a few inches across, to three feet.  Her hair was bright red and her blush intense.

“Finn!  Seen Jude?”

Finn shook his head.  He walked over.

“New rule, you must take another bite,” the woman said.  “Try and enjoy it.”

Finn forked another bite of what looked like cherry pie into his mouth, chewed, then forced a smile as he looked up at the woman.

“Good boys need to eat well.  Hello dearie.  You have three rules tied to you.  Very slack.”

“Yes ma’am,” Avery greeted her.

“You let me know if you need more rules.”

“I don’t suppose I could ask if a woman without a face or hands came by?”

“One lives just down the road.”

“She’d be a visitor.  Black hair, likes sweaters, long skirts?  Called Miss?”

“Hmm.”

“Soft spoken, mysterious?”

“Oh, I’ve heard of her.  Yes.  Came and went very quickly.”

“Okay.  Uneventful?  No issues?”

“Not that I know of.  If you do run into issues, tell someone.  We try to keep things orderly.”

“Three kids tried to bind me.  I normally wouldn’t tattle, but if they try it with someone else…”

“Did they, now?”

“Gasp, Awesome Boy, and Buttons.”

“I’ll have a word with their parents when you’re done.  What rules did they set?”

Avery recited the rules.  Part of the conditions for this Path was to keep track, which was partially why it could be a problem.  Stay too long and it could take minutes to recite every rule.

“Not so bad, those.”

“Curfew’s an issue.  I’ll need to find my friend Jude.”

“I’ll ask around.  You two stay put, that’s not a rule, only a recommendation.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course.  Have some pie.  That’s not a rule, only a recommendation.”

The woman hurried off.

Avery leaned over, looking into the pie tin, and found a chunk that had come free.  She popped it into her mouth.

“Eat more,” Finn said.  “She told me to finish it.  It’s a big pie.  I don’t even like cherries.”

Snowdrop turned human, sitting on the same barrel as Avery.  She motioned for the fork.

“Just leave the last bit for me to finish.”

“Can’t say I will,” Snowdrop replied.

Avery leaned back, tense, hurting, and still feeling a bit of panic from how close that call had been in the alleyway.  Were there possible ways out?  Maybe.  But… ugh.

It gave her sympathy for the Lost who got bound.  Wrong place, wrong time?  That had happened to Miss.

Not just a sleepy binding, like the Garricks had done, but being trapped, knowing there was no way?

She observed the crowd, and she could see a change in the flow of it.  In a sea of various odd Lost, and the occasional non-Lost, she saw a gap.  She wondered if it was some Other that was wide to some silly degree, that forced others to walk around them.

It wasn’t.

It was a boy, Declan’s age, with a mask on a stick.  He wore a plain white T-shirt with ‘adventure guide’ on it, with ‘magazine’ in small print beneath it.  It made her think of something her dad had as a backup t-shirt from twenty years ago.  He also wore orange surf shorts that went down to his knees, with sandals.  His arms, legs, and neck were covered in detailed body paint, with shades of blue, and intricate collections of stars.  The cobblestone street around him smoked with residual heat, and even a distance behind him, some Lost would skip or hurry on their way, wincing at the lingering heat.

The mask was a sun.  Smiling.  Just as it had appeared in illustrations in books the Garricks had given her.

She slipped down from the barrel and stood straight.  Finn, to the left of her, was mid-chew, and he stopped, mouth full, looking.

“Do you know who I am?” the Page of Suns asked.

“I think so.  The Page of Suns?”

“That is what they call me.  Do you know what I represent?”

“No.  But I know bits.”

He nodded.  “And by giving me that answer, you know the consequence?”

“I think so,” Avery replied.  “I’ve read you appear to Finders and key Lost when something very great or something very terrible is going to happen.”

“Few things are great without being terrible to someone, or terrible, without being great for some.”

Avery thought of Chloe and Nibble, and how they were getting a lot of meals from Kennet’s current troubles.  She nodded.  “It’s my understanding that, if someone has the right answers, you take them to the next major step of their journey.  I don’t have the answers or understanding, so…”

“I won’t be helping you along, and I won’t be your companion, in any big sense.  But we can talk,” the Page told her.  “Walk with me.”

“I have a time limit.  It’s a rule I have to abide by.”

“I know.  You’ll be fine.”

“I’m glad I get to leave you with your pie to finish,” Snowdrop said.  “It’s hilarious.”

Finn nodded, looking down at the pie tin.

Avery got down from the barrel, Snowdrop moving to her shoulder, transforming into an opossum again.  She looked at the Page.  “Will I be forced to obey your rules?”

“We’ll do without.  You can think of it as me having a special pass.  It includes people who are with me.”

Avery nodded.  She approached, and when he moved his head slightly, she crossed into that ‘hot zone’ where the uneven waves of heat that came off of him were worst.  It was hot, but it wasn’t doing any harm to her.

“I guess I’ll be back, Finn?”

Finn swallowed and nodded.  “Sure.”

They walked.  The crowd naturally parted, some of them moving without looking to see what the heat source was.

“I stopped in to see the Other you call Miss, first.  The task before me is both massive and delicate.  I have a system for finding candidates, and that starts with the extraordinary.  Those who do new things, or set a new bar.”

“Yeah.  And if I get things right, or figure out the right answers to your test questions, I get to move closer to the inner workings of the universe?”

“It’s your test, not mine.  You read the book, Hazel’s diary.”

“Yes,” Avery replied, even though it was a statement, not a question, that she was answering.

“Hazel’s answers to the questions wouldn’t be the same as yours.  But there are some fundamental truths.  If I think you’re close enough to grasping them, I may help put certain things in your reach.”

“I’m honestly not sure I’m in any sort of place to handle fundamental truths.  I just want to save my town and stop bad people.”

“To do that, you want to Found a third version of it.  Wouldn’t you say that that requires some grasp of the fundamental?  You couldn’t build an atom bomb without understanding the principles of the atom, or you could, but it would be difficult.”

“Like a geologist with a rock,” Snowdrop said.

“Or a monkey with a typewriter,” the Page of Suns said, humor in his voice.

They exited the neighborhood, street swaying on a thousand slack threads.  Walls knocked against walls as a strong wind blew.

They reached a coast.  There was empty nothingness stretching out where there would normally be ocean.

“How do you think it’s all put together?” the Page of Suns asked.

“What do you mean?  Realms?”

“If you like.  You’ve been putting your thoughts about the places you explore to paper from the beginning.  Tell me your thoughts.”

“Don’t you know my thoughts?”

“I might know what’s in your head, but in the process of explaining, especially in an important moment, you may consolidate thoughts in a way that I wouldn’t be able to simply know, by looking at you.”

“That’s a little spooky.”

“Try talking it out.  I don’t expect the right answer, but perhaps we’ll meet again, and you’ll have thought about it some more.  Realms, if you wish.”

“Earth… some realms overlap it.  You can be in the middle of your bedroom on Earth and simultaneously you’re in the spirit world, you’re in the Abyss, you’re possibly represented in the Digital Aether, the Ruins… and with the right practice, you can step across.  Or you can astrally travel in the Ruins, dive deep, and find that kernel of someone you love or something important, in the same place and time.  Even if they aren’t truly of the Ruins.”

“You can.”

“Or if you’re like Queen Sootsleeves or Miss, you can step across naturally, though for someone like Miss, sometimes it’s not easy getting back.  Edith can do it too, for the Ruins.  Other realms are adjacent.”

“Which are?”

“More their own thing?  Maybe tied up in stories or ideas?  The Faerie, the Warrens.  Some godly realms.”

“And the Paths?  What are they?”

“If the Ruins are a big, rough puzzle-cube of interconnected emotions, constantly shuffling and trying to find their own kind of order, and the Abyss is this nexus of intense, brutal change that smooths out toward the edges, the Faerie are schemes and self-delusions… all those things have edges, where they don’t neatly intersect or fit together with or attach to other realms.  Sometimes that flakes off.  Sometimes it gathers together.”

“What is it that flakes off?”

“I- I think for the Abyss, it’s stuff furthest from the turmoil, that vicious churning that either tears things up or spits them out, hard and hurting.  For the Faerie, it’s dull things.  It’s… whatever’s unimportant enough?”

“Do you think this is all very unimportant, Avery Kelly?” the Page of Suns asked.  “You seem inclined to dedicate a big part of your career as a practitioner to exploring it.”

Avery shook her head.  It felt hard to breathe, like pressure was being applied to her.  It wasn’t just that the heat singed at her nostrils, baking the air that she pulled into her lungs.  Or that there was a time limit, or that there was a whole pile of mess waiting for her…

Snowdrop touched her back, and rubbed.

Avery thought of her Awakening ritual.

“I think something or someone can be seen as unimportant, not a priority, or be ignored, and still have an awful lot of value or meaning.”

“That’s true, if you accept a certain meaning of value.”

“I think there are paintings by famous people sitting in pawn shops that, if people realized what they were, they’d be worth a fortune.  People can be like that.  Paths too.”

“Good answer.”

“Thank you,” Avery said, quiet.

“Sometimes you get to the bottom of a bin of trash and there’s nothing,” Snowdrop said, sagely.  “And sometimes there’s something.”

The Page of Suns nodded.

“Snow’s right.  Sometimes trash is trash, sometimes nothing’s nothing.  But that’s why I like the idea of exploring,” Avery said.

“Most Path Runners do.”

“Not all?”

“No.  And there are other motivations mixed in.  For example, you seem intent on running away.”

“Do I?  I wouldn’t call it intent, exactly.  I’m sure there’s some escapism or whatever.”

“Can you say that you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t partially avoiding that dinner with your father?” the Page of Suns asked.

“I- I did say I would.  It’s just such freaking bad timing.”

“I promise you, I’m hardly the type to judge or be concerned.  I only remark on it to highlight where you stand, and to see your reaction.”

“Did I pass my test?” Avery asked, partially to change the subject.

“”My’.  I like that you paid attention to the distinction of whether the test was mine or yours.  If you all have your issue, it’s that you’re so caught up in yourselves and your worldview.”

“One of the big things about realms- you asked about those.  A lot of Others and realms and stuff, they seem to come from humans, or human ideas.  I can’t think of a single time I’ve read about a major event in a realm that wasn’t started in the human world.  Even the big overturning of the Flower Courts by the Fae, the Oni Wars… they were things that reached big boiling points, sure, but from what I read, it was humans getting involved that really sparked things off.”

“It tends to be the case in most major events.  However, keep the writers of your texts in mind.”

“Practitioners.  Humans.”

“Yes.”

“Still, I think if so much of this stuff revolves around us- which like, I get your point, but I think a lot of it does?”

“It does.”

“That sort of explains why we’re so us-centric.”

“You’re right.  To answer your question, you asked if you passed your test.  I’d say you did fine.”

“Cool.”

“Then you did less fine, after that.”

Avery frowned.  “Because of my response to you bringing up my dad?”

“No.  After that.  But I wouldn’t worry.  Hazel had decades more experience than you did when she realized it.  I’m sorry for bringing her up, by the by.”

“Sorry?”

“I only do so because you know of her and I knew her, and so she’s the closest thing we have to a common acquaintance, that isn’t Miss.”

Avery nodded.  “Is she okay?”

“She is not.  And you are not.”

“Why not?”

“Because the world is complicated.  The time to build the sorts of things you wanted to build was centuries ago, when so much more of your world was new.  Your Earth has its own way of consolidating, prioritizing certain things and pushing the rest to the edges.  As a next day of defeat draws near, Crooked Rook is increasingly willing to make deals with metaphorical devils.”

“Defeat?”

“As she sees it.  You could win, somehow, and still lose, because of the price of that dealing.  Abraham Musser represents a consolidation of another sort.  If he can solidify his grasp around what he wants to claim, you’ll be pushed out.  You can’t thrive in a world under his rule.  Nor can your friends or allies.  You’d be Lost, metaphorically.”

“Yeah.  Figured that much.”

“Elsewhere, even the practice of approaching the Paths is being commodified, organized, consolidated.  Certain ideas and possibilities are pushed out.”

“Wunderkand?  The Finder Corporation the Garricks mentioned?  They came up a few times in books.  Especially modern ones.”

“Them.  I’ve met them, to ask the questions, and I’ve spent more time ruminating on the answers they gave than I have on all the rest put together.”

“Can I ask why?  Or is that protected?”

“If I told you, then I think if they ever asked about you, I’d be obliged to share.”

“I don’t think I’m on their radar.”

“The answers they gave aren’t the sort I’m looking for.  There are places I guided Hazel to, that perhaps, one day, if you ever gave the right answers, I would guide you to.  But I’d never take the people of Wunderkand that I talked to.  Perhaps one special employee who broke from the mold, but… no.”

“Hm.  I didn’t actually say yes, I want to know.”

“I didn’t need your permission to say.  I only thought you’d know this knowledge cuts both ways.  If you’re afraid of their knowledge of you being used against you, then be prepared to wield this against them.”

“I don’t want to sweat all that, or memorize this.  I just want to save people I care about, save my town.”

“Yet this is your reality.  These are forces that are closing in around you, around the Paths.  Even non-participation may mean settling into a position.  I think they could still reach the places I would have guided them to, but with the help of a force like the Queen of Ends.  Perhaps one day every Finder will need to belong to a faction.”

“The Little Wolves and the Wolf?”

“Perhaps.  I know you have limited time, in more ways than one, and in more ways than two.  So I will tell you, if you’ll turn your attention to the thread above my head?”

Avery looked up.  Sure enough, a thread stretched out over the harbor of nothingness.

“Miss is currently facing down three individuals from Wonderkand.  Perhaps she can fend for herself, but my words sparked worry in your heart.  I think you know it’s a dangerous situation.”

“Yeah,” Avery said, straightening.

“If you were to slide down this thread, it would take you to her.”

Avery gave the thread a wary look.  “Can it snap?”

“Readily.  It’s a thread.”

“And if I fall?”

“There is about a fourteen percent chance you find yourself on a Path with no easy way back, and that’s only if you’re fortunate.  There’s an eighty six percent chance you’d be Lost.  By the time you stopped drifting through nothingness and found your way back, there would be little that’s meaningful left of you.”

Avery looked back in the direction where Finn had been.  “I should go get Jude…”

“He’s found.  If you’d like, you can leave now, I’d find him and tell him.  He’s not the type I’d usually stop in and see, he’s only adjacent to someone that’s doing the unprecedented, but it would ferry things along.”

“I thought you didn’t help,” Avery said.  “Unless someone had the right answers.”

“I don’t.  You didn’t have the right answers, so this isn’t assistance.”

“This feels like another one of those riddles I read about Hazel complaining about.  Is it a trap?”

“I observe.  I have no interest in assisting or trapping you just yet.”

“It’s a test?” Avery asked.  “Is it my test?”

“A test.”

“And you said that’s important.  Whether it’s mine or not.  I should be careful about being too me-centric, or us-centric.”

“I implied such, yes.  You should, yes.  You are running out of time, Avery Kelly.

“Did Hazel do this?  Sliding down a thread, over oblivion?”

“Yes.  So have you.”

“I have?”

“You have.  Even in the last twenty-four hours.”

“I think I would’ve remembered.  Are you speaking in metaphor?”

“You’re close to being out of time.  I told you you’d be fine, as far as your deadline was concerned.  If I must now act, I’d cast you over this railing and into oblivion, onto one of those distant Paths, all the way down there, too far away to see.  Decide.”

“I think- I’ll go to my friends.  I think we can make good time if we take the dangerous route.”

“That’s fine.”

“I failed the test, didn’t I?”

“It was a small but fundamental one, to provoke thought.  I wouldn’t worry, but I would hurry.”

Avery checked with Snowdrop, then paused.  “The permission and protection from the rules?”

“You’ll be fine, but take the shortest path to leaving you can.”

Avery nodded.

She hurried off, running full-bore to where she’d left Finn.  She had to cut through the crowd, and apologized as she cut some people off.  Here and there, panels of the sidewalk did that rope-bridge jitter underfoot.

Snowdrop hung onto her shoulder, fore paws gripping shirt, back paws at her bag.

She spotted a burning building as she ran by.

Okay.  Not her first choice, but if it was the shortest, fastest route…

She found Jude and Finn.  “We go, now.”

“Was that really the Page?”

“Come on!”

They hurried.

Back to the burning house, where Lost were controlling the fire.  It might’ve been a fire that never went out.  If it wasn’t, then when the fire was extinguished, another would spring up.  Miss’s notes said it was a possibility, an exit from the Commons Thread that was always there.

She burst through the door, running inside, into the smoke.

Through the door or window of something burning.  Into dark.

She chased the darkest parts of the area, past smoke, past furniture that was licked with flame, holding her breath, the eyeliner helping to keep her vision clear.  Jude hung onto her bag, slowing her down here and there when she went from standing still and getting her bearings to sudden movement.

Into the dark.  A door moved under her hand.  She pushed, giving it all her weight, and as it opened, she faced the darkness beyond.  As black as the coastline of oblivion had been white and featureless.

The thread.  I’d used it already.

And by stepping through here, I’m doing the same dang thing.  Sliding down a single thread with terrible oblivion around me.  It’s just fancy in a way that hides what I’m really doing from me.

She hesitated.

Hold on, Miss.

She stepped through.

“And the last of the three branching options is Burning Daylight.  Seven ‘x’ marks for difficulty, but it’s fast.  Familiar with it?”

“Texting you the write-up.”  Avery put the pages on the hood of the car, then took pictures.

She waited a minute.

“Let’s not,” Jude said.

“We might have to, depending?  Because the Commons Thread gets really dangerous if you linger and the rules pile up.  Or if someone sets down some nasty rules you have to follow.”

“Sunlight is instant death!  And there are three suns in constant motion!  And hostile Lost!”

“Potentially hostile.”

“That doesn’t make it as much better as you think it is.”

The largest sun was slow to move, casting a shadow with edges so sharp they could cut.  Flowers were incinerated, the ashes burned up, and the smoke was annihilated with such intensity that a shadow of the smoke was burned into the soil.

But new shadow was created, and where it was created, grass grew, weeds sprung up and flowered, and bioluminescent nectars oozed out and dribbled down, glowing nodes bubbled up and then unfolded into mushroom shapes, and flowers took on an intense inner illumination.

The second largest sun was arcing overhead.  That forced them to time things.  Any area with an overhang was good if it was directly overhead, but if it was rising, an area with an overhang but nothing to the one side would be dangerous.  If it was setting, an area with an overhang and nothing to the other side would be just as bad.

And the last sun was small, low to the horizon, and it circled around them and the sun-bleached ruins they stood within.

Avery watched the shadows move, almost hypnotized as she tried to imprint the patterns on her mind.  It required concentration, but that concentration was broken by regular screaming, shouting, and commotion in places she couldn’t easily see.

She could have remained in the one spot where the shadows were consistent, just past the entryway they’d come through, and she could have studied these shadows for hours more, to be sure, but she couldn’t waste time.  If Miss was being bound or captured…?

It wasn’t just that she had to stand in shadow though.  There were places that looked deceptively safe, but the suns would burn everything from the knees up, most of the time.

“Going,” she said.

“Really?” Jude asked.

She nodded.

Spell cards ready, she took the path, stepping away from safety, hurrying down a slight slope with fine sand on it.  She nearly slipped, caught herself, and hurried forward, hugging a corner.

“What did you and the Page talk about?”

“Realms.  What a realm means.  The various powers taking things over.”

“Huh.”

“I think I did mostly okay, then I brought up some stuff I’d been thinking about, I might’ve given him the wrong impression.”

“He’s omniscient, I think.  I think he got exactly the right impression.”

“Pretty sure he’s ‘scient.  That’s different.”

“Huh.”

Avery stepped into a shadow that stretched out to one side, and walked with it as it slowly moved, stepping under an overhanging bit of ruined building.

“He tested me.  I failed.”

“What was the test?” Finn asked.

“I think I was in the right ballpark with the Paths,” Avery told them.  “But he asked me if I wanted to take a dangerous shortcut and I said no.  The point was I was supposed to understand all these routes we’re taking are dangerous shortcuts, basically.  I got the Paths and realms stuff okay, maybe, but wasn’t paying attention to the stuff that ties them together.”

“Huh,” Jude replied.

Avery moved forward, crossing at a diagonal, to be protected against the imminent sunrise of the medium-sized sun.

She had a perspective of two Lost who were in the shadows, just outside the ruins.  A guy with a hole through his chest and a topless girl with a hole through her head.

The sunrise caught them, and both ignited, screaming and flailing, burning alive.  Hands clawed at flesh and dragged away charred flesh while exposing red meat to the sun, which promptly boiled, turned black, and curled.  Where arms dragged against hard, baked wasteland ground, more skin sloughed off.

The shadow came much as the light had, and where it touched them, they were restored to a state very close to what they had been before.  The man sat up and examined his skin, which was faintly more tanned than it had been.  The woman, face-down, stretched, breathing hard from the writhing panic.

“Why?” Avery asked.

The man jumped.

“You’re not hostile, are you?” Avery asked.  She took three steps to the right to keep to the shadow.

“No,” the man replied.  “Why?  We wanted a tan.”

“Aren’t there better ways?” Avery asked.

“Not if you’re immortal and basically unchanging.  Have to dig deep,” the man said, leaning more and more to the side as Avery inched away, keeping to the paths prescribed by shadow.  The weeds and grasses grew up around and beneath him.

“Okay.  Well… okay.”

“I’m glad you think so,” he said, with a note of irony.

“Did a Lost woman without a face come through recently?”

“Three did!” the woman called out.  Avery couldn’t see her.

“She had black hair.”

“That narrows it down to two!”

“Mysterious?”

“Do you know how many Lost are mysterious?”

“Usually a long skirt, soft-spoken?”

“Doesn’t help much.”

“Named Miss?”

“Oh, Miss!  Never heard of her.”

“Damn it,” Avery muttered.

“But the one that came through a year ago and the one who came through yesterday both went to the same door, so yeah.”

Avery could glimpse through a narrow window at the couple.  The guy was pointing a finger.

“Thanks!”

He was partway into giving a thumbs up when the sun passed over him.  Flesh boiled, eyeballs popped and the contents sizzled on his cheeks like water on a hot frying pan.  He writhed and screamed alongside his companion.

It was good to know she was going in more or less the right direction.

She progressed until she saw another Lost, standing where the sunlight was constant.  He looked like a bipedal elephant, skin burned to charcoal black, eyes like coals.

“No,” the Lost said.

“But-”

“My spot.  Get going, unless you want a real ray of sunshine in your life.”

Avery was forced to backtrack, and her plan sort of fell to pieces.

Fuck.  She needed to help Miss.

She had spell cards, at least.

She threw some down.  Darkness-

And she watched as the darkness was utterly demolished by the sunlight.  It reached to the rune-

Her little antler, poised above her brow, dropped to the ground.  Avery quickly stooped to pick it up.

Her barometer- she checked.

It was burned at the edges, polyester fibers turned black at the outermost edges.

As she watched, that burn slowly mended.

Okay, that made things harder.

She’d be okay in a little while, but for right now…

It forced improvisation, and there was really no place or pattern that would let her take it easy or form a clear way through.

“Following!” Jude called out.  “We’ll have to share shadow if you don’t get moving.”

Miss might not be there when I get there, if I don’t get moving.

Opossum senses to the rescue again.  It wasn’t much of a rescue, but she was willing to take any edge she could get.  There was some instinctive awareness of light and dark, and the danger the light posed.

“Going ahead!” she called out.

She circled around, stepped under an overhang, and measured her next steps.  Around one partially collapsed wall, over some uneven ground, next overhang.

Light that shone in through a window became a kind of death beam sweeping the wall.  She dropped to a crouch, glad for the regular exercises she did, that she could do that, avoid the beam, then spring to her feet and hurry forward.

The woman who had been sunbathing had wrapped a towel around herself.  She was fifteen feet away, and watched Avery.  “There’s a bit of a space here, between two walls.”

“Can I trust you?” Avery asked.

“I dunno.  It just seems like one way.  You want to go where the faceless women went?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s over here.”

Avery decided to trust the woman.  She hurried across, spotted the space, about a foot and a half wide, between two walls.  Some bricks had fallen between them, making it shaky footing, and the weeds and grass had grown waist high.

She waited for one cycle, moving slowly toward the wall, watching.

It wasn’t perfect.  The medium-sized sun moved overhead, and scoured away the weeds.  Avery hurried after, before the weeds could grow up.

But as soon as she approached, she realized the inherent danger.  The space between was rarely touched by sun, but the walls were.  They were oven hot.

She pushed forward, twisting her body so she wouldn’t touch any surface.  Her bag dragged, and she could smell the material of the bag smouldering.

“Sun’s coming overhead in a bit,” the woman said.

“I know!”

“I’d hurry.”

She hurried.  The weeds tangled at her feet, catching on the tops of her shoes as they grew.

“You mortals are so funny.”

“Glad to amuse.  It’s better than being treated like that elephant guy.”

“He’s an asshole,” the woman replied.  “Here.  There’s a window, but if I stand here…”

Avery escaped to an overhang before the sun passed overhead, then skipped forward, nearly bumping into the woman as she moved to a window.

The woman moved up to the windowsill, sitting there, leaning to one side, with her arm helping to block the light.  Avery went past her-

And two different suns shone through.  The woman screamed, everything from shoulder blades to butt burning where the suns touched.

Avery continued forward, crossing the room.  Light slipped past the woman’s arm as flesh was charred down to bone, and touched Avery’s backpack, making it ignite.  She hurried to put it out, stopping, dropping, and rolling.

The woman in the window fell as well, and landed in more sunlight, writhing and screaming as she burned.

But she’d bought Avery a tiny amount of cover to slip by.

“Thank you so much.  Is there anything I can give you, anything-?”

The shadow touched the woman, who sat up, smoke still rising off her skin.  “Hm?  I didn’t have eardrums, did you say something?”

“Can I pay you back somehow?”

“Do you have water, by any chance?”

Avery hurried to get water from her bag.  “You okay, Snow?”

Snowdrop gave her an affirmative response.

Avery tossed the woman a full thermos of water.

“Ooh, chilly.  Lovely.”

“Could you maybe help my buddy and his cousin?”

“Of course.  Can they give me water too?” the woman asked, unscrewing the cap.  “It’s just so bothersome to keep track of, and evaporates if you leave it anywhere.”

“I think they could.  Jude!  I’m going ahead!  Catch up!  I think this Lost woman is legit, so give her water!”

“Okay!”

Avery hurried to the doorway.  It was ajar, and a cat’s eyes peered out of the weeds that grew around the base of the doorframe.

“And like, three seconds in the Watched Way.  Not even a full dash.”

“That’s a fairly common and known Path.”

“Thousands of crows or cats or whatever peering at you.  Lots of riddles and puzzles.  Have to figure out the right door, all while being stared at,” Avery noted.  “Four ‘x’ marks or difficulty, but that’s apparently only if you stay.”

“Some people lose their minds.  It requires some crazy concentration,” Jude reported.  “What route are you taking that it’s only a half dash?”

Avery kept her eyes carefully focused on the ground ten feet ahead of her.  Every eye movement had to be deliberate.

Children Kerry’s age were gathered everywhere.  Sitting on rooftops, sitting on lawns, standing on lawns, sitting on fences, sitting on swingsets without swinging.  All of them were pitch black, like cut-outs, and all had eyes like moons in a night sky, perfectly round.  Their heads were the heads of deer, with immature horns.

“Coming up behind you,” Jude reported.

“Okay,” Avery replied.

“I hate rats,” Jude muttered.

“Deer, for me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.  Um.  Okay.  Is Finn okay?”

“He escaped out, pulled the rope.  Panicked when the shadows got a little narrower than he expected.”

“I can’t have your family internal politics mucking things up when I’m doing something important, Jude.”

“I get that.  It’s not like I chose it.”

“Relay it?  Not just to your parents, but the other parents, whoever?”

“Yeah.”

“I really got to get where I’m going,” Avery said.  “I think… I’m going to take a door.”

“There’s about two hundred and fifty doors down here.  Getting from the Watched Way back to reality means dodging a few hundred cases of eye contact, figuring out the details and the hints, finding key components, and then identifying the right property.  That only gets you the ability to approach the Lost at the end of the Watched Way.”

There was, all the way down at the end of the Way, a deer sitting on the apex of a roof.  The others had given it space.  The way this worked, Avery would approach and the closer she got, the bigger it would seem.

It wasn’t easy or fast.

“But if I take another route… most wrong answers that meet the criteria will send me to the Stuck-In Place.”

“I guess what I’m saying is, it’d be kind of fucked up if we came all this way, you guessed, and you guessed the right location,” Jude said.

In which case she’d be sent hurtling back to Earth, with prizes, a boon, and… no way to help Miss.

“If I do, can you take another door, and do what you can for her?  At least get some info?”

“Yeah.  Sure.”

Jude being there gave her the courage to press forward.  She spoke her thoughts aloud.  “Have to take a door that would get you Lost, normally, except it has something brown near it.  And it has to be within a few steps of separation of the Stuck-In Place.  This is one.”

“Surprisingly little brown nearby.”

“Yeah,” Avery agreed.  Gardens had rich black soil.  Things were dark, and gray, and ominous.  Lost peered out from behind curtains.

Lost crossed the street behind her.

Her nerves were already tense, she was tired, she was still hurt from the Falling Oak Avenue.  This place made it worse.  Being stared at and scrutinized by hundreds of eyes made it worse.

She found one.  A wooden garden gnome.  Brown.  She went to the door.

The deer on the rooftop down the road was three times as big as it should be, and it had the eyes of a Wolf.

She pushed the door open, and she stepped through.

The building was unlit, with rooms all down the left side, and windows all down the right.  But ferris wheels with bright white lights all around them sat there on the horizon, past near-black grass and growths that covered the plain between the horizon and the building.  They shed a light that illuminated everything within the building in a soft way.  The walls were plastered in papers and pamphlets, fliers, and notices, to the point it was a quarter-inch thick.

There was an old man, because of course there was.  He held an umbrella and wore a blue silk suit with a dark blue pattern embossed onto it.  His mustache and beard were carefully cultivated.

With him was a woman, twenty or so, built like a linebacker, wearing a fine, frilly shirt that exploded into ruffles at the collar and sleeves, with an ankle-length dress that frilled up at the bottom, held in place with suspenders that made it very clear her bra was an old fashioned, cone-shaped type- the suspenders themselves stretched as taut as bowstrings, in straight lines that went to the furthest point of the hard bra to belt.  Her hair was fancy, her expression perpetually unimpressed.

And a little boy in an old fashioned sailor outfit, complete with beret-style hat, kerchief-style collar, and little shorts.  He looked even less impressed with everything.

They had Miss cornered.  A yellow ribbon tied her wrist to a doorknob, and her neck to a ceiling light.  Her head hung, hair hiding her face.  She was barely moving, and barely reacted to Avery’s approach.

“A visitor,” the little boy said.  “Handle it.”

The woman with the suspenders stepped forward.

“Avery Kelly, Path Runner.  This is Snowdrop.”

“Veal.  You don’t need my first name,” the woman replied.

“Can I carry on through?”

“Can you?” the woman asked.

“I know the answer to some of the puzzles,” Avery replied.  She wanted to look at Miss and get some signal that what she was doing was right or wrong.  “I would like to rescue my friend there.”

Snowdrop recognized Jude as he came in through the door.  He moved up to stand behind Avery.

“A Garrick,” the old man said.  “Large family, smaller impact.  We’ve seen them around.”

“Yes.  I knew your grandfather,” the boy said.

“Yes,” Jude replied.  “I think I’ve heard of you, sir.  Nice to meet you.”

“Don’t be so sure,” the little boy said.  “I could say you’re a friend to her, but she’s being uncooperative with us, so you’re the enemy of my enemy?”

“I don’t think she’s an enemy,” Avery told him.  “Most people would be uncooperative if you had a leash on their neck.”

“Do you still want me to handle them, sir?” Veal asked.

“We’ll see,” the boy replied.  “She won’t give us information.  I can ask thrice but it’s a slow squeeze.  I’m not sure I care that much.  I’ll make you an offer.  You have younger siblings, Garrick?”

“Why?”

“I’ve got a Lost item.  A crown.  It lets me play with ages, and exchange them around.  If you know of any children younger than I currently am, who could be made to oblige, we can have them be eleven years old and have me take their current age.  I get a few more years.”

Avery glanced at Jude.

The boy paced.  “And for every year of difference I get, that’s one year I give you, of reprieve.  And after that reprieve is spent, if your family hasn’t made nice and assured me I’ve earned more than anything I would have discovered here, you either give me another, same deal going forward, or…”

“Or?” Jude asked.

“I meant to leave it to interpretation.  Let’s just say that if it comes to that, your grandfather would have been very disappointed about what happened to his family in the end.”

“I’m not really the focus here.  I don’t know that Lost.”

“Who’s your friend?” the boy asked.  “Avery Kelly?”

Avery nodded.  “Independent.”

“Not all that independent if you care what happens to her.”

Jude leaned in close, and murmured to Avery, “Can I puff you up?  Might get bad attention, could help.”

Avery thought about it, then nodded.

“Avery’s the kind of practitioner you guys probably want on your team, later on,” Jude said.  “Talented, good with Lost.”

“There are an awful lot of assumptions in what you just said,” the old man told Jude.

“Sure.  Even if you don’t get her on your team, I think you want her around figuring stuff out, doing her thing, just because she’s the type who’ll probably figure out something big.  Don’t, um…”

“Crush her?” the boy asked.

“Yeah.”

“Seems you might be biased.  You have a crush on this girl, Jude?”

“Uh… yeah.  Massive, stupid, never-going-to-go-anywhere crush.”

Avery frowned a little looking over at Jude.  He shrugged.

“Bias, no wonder you seem to think the sun shines out her ass,” the boy said.

“It’s not that.  It’s because of how much ass she kicks that it’s hard to let it go.  I’m pretty sure the Page of Suns paid her a visit earlier today.”

Miss stirred a bit at that.

“Did he?” the boy asked, eyebrows raising.

“Either the Page or some Other with a very, very good disguise.  Pretty sure it was the Page,” Avery replied, keeping her voice level.

“Why?”

“He wanted to ask me questions about realms, the configuration of things.  I think he thinks I was close to figuring something out.”

“Something big?”

Avery shrugged.

“I feel like you didn’t answer my question,” the boy told her.  “Why?”

“Because I’m about to participate in something big.  And it’s either going to be big and attention-grabbing, or it’ll be an unmitigated disaster with a lot of really horrible consequences.  I don’t know which, but I am doing this.”

“What if we took it over?”

“It would almost definitely be a disaster with consequences.  Ones that would make you look bad, hurt you, hurt business,” Avery replied.

“You sound pretty sure.”

“It’s too tied into personal stuff.  Demesnes, people, specific Others.  Goodwill with her, for example.  I think you’d really have to force things to get that, after tying her up.  You’d also probably end up on the wrong side of a good third to a half of the practitioners in central Canada- to ballpark, anyway.  I don’t know the actual numbers.”

“Are you on the wrong side of a third to a half of the practitioners in central Canada?” the boy asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Hm.  So our only choice is supposed to be to let you carry on?”

“That’d be great for me.  You could also hurt her, kill me, ruin everything.  But that seems boring.”

“Hm,” the boy said, rubbing his chin.  “Are you going to win?”

“Probably not.  But it’ll be really cool if we pull this off and do get past that ‘probably not’.”

“Cool is one way to put it,” Jude said.

“You know what this is?” the boy asked.

“I’m sworn to secrecy.”

“And are you?” the boy asked Avery.

“No, but I won’t reveal it in advance unless I absolutely have to.  If you force me to say through torture or whatever, then you’ll be involved, the consequences could touch you.”

I’ll make them touch you.

“I don’t torture.  Or compel with mind control,” the boy said.

“Okay, that doesn’t change my stance.”

“I am curious now.  I suppose I should let you carry on, investigate later?”

“I’m betting a lot of people will be able to tell you stuff after,” Jude said.

“Shall we make an appointment?  I’ll release your Other, let you carry on, no further interference, but any time, six months to ten years from now, I’ll pay a visit, you explain, you show me.”

“There was a time a major Practitioner set a deadline like that for my town and he kind of didn’t survive it,” Avery replied, thinking of Alexander.

“I’m not him.”

“No.  Still.”

The boy smiled.  “I’m getting the impression you’ve found a kind of audacity in the fact you’re standing in the midst of a number of bombs going off, so to say.”

“That is astoundingly accurate,” Jude remarked.

The boy gestured.  The old man motioned a hand, and the cords tying Miss released her, then became threads in the air, forming into two rings on the man’s wizened hand.

“I’m Milton.  You can consider that a first or last name, it doesn’t matter,” the boy said.  “Most call me sir.  Vice head of northeastern relations.  I will not forget you exist, Avery Kelly.  We should talk another time, if you haven’t been blown up by one of those errant, metaphorical bombs.  Don’t worry, I won’t interfere in your business, so there’s no need for the threats.”

“Okay.”

“Visit sometime, instead, take the initiative yourself, I will be much friendlier.  I should be available whenever.  Most of us don’t sleep, there’s a path we run to do away with that.  The only other reason I’d be away is if I was doing one of these nonsense little procedures.  The company head has everyone, regardless of status, run a certain number of paths each quarter.”

“My family does the same,” Jude replied.

“Christofferse, Veal?  Come.  We explored, found out enough to fill out some pages of paperwork.  Let’s leave Avery Kelly to it, and I can look forward to her showing up at my office sometime in the next few years, to engage me in idle conversation where she’ll be a little more forthcoming than she was here?”

He made it a question, giving a pointed look to Avery.

“After things calm down?  Keeping in mind they aren’t usually very calm?” Avery asked.

“If you wish.  But if time passes and you cross my mind, and I feel even a glimmer of annoyance that it’s been oh so many years, and you can’t justify why you haven’t come?  You may never run a path again.  That isn’t up to me, it’s essential policy.  I have others to answer to.”

Avery drew in a deep breath, then sighed, before nodding.

“If you can’t figure out how to find me, you shouldn’t be running Paths to begin with.”

The boy walked by.  Avery stepped aside for the large woman and the jaunty old man with the umbrella.

They went through the door Avery and Jude had come from.

“Did they hurt you?” Avery asked Miss.

Miss knelt on the floor.

“No.  He told the truth.  He doesn’t torture or control.  But I loathe being bound, even with cord.”

“That’s fair, Avery said, quiet.  “I’m sorry.”

Jude gripped Avery’s upper arm, moving back.

The Ballerina in Blue stepped out of one of the rooms that punctuated the hallway.

“You had a plan?”

“It was not an especially good one.  There would have been follow-up, if she’d acted.  They would investigate.  There’s a good chance they would have found whatever is going to tie this place to Kennet.  If she’d succeeded.  Not that this outcome is necessarily better.  There may be consequences, years down the line.”

“Years feel like lifetimes, right now.”

“You’re not wrong.”  Miss climbed to her feet, her back to Avery.  “You met the Page of Suns?”

“Yeah.  He met you too, apparently.”

“He did.”

Miss touched brickwork that was exposed, where the stapled-on or nailed-on notices and papers had come away, taking paint with them.  Bricks moved.  A set combination.

She opened windows as she walked down the hallway.

“I thought you would be talking to your father,” Miss remarked.

“There’s still time, I think.”

“It’s mid-afternoon, the day after I began,” Miss said.

“Okay, well, that’s tight, but doable.”

“We’ll do what we must here, then you can go.”

“Sure.”

She pulled some fliers off the wall, uncovering papers she’d hidden there.  The runework on the papers glowed.  It was the one end of the ritual, that was meant to launch her from here.  Initiating it had been what had brought the wheel into Kennet’s sky.

“Are things prepared and waiting?”

“You’ll need to secure things.  Your relationship to your father, or any lack thereof, it matters as far as the security of your self and your ability to protect Kennet when I see to the Founding.”

“Right, yeah.”

“And the ritual itself.  The diagram must be there, prepared.”

“Yeah.”

Birds entered the corridor through the windows Miss had opened.  There was a collection of white fireflies at the end of the hall, and the birds wasted little time in seeking them out.

One door had been left closed, and the bird collided with it, dropping its prize.  Miss bent down and picked up the ‘firefly’ that it had caught.  Hidden in the midst of the swarm was one that did not fit the rest.  It was a diamond that had a way of catching the light.  Miss bent down beside it, then stood, and when she moved on, the diamond wasn’t there anymore.

“I wonder if I could get my girlfriend to wear suspenders, ever,” Avery mused aloud.

Jude snorted.

“Oh, sorry, is that weird, is that-?”

“What?  No.  The crush thing?  No.  I’m a guy, I get a crush on girls I do a half hour of group work with.  Hormones are dumb.  Ignore it.  I only brought it up because I figured lying to the guy would be worse than the embarrassment.”

“Sure, okay.”

“Can I be in the room when you ask your girlfriend to wear suspenders?  I’m really curious how that would play out.”

“I don’t think you can, Jude, no.”

Jude snorted a short laugh again.

Avery watched Miss walking down the hallway, and the smile fell off her face.

Is this okay? she wondered.

Miss apparently pushed it into the keyhole, then pushed the door at the end of the hall open.

The room they entered was a large one, with a domed ceiling that gave a view of the sky, like stained glass but no stain, just decoratively arranged iron framing panels of glass.

Avery took in the space, looking around- there were tables, chairs, maybe a space cleared for a dance to happen, but there was nobody.  It looked like ten different kinds of care had been taken to make this place really special and then it had been abandoned.

She wondered if it was the kind of place that would have flaked away from the Paths.

“It makes me think of the Kennet Arena,” Avery remarked.  She startled a bit as the Ballerina in Blue shut the door behind them.  “Only there’s no rink, nothing in the middle except open space.  But there’s that bar, kind of like the concessions stand.  Glass windows… and a feeling to it.”

“Yes.  I had the very same thought,” Miss remarked.  She set pages down.  “These pages would do to get me started, but if you could draw something larger?”

“There are details to tweak, too.  The mundane items, twelve sets, I could mark them out.  Make the way clear.”

“If you will.  And if it doesn’t interfere too much with the timing with your father?”

Avery nodded.

“I’ll help,” Jude told her.  “If we have to, if you need to go, you go, I’ll stay.  I’ll sort things out as best I can.  I spent a few days cramming on this stuff so we could help Verona with her toothpicks and bubble gum, I should be able to work this out.”

“You’re a really good guy, Jude.”

Avery set to drawing out the diagram in large scale, and once she’d done half, she let Jude cover the other half, and put down the marks around the edge, for the twelve groups of mundane items.

Snowdrop sorted out bringing water, snacks, and tools, and, most importantly, kept the company of a very somber Miss, who sat facing the windows, the Blue Ballerina beside her.

“Are you excited?  Do you not want to do this?” Avery asked.

“I want to and I’m terrified,” Miss said, without turning around, hands in her lap where Avery couldn’t see.  Avery imagined those hands clenching together, if they even existed.

Avery finished penning down the twelfth marker of the mundane items.  Chalk on the floor.  Hers.  Then she straightened, watching as it picked up the ambient light, almost shining white with the way it cut through the gloom.

Snowdrop had noticed something, and Avery noticed through her.  Avery looked past the two women and the opossum girl in her little decorated military jacket, past the large glass window with its wrought iron decoration, and past the field of black crops.

The ferris wheels were no longer ferris wheels, but moons, sitting embedded on the horizon.  Both wept blood, and it was a startling shock of color when everything else was either white, dark blue, or black.

“I’m assuming the sky in Kennet just got a lot more interesting, huh?” Avery asked.

“Yes,” Miss replied.  “Your assumption is right.  You should go.  Tend to what you can, be prepared.  I’ll arrive shortly after Matthew completes his ritual.  Things will only get more complicated from here.”

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