Authors: Anne Nesbet
“He’s hurting the ground,” said the ghost of Sayra in a small voice at Linny’s elbow. The transparent silk blossom, which had tucked itself into Sayra’s equally transparent hair, fluttered a little, as if it had had a fright.
“Stop that!”
said Linny again to that awful man, and something in her was getting so mad that she couldn’t help it; she took a great risk. She let go of Sayra’s half-transparent arm and ran across the springy turf of that bluff toward the Tinkerman and his needles and the machine made of copper wires and tubing that he was now fetching out of the depths of his backpack.
She hadn’t decided whether to grab the machine or try to shove him onto the ground, and in the millisecond before she made up her mind, Mr. Vix jumped out of the way and bounded a few yards closer to the edge of the bluff, bending slightly again, to pound another of his little stakes into the ground.
Under his breath ran a singsong hum: “Runs downhill! Runs downhill! And even the hills will be made Plain!”
“It’s burning,” said a whisper from where Sayra was
still crouching, a few yards behind Linny’s back.
The ground was indeed smoking slightly, from each of the places where he had planted a stake. And the smell of the smoke was sour and bitter, both at once, as if someone had sliced rancid almonds very thin and was letting them burn. He had pounded in his last stake. He stood there, fastening the last wires to the strange machine in his hand.
“Now we’ll see!” he said. “Water conducts! Water conducts! When this hits the ocean, the circuit will close!”
“I won’t let you,” said Linny, slowly inching her way closer to the Tinkerman. She didn’t like the smoke seeping out of the ground, all of those places where the man’s needle stakes had pierced it. “Mina said . . . too dangerous . . . the universe . . . the soap bubble . . . it might all go
po
—”
But the Tinkerman didn’t wait for Linny to finish her thought or her sentence. He just turned his back to her and, with a great heaving throw, lobbed the machine right over the cliff. It arced up into the sky—almost lazily, at first, as if it were considering sprouting wings and spending the rest of its life in the air—and then plunged out of sight beyond the bluff, down toward the roiling, complicated sea.
F
or a moment no one moved. The Tinkerman’s thin wire hissed across the grass as the machine fell (the cliff must be taller than it looked), and the little puncture wounds where the stakes went into the turf of Away continued to send up their small tendrils of smoke, and everything and everyone was listening for the distant slap of a metal sphere, that might or might not bring the end of the world, hitting rocks or sand or the rolling surface of the sea.
Then the Half-Cat yowled and flung itself at the old man’s back. He had been watching his spherical machine plummet toward the water, and to get a good look he had gotten very close—
very
close—to the true edge of the cliff.
“Hey!” said Arthur Vix, his hands going all windmillish as he struggled to keep his balance in the place where the bluff came to its abrupt green end.
And then, as if the air or the sea had simply reached up and grabbed him, Arthur Vix slipped right over the edge, with the Half-Cat still clinging to him, and he was gone.
Gone!
The ghost of Sayra made a scared little sound.
But that whimper was drowned out by a dreadful commotion rising up from the sea—that awful machine must have finally reached the water—and the needles stuck into the ground twitched in response.
That was when Linny got her mind back, or some percentage of it. She dove to the ground, close to the edge of the bluff, and yanked out the nearest of those strange smoking needle stakes, but just as she did so a brilliant, sparkling, burning, dreadful brightness came up over the edge of the cliff, running along the wire, right toward her hand.
“Linny!” said the half-transparent Sayra.
Linny hardly had enough time even to brace herself before the strange fire was engulfing her hand.
It hurt like the dickens.
It hurt a lot.
It
hurt
.
But it wasn’t just pain. It also felt very odd. The hugeness of the ocean, the complexity of everything in Away, the wrinkledness of this part of the world—all of that was flooding into or over Linny.
It tickled at least as much as it hurt, and it made her gasp, and almost as soon as it broke over her, she felt she couldn’t stand it, not one second more. But she hung on anyway.
The world had become very large, and Linny felt almost as large as the world.
Even though the wire was narrow, a whole ocean’s worth of story and magic and complexity was coming along it, sucked up as if by a very thirsty straw, freed to—what was it the Tinkerman had kept saying? “Flow downhill.”
And only Linny blocked it: Linny, standing there with the little spike burning in her hand. Linny, with tears of pain and amazement rolling down her cheeks, because the essence of Away was wrinkling through her, trying to get past her, and she could only stand there and hold on, like the flimsiest dam of leaves and twigs she and Sayra used to make together in the woods above Lourka. She held on and said no.
If she did not hold on, all of Away’s complicated magic would flow down this wire, flow right down into the Plain, and be used as power, to unmake the wrinkled places of the world.
Away fed itself through that wire and burned her hand trying to push itself through, and Linny stood her ground as well as she could. It was hopeless, of course. It was like trying to hold an ocean back with her arms.
But in that long, hopeless moment, she caught a glimpse of what a wrinkled world really meant: every drop of what passed for water in that ocean, every blade of grass growing on that bluff, every inch of Away, was itself a universe, and contained universes. If you squinted at those drops of water properly, you saw that all the stories of the world were here, all the stories and all the songs.
Even the Voices were part of that richness, stories within stories—Linny saw that now, in this moment when she could see all the wrinkled sides of everything.
But it was too much. The world was spinning and her ears were ringing and black fireworks were going off before her eyes—
And then there was a sudden zip of a sound, and the wire went slack, and Linny, all that pressure released, found herself rolling across the bumpy, cool, grass-scented ground. For a moment she couldn’t see anything, and then the world began to form itself in front of her eyes.
Somewhere nearby, someone gasped.
“You’re hurt!” said that voice, an echo of Sayra’s real voice, quite close to Linny’s ear. And kind fingers (like the echo of real fingers) brushed across Linny’s arm.
“What happened?” said Linny. She felt like she had just fallen out of a tree.
“Oh, Linny, you’re hurt,” said the ghost, the echo, of Sayra. “Your poor hand.”
Her hand? One hand was pressed at an awkward angle into the ground. The other one she couldn’t feel at all.
“I think you closed the window,” said that voice. An echo, an echo, but an echo that could talk! “How did you even do that?”
Linny forced her eyes open. The ghost of Sayra was looking down at her, a pale and worried face that shifted suddenly, when Linny blinked, into the echo of a grin. For the tiniest moment, Linny let herself think they were back in the hills above Lourka, back in the familiar woods, and falling out of familiar trees. Then she heard the sound of waves crashing not so far away, and saw the sky shining through Sayra’s still-transparent shoulder, and she remembered where she was.
“What window?” she said, beginning to scramble back to her feet. And then: “Ow!”
Her right hand.
It had been numb until she tried to open it, and then it hurt so much she squeaked. She caught a glimpse of a dark slash across her palm, and then her hand was squeezing itself shut again against the pain.
“The wire burned you,” said the ghost of Sayra. “You stopped the fire. But that window in the sky you all came through—it’s gone.”
She waved a transparent hand over Linny’s shoulder, pointing away from the edge of the bluff.
Linny turned to look and saw . . . nothing.
There was no shimmering anymore of any invisible edge. The grass of the bluff went on back and back, under the strange trees.
She took a few steps toward where that edge, that window, had been, and the bizarre thing was, she felt no tugs in her, no whisper of direction anywhere. And for a moment, that made her feel dizzy and disoriented. They were truly stuck in Away, then.
And she had no idea at all which way might lead home.
She looked at the ghost of Sayra, which was watching her with those unreadable, ocean-filled eyes.
“Oh, Sayra,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I wanted so much to save you. I went all the way to the Plain Sea, at the other end of the world, looking for the medicines that would cure you—”
She was so unbelievably sorry. It was her fault Sayra had been taken off to Away, and she had tried so hard to make it right, and it had all come to nothing anyway, and she was sorry to the bone about all of it.
“I waited and waited,” said the ghost of Sayra.
“And you came back!”
Linny looked at her again. It was the tone of voice that threw her for a moment. She was so miserable herself that she half expected Sayra, who was the one who had had to suffer all this lonely unraveling, to sound miserable, too. So it caught Linny by surprise, here at the end of hope
and the end of the world, to hear that thrum of
joy
rising up under each one of Sayra’s words.
“You did! You came back!” said half-transparent Sayra, and something more human than ocean smiled out of her green, green eyes.
It’s not always what happens that is the most important thing. Sometimes it’s how you tell the story.
“Sayra—” said Linny in wonder. Something enormous had just shifted a little in her. Something defeated and bitter and hard had cracked and was beginning to crumble away.
And at that very moment, there came a crushed, charming racket from the bluff nearest them, and the most bedraggled Half-Cat ever in the universe hauled itself over the edge of the cliff. Its fur managed to look both singed and dripping wet (smoking and steaming, both at once). All in all the Half-Cat looked very much as you would expect a cat to look, that had gone flying over the edge of a cliff. But it limped up to Linny with its tail held gracefully high, and at Linny’s feet it paused to make some gagging, retching sounds until it spat up a mass of little shards of metal.
The Half-Cat must have bitten through the old man’s awful wire. If Linny had had to hold on much longer, the whole of her would probably have been as burned and blackened as her poor hand.
Linny looked at it and felt that enormous shift continuing to happen in her. In her, and in all the world.
“You fell off the cliff!” she said to the Half-Cat. “I thought you must be squashed or drowned.”
“Only eight lives left,” said the ghost of Sayra, and she actually laughed.
“Not nearly that many,” said Linny. “That Tinkerman did some terrible things to this cat.”
“Six, then,” said the ghost of Sayra, and she scratched it kindly with one of her transparent hands. The Half-Cat let her do it, too.
I’m stuck in Away with a Half-Cat and a half Sayra,
thought Linny, looking up and down the bluff as she did so. It was so odd, not knowing which way to go. That part of her was muffled, or gone, or blind.
“Well,” she said to the ghost of Sayra. “I guess we better get moving, if we’re ever going to find our way home.”
The ghost of Sayra smiled willingly and took the lightest of steps forward, but the wind came swooping in to catch her and float her right away. Linny grabbed that transparent arm in the nick of time.
“I’ll have to carry you,” said Linny. She could see she was going to have to be selfish about this. And stubborn. Because one thing was clear—sorry, ocean!—she was not letting Sayra go.
The ghost of your best friend in the world turns out to
weigh almost nothing. Linny cradled the half-transparent Sayra as easily in her arms as if she were made of air and light, which perhaps she sort of was, and the ghost of Sayra tucked her head cozily against Linny’s shoulder, not minding too much, apparently, about the ocean.
“Tell me a story,” said Sayra drowsily. “How you went all that way . . . down to the Plain—”
“Because it was my turn to save you. Don’t you remember? That wolf you fought off! Then the snake bit you—my turn—and then I fell right out of the tree. And you carried me all the way home from the woods. How’d you even do that? So, my turn now.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” said Sayra, shifting her nonweight in Linny’s arms. “I sewed you that wolf once.”
“Look,” said Linny, and she balanced the ghost of Sayra in the crook of her right arm for a moment, so she could fish around in her pocket with her unwounded hand. The birthday sash was there where it had been all along, a little battered, perhaps, but you could still read the pictures there: wolf, snake, tree.
“Oh, but that tree looks like a cabbage on a stick!” said Sayra. “I remember now. And I worked so hard on the wolf. The legs of the wolf. It’s not right. It’s not quite right.”
“It’s perfect,” said Linny.
The ghost of Sayra turned the sash over and over in
her hands, and then she reached up and tied it with her nimble, fragile fingers around Linny’s head, so she could see the embroidered pictures on it even while resting against Linny’s shoulder there.
“Then what happened?” she said.
So Linny walked along the bluffs, holding Sayra in her arms, while she told the whole story, how she went down into the Plain and to the other end of the world to look for medicine for Sayra, and the Tinkerman had swallowed the antidote . . .
“But I waited and you came back to me,” added Sayra, with a sleepy smile, “and then . . .”
And then the Half-Cat had gone over the cliff but somehow climbed back up to them again.