The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

by Seanan McGuire

  But Apple is holding on, and it seems rude to keep her waiting. I swallow, chasing away some of the roughness of my throat, and I swallow again, and the burning fades even more, and finally I whisper, “You didn’t tell me it was like this.”

  “It isn’t, for everyone.” She’s still holding my hand, squeezing hard and holding me here. “It wasn’t for me. It wouldn’t have been for you, if you hadn’t been cut off. I’m so sorry. I should have taken you somewhere else before we asked you to clear the salt out of your system.”

  “S’okay,” I whisper.

  “It’s not, and I’m going to make it up to you. Give me time.” She gives my hand another squeeze before she lets go. “Can you open your eyes for me? Please? I need to see you.”

  I wasn’t really aware that I’d closed them, but if she says I did, I did. I try to focus on the circumference of my own skin, the limits of what makes me a being apart and distinct from the roads. Once I find my outline, I start filling in details, naming hands and arms and feet and legs. I find my face.

  I open my eyes.

  The moon is bright and the night is dark and the stars are shining and this is the human world, this is the land of the living. None of that has changed. But at the back of my mind something is humming, thrumming, anchoring me to the moment and singing to me of the movement yet to come, the press of pavement against the soles of my shoes, the whisper of my wheels against the road. I can hear the road.

  “Wow,” I breathe.

  Apple leans over me. It’s dark, but she moves in her own light, every line of her etched in stardust and potential. She’s smiling, the way a nurse smiles for a patient who’s just made a miraculous recovery. “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi,” I manage. Then her arm is around my shoulders, urging me into a sitting position, easing me upright. I can’t fight. That would take more strength than I have left. I loll against her shoulders, blinking blearily at the woman who appears in front of me.

  Laura isn’t limned in starlight, isn’t glowing from within, but there is a brightness to her features, like someone is holding an unseen candle a few feet away from her, casting her into delicate relief. I frown.

  “What does the light mean?”

  “It means the road is showing you what it wants you to know,” says Apple. “Can you stand?”

  I do not want to stand. But that isn’t the same thing. “I’m not sure.”

  “Let’s try, okay? Ms. Moorhead, help me out here.”

  Between them, Laura and Apple are able to tug me to my feet. My jeans and underpants are still down around my knees. They let go of me while I hike my clothes back into position, fumble with the zipper and negotiate the snap.

  When I turn, Apple and Laura are watching me, the one hopeful, the other wary. Apple speaks first.

  “How do you feel, Rose?”

  “Like my head just got blown up and sticky-taped back together by asshole aliens,” I say, and rub my temple. There’s no pain. I’d expect a migraine after everything I just went through, but there’s no pain. “What happened?”

  “The road remembered you.” Apple’s smile is wry. “Welcome to the family.”

  “It worked?” I drop my hand. “Of course, it worked. You’re lit up like a giant firefly. You wouldn’t be if it hadn’t worked. So it worked. Now can we kill me?”

  “You have a one-track mind,” says Laura.

  “Yeah, and normally that track is all about getting a coat, getting a cheeseburger, and keeping some stupid trucker from driving off the edge of the world. Since none of those things apply right now, my one track is getting rid of this flesh-sack.” I hit my sternum with the heel of my hand. “I’m done. I’ve had my vacation in the land of the living. How do I go back?”

  “We need to walk the Ocean Lady,” says Apple. “We need to ask her for aid.”

  “Great, let’s go,” I say. Then I pause.

  Laura Moorhead, the woman I would once have put right below Bobby Cross on my list of enemies, is looking at her feet. Her shoulders are slumped, her posture defeated. She sees me looking and smiles wanly.

  “I guess you won’t be needing a ride back to the motel,” she says.

  “No, because you’re coming with us.”

  Apple glances at me, startled. I want to apologize. I want to take that surprise and mild disapproval off my queen’s face. The habit of obedience is, it seems, part and parcel of being a routewitch. Isn’t that a fun little bonus.

  I look at Apple and I smile, guileless and innocent of intentional disobedience. Years of cadging rides from truckers who didn’t want to give them to me have transformed me into an excellent actress, under the right circumstances. “I’m a routewitch, apparently, and I’ve traveled far enough and long enough that I should be a pretty darn powerful one. You’re the queen. Between the two of us, there’s no way we don’t have the gas to take Laura as far as the rest stop. She’s my ride. A hitcher never abandons her ride.”

  Apple frowns, eyes narrowing. She knows I’m bending the rules on purpose. She also knows there’s not a damn thing she can do about it, not without calling me out in front of a woman who barely belongs here. “It’s going to be dangerous.”

  “Everything about this has been dangerous. If we leave her alone, we’re leaving her vulnerable, and it’s all because of me.” I let the pretense of my innocence fall away, replaced by the sincere need to make things right. I have to fix this. Not just for me: for everyone involved. “Please. She needs to come.”

  “I swear you’re going to be the death of me, Rose Marshall,” says Apple, rubbing her temple with one hand. “All right. You need to extinguish the beacon before it attracts something we can’t get rid of. The car stays here.”

  “It’s a rental,” says Laura. At Apple’s sharp glance, she amends, “But I can afford the late fees, and it’s insured. The car stays here.”

  “Good. Can you break the beacon?”

  “Yes,” says Laura. “I’ll be right back.” She walks quickly into the diner. She doesn’t look back.

  Apple touches my cheek. I turn toward her, startled.

  “If we go now, we can clear the boundary before she returns,” she says. “If she has some hold over you, if she’s compelling you—”

  “She’s not,” I say, warmed and offended at the same time. I can take care of myself. Only I can’t, because everything about this world is unfamiliar and dangerous, and I don’t know how to keep myself alive long enough to die. “Laura is helping me. I need her. I want her to come.”

  “Did you forget what she did to you?” Behind Apple, the artificial light goes out of the diner, leaving it the dead, deserted shell that it was when we arrived. “This woman is not your friend.”

  I want to listen to her. I want to let her guide me, to tell me where the dangerous places of the world are so that I can avoid them. I guess that’s what it is, to have a queen. I guess if I’d met her when we were really the ages we appear to be, when I was young and innocent and eager to be led, I would have given in to the part of me that wants nothing more than to be told what to do. I think everybody has that part. It makes things easier. It makes the blame less.

  Too bad for me that the part of me where I store the stubborn pig-headedness that’s kept me on the ghostroads longer than any other hitcher I know is so well-developed. “It doesn’t matter if she’s my friend or not. She’s my ally. She brought me all the way across the country when she didn’t have to, so I could attract the attention of the Ocean Lady and bring you here. I need her to come.”

  Apple scoffs. There’s a scraping sound. We both turn to find Laura halfway back to us, the dark diner behind her, indecision in her eyes.

  “I know you don’t like me,” she says. “I even understand it. I don’t think I’d like me much in your position, not after what I—what I tried to do to Rose. I’m sorry, if that helps at all. I know s
he didn’t hurt Tommy. He said so.” There’s wonder in her last three words, wonder and pain and the kind of longing that speaks of first loves and true loves and how much it hurts not to be able to let go. Some of us just aren’t made for moving on.

  “So I’m sure you can understand why I don’t want you in my territory,” says Apple.

  “You’ve been living among the dead for what, seventy years? You came to them before Rose did, if I have my dates right.” Laura’s an academic. She sounds confident about this part, at least. “Do you know what happens to a teenage girl without someone willing to claim her, today? What would have happened to Rose if I’d hung up the phone and refused to listen to what she had to say?”

  Apple is silent.

  “They have juvenile detention centers. They have foster homes. They have the kind of surveillance that would have kept her locked up for years. She might still have been able to make it to you on her own—she’s resourceful, I will absolutely give her that much—but how much time do you think it would have taken? That old song, how does it go? ‘They always say that the good die young’? She might not have been by the time she got here. Forget sweet sixteen. You’d have been lucky to get her by twenty-five, especially if she’d been foolish enough to tell anyone who she was or what she was running away from. There are drugs for people who see things. Treatments for people who say that they’re not teenagers, they’re hitchhiking ghosts from the middle of last century. I saved her. When I picked up that phone and agreed to help, I saved her. Doesn’t that earn me a fair chance?”

  Apple looks from Laura to me and back again. Her laughter, when it comes, is thin and bitter.

  “You’re mine, but you’re never going to be, are you, Rose?” she asks.

  “No,” I say regretfully—and I am sorry, I truly am. It would have been nice to be able to relax into a world where someone else would make the big decisions, and leave me to run the roads without fear. “I think that bus pulled away a long time ago.”

  She turns to Laura then, and the light that surrounds her—the brilliant, burning light—seems to brighten, to become all-consuming. “If you walk the Ocean Lady, you are putting yourself into my home and into my hands. You will do as you are bid. You will listen. My subjects have little love for those who would interfere with the functionality of the road, and that means our dead as well as our living. Do you understand the consequences of your choices?”

  “Nope,” says Laura cheerfully. “What I understand is that I’m a folklore professor, and you’re offering me the chance to see a world that no one else in my field admits to knowing about. Even if I didn’t want to keep an eye on Rose, I’d want to go with you.”

  Apple rolls her eyes, but it’s hard not to shake the feeling that she’s pleased, somehow, that this was the outcome she was hoping for, even if she didn’t say so. She’s planning something. She’s always planning something. That’s the only way she’s been able to keep her crown for so long.

  “So shall we go?” asks Laura.

  Apple looks to me.

  I nod.

  “Yes,” I say. “We shall.”

  Chapter 11

  The World’s Greatest Graveyard

  LAURA WIPES AWAY THE LAST REMAINING RUNES, casts the diner back into the shadows and sorrows of its own demise, and then it’s time to go. Her car is too new and too impersonal to have the strength to reach the Ocean Lady, and even if we could get it there, we could never get it back. It has never known what it is to belong to a single person, to be loved and cherished and worried about and hated. It can’t come, and so she moves it to the darkest corner of the parking lot, the point farthest from the road. That may not be enough to protect it from thieves and vandals, but it’s something. It’s a start.

  My borrowed backpack is heavy enough to feel like an anchor across my shoulders, pinning me to the ground, keeping me from floating away. I don’t dare leave it behind. Being alive means owning things, needing to own things, and I don’t know how long I’m going to be like this, prey to the weaknesses of my own unwanted flesh, unable to let it all go. Bodies sweat and stink and hunger. I need to take care of mine. For now, I need to take care of mine.

  Laura leaves most of what she brought across the country in the car, stuffing a change of underwear and a clean shirt into her purse before she locks what’s left in the trunk. I guess it’s easy to feel anchored to this world when you have as much as she does. No matter how far she gets from her apartment, she has to know it still exists.

  Apple takes my hand in her right and Laura’s hand in her left and leads us out of the parking lot and along the highway on-ramp. It’s so familiar, walking along the shoulder, watching for cars, that I almost put my thumb out, almost try to signal myself a ride. This is what my existence is supposed to be, not . . . not runic salt and sliced fingers. I can almost believe that I’m a ghost again, free to move across the country as I like, leaving all the nightmares of the past few days behind.

  Then we step from the on-ramp to the highway, and the world bends, the world folds in on itself, a narrative snake chasing its own tail, the flesh of reality tearing and stitching back together in the time it takes for a foot to fall, and everything is outlined in light and shadow, the blaze of stars, the burn of black holes. Apple gleams like a lighthouse against the deeper dark around her, so covered in power that she hurts my eyes if I look too close. Laura’s pale candleglow glimmer strengthens. I could use her to guide myself across a haunted house, never losing sight of my destination.

  Apple smiles as she sees me staring, as Laura continues to walk without, apparently, seeing anything out of the ordinary.

  “Look down,” she says, and she’s my queen, so I obey.

  My gasp is enough to catch Laura’s attention. I stop walking, my hand slipping free of Apple’s, and stare at myself.

  I’m lit up like a carnival midway in the middle of July, all bright lights and midway miracles. The same glow that covers Apple covers me, and it burns, it burns, it burns with a firefly intensity that’s all the more stunning because of the scale at which it’s been cast.

  “It’s the road,” says Apple, echoing her words from before. “Distance is power, and you’ve traveled a long, long way, Rose Marshall, all the way from the lands of the living to the lands of the dead and back again. You can’t use that kind of power when you’re dead, but now? You could be the best of us, if you wanted to be. You could be the one who takes my crown of stars and sets it on her brow like a challenge to anyone who’d try to harm us. I’ve never seen a routewitch as bright as this. You could change everything.”

  “All I want to do is change flesh to dust, and go home.” I look away from myself, away from that burning, tempting brightness, and focus on Apple. “Are you trying to talk me into something because you’re tired of being queen? Because honestly, if you are, I’m going to start questioning why you sent me to the Barrowman farm.”

  “I intend to be queen for a hundred years or more, until people stop trying to lock away the things that scare them,” says Apple. There’s steel in her voice now. “I will run these roads and protect these people until there are no more Manzanars. I don’t want you to stay so you can replace me. I want you to consider that you’ve been given an opportunity no one has been afforded in longer than I can count, because I doubt you’re going to get a second chance at coming back from the dead. But that’s something we can talk about while we walk.”

  “Where are we?” asks Laura. She’s staring at a nearby tree. I follow her gaze. There’s a nest there, cradled in the hollow of the trunk, and two big black and white birds with red crests are cuddled up there, eyes closed, seemingly unperturbed by our presence. Laura can’t seem to take her eyes off of them. “Those are . . . those are ivory-billed woodpeckers. They’re extinct. They’ve been extinct for decades.”

  “We’re between the daylight and the twilight,” says Apple. “The road keeps wha
t the road wants, and the road is very fond of birds. You can find almost anything here, if you look hard enough.”

  I think of the ghost birds in the twilight, the flocks of passenger pigeons and the chirps of the Carolina parakeets, and I don’t say anything. The birds here are like the routewitches: alive, eating and breeding and flying, wings spread as they chase their private horizons. The birds I know are long, long dead, and would never call that look of wonder onto Laura’s face.

  “Fairyland.” Laura turns abruptly on Apple. “Old stories about fairyland say it’s between the lands of the living and the dead, that travelers can fall into and out of it without meaning to, that it takes what catches its eye. Are we in . . . is this fairyland?”

  Apple smiles, amusement and relief. “In a way, yes,” she agrees. “That’s what some people call it, anyway. If there’s a real fairyland, I’ve never seen it. This is what endures when everything else ends. This is where you go to spend your distance. Follow me.”

  She starts walking again. She doesn’t bother to retake our hands. We’re in her space now, through the veil and walking along the backbone of the Ocean Lady, in this place where everything bends to the whim of one pretty Japanese-American teen who will likely never get any older. We’re in her fairyland. There’s no getting out without her, and that means we have no choice but to follow, obedient and eager, as she leads us onward.

  There are no cars. The stars overhead twinkle like they do in the daylight, filtered through layers of ice and atmosphere, but they’re so bright. Bright as they are in the twilight, untouched by city glow or light pollution. I almost trip, I’m trying so hard to look at those stars.

  Apple’s hand on my arm catches me, pulls me back before I can send myself toppling. I turn and she’s looking at me, a small, wry smile on her glittering face. “It can be a little much, at first,” she says.

  “The Ocean Lady never looked like this before.”

  “You were never hers before.” Apple looks to Laura, who is marveling over something she’s spotted in the bushes, some extinct impossibility from another time. “She shows her face differently depending on who and what you are, and where you’re coming from. Right now, you’re hers, and you’re walking in my company. She’s showing you the best face she has.”