off its neck. What the—I attempted to pull it off the bar but it was stuck. I tried picking up another, but it, too, didn’t budge. Frowning, I walked over to one of the tables and shoved it. Its feet might as well have been soldered to the wide planks for all it moved. The only thing not stuck was the dust. I was tempted to return to the boarding house to check if the furniture there was also wedged to the floor but decided to test this out in the next building instead.
I exited onto the dusty road. Again, no Remo in sight. He couldn’t have gone far though, the valley was small and the town compact. He was probably exploring the . . . I lifted my gaze to make out the sign atop the building across the road from me. How appropriate. The BROTHEL. If Remo was anything like Gregor, and there were real women in there, I might never see him again.
Good riddance.
My next stop was the GENERAL STORE. There was no sign up front, but burlap sacks filled with grain trimmed the windowsill, a black iron register sat on a counter, and tall shelving units ran across the three other walls. The highest one was weighed down by porcelain canisters and brown medicine bottles with the words witch-hazel, arrowroot, and ether scratched across peeling labels. I poked one. Stuck. And empty. I climbed the ladder to check the canisters. The lids were screwed on too tight, but my guess was that there’d be nothing to see. The rest of the shelves were bare except for the dust.
I hopped back onto the wide-planked floor and crossed the store toward the burlap sacks. I lowered my hand inside, expecting my fingers to comb through the grains, but the seeds were pasted to one another. Were they even real? Edible? Although I wasn’t hungry yet, if I didn’t find a way out of here fast, I’d need food. My gaze snagged on the ladder I’d just climbed. Three of them were propped against the shelves. If I nailed all three together, I might reach the portal. Remo would have to hold it up. Would he work with me, or would he assume I was using him to leave and refuse to help?
I thought of my gajoï then. I could use it to make him hold up the ladder. Optimism flooded me until I went around the counter and gripped one of the ladders. Like everything else, it didn’t move. Another decoy. If only I could get my hands on a saw. Unless the ladders weren’t made of wood but crafted from a magical, unchoppable material. I wouldn’t put it past the whackjobs who’d created this place.
As I retraced my steps to the glass door, I wondered what had gotten into the wariff and my grandfather to build a fake frontier town. What sort of twisted torture was this? It must’ve driven the prisoners mad. Oh, Skies, what if making fae lose their minds was the goal of their secret jail?
When I stepped out of the store, launching into a new tune, I squinted at the barren land stretching beyond the town, all gray dirt and clumps of glass. What if the vegetation was fake too?
I entered the bank next door. Or what I assumed was a bank from the teller windows and large vault in the back, which was gaping and empty. Pappy and Nana Em’s favorite movies were Westerns, so I’d watched plenty during our sacred Saturday night sleepovers, which coincided with my parents’ weekly “date-night.”
I walked back out, no longer on my guard. There was clearly nothing and no one around. Of course, the moment I thought this, a lace curtain fluttered in a second-story window across the street. My heart leaped right into my throat, interrupting my song. I grew silent and still, pulse rustling through my ears until the figure passed in front of another window, and I made out tufts of red hair amid caked ochre.
It’s just Remo, I reassured myself, running a shaky hand through my own hair, weighed down by so much dried mud.
A new tune forming on my lips, I headed to the penultimate building on my side of the road—a small clapboard structure filled with desks and benches. A red apple was propped on the largest desk. Was this a schoolhouse? Had Gregor sent children to this supernatural prison?
I walked over to the apple. Expecting to be met with