walls. Much too quiet for a Saturday night, but with finals over the neighborhood around campus was a ghost town. Even her neighbors had vanished—she hadn’t heard the thump of their bass through the walls in days.
“Have you called him?” Alex sat beside her and slid a steaming mug across the table. Books and notes and graduate catalogues buried the nicked Ikea veneer, the carnage of another semester past. Only one more until her Master’s and still no plans after that. Maybe that was a good enough reason for falling out of touch with Blake, but it certainly didn’t feel that way now.
“And emailed. No one answers.” She stared at the cup, at the leaves drifting dark as silt in amber fluid. No symbols to read in their eddy and swirl, no visions in the chamomile fumes.
“You think something’s happened,” Alex said, not a question. He never dismissed her dreams or hunches or magical thinking outright, but his eyes tightened whenever she mentioned them.
Liz lifted her cup, but her hands shook and hot tea slopped over her fingers. As she blew on her scalded knuckles, the unhappy chill in her stomach crystallized into something sharp and certain.
“I do. Something’s wrong. I haven’t heard from him since October.”
She turned toward the wall beside the table, where framed photographs lined the worn white plaster. Her gaze settled on one of the newest, the three of them on Halloween two years ago—Liz as Alice in a starched apron and witch boots, Blake the Mad Hatter in a red leather straitjacket. Alex had dyed his hair orange and black but resisted all her pleas to be the White Rabbit.
“Something’s wrong,” she said again. “I need to find out what happened. I have to go.”
“To Vancouver?” Alex’s eyebrows shot toward his hairline. “In December?”
The skepticism in his voice woke all her own doubts. The money, the time—where would she go when she got there? What if Blake didn’t want to see her?
“What if it’s a false alarm?” Alex said, taking up where her secondguessing left off. “A new phone number and he forgot to tell you?”
“I need to know,” she whispered, to Alex and herself. “Whatever it is, I need to know.”
She didn’t look at another photograph. Another Halloween, years before. Three Alices in that one, blonde and brunette and ravendark, all their cheeks soft with adolescence. Liz on one end, Alis Park on the other, and Alice Ransom between them. Alice, whom Liz hadn’t been able to help. Alice, whose drowned voice still whispered to her in the dark.
Her neck ached with the effort of not looking at the dead girl’s shy smiling face. Instead she lifted her mug and took a determined swallow, exhaling steam from burning lips. “I have to go.”
Alex stared at her for a long moment, thin mouth turned down at the corners, eyes blind and unreadable behind a glaze of light. Finally he sighed and lifted one long hand in a shrug. “It’s been a while since I had a vacation.”
She swallowed. Her throat had gone dry despite the tea. “You mean—”
“That I won’t let you fly across the continent chasing another man by yourself?” He smiled wryly. “Yes. If you want me to come, that is.”
“Of course I do.” She reached out to catch his hand, a quick pressure of fingers. “Let’s start packing.”
2
Terminal City
RAE FLEW.
Thermals swelled, ruffling black wings. The city sprawled below, a web of glass and steel and concrete, softened along the edges with green, bounded by black water, and all of that enfolded soft and safe by layered clouds. Between those clouds the sun sank toward the sea, trailing veils of color—violet-grey and salmon and sticky marmalade orange. The cracks in the world that let the light in.
Above the clouds the stars burned. The stars called her and she flew higher, shredding vapor with every wing-stroke. East, where Taurus snorted and heaved himself over the horizon. Her blood itched, driving her farther, faster, closer to the blazing stars, where the Hyades sang wild cradle songs to their wild god. The god who waited for her in the heart of the Bull’s eye.
Faster, farther, higher than she’d ever flown before, but her wings weren’t meant for the icy void between the stars, for the solar winds that gusted around her. Pinions cracked, wax melted, and she fell screaming, a flurry of black feathers blinding her as she tumbled down.
Back into the prison of her flesh.
Rae moaned, her face buried in a mattress that stank of