Furthermore(72)

“Let’s go,” he said. And in an act of great determination, he pulled himself to his feet.

Alice slung his bag over his shoulder, his heavy arm over her shoulder, and allowed Oliver to lean against her much-smaller frame. And though at any other time this might have seemed impossible, their weights didn’t matter now; they were both adrenaline from head to foot, and moving on instinct.

Still, Alice felt like it took forever to reach the front door. In her mind their every slow movement brought Paramint closer, and every sudden sound meant Paramint was around the corner, waiting to pounce. In fact, Alice was so focused on outrunning Paramint that it hadn’t even occurred to her where they’d go to outrun him; not until they reached the door, and Oliver said,

“Where now, Alice?”

But she didn’t know.

She was in a real panic. She looked left, looked right: They were surrounded on all sides by the busy bodies making up the land of Left, and there was no other place to go, no other person to trust. Eggshell homes had been strung from nearly every branch as far as she could see, and there was no doubt in her mind that if they tried to hide here, they would too easily be found. For a moment Alice even considered turning everything black again—after all, it had worked on the foxes—but they were not on flat land, which made everything more dangerous. Alice and Oliver would be running across a series of treetops—it would be too dangerous to run blindly; one misstep and they’d plummet to their deaths.

But maybe—

Maybe they stayed put. Maybe they stayed here and bided their time, played nice with Paramint until they formed a real plan—until Oliver was feeling better and could persuade them to have someone else for dinner. Maybe they’d be able to think more clearly in a couple of hours. After all, Paramint wanted to plan a feast. They wouldn’t be eaten in the next five minutes.

Maybe Alice had gotten ahead of herself; she was too anxious and panicked; she was sure that was it. In fact, now she was sure they would do better to stay. Racing around with no rational plan couldn’t help them at all, she thought. So she exhaled a deep breath and glanced back at the eggshell home, ready to tell Oliver her new idea.

Except that when she glanced back, there stood Paramint, hovering just to the side of his own front door, smiling at her in a way that she no longer trusted. He carried in one hand a very large linen sack. And, in the other, a very large butcher knife.

Something inside of Alice screamed, but she didn’t say a word.

Paramint’s eyes were locked on to hers, and when he next spoke, his voice was suddenly too high, too happy, all wrong. “Where are you going, your honorableness?”

At any other time, they might’ve been able to dash past Paramint and head back from whence they came, but Oliver could barely stand, much less sprint. Alice scanned the forest floor for options and found little solace in the thousand-foot fall below them. Oliver had said that falling in Furthermore was too anticlimactic to be deadly, but Alice felt certain that this drop would be an exception. After all, if it were safe to fall so far, why was the seamstress pushed off the branch?

All these thoughts rushed through Alice’s mind in only a snip of a second, but this last question reminded Alice of something she’d nearly forgotten. It was something Ancilly had said—something she sang.

I fell into the sky one day

And it didn’t hurt at all

I fell into the sky one day

But I didn’t fall at all

Was it possible? Was Ancilly trying to tell her how to escape?

Well, Alice had no idea, but trusting Ancilly was her only option at the moment, as Paramint was still holding a butcher knife within slicing distance. Alice was out of options and fully tapped of time but she’d not yet lost her hope. So she took a deep breath and whispered,

“Fall, Oliver, fall.”

And they did.





She and Oliver clung to each other as they fell, and in her mind Alice was already apologizing to him for being the reason he died. Alice was half hope, half horror, split vertically down the middle about her chances at survival. She wanted to believe there was merit to Ancilly’s song, but how could she? She was currently plummeting to her death. Worse still, this didn’t feel anything like flying. This felt like dying. Though at least this death, Alice thought, would be a less brutal one. Alice had no interest in being eaten.

So there they were: falling to their deaths.

Neither one of them screamed (as it seemed to serve no purpose), and all Alice saw were Oliver’s eyes, wide and scared and sad, so she closed her own, wrapped her single arm more tightly around his, and prayed for a quick, relatively painless exit from these worlds. But no matter how dramatic they tried to make the moment—muscles tensed, whispering quiet good-byes to the ones they loved—their imminent demise was running a bit late.

Eventually Alice opened her eyes and found that Oliver had, too. They were indeed still falling, and there was indeed a ground coming up beneath them, but something strange was happening, too: The farther they fell, the slower the fall, and soon they weren’t rushing to the ground at all, but floating; floating, gently and steadily, all the way down.

They landed on the forest floor with their feet flat on the ground. She and Oliver were so surprised to still be alive that they spent the first few moments just staring at each other.

“Are you alright?” Alice finally said. Oliver was standing on his own now, and he looked wide awake. “Are you feeling okay?”