The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(88)
It was green leather stamped in gold. PASSPORT, it said across the top, and Hinterland. In between, a flower like the one on my arm. I held it gingerly, like it might evaporate, and opened it. There was a flurry of stamps inside, some with dates that made sense, and some that didn’t. The stamps were of doors, mostly, but one was a ship, one a train, another a stylized boot. The place-names were unfamiliar, so odd they slipped from my mind before I could understand them.
I smiled wider than I had in weeks. “More doors. You found them.”
“Not by myself,” Janet said modestly. “There was some mixing of refugee groups near the end. Some of them knew a few tricks I didn’t—more than you’d think relies on having the right paperwork.”
“Near the end? Of what?”
She tugged the passport from my grip and slipped it back into her purse, tucked the purse away. “Well. Things haven’t been so up to snuff in the Hinterland these days. I’m afraid we started a bit of a trend. One broken story begets another—you weren’t the only doomed princess to want a happier end.”
“Wait. I was doomed? What was my end supposed to be? I never knew.”
“I think it’s best if you keep not knowing, don’t you? Wouldn’t want to make any self-fulfilling prophecies. Anyway, the place doesn’t run the same without those stories ticking away. Things are getting a little … fuzzy.”
“I nearly fell through a thin place,” Ingrid put in.
“Right,” Janet said. “She was knee deep in the ground, nothing but black and stars under her feet, and the damned story kept trying to weave her out of the world. But we got her out all right, didn’t we?”
Ingrid made a face like it wasn’t that all right.
“Finch—did he come back with you?”
Janet’s face went soft. “He didn’t. That boy has other worlds to explore. We’re not always born to the right one, are we?”
I didn’t know how badly I wanted to see him again till I learned, one more time, I never would.
“I don’t know who I am without it,” I said impulsively. I said it like an ugly secret.
“Without the Hinterland? You weren’t back in it so long, were you?”
“Without the ice.”
“Ah. Well, you aren’t the first ex-Story to feel that way. It’s like half of you got sucked out with a straw, isn’t it?”
It was. It was exactly like that. “What should I do?” I asked desperately.
She touched my cheek, then wrote something down for me on the back of a napkin. An address, a date, a time.
That was how I ended up in a nag champa–scented psychic’s parlor on Thirty-Sixth Street. The psychic wasn’t in—she didn’t start work till noon, and it was ten a.m. on a Sunday—but the room was half-filled with people who had singular faces. Cruel features, or lovely ones, delicately drawn. More than one of us had feral Manson eyes, rosered lips, chapped mouths bitten till they were bloody. I estimated two-thirds of the room wore nicotine patches, and nearly everyone had ink on whatever skin was visible. Tattoos of remembrance, bits of Hinterland flora or the outline of a dagger or a teardrop or a cup. Or a door.
And all of us had something empty in our eyes. Something eager to be filled. There were some fully human refugees there who’d lived in the Hinterland too long to know what to do with themselves back on Earth, but most of us were ex-Story. When their world fell apart—our world—they came here.
Every week, the Hinterland’s refugees gathered in the psychic’s parlor to talk. Drink coffee. Settle grievances. It was a last stop before prison or an institution for lots of them. The violent ones, the Briar Kings, were already gone. Faded into the crowd, burying themselves where they could do the most damage, or dead. When a world dies, it doesn’t go with a whimper. I felt like an outsider there, too, but then we all did. I’d sat at enough misfit lunch tables in my life to know the feeling. We were each our own island, gathered together into one messed-up archipelago.
I stocked oats and pecans and lucuma powder at the co-op, and tried to stay in my own bed the whole night. I read books that helped pave over the chinks and canyons in my memory, and let Ella comb henna through my hair. On Sundays I drank bad coffee and listened to the refugees’ stories, and they started to fill me up. My memories became denser. I was building a scaffolding out of them to hang a real life on.
With a girl whose fairy tale had been so dark I didn’t see how she could be anything less than a sociopath, I made a pact: we’d go to school. Her for the first time, me again. By then the group had someone at work forging documents for anyone who needed them. My friend became Sophia Snow, a fairy-tale name I tried to talk her out of. I went with Alice Proserpine, and moved my birthday two years up. I wanted to be seventeen on the record.
The doors to the Hinterland were closed, the world winked out. The ice was out of me. The Spinner’s world had set Finch loose, too. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I pictured him journeying through starry spaces and dusty doors, strange universes he could sift through like coffee beans.
Sometimes after those restless nights, I wake up early in the morning, woozy with dark dreams. I check my reflection in the mirror. I slide on sunglasses before Ella wakes up, and I go walking. I drink scalding tea and ride the ferry and breathe hard into my hands. When I come home again, my eyes are brown, and faultless, and you could almost, almost say they look like my mother’s. Ella Proserpine’s.