The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(29)

“Are they your best friends?” said Jonah.

X considered this.

“Yes,” he said. “If I can claim any friends at all.”

He hadn’t meant it to sound self-pitying, but he noticed that Zoe frowned at the words, then came to sit next to him in the snow.

Zoe and her mother watched as the Lowlands came to life. When the cells were filled with “residents,” X told Jonah they required five or ten more figurines.

“To play the role of the guards,” he explained, before correcting himself and referring to them as “the helpers.”

Jonah asked him to describe the helpers. “So I can get a mental picture,” he said. X said that they were fat and simple-minded, more often than not—and that they had waxy skin and bulbous noses, and were highly pungent.

Jonah asked what “pungent” meant. Zoe spoke up and said, “They like puns,” which seemed to satisfy him.

X asked what sort of figures Jonah would suggest for the helpers, and Jonah scrunched his eyebrows down and made his thinking-cap face.

“What about orcs and dwarves?” he said.

X asked to see representatives of each species. Jonah pulled a few from the basket, and held them out to X, their ugly bodies lying on their backs on the chubby starfish of his palm.

“Well chosen,” said X. They placed the motley guards in a row atop the wall. “Now,” he continued, “we shall need a river and a tree.”

“I have a tree!” said Jonah. “It’s Pooh’s honey tree. I don’t play with it anymore. Obviously.”

He plucked it from the basket and handed it to X, who regarded it with a smile.

“This is a far lovelier tree than the one in the Lowlands,” he said. “Yet for our purposes it is perfect.”

He set it carefully on the plain, covering its base with snow so it wouldn’t topple, and then he and Jonah began discussing what might pass for a river. They were stumped, and were about to dig a long, snaking ditch through the plain when Zoe unwound the blue scarf from her neck and offered it up. X bowed his head in thanks—she thought he did it in jest, but he did not—and arranged the scarf so that it curved along the ground.

When X announced that their model was nearly complete, Jonah made a confused face and raised his hand, as if he were in school.

“Where does the devil live?” he asked.

X faltered.

“It’s said that some Higher Power rules the Lowlands,” he said. “Yet I have never seen evidence of such a presence, nor have I heard the same tale told about him twice.”

So X told Jonah about the lords. He’d delayed describing them because he didn’t know how to disguise how terrifying they were. In the end, he simply said that they were angry beasts, and that he and Jonah must use the fiercest of figurines to represent them.

Jonah’s hand shot up once more, his fingers wiggling excitedly.

“T. rexes?” he said.

Soon a half dozen dinosaurs were stationed in the miniature Lowlands. A few were raging on the plain, jaws agape, teeth flashing. Others were scaling the great wall and reaching into the cells.

“The lords are the ones who sent you here?” said Zoe.

“They are, indeed,” said X. “They put Stan’s name into my blood like a poison, along with the powers I needed to capture him. My powers are only a fraction of their own, however, and they will strip me of them when I return to the Lowlands.”

“What if you never return?” said Zoe. “What if you stay in our world?”

Hadn’t he told her already? Didn’t she understand how he endangered them every moment he lingered in the Overworld? Why was she so reluctant to believe him?

“I suspect,” he said, “that they would obliterate everything—and everyone—you ever loved.”



Building the Lowlands, even out of snow and toys, put X into such a grave mood that once it was finished he could hardly stand to look at it. Jonah continued to play. X was touched to see that he freed the prisoners from their cells and locked the lords and guards in instead.

Zoe’s mother seemed as troubled as X. She took her daughter’s arm and steered her around to the front of the house, not knowing how keen X’s hearing was.

“He’s cute—I get it—but I want him out,” he heard the mother say.

The words, though wrapped in wind, were so clear that she might have been standing in front of him.

“I’ll give him another day to make sure he’s recovered,” she added. “That’s it.”

“You want to send him back there?” said Zoe. She sounded as if she’d been struck. “Now that you know he’s innocent? Now that you’ve seen what the Lowlands are like?”

“Yes, it has T. rexes, I know,” her mother said.

“You think he’s lying?” said Zoe. “You didn’t see what Jonah and I saw on the lake.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what I believe,” her mother said. “But last night—when I woke up at two in the morning in a sweat—it occurred to me that the best-case scenario is that he’s a delusional psychopath. I mean, that’s what I’m rooting for.”

In the distance, X could hear a car—a truck, from the sound of it—shifting gears as it plodded up the mountain. He’d been so comfortably ensconced in the Bissells’ home that he had forgotten there was anyone else in the world. The reminder was unsettling.