The Edge of Everything (The Edge of Everything #1)(93)

Zoe’s father got to his feet. He was sobbing, but he must have known Zoe wouldn’t listen to another word.

He scrambled into the woods without looking back. The trees quaked and shed some snow, then settled once more.



X had felt no joy when Zoe said she would make a life with him, for he knew how unlikely it was. He had let her father go free, so the lords would almost certainly haul him back to the Lowlands. He suspected Dervish was lurking in the forest even now. He could picture him gouging the bark of a tree with his nails, barely able to contain his glee.

X listened. He waited. He looked to Zoe and Ripper, and saw that they were waiting, too. But everything was silent. There was nothing but the sound of their breathing and the tiny puffs of smoke it made, like steam from a train.

He stooped to collect his clothes, and began pulling them on.

No one spoke, for fear it would unleash something. Their eyes scanned the blackening woods.

Nothing.

Maybe the lords wouldn’t come? Maybe Regent had convinced them that X had been punished enough? With each moment that passed, X became more and more convinced that it was possible. He was still in the grip of the Trembling. He was still feverish, still dizzy. His body was not his own. But Zoe had nursed him before, and he felt sure that if he could just lay his head against her—if he could just feel her cool breath settling over him—they could defeat the Trembling forever. Her father would be free. So would X. The lords would not own him any longer.

But then the buzzing began. They all heard it. It was faint but insistent. It sounded like a blackfly circling closer and closer.

X whirled toward it.

It was coming from Zoe.

She searched her pockets. It was her phone.

It was only her phone!

Zoe and Ripper stared down to read what was written there. Their faces looked eerie in the screen’s yellow light.

X was about to look away when Zoe gasped.

The noise hit him like a punch.

She seemed unable to speak, so Ripper spoke for her.

“The lords are striking,” she said.

X had known Ripper virtually his whole life. He had seen her fight and curse and flirt and sing. He had seen her tear out her fingernails and beg to be beaten. He had literally seen her in hell—but he’d never seen her afraid.

She was afraid now.

X wheeled around. The sky, the woods, the lake—they all spun before his eyes. But he found nothing to fear. The world was empty. He was certain of it.

“I see no threat,” he said.

Zoe held out her phone, as if he could read it.

Her palm was shaking.

“I d-don’t think they’re coming after us,” she said haltingly. “I th-think they’re going after Jonah.”





twenty-two


X and Ripper dove into holes in the ice. Zoe had begged them to take her with them but they left her standing on the lake—she would only have slowed them down.

They rushed toward Jonah through water, then earth, then water again as they joined the stream that ran behind the Bissells’ house. X was a powerful swimmer. Ripper matched him stroke for stroke. Her hair had come loose. X could see it fanning out under the water—floating above her for a moment, then sinking down again. He didn’t know what they’d find at Zoe’s house, but he was glad to have Ripper with him. He felt there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. Nor he for her. As they neared the surface, light began to leak down and glint off her dress. She shimmered like an iridescent fish.

The cold water gummed up their muscles. It felt nearly solid. It seemed not to want to let them through. X had promised Zoe three things: that he would save Jonah, that neither he nor her mother would ever discover that her father was still alive, and that he himself would return to her one more time. But X felt no certainty now. He pictured Jonah in his room, surrounded by figurines of animals and elves. He pictured him on his ladybug bed, hugging Spock and Uhura to his chest, and trying to gentle them down with that quavering voice that seemed to run in the family: D-don’t be scared, guys. Because—because I’m n-not scared.

As X and Ripper reached the pocket of air beneath the ice, their lungs were bursting. He nodded to her. Together they raised their fists and punched through the translucent ceiling. Ice fell into their eyes. It rained down around them in splinters.

Ripper climbed out of the river first, her hair flat against her skull, her dress twisted and wrinkled as tissue paper. She helped X out of the water. The moon was already up.

For a moment, they stood shivering and stamping. X felt a presence behind them. It seemed enormous. It was breathing and pulsing—and watching them. He wished with his whole being that he didn’t have to turn. But he did.

A hundred lords stood in a chain around Zoe’s house.

The house itself was so thickly coated with ice that X could hardly make out the windows, the roof, the doors. The land around it was ravaged and scarred. Trees had been pulled out of the ground and hurled like sticks. What was more, everything was frozen and glittering so that there was an awful beauty to the devastation: it was a wasteland strung with diamonds. The willow where Jonah had buried the Ninja Dad T-shirt lay on its side, broken and contorted as if its neck had been snapped.

The lords glowered at X and Ripper across the upturned earth. They seemed to be daring them to step forward and engage. Their silky garments—purple and green and yellow and red—were sickeningly vivid against the desolation of the hill. Their golden bands shone in the moonlight.