the energy necessary to sustain this sort of output. I had to hope that it was something else. I had to hope that I was actually getting through to her.
“I’ve never told you that before, but it’s been true for years. I love you. I’m in love with you. I want to wake up next to you. I want to watch you do math—you’re so cute when you’re doing math. I want you to tell me how soothing my brain is. So please, you have to stop this. You have to let us help you. Please, Sarah. Please don’t leave me again. I only just got you back. I can’t lose you yet.”
Artie . . .
For a moment—just a moment—her mental tone sounded less distant and clinical, and more like the Sarah I loved. Then her eyes flashed again.
We’re part of a different equation. You can’t lose me. You never had me. I can’t do this here.
And she stepped through the rift in the air.
Things began to happen very quickly. Annie, who had been close enough to reach out for Sarah—I saw the glint of an anti-telepathy charm in her outstretched palm and realized what her plan had been—stumbled under the combined weight of James and the sudden absence of her target. The air was thick and thin at the same time, making both movement and breathing difficult. And Annie, who was off-balance and probably faintly hypoxic, fell into the rift, dragging James with her.
I didn’t hesitate. Hesitation is one of my great skills. I overthink everything. But in that moment, I threw caution aside and dove through the thickening air, into the rift, following my cousin and her pet sorcerer and the cuckoo I loved into the glittering, light-lined darkness.
I hope this isn’t how I die, I thought, and blacked out.
Twenty-three
“Human morality is only absolute because the humans won the war to see who would be the dominant species of this planet. We live by the moral and ethical standards of a species whose dominion is built on bones.”
—Martin Baker
Sprawled in the middle of the street in an unfamiliar city, because that’s fun
—TIE? ARTIE, CAN YOU hear me?”
So I wasn’t dead. That was nice to know. Not that dead people can’t yell—Aunt Mary yells plenty when she thinks her living relatives are doing stupid shit that could land us in the afterlife before she’s ready for us—but dead people aren’t usually that interested in whether or not I can hear them. Sort of like telepaths, dead people get their meaning across regardless of how many senses are functional at any given time.
I wasn’t dead, and I was lying on something that managed to be uncomfortably hard and uncomfortably jagged at the exact same time. What felt like a rock was digging into my hip, and I was pretty sure there was gravel under my back. It sort of hurt. I opened my eyes, staring up into a chalk-colored early morning sky. It was that bleached bone-white that sometimes accompanies the very beginning of dawn, streaked with bands of cirrus clouds. The moon was still visible, hanging low and pinkish-red on the horizon.
Then Annie leaned into my field of vision, eclipsing everything else.
“Ack,” I said, with all the coherence I could muster.
“You hit your head when we came out of the rift,” said Annie, reaching down to offer me a hand up. “I recommend against doing that again.”
“Okay, um, what the actual fuck?” I took her hand, letting her pull me into a sitting position. Being able to see my surroundings raised more questions than it answered.
We were in the middle of a street in what looked like a shopping district, only small and quaint and bizarrely agrarian. Even the suburbs near farm country outside Portland didn’t look like this. There was something old-timey about it all, but modern at the same time, like a paradox that somehow managed not to contradict itself. This was a place where people lived. This was real.
“I didn’t hit my head,” said Annie, letting go of my hand. “I landed on James. Not super fun for James, but since he was already barely conscious, he wasn’t too pissed about it, and I got him clear before you came tumbling through. He’s awake now. Sarah didn’t hurt him. She just terrified him. The rift closed a while ago. We’re stuck here.”
“Where’s ‘here’?”
“Ames, Iowa.”
I stared at her. “What? That’s like, I don’t know—”
“It’s eighteen hundred miles away.” She held up her cellphone. “The wonders