A Long Day in Lychford (Lychford #3)(13)

“Does it have to be here?” said Lizzie, about digging under the slide, aware that if anyone saw her she’d have some serious explaining, or rather lying, to do to the town council. At least she was getting her steps in today.

“I’m not responsible for where the cardinal points are. I just did my best to get these within twenty feet.” Judith had done the same trick with the bags at three sites now, and now she embarked on it one last time. Lizzie seriously wondered if it would kill her.

Finally, she dropped the last bag into the hole and they filled it in. The light this time flashed up, connected with the other beacons, and from this angle they could now see they were inside a barely perceptible dome, which faded. But Lizzie could still feel the slight sense of added safety its continuing presence imparted.

Judith sat down on the grass. “Right,” she said. “Now we can . . . can find those . . .”

“Let us do it,” said Autumn.

Judith was silent for a long moment, her eyes closed. Lizzie hoped she’d say something comforting, but when she finally spoke, it was as bitter as before. “You’ve done enough.”

“Do we know if anything’s got through?”

Judith opened her eyes and started to push herself up. “It will have. Maybe a few things, at random, shunted here like Rory Holt and the lorry driver and the rave were shunted elsewhere, or maybe loads of ’em, deliberately, if they were waiting ready to seize their chance.”

“Refugees coming over the border,” said Autumn. And now her voice was as hard as Judith’s had been.

Judith finally looked at her. “It’s not a bloody metaphor,” she said. “Everything isn’t about you.”

She’d hauled herself to her feet and set off before Autumn could find a reply. Lizzie put a hand on Autumn’s arm. The look on her face was a battle between anger and absolute guilt. “Just let me try to fix it,” Autumn whispered. “Please. She has to let me try.”

*

As the three of them marched down the river toward the route to the woods, Autumn kept looking at Judith. She kept waiting for the old woman to say that Autumn was no longer her apprentice, that after the lack of care she’d shown, she wasn’t worthy. Autumn would have welcomed that. She would have got angry at it too, she couldn’t help but react like that, but . . . oh God, when was Judith going to say it?

What would Lizzie be thinking now, if she’d been the one who’d done this? Would she be seeking judgment? Would her guilt be so extreme? How much had the town Autumn had grown up in made the feeling seep into her skin that, being the only black person here, anything abnormal might be her fault? But no. The thought that she’d allowed this to happen because of how this place had treated her . . . that was a luxury she couldn’t allow herself. Not if she wanted to retain her mental health. That was what other people liked to think of people like her. She wanted to take responsibility. She would find a way.

And yet, that whole circle of awful thoughts was something that would never even have occurred to Lizzie.

They entered the woods, and after a while came to the signpost that marked the point where some routes seen only by those such as them headed off in directions that could never be recorded on any map. It felt . . . different now. Judith sniffed the air. “Borders have moved here too,” she said. “Right, so, we have at least one thing that’s continuously leaking across the boundaries.”

“What?” asked Lizzie.

“That bloody music.” And yeah, there it was, still. “So that’s the first thing we can work with. Try to figure out where it’s coming from.”

The three of them looked around, and managed, between them, to triangulate a direction for the varying beats. They set off that way, through the woods. “Time might be different where they are,” said Autumn, remembering her own experience of journeying to fairy. “They’d have shut down the music and gone home by now otherwise.”

No reply from Judith. It was as if she hadn’t spoken.

After a while, they came to a halt as they all realised, just about at the same time, that the direction the sound was coming from had suddenly shifted, moved to somewhere behind them.

“It’s like in a video game,” said Lizzie, “when you’re right on top of the marker you’re trying to find, and it kind of slides away around you.”

“I dunno what that means,” said Judith, “but now I see what’s gone on. The . . . rave, is it? It’s caught in what we call a knot, a little loop of border stuff that she made when she went crashing through them.”

“I think you should start using Autumn’s name again,” said Lizzie.

Judith ignored her. “There’ll be different knots all over the place. The ends knit when they’re thrown together, so they form little bubble worlds. I saw it once before, when I were younger. In . . .” She paused for a long moment, and a frown crossed her face. “Don’t remember. Don’t matter. Where was I? Oh ah. The rave might be in one, the lorry driver in another, Rory Holt in another.”

“Do we know how many of them there are?” asked Lizzie.

“Dunno. Could be half a dozen, could be thousands. What worries me most is, are those people alone in there? These aren’t just bits cut off from this world. She made the borders fly about, get mixed up and connected to each other, so there’ll be bits of the other worlds in there too. There might be stuff that’s got into the wrong places, dark things we’ve been trying to keep out, but have fallen into the knots.”