I wanted to crawl back and rinse the mud from my mouth, but I didn’t dare. Instead I walked up the bank till my calves ached. It angled more and more sharply till I had to grab at bushes just to pull myself along, cursing when I gripped a handful of thorns. When I finally reached the summit, I’d cleared the tops of the tallest trees. I looked out over the whole woods, stretching to the horizon below me. The fear I’d held back with sweat, with thoughtless forward motion, settled back around my shoulders.
Then I saw it. Or part of it: in the distance, between the swaying night-green heads of the trees, a patch of something black and unmoving. A rooftop, I thought—it had to be. It had to be the Hazel Wood. I felt the phantom presence of Finch beside me, the lift of wonder he would’ve felt standing here.
A sudden snicking reached my ears, the out-of-place preschool sound of scissors cutting through paper. I turned and saw a little girl sitting on a red-and-white checkered picnic blanket in the moonlight, cutting up the pages of an old atlas. Moonlight lit the crown of her downturned head. I wavered for a moment, wondering if I should creep quietly away, but didn’t. I’d been thrust by the Hinterland into a tale. Maybe, if I let it reach its end, I would escape it.
The girl’s soft little hands ripped pages from the atlas one by one. Green maps threaded with silver rivers, castles and towns marked in ruddy ink. Nautical maps crawling with sea creatures and rippling waves, grounded at each corner by the puffing faces of the four winds. The East Wind seemed to scream as the little girl’s scissors cut it into shreds. She turned the page to a yellow map that glittered. I sucked in a breath as I spied a tiny caravan crossing it, and the scissors descending to cut it in two.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked. I’d reached the edge of her blanket.
She kept her gaze on the atlas, but I could hear the scowl in her voice. It was a funny voice, froggy and boyish. “My grandmother doesn’t like me talking to strangers.”
I looked around for the grandmother, expecting some gorgon to launch herself at me from the other side of the hill. The girl rolled her eyes. Her face was peaky and pointed, but her eyes were beautiful, the color of the oceans she was cutting into confetti. “She’s up there,” she said, jabbing her scissors toward the sky.
I looked upward and saw nothing but the moon, gathering bits of cloud around itself like a shrug. For a moment I could see a face in it. Not a man’s, a woman’s. A beautiful, distant woman who watched me with a disapproving look.
Then the face smoothed itself away, and the moon was just a moon, a perfect orb the flat gold of a Casio watch.
“What if I introduced myself,” I said, “so we won’t be strangers anymore? I’m Alice.”
Her scissors stopped, and she looked up. “You’re Alice?” But she must’ve seen nothing interesting in my face, because she shrugged and tilted her head back down. Snip snip snip. A Queenswood labeled in looping script was sheared away from a tiny ivory castle, its ramparts bristling with spikes. “My name is Hansa.”
Hansa. I knew the name—I’d read it in the contents page of Tales from the Hinterland.
“You’re Hansa the Traveler,” I said quietly, trying not to draw the attention of the moon. “Where are we?”
“You’re stupid for being so much older than me,” she said. Not meanly, but matter-of-factly. “You don’t know we’re in the Halfway Wood?”
“Not the Hinterland?”
“The Hinterland’s that way.” She gestured meaninglessly and flopped onto her stomach. “I’m not allowed to talk with strangers anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m too trusting,” she said primly. It sounded like she was quoting something an adult had told her. “And I made friends with the thief.”
The thief? A character from her story, probably. I wished for the thousandth time I’d read Tales from the Hinterland, that I knew every inch of it the way Finch had. No. Don’t think of Finch.
“Who’s the thief?” I asked, bracing for her to tell me I was stupid again.
“She comes from that side.”
“From Earth? Where I come from?”
“You really are stupid. She came from Earth, but it was a long time ago. She doesn’t visit anymore. Now go away, please, I’m busy.”
I squatted down beside her. “Hansa, one more question, okay? The thief—was her name Ness?”
“No. Her name was Vanella.”
My heart went hollow. “Ella—was here? When?”
“I told you, she doesn’t come anymore. You’re in my light—would you leave me alone now?”
“Wait. Please. Have you seen her? Ella? Has she been here in the last couple of days? What did she steal?”
“I told you I can’t talk to you,” Hansa said primly, turning a page of her atlas. “Now go away before my grandmother gets angry.”
“Hansa, please.” I grabbed her shoulder—not hard, but firmly—and she hissed in pain, skittering away from me like a crab.
“Grandmother!” she screamed.
Suddenly my vision was all white fire. The moon threw its rays over me in a hot spotlight, and I screamed and swatted at my face like the moonlight was flies. I heard the prickling noise of Hansa’s laughter as I staggered away.
All at once the moon’s horrible spotlight switched off. I fell in the sudden dark, my eyes swimming with dots. Then I was rolling, grass slicing at my skin and crushing into a sharp perfume.
I landed at the bottom of the hill, chilled and scratched and wanting Ella so badly I could’ve given up right there. The green fragrance of ruined grass got into my head and gave me that high, lonesome feeling you only get at night, when you feel like the last person on Earth.
I was staring miserably into the dark when the hill in front of me cracked like an egg. A scent like the amber perfume Ella wore poured out from the glowing break in the hill; if my head hadn’t been filled with green grass, it might’ve overwhelmed me. Before it could, I stood and ran to a cluster of bushes big enough to duck behind.
The line of light grew so viciously bright I wondered if the sun was hiding in that hill, preparing to do battle with the moon. But it faded as it widened, until I could just look at it through my fingers.
The broken hill looked violated, a wrenched-open chest cavity. Black shapes appeared in the space where it split, and became people.
Or something like people.
They moved furtively at first, stepping onto the grass like it might set off an alarm. Then one of them—a beautiful girl wearing pants and a coat that made her look like an aviatrix—somersaulted across the grass. The people with her, a mix of men and women a little younger than my mother, laughed and joined in. They didn’t seem like figures you’d imagine crawling out of a hillside. Most looked like they’d gotten dressed from a Salvation Army donation box.
The aviatrix seemed to be the ringleader. She kept raising her head to sniff the air. There was something wrong with her eyes. The rest crept close to her, drawn in like down-and-outers gathered around a trash can fire.
A girl wearing an empire-waist dress over a hugely pregnant stomach threw a blanket over the grass. Everyone sat down but the aviatrix and a man dressed like Mr. Rochester. They circled each other, bowed, and brought their hands to their waists.