Betwixt (48 page)

They’d bought fluorescent orange paint to keep out whoever might be poking around, but when Morgan dipped her brush in, she
stopped and looked up, the flashlight’s reflection lighting up Moth’s clean-shaven face.

“Do we just write ‘Keep Out’ or what?”

Moth looked at her hard. He had just gotten used to trusting the girl again. He walked over and dipped his own brush in the
can.

“No, that won’t be enough. We need something that will last. Something everyone can understand — even if they don’t speak
English. A symbol.”

“An X?” Morgan shrugged. She wanted to get out. She remembered too much.

“Something like that,” he whispered, and once more stepped
over to the concrete wall. He traced a large X, a mirror of what Morgan would soon wear on her wrist, dipping his brush again
in the canister to encircle it. Then he drew a line through the X’s center so that the lines formed six pieces of pie. He
daubed a slash in the wedge on the right and the left, and one on the bottom, till it became a more defined sketch of the
universal symbol of Don’t go in there, Don’t touch this, Stay the hell away.

Morgan held her brush up as if to start but stopped, the bristles curving against the wall. A drop of orange began its slow
descent and her eyes followed it.

“Where do you think he is?” she said softly.

“He’ll come back,” Moth replied, though his voice did not sound certain.

“Just fill those in,” he said, kindlier this time, and Morgan did, working carefully, as she always did, to not go over the
lines.

E
VERYWHERE HE LOOKED
, the only thing he could see was water. Ocean blue-gray and misty at its brim, or slick as oil, or coming at him in dark
swells twenty, thirty feet high. They crashed over the edge of the boat he was on; if it was a boat, though the creaking black
hull and the clanking made it sound like one, and the weaving and bobbing on the skin of the sea made it feel like one, and
in the salt tang of the wind he could smell one. There
did not seem to be a captain, and Nix himself was the boat’s only crew. He did not know where he was heading, only that it
was somewhere, for the boat was moving, and he on it. What felt like days passed … or were those months? Or years? Sometimes
the sun came out and turned everything a brilliant, jewel-like blue. He did not eat; he drank the rainwater that collected
in tiny puddles on the deck, reflecting the sky. He looked at the stars at night and they seemed to look back at him. He waited
for he knew not what. Every day he woke to the line of the horizon encircling him and looked for land.

H
OW DO YOU END A FAIRY TALE THAT HAS NO ENDING
?

In a house at the edge of a forest in Southeast, a girl eats pancakes with her brother. She doesn’t sleepwalk anymore, and
they don’t talk about what happened in the tunnels, though some late summer nights, when the moon is out and the sky is black,
she hears a whispering.
Morgana.

Another girl plays Scrabble with her father and mother and brother on a firefly-lit front porch, just outside of Chicago.
She loves the fireflies, though their color reminds her of them. She knows she will go back once fall arrives, but for now,
everything can wait.

A father and his daughter sit on their terrace in the Portland
hills at noon: she in a string bikini, he in tattered cargo shorts. They listen to music and sip ice teas. The daughter reads
a magazine and doesn’t speak about the fluttering inside of her. Her father doesn’t ask.

A man who used to be called James waits.

And somewhere on a sea, a sea like none he’s ever seen, on a boat with no captain at the edge of the world, a young man is
sailing north, home.

To Cindy Eagan (wow!) and your contagiously energetic team at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers — Phoebe Sorkin, Kate
Sullivan, Connie Hsu, Kerry Johnson, Christine Cuccio, Tracy Shaw, Gail Doobinin, and Elizabeth Eulberg — sincerest thanks.
I am proud to be in your company. To Richard Abate, Kate Lee, Dale Peck, Calvin Baker, and James Gregorio, gratitude going
on three years. Ausgeseichnet! to Raphael Hartmann for being my first reader, and tausend danke to Jana Fay Ragsdale for her
PDX knowledge and intrinsically cool ways. For my sisters, especially Lauren, who spun out the mystery, and to K.B.M., who
inspired its contours. Thank you, Danny and Elizabeth, for your Buffy-derived wisdom, Susan Muñoz for title wizardry, and
grazie Davie G., for all those French fries at Westville … Thomas, for your suspension of disbelief, muscular optimism (!),
and for making breakfast.

This book is dedicated to my father, Kirk Brayton Smith, who introduced me to Oz.