Authors: Anne Nesbet
And ruin things,
thought Linny, finishing that sentence for her.
“The funny bit is,” said Mina, with an unreadable
expression in her eyes and the corners of her clever, clever mouth, “that although I had made such huge strides in this project before they imprisoned me here, my progress since then has been very, very, very slow.”
She guided Linny through a door. And through another door. Her words were easy and relaxed, but her movements were exceedingly awake, alert, and quick.
“Would an antidote to magic, to hillsickness, help my friend in Away?”
“I think it might,” said Mina. They were in another great huge room now, filled with shelves. “
If only
it existed.
If only
I had somehow managed to secret away a single dose of it, before it became clear what the Surveyors had in mind for its use.”
She was ushering Linny down one of the aisles now. Linny opened her mouth to ask another question, but Mina shook her head in warning and put a finger to her lips: “hush hush.” Then she reached her hand up, up to one of the higher shelves.
“Because my brain has become very fuzzy,” she said. “Since they put the shackle on my ankle. And since I heard about those plans to unwrinkle the wrinkled places. I have found chemistry very hard to focus on. It’s sad, isn’t it? After my sister, Irika, chemistry was what I used to love most in the world.”
In her hands was a crystal-glass vial with a stopper.
In it, several grains of some green powder. There was a label on that vial that said only
ADD THREE DROPS WATER FROM PLAIN SEA.
Mina took Linny’s hand and curled her fingers around the vial. Then she wrapped both her own warm hands around Linny’s, and there was such courage and affection in her hands and her voice that Linny almost couldn’t stand it.
“They come all the time, demanding and shouting,” Mina said. “But what can I do? I work all day, and then something happens, I drop something, I spill something, so every day it is as if I must start over. They will never have their antidote, I’m quite sure. Indeed, I have a feeling that today all my remaining notes will be accidentally destroyed. And the apparatus, too. Too bad.”
There were voices being raised in some other part of that building.
“Apparently it’s time for you to go,” said Mina. She had already hustled the two of them over to another one of those outside doors. “I won’t see my Irika again, I guess. But I have seen her daughter, and that is a wonderful thing. You must kiss your mother for me, when you find her again. Oh, and about the Plain Sea—”
The door was open; the wind came and sputtered in their faces.
“We can’t even get near it. It does something odd to
our brains. But you, like your mother, seem to have a knack for getting to places others can’t reach.
Even so,
don’t let the water touch you. Use this—”
It was a long, curved glass dropper.
There was more noise from the other side of the building.
“Go, go, go,” said Linny’s Auntie Mina. “I will do my best to distract them. I haven’t done much with my life, perhaps, but I have gotten lots and lots of practice in delaying Surveyors.”
She bent forward and kissed Linny on her wild and messy hair, and then gave her a gentle shove out the door.
Linny looked back at her, something strong and warm bubbling up in her.
“Auntie Mina!” she said. She was looking for the right words. She had never wanted to find the right words so badly as she did right now.
“Time to run away very fast,” said her aunt, with a last quick smile, and she stepped back in through that door.
“Auntie Mina, you’re, I think, you must be a—”
The door swung shut.
So the right word came a little too late that time, but maybe that didn’t matter.
The right word, by the way, was:
“Hero.”
T
he Half-Cat was waiting for her behind the back wall.
“We’ve got to hurry now, sorry,” Linny said to it.
There was a siren blaring; she didn’t care much for that sound. It probably meant the Surveyors had found out she had been there and then gone. In another second, they would surely come spilling out of all possible doors.
Before they could nab her, she had to get to the Plain Sea, where the water for Sayra’s antidote was waiting.
So she ran.
For the first fifteen minutes or so, she ran with her mind full of fretfulness about what might be happening back at the research hub, and whether her Auntie Mina could really distract and delay a bunch of Surveyors. But the world was growing quieter and quieter all around her, until even the sound of her breathing began to seem like an intrusion, and she slowed her pace to a quieter lope.
On either side of her stretched a great plain of yellow grass, rippling in the breeze. She was on a path forward, through that endless yellow field, and there were no hills or trees or houses anywhere. Once or twice she had to stop and shake her head, because the sameness of everything made a person’s head a little dizzy.
Dizzy was not the same as frightened or upset! She felt, in fact, strangely calm, for someone the Surveyors were after. But none of that mattered much, out here.
She thought nothing would break the beautiful monotony of that yellow grass, but then something caught her eye, down the path ahead of her—a pole or a toothpick (since distances were so hard to judge) sticking out of the endless yellow. She walked toward it for fifteen minutes, watching it grow taller, and when she arrived at the thing itself, she saw it was a simple sign, stuck on a pole.
AREA CLOSED. USE EXTREME CAUTION AT ALL TIMES.
The Half-Cat meowed, which was a strange sound in that quiet place, and sat itself down at the foot of the sign.
Caution,
thought Linny, without tasting anything particular in the word. It went floating, simply, through her head and moved on.
The Half-Cat didn’t follow, but that was all right, too. It meowed again, already from distinctly farther away.
The world was flattening out. She quite liked the feeling, actually. It was restful. The yellow grass sighed a little
as the breeze brushed through it, and somewhere ahead was another faint roar of a noise, and her feet walked forward, step after step after step.
Eventually she noticed that the yellow grass was thinning out. She could see the sandy soil it somehow grew in. And after another very long time, the sound her feet made on the path had softened to the faintest
swish swish swish
, because the path was made of sand, sand was all around her, and ahead, where the sand seemed to darken a little and grow glassy, was the sea.
That must be why the cat had stayed behind. Cats, she remembered vaguely, did not care for things like lakes or puddles.
She looked to her right and her left, and again it was all more or less the same, everything she could see. Wonderfully peaceful, truly. A step later, her feet tripped on something, but even that little jolt didn’t bother her much. Her hand reached down and picked up the thing her toes had stumbled over, and she saw it was a bone, but again her mind registered the fact without alarm.
The sand was beautifully flat, and the sea came rolling in, and it, too, was flat and lovely. And every now and then the sand was dotted with bones, which would become part of the sand in time.
She sat down to watch the water come in. It licked its way up the sand, in arcs and curves and parabolas, and
then it shrank back into itself. And it did that again and again and again.
She could sit there forever and not be tired of it . . . the water moving in, the water moving out. The plain sand and the plain air and the Plain Sea.
Some quite long stretch of time had passed before she remembered that a Plain Sea used to mean something important to her. Maybe not so important that you would have to do something about it, but still, important. Her mind felt cluttered with those thoughts in it. She preferred not to have a cluttered head, so she pushed them away, but that mental effort woke her up a little more, and she looked down at the long, narrow curve of glass in her hand and remembered it was a dropper.
For collecting drops.
Her mind thought about drops for a while, about the curve and roundness of them, about the equations you might make up to describe them, all of which in turn reminded her of the push and pull of the lovely sea.
It was not until somewhat later that she looked down and saw the crystal vial in her other hand.
She thought about how much nicer the little bottle would be if it were empty, if she just dumped those green grains into the sand. In fact, she had gotten as far as pulling the top out of the vial when something stopped her. It might have been the greenness of the grains, which would
have been jarring, maybe, against the pure yellow sand.
Whatever it was, she stood there quite awhile, with the glass dropper curving forward from one hand, and the almost empty vial in the other.
She was supposed to put water in the bottle, but she couldn’t remember why. She looked at it and looked at the sea, stared at each of them for a very long time.
And then, to her own surprise, she found herself standing up and walking forward, to the place where the sea lapped at the sand, and she leaned forward with her long curved dropper and squeezed water into it, and then put three drops of that Plainest water into the crystal vial.
One.
Two.
Three.
The little green grains fizzed and bubbled when the Plain water hit them. The fizzing turned them into a teaspoon’s worth of liquid, as green as spring leaves.
It was as she was pushing the rubber stopper so snugly back into the vial that the watery edge of the Plain Sea washed right up over the toes of her shoes and for a while cleared her thoughts utterly away. She had been too active for this quiet place, poking at the sea with the long curve of glass. She stood watching the water come forward and recede, come forward and recede, lapping at the sand and her toes and the patient, quiet heaps of bones.
The light around her (on the sand, the sea, and the bones) changed color. She did sort of notice that. But nothing had to be done or could be done about that changing light.
She stood there and was empty and free and plain.
If you waited long enough, time would become as flat and plain a thing as the yellow fields or the sand or the sea, going on and on forever without end. And this was that endless moment for her. She had reached the end of the world.
Everything has an end, even worlds. Ends. Everything has ends.
That reminded her of something:
“Yarn’s like life—two ends and a tangled middle.”
A tremor ran through her. Someone used to laugh and say that, when the yarn got away from her. Who was that? When was that?
Someone who was also, she seemed to remember, at an end of the world, also fading, because worlds, like tangles—like lives—have two ends, as anyone knows.
After that long, long moment of ending, she was beginning to see things again—the water at her feet, the vial in her hand, the liquid in it shining leaf green, like something she couldn’t remember, something she really wanted to remember—oh, that was it.
Like Sayra’s eyes.
She took a great gasping breath and stepped back out of reach of the water.
Then something stung her on the back of the neck. And again.
Someone was apparently throwing pebbles at her.
And calling her name.
“Linny! Linny! Come away from there.”
Although this wasn’t a place where she could feel angry, she did feel mildly bothered. The plainness and quiet had been so perfect, before the pebbles and the shouting! She turned around to see what was going on and saw an extremely bedraggled, grubby, dirty, unhappy face looking at her from the top of a rolling dune. A familiar face! If she had a little more time, she might even have been able to come up with a name to go with it.
“Quick,” said that person. “Quick, hurry, come away from here.”
He had a cat in his arms. Linny was pretty sure she had seen both of them before, the cat and the person.
“Darn it, Linny!” said the irritating person. “Didn’t you even notice what was lying there all around you? Look!”
A hand shook something in front of her eyes.
Sand falling from grubby fingers, and clenched in those fingers, a bone.
A bone. Was that bad?
For the first time in a very long while, she felt a twinge of unease.
“Bones all over! Cursed place!” said—
Wait! The grubby person had a name!
“It’s
Elias
!” said Linny, and in remembering his name, she also remembered her own. She remembered a lot of things, all at once. Her mind snapped back from plainness and became all wrinkled and complicated again. “But you drowned! Or exploded!”
“
Almost
drowned and
sort of
exploded,” said Elias. He seemed almost proud of it. “I remember being in the water and that magician’s awful ma pulling at my jacket. I guess it came off at some point. I don’t know. I don’t remember anything else until I washed up on the river’s bank, way down this way. Then that cat of yours showed up, so I knew you must be nearby. Come on! Don’t stand there! We have to get away—it had you trapped, until I rescued you.”
“Rescue me! You did not,” said Linny. It was almost like old times, arguing with Elias. “I had just remembered Sayra, all on my own. I got the antidote, see?”
She waved the little bottle before his nose.
They were walking away from the sea now, step after step. It was becoming almost normal to be walking again, though she was sorry to leave the quiet curve of the water slipping up the sand and back again.
How miraculous that Elias was actually here.
“I thought you were dead,” she said, a little shyly.
“Nope. But
you
soon would have been, if I hadn’t been
there to pitch pebbles at you. That’s a deadly, horrible place, that beach. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Did you see all those bones everywhere? Ugh. People go there, and they
die
.”