Reluctantly, Avery released her wrist. “This is the wrong thing to do,” he said.
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” said Zib. “It’s what we have right now.”
She turned back to the road, the scattered, glimmering bricks all the brighter now that the Crow Girl had stepped on them and reminded them that they had a job to do. She began to follow it, making the bricks grow brighter still. Avery watched, trembling. He wanted to be brave. He wanted to stand alone in the brambles, to let the darkness come down around him, and to know that he was not afraid.
He was afraid. He was so very afraid. Something rustled in the brambles and he was running, racing after Zib and the Crow Girl, running through the Tangle until the tunnel of briars ended around him and he was standing in sunlight once again. He stopped, chest heaving, heart pounding, and looked around himself with wide, bewildered eyes.
The improbable road was no longer made of scattered bricks. It was shining and complete, stretching ahead of him in a pearlescent ribbon that wove between berry bushes and high trees whose branches were alive with birds he had never seen before and couldn’t name. The ground to either side of the road was windswept and dusted with sparse, sere-looking grass, like the fields at the end of the growing season. Zib was up ahead, plucking bright pink berries from a bush twice as tall as she was. The Crow Girl was nowhere to be seen.
Avery stopped in the middle of the road, scowling. Zib looked content, almost, like this was normal, ordinary—like this was the way the world was supposed to be, and not proof that something had gone terribly, horribly, awfully wrong. Roads weren’t supposed to glow, or to follow people. Flocks of crows weren’t supposed to turn into girls, and girls weren’t supposed to turn into flocks of crows. Berries weren’t supposed to be as pink as sugar candy, and somehow that was the worst offense of all, because it was such a small one. Everything else had been a huge offense, mudslides and monsters and boulders that talked and owls that gave advice. It had been like walking in a terrible, complicated, frustrating dream. But this …
Berries were simple. Berries were small, ordinary things, served in bowls with cream for dessert, or maybe baked into pies. They didn’t belong in dreams, and yet there they were, staining Zib’s fingers and lips with their juices. If there were berries here, this wasn’t a dream, and if this wasn’t a dream, it was really happening. Avery didn’t want it to be really happening. He didn’t want that at all.
“Avery!”
He blinked, and focused. Zib had seen him. She was waving one pink-stained hand, a bright smile on her face.
“They’re safe to eat,” she said, and held out her other hand, showing him the berries cupped in her palm. “They’re called bonberries, and they grow everywhere around here.”
“Where’s the Crow Girl?” he asked. His stomach rumbled and grumbled, reminding him that it had been a long time and a lot of walking since breakfast. He tried to push the feeling aside. He didn’t want to eat those berries. He didn’t want to look at them. They made the Up-and-Under too real, and they didn’t belong here.
“She went to get us some fish and bigger fruit,” said Zib. “She told me to stay here for when you came out of the brambles, because you’d want to know where she was.”
Avery scowled again. “I don’t want to eat anything she brings. I don’t want to put this place in my stomach and let it be a part of me. I want to leave. I want to go home. Why are you so happy? You shouldn’t be happy. This is a bad place.”
“This is an adventure,” said Zib. “Shouldn’t you be happy? I thought everyone wanted an adventure.”
“Not me!” Avery realized he was shouting. He realized he didn’t know how to stop. Most of all, he realized that he didn’t want to. “I want to go to school and go home and do my chores and go to bed and be safe! I want to tell my father about my day and have him laugh and say I’m smart and good and just the sort of son he always hoped he’d have! I want my books and my room and my things and not this!” He stomped his foot for emphasis, then ground out, every word a stone: “I. Want. My. Shoes. To. Shine.”
Zib’s face fell. “Oh. I—”
“Don’t. I don’t want to talk to you. I want to go home.” Avery began to pace from one side of the road to the other, turning back every time it seemed like he might touch the windswept ground.
The berries that had been so sweet a few seconds before didn’t taste very good anymore. Zib looked at the squashed pink mass in her hand, wrinkled her nose, and flung it as far from the road as she could. Then she sat and hugged her knees to her chest, watching Avery pace back and forth across the rainbow sheen of the improbable road, his hands in his pockets and a frown on his face.
Avery paced. Zib began counting silently to one hundred, ticking off his steps. When she reached a hundred, she started again, and again, until it seemed like she had always been counting, until it seemed like surely, she’d counted enough.
“Are you done being angry with me yet?” she called.
“No,” he replied, voice sullen. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
Zib didn’t have to ask what she’d done: it was obvious. “We needed to give something to the Bumble Bear if we wanted it to let us pass. It couldn’t be my slingshot, and it couldn’t be your ruler. The shine from your shoes was something we could lose. It didn’t hurt us.”
“It hurt me,” said Avery. He finally stopped pacing and turned to look at her again, expression bleak. Something about him seemed so lost that Zib stopped looking at him and started seeing him, which was something else altogether. People look at things all day long and never really see them; look at the shelves without seeing their contents, look at the houses without seeing the people who live inside.
Look at their friends and neighbors without seeing the harmony and horror in their hearts.
Without their shine, Avery’s shoes were ordinary brown leather, like any kid out on the playground might be wearing. They didn’t reflect him anymore. They were too scuffed to reflect anything. His shirt seemed just a little less starched without them reflecting its crispness; his hair seemed just a little less combed. He looked like an ordinary boy. Zib hadn’t known him for very long, but she already knew that that was wrong.
She felt fear tickle her ribs. If they had to lose themselves to walk this road, would it ever really be able to lead them home?
“I have birthday money,” she said. “I keep it in a pickle jar I bury in the backyard. I move it every weekend, in case pirates come looking for the buried treasure. I’ll dig it up when we get home, and we’ll buy you a new pair of shoes. The brightest, shiniest shoes you ever saw. Shoes like stars.”
“Stars fall down a lot,” said Avery.
“So every time you fall down, you can make a wish on your shoes, and it’ll come true,” said Zib.
She sounded so earnest that it startled a laugh out of him, and that laugh broke the shell of his anger, letting it all leak out and away. He laughed again, happier now. Maybe it didn’t matter if these shoes were shiny: there were other shoes in the world. Shinier shoes, even, shoes like stars.
“Buy me shoes and we’re square,” said Avery.