Passenger

by Andrew Smith

  Fee rolled around in the dirt, crying and squeezing his jaw. Rum dropped Ethan’s shoes and put his hands in the air, backing away from me and Griffin like he was an arrestee held at gunpoint, and Alex just whimpered faintly, too scared to move.

  I let go of his hair.

  “You ever touch anyone again, I’ll fucking kill you, kid. Anyone. Understand me?”

  Alex nodded enough to let me know he got the message, so I pulled my knife away from his face.

  Griffin had his hands in a fighting position, eyes shifting alternately between the brothers. I could tell he wanted to kick Fee again, but he wasn’t about to fight back. Fee just rolled around and sobbed.

  Ethan sat up.

  I was disgusted with everything. “Get your shoes on and come with us.”

  * * *

  I heard them following me, but I kept my eyes forward as we climbed the rocky chute that led up to the ridge where the lookouts perched.

  I dug my fingers as forcefully as I could into the sharp rock face, trying to make it hurt so the anger might stop howling inside me. But it didn’t work. It just made me madder. I wanted to run back down so I could feel the satisfaction of jamming my knife as far as it would go into Alex’s belly, to marvel at the kid’s warm blood as it spilled out on me, and watch the show of his eyes as they alternately flickered surprise and horror at what Jack was capable of doing.

  I was sick of myself, of what I’d become.

  I killed Quinn Cahill.

  I climbed faster.

  All the not-worlds left me numb. All the not-worlds trapped in the Marbury lens made Jack a monster no matter where he found himself.

  Fun game.

  I am the King of Marbury.

  If I couldn’t get home, back to Nickie, back to my friends and what was real, everything would be lost.

  Everything except my kingdom.

  * * *

  Henry was different.

  I could see it as soon as I looked at his face. He didn’t need to say anything to me at all. He knew who I was.

  Ben nodded to me and gave a wary glance past my shoulder at Ethan. “This is it, Jack.”

  Frankie hovered behind him, practically bumping into Ben with his chest. His voice sounded tense, ready for a fight. “This is what, Odd?”

  When nobody answered him, he grabbed Henry’s arm, made the man look at him. “This is what, Henry? What’s going on?”

  Henry shook his head and shrugged, as if to tell the boy he had no answers.

  Then I saw the rider.

  I squinted, cupped my hands around my eyes so I could screen out the endless wash of gray in the fading evening sky. Solitary, so far away that he nearly vanished, half in, half out of the Marbury haze, keeping his head down as he rode southeast; and I was certain beyond any doubt that it was Conner Kirk out there.

  We’d been closer than brothers, and I could recognize Conner Kirk from the angle of his shoulders, the motion of his hand when he wiped across his eyes. Even as tired and worn as he must have been after being hunted by the Rangers since helping me to escape, I knew I was looking at my friend.

  “That’s him,” I said.

  “Fuck this,” Frankie snapped. He started off down the path to the clearing. “I’ll show you who he is. We’ll fucking go kill him. I’ll bring back his fucking head.”

  “You won’t get anywhere near him,” I said.

  Frankie stopped. “I’m not afraid of guns. We’ve fucking killed Rangers before. There’s more of us than him.”

  “Believe me, Frankie. You don’t want to fuck with him.”

  Frankie’s eyes darted from me to Henry, then to each of the other boys who stood there on the lookout with us, as though he were searching for any gesture of support.

  He spit a long, stringy blob down on the rocks between us. Frankie put his hands up to Henry, like he was expecting something. “We’re just going to let him go, then?”

  Henry inhaled slowly and looked at the sky. “Nobody wants to go out there at night.”

  “I’m going to go after him,” I said.

  “Jack—” Ben started, but I cut him off.

  “We’ll talk about it later, Ben.”

  I already knew he was going to tell me I couldn’t go out there looking for Conner without taking him and Griffin. I tried not to think about leaving, about not coming back. This was Marbury, after all. Or not-Marbury. Who knew where the four of us would be tomorrow, and the next day after that?

  So I stared at Conner until I couldn’t see him anymore. I tried to estimate the distance and direction where I might intercept his path, but calculations like those were meaningless in Marbury.

  The dimness of the gray night fell over the silent Odds who stood on the ridge beside me.

  We scanned the nothingness of the desert below until Frankie got tired of waiting for some affirmation from the other boys that he was right, that he was still in charge. When it never came, he started down the narrow path, half whispering that it was time to eat.

  Frankie chose out the next shift of boys to keep guard on the watchposts. Nighttime meant Hunters would be out, and the Odds never slept. At least, they never all slept at the same time. It was perhaps the only reason they had survived to escape Glenbrook and attempt the crossing to the settlement in the first place.

  So I half expected him to appoint me as a replacement for Ben or Griffin on the ridge, but the kid never asked me to do anything throughout the five days that I’d been with the Odds, and he continued to ignore me over the small rations of food that were distributed for our dinner.

  We ate in segregated groups. The division was more than just the few feet of dirt that separated us from the other boys. The Odds were talking about me, about the three new kids and the bed wetter. No matter what happened to us tonight, I knew things would be different from now on.

  Ben and Griffin sat with me while we ate. Henry stayed up on the ridge. I knew he wanted to talk to me, but he was just waiting for the situation between the Odds and me to calm down, I thought.

  Ethan sat with us. There was nowhere else the kid could go. That was my fault, too. He never tried to fight back against the bullying of the other boys, and things would probably be calmer, easier, if I’d just let them get away with their shit.

  But it was too late for that once Ethan had seen through the lens. He knew me. Another thread had been woven into this hopeless string, and I couldn’t ignore it, no matter how much I wished I could.

  In the other group, Frankie stayed where he could watch us. He always watched us. But the three assholes—Alex, Fee, and Rum—sat as far away from us as they could, wounded and angry, backs turned, never so much as glancing toward me.

  Griffin broke our mournful silence with one word.

  “When?”

  I shook my head. “Henry needs to make it okay. I need to ask him to let us go, so he can help us.”

  Ben watched me, like he was waiting for me to say something more. Then he looked at Ethan.

  “I’m not stupid, you know,” Ethan said.

  Ben spit in the dirt and turned away from the kid. “I guess putting up with all the shit those fuckers do to you makes you smart, then.”

  Something like that would have been the first act in a fistfight with any one of the other boys. Not the English kid, though.

  Ethan shrugged. “I know you’re not Odds. I know why you’re not like them.”

  “Because you fit in so well, right?” Griffin said.

  “Him, too,” I said. I lowered my voice and scooted in closer to the other boys. “He went through the lens today.”

  I watched Ethan to see if what I said made any difference to him. But I just couldn’t figure out that kid at all.

  “He went through?” Griffin said.

  He knew what it meant. Griffin and Ben couldn’t see anything in the glasses. Because you don’t see anything when you’re dead and inside a fucking trash can in some twisted and rearranged goddamned not-world. And the first lens, the
broken lens, the one that caused it all, could only destroy things now.

  Nobody went through the broken lens. It only let things out. Ben and Griffin saw what it did at the market when we were attacked by Hunters, and again on the roof deck at Quinn’s firehouse.

  They knew what it meant.

  “Where did you go?” Ben asked.

  I watched the knobby Adam’s apple in Ethan’s neck twitch as he considered what he should say.

  “Well?” I said. “You can tell us.”

  “You were there, Jack. You had to have seen it,” Ethan said. “It was real.”

  He glanced around nervously. It was like he was trying to gauge our expressions to see if we thought he was crazy, or stupid. And he looked carefully, too, across the way at the other Odds.

  Ethan’s voice fell to a whisper. “It was morning. I think it was the most pleasant place I’ve ever seen. We were inside a room, our room. We lived there, and it was clean and felt cold beneath my feet, too. There was a window on a wall, between our two beds. Outside, it was raining, but I could see trees and the most fantastic colors I have ever seen.”

  I knew where it was.

  Of course I knew.

  Ethan looked directly at me. “You were still lying in bed.” He looked down, embarrassed, and said, “I had just taken a piss. In a toilet. With water in it. And you asked me about some news. And I remembered we were leaving that morning, that we would be catching a train somewhere.”

  “London,” I said.

  “Yes. That was it. Do you remember, Jack?”

  I shook my head.

  Ben leaned in closer to us. “Fuck that. How come we couldn’t get through, then? Fuck that, Jack.”

  “It’s my fault,” I said. “I messed it all up.”

  “That’s why he talks like Henry,” Griffin said. “He’s English. That’s why, isn’t it?”

  “He’s from my school,” I said. “St. Atticus.”

  Ethan’s brow tightened. He was excited. “That’s it! That’s what it was called. St. Atticus Grammar School for Boys. You remember!”

  “No. I just know it. But it’s a good thing, Ben. Maybe he’s right. Maybe we are all home, where we belong. We just need to—”

  And Griffin said, “What? We need to what, Jack?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. Change the fucking channel or something.”

  Ben stood up. “Fuck this place, Jack. So, where’d you leave the goddamned remote?”

  Ben had every right to be as angry as he sounded.

  Ethan cleared his throat, obviously confused. “How can I go back there?”

  I kept my eyes on Ben. He started off, up the trail to the ridge.

  I stood up. “You can’t go back, Ethan.”

  Griffin got up, shaking his head. “Everything’s fucked out of shape, Jack.”

  “Let’s get Ben,” I said. Then I figured there was nothing else I could do, and added, “Come on, Ethan.”

  The Odds watched us with untrusting eyes as we crossed the clearing and followed Ben up to the ridge where Henry was waiting for me.

  thirty

  “We need to leave before something else happens,” I said.

  When I saw Henry’s eyes, the slate haze of the Marbury night made him seem so old and tired.

  And for just an instant, he looked like the old preacher, and it scared me.

  I believed in that moment that Jack had jumped across again, landed on another string; and I realized this was how my brain worked now—that from now on I would always wonder, or doubt, what not-world I’d quietly fallen into.

  “Something else always happens,” Henry said. “It’s the only thing we know for certain, isn’t it?”

  The other boys stood away from us. They waited, shifting their feet impatiently at the top of the trail. I knew how bad Ben and Griffin wanted to leave, and Ethan, he was helplessly tied to us now.

  Just another string in our knot.

  “I’m afraid the Odds will fight us if we take horses. You can make it be okay.”

  Henry took a deep breath. He thought about it, but I already knew he wouldn’t refuse. It had to happen.

  He said, “One day soon, I expect to have another beer with you at The Prince of Wales.”

  “I’ll buy.”

  “Will we be real friends, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I suppose we’re always certain of that, too, aren’t we? The not-knowing, I mean.”

  I nodded. “Will you come down with us?”

  “You will be back. I’ll tell them that.”

  “What if we don’t?”

  Henry smiled. “It has to be, doesn’t it? You know what still has to happen, Jack.”

  Then Henry touched my side, just above my hip, with the point of his index finger. “You know. This. In. Out.”

  He raised his eyebrow as though asking if I remembered the arrow. The first time I’d set my feet down in Marbury.

  I said, “It doesn’t have to happen, Henry. This isn’t the world. This is not the same place.”

  Henry waved his arm across the air between us, like he was painting the scenery with the sweep of his fingers. “Then what is it, Jack? Of course this is the world.”

  I shook my head. “This might be the only way for me and the boys to get back home.”

  “You know, Jack, everything we do, no matter how ordinary and insignificant the action, continually reinvents our future.”

  I thought about seeing Ben and Griffin in photographs, and inside a fucking barrel hidden in Freddie Horvath’s garage.

  “Maybe it’s all my fault. Maybe I’ll never go anywhere that’s close to being home again. But I have to try. For them.” I pointed to Ben and Griffin. “And everything’s already been rearranged behind me, so it doesn’t much matter what you do now, Henry. Scratch your head, don’t scratch it, throw a rock off this wall, whatever. All things have been accomplished. That’s what the preacher always says, so it doesn’t matter. I saw … I saw…”

  “What?” Henry said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Henry said, “I suppose I’ll see you again.”

  “In a better place.”

  Henry patted my shoulder and walked around me toward the waiting boys. “What could possibly be better than this?”

  * * *

  Five of us rode out from the encampment that night.

  Ben, Griffin, Ethan, me, and Frankie.

  Frankie refused to let us go without him, despite Henry’s assurance that we would come back before morning. Frankie considered the horses, like most of the things transported on the caravan, to be his property. He argued that it was he who’d orchestrated the theft of the horses from the Rangers’ holding pens, and he was the most capable rider of all the boys.

  “I want to see for myself what that rider out there is trying to do,” Frankie said. “If I have to, I’ll kill him myself.”

  And I told him, “I think we’re all going to die out there.”

  That was all we said about it.

  With or without us, Henry decided, the Odds would all be leaving in the morning. They had rested long enough, and he was certain the Hunters were coming soon.

  Stubbornly, Frankie led the way, as though he’d already calculated exactly the course we’d have to follow to intercept Conner’s path. He’d chosen out the fittest horses and forced us to ride hard to keep up with him.

  As we rode, I kept thinking about what Henry said to me before we left, how he seemed resigned to things that had already been determined, and from time to time I slipped my hand up inside my shirt so I could rub the spot near my belly where I’d been shot with a Hunter’s arrow in some other world, at some other time.

  This had to work.

  Conner was waiting for me.

  I had to believe we would get home, that I would see Nickie again, that everything would be put in its place, made whole. And Ben and Griffin would not be harmed.

  Earlier, when we’d seen
Conner passing across the desert, it was obvious that he was in no particular hurry to get to the settlement. He moved so slowly, and even at such distance I could see by the slump to Conner’s shoulders and the angle of his downturned head that he was tired, possibly even asleep while his horse plodded forward.

  Above us, the Marbury sky bled a constant shower of light. It looked like blazing powder that sprinkled like dusty embers in constant, undulating flows.

  The hole had grown larger again.

  Ben rode closest to me. “What are you going to do when we find him?”

  I passed a hand over the one pocket I hadn’t cut out of my jeans so I could feel the contour of the broken lens in there. And I wondered if, unnoticed, it may have turned into something else, black and knotted.

  I exhaled. “I don’t know, Ben.”

  “Make sure that asshole Frankie doesn’t fuck things up.”

  “You mean worse than Jack already did?”

  “Wasn’t your fault. We all did it.”

  * * *

  It was Ethan who saw him first.

  Frankie overestimated. He rode past Conner by a good quarter-mile, so if the St. Atticus kid hadn’t been paying attention, who knows how far off course Frankie might have taken us?

  Ethan stopped his horse and turned to face the distant rider.

  He pointed to the faint figure, hundreds of yards from us. “He’s over there.”

  There was no way of knowing if Conner could see us or not. He rode with his head pillowed against the horse’s neck.

  I glanced back to get an idea of how far Frankie had gone, but I couldn’t even see the kid at all. Still, I knew I needed to hurry.

  “The three of you wait here for me.”

  Griffin argued, “You have to let us come, too.”

  “What if he doesn’t remember you, Griff? What if it isn’t really Conner out there?”

  Griffin bit his lower lip, didn’t say anything.

  So I answered for him. “You’ll know in a minute what needs to happen. Just watch me. And keep an eye out for Frankie, too.”

  Then I kicked my horse into a trot.

  Of course it was him.

  I knew it before I’d seen him. I knew Conner would be here before we ever left the camp that night; I could feel it.

  And part of me knew, too, how when I found him, Conner would be sick.