by Holly Black
An owl cries once. I open the truck and Rosco, our creaky old mutt, jumps in. I have to move fast before the owl calls again, and that fool of a dog will not be moved. I guess he’s coming along with me.
So hold on tight, boy.
We’re on our way.
* * *
It was all over Bordertown—a town flooded suddenly with “noobs,” as they called themselves. New kids with new toys, new stories, new music, new books, new hopes.
“I thought we were supposed to be the new kids,” Anisette Wolfsdottir grumbled as she washed out her socks in the sink at Carterhaugh. Trish waited for her turn at the tap. The tap water was running pale green today, and everything they washed smelled faintly of cantaloupe.
“I’ve only been here a month,” Anisette went on, scrubbing vigorously. “I’m not exactly old. And know what? I’ll be fifteen next Tuesday.”
“No, you won’t,” said Thelma Louise. “You’ll be twenty-eight.”
Anisette sat down hard.
“We figured it out.”
Anisette started crying in long gulping sobs, still clutching her wet socks as green water trickled down her legs.
“Shut up, Thelma,” Trish said. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
“Do the math,” Thelma Louise said. “Thirteen days ago here—about the time you moved in to Carterhaugh, Tara—it was thirteen years ago in the World. So fifteen plus thirteen equals …”
“I’m still a ki-i-i-d,” Anisette wailed.
Trish handed her a dirty T-shirt; there was no Kleenex here, and toilet paper was precious. But Anisette just wailed on. “Don’t listen to her,” Trish said. “It isn’t like that at all.” Anisette was beginning to take great whooping gasps. It was getting scary. “Listen to me!” Trish squeezed her hand, sock and all. She had to do something. “Anisette, listen. We’re right on the border of the land of Faerie, the land of Eternal Youth.…” Anisette’s hand gripped hers like a vise. Trish tried to remember what she’d read. “Some call it Tir-nan-Og, the Country of the Young, for age and death have not found it.… So while the World ages, we’ve stayed here, young and beautiful. See? Isn’t that good?”
Anisette leaned her head against her, dripping snot onto Trish’s blouse, but at least she was quieter now. Trish stroked her hair. Anisette was just a kid, like her own little Jimbo.
“But if we go back,” Anisette sniffled, “will we get old all of a sudden?”
“I hope so,” said Thelma Louise. “I want to be able to buy booze and cigarettes without anyone giving me shit. I want those smart-ass pimply little guys at the filling station to call me ma’am.”
Trish held Anisette harder. Because if she really had lost thirteen years in her thirteen days in Bordertown, then Jimbo was all grown up by now. Maybe he was in college. He was such a smart little boy. Maybe he’d gone to Harvard. He’d probably forgotten her. He probably thought she was dead.
* * *
We’re here, in Bordertown, Rosco and me. The hike through the Nevernever was hard, but we made it before our water ran out, reaching the city outskirts at last on a cracked and weedy road beside the river.
I found my way from Riverside to Soho by following the Tough Guide’s blurry map, got lost looking for Carnival Street (it wasn’t anywhere near where the Guide said it would be), then stopped at a club called The Dancing Ferret and ordered my first Border beer. The waitress there had grass-green hair, alabaster skin, and ears with points. “Toto,” I whispered in Rosco’s ear, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
I’m staying at the Diggers’ House on Plum, which is kind of a hostel and kind of a safe house. It’s not the Ritz. My bed’s on the floor of a dusty little storage space off the kitchen. That’s partly because the House is crowded and partly because my “scary” black dog makes people nervous. Elfin people, I mean, and I don’t get it, since he’s old and arthritic and wouldn’t hurt a fly; but Berlin, the girl who runs the House, made me promise I’d keep Rosco out of sight whenever the elf kids are around. So we sleep in the closet, which is better than sleeping out on the street, so I’m not complaining.
We don’t spend much time at the House, anyway; it’s just a free place to crash at night. By day we’re out walking the streets as I figure out how this crazy town works, and then figure out how I’m going to find Trish. It’s a much bigger place than I thought it would be; the words “needle” and “haystack” keep coming to mind. I’ve put up signs at The Ferret, the Poop, the Free Clinic, and lots of other locations:
Trish, I’m here and trying to find you.
Please contact me through the Diggers.
Love, Jimmy
Totally useless. An hour later my signs are covered up by brand-new signs: for bands, for squats, for other missing people who do and do not resemble my sister. An hour after that, the new signs are covered. Does anyone ever read these things?
I ask about Trish everywhere I go and show everyone the picture that I carry in my wallet: Trish and me on the day we brought little Rosco home from the pound. Now, here’s the weird thing (I mean really weird, a magic-leaking-over-the-Border kind of weird): The puppy in that picture is thirteen years old now. The boy in that picture is almost nineteen. But Trish? She’s still the girl in the photo. What I mean is, she’s still seventeen. I found this out on my first day in the city: that the thirteen years that have passed for us back home have only been thirteen days on the Border. The whole damn city did a Rip van Winkle when the Way to the Border closed down.
That means, for Trish, it’s been only a few short weeks since she ran away from home. And I guess that’s good, since it means that she didn’t intend to leave us for all this time. But it’s freaking me out a bit all the same. I’d been thinking of her as all grown up—but she hasn’t aged; she hasn’t changed. She’s still the Trish that I remember: that same dreamy girl who filled her room with books and art and unicorns; that hardworking girl who was supposed to be the first Milltown kid to go to Harvard; that heartbroken girl who cried in her bed at night, where nobody but me could hear her—while Mom and Dad kept saying that really, community college would be just as good, and she could live at home and keep working at Denny’s, and Harvard wasn’t for people like us.
She’s still that Trish, just like I remember.
But I’m not the same Jimmy, and we’re not the same family. Thirteen years is a long, long time.
* * *
Should I stay or should I go?
Goddammit, if Trish heard that song one more time, she was going to curl up on the cracked pavement with her backpack over her head and howl like a dog. Since the news of the Lost Years had hit like an atom bomb, it seemed like every street singer in Bordertown suddenly wanted to be Joe Strummer, singing or shouting their raucous: “If I go there will be trouble, And if I stay it will be double.”
She couldn’t stand it. She had to go; she knew that. She had to get home to her family and see if they were all right. And let them know that she was okay, too. Had they even gotten her postcard? She’d sent it over a week ago. But was that before or after the terrible split? She couldn’t count right. It made her giddy: “As bad as ants crawling around in your head,” as Princess Eilonwy would say in the Prydain books. What would Eilonwy do? She was impetuous and followed her heart. So she’d go back to Milltown, wouldn’t she? But what if … what if they weren’t all right? What if something had happened, something awful? What if they hated her for staying away so long? What if she got there, and they’d moved and left no address?
And what if she went back home to Milltown, just to see them, and then she never managed to leave again?
But of course she had to go back now … didn’t she? Should I stay or should I go?
* * *
There was a simple solution to Anush’s problem.
The trouble was, it would utterly destroy his life.
But wasn’t his life pretty well destroyed already?
“Stop sulking,” his lover said. “Or is it bro
oding? The distinction evades me.”
The elfin woman paced across the floor of her loft, her white robes swirling around her, dappling with dusty sunlight as she passed between the high, paned windows. All the room’s pipes were exposed, showing the raw industrial space it had once been—but the pipes changed color, humming musically with each shifting hue.
“What am I to do with you?” the woman asked the air. “It is hours till sunset, yet. Come.” She patted a velvet hassock. “Come sit at my feet, and ask me more of your questions.”
“What’s the point?” Anush said. He’d given up not speaking. Either way, it was just too painful.
“What was the point before? You were eager enough with your rude questions then.”
“You don’t understand!” Anush exploded. “There’s no point to any of this now! My research grant ran out twelve—no, almost thirteen years ago! No wonder the university never answered my letters asking for an extension. I’ve got no funding! No scholarship! I’ve probably been kicked out of my department for truancy, vagrancy, playing hooky—”
“But …,” said the woman, “you attain all the information you were seeking.”
“Beginning to,” he muttered.
She swept across the floor again. “Look! I’ve an invitation.” She opened her fingers, and a piece of paper fluttered to the floor, turning to silver powder just as it touched the wood. “Death apples,” she swore. “It wasn’t supposed to do that. These Border magics are so unreliable. Never mind, I know what it said. We’re invited to a garden party on the Hill at my cousin Windreed’s. We must go.”
“I don’t want to go to any party. Not like this.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s at night. You’ll be beautiful. Again.”
* * *
I’m starting to know my way around Soho. I walk and walk as I search for Trish, which is harder on Rosco than it is on me, but he trots along gamely, wheezing as he goes but refusing to stay back at the House. At night I rub Ms. Wu’s Special Magic Healing Salve into his aching old joints. The stuff makes him sneeze, and he smells like cherry candy, but it seems to be helping.
We go to the places I think Trish might go to: the music clubs and the galleries, the free concerts in Fare-You-Well Park. Yeats Night at the Changeling Theater and the poetry slams at Café Tremolo. I’ve tracked down every bookstore and library this side of Water Street, describing my sister to the clerks: brown hair, blue eyes, and about this tall; a lover of myths, medieval ballads, Celtic harp music, and fantasy trilogies. It finally dawns on me that it’s not exactly a unique description in this town.
I’m the one who stands out here, a long-haired redneck with a scruffy old dog and a heavy old duffel that I carry everywhere. (My tools are in that bag, and I’m not letting them get stolen.) I packed up my tools with more care than my clothes, so my wardrobe is kind of limited, just two pairs of jeans, an old flannel shirt, and a couple of T-shirts from Mr. Fix-It, the repair shop where I used to work. Some of the kids at the Diggers’ House are calling me Mr. Fix-It now. I’d been quietly making repairs at the House—just simple things, carpentry and plumbing jobs that don’t need any weird magic. If a hinge is sagging or a tap is leaking, it will bug me until I get out my tools.
At night, in my closet, I sleep like the dead, with Rosco stretched out and snoring beside me. The next day we’re up and back on the streets: We walk and we walk and we walk and we walk. I stare at strangers; I scan every crowd; I ask everyone I meet if they’ve seen her. “Maybe,” they tell me. She’s got that kind of face that you think you’ve seen somewhere before. And maybe you have. So I follow every lead I am given, and it’s never my sister.
Berlin, at the Diggers’ House, is sympathetic but not optimistic. She tells me that finding one runaway girl in a city this big will be no easy task. “If she’s down here in Soho, then maybe you’ll get lucky. But, honey, she could be anywhere—traveling with the traders, or working Uptown, or tucked away in some fancy love nest on the Hill. What are you going to do, spend the next five years knocking on every door from Letterville to Elftown?”
Yeah, I know, needle and haystack. But I’ve got to try to find her all the same. My family has been broken for thirteen long years now.
And fixing things is what I do.
* * *
Should I stay or should I go?
A solitary violinist was busking mournfully on the southern corner of Ho and Third. Even he was fiddling that same tune. Playing it like a lament.
It was too much. Trish felt like she was going crazy—like the city itself was attacking her, mocking her indecision, magnifying her pain. She whirled around in a circle on the sidewalk in front of Danceland, looking for an escape that wasn’t there. She couldn’t breathe. She was going to faint—she was going to die—
“Hey.” Trish felt a hand on her arm. “You okay?”
It was an elf, tall and blond—a girl with a ponytail and a Changeling Theater T-shirt. It was Cam, the halfie waitress from the Hard Luck Café.
“Here …” Cam tried to ease Trish’s backpack off her.
For some reason the lifting of that tiny burden made Trish want to burst into sobs of relief, as though Cam were lifting all her troubles off her back. But she didn’t want to cry on the street, in front of some stranger—
“Hey,” Cam said again, helping her sit down on the curb. “It’s okay. Really. Everyone from the World is going through it. I see it all the time, these days. You’re all in shock.”
“What about you?”
“I was born here. I’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Well, um, thanks for worrying about me, then.”
“No worries!” Cam grinned. “That’s what the kids from Brisbane say all the time. ‘No worries!’ I think it’s cute.”
Trish smiled shakily back. No worries.
“So, listen,” Cam said. “I’m on my way to work now, but you wanna come over to our place tonight? We’re at the Chimera, over on Carmine Street. You know, the big place down from Wish You Were Here, across from the Pumpkin Coach?”
She’d heard of the galleries and shops and clubs on Carmine Street. She’d thought there’d be nothing for her sort of person there. But now, it seemed, there was.
“Okay,” Trish said. “Chimera. Do I need a special pass to get in or something?”
Cam laughed. “Hell, no. It’s just a squat—well, a squat and a little more. You’ll see.”
* * *
“You will like this party of Windreed’s,” his lady said. “Have you ever even been to Dragon’s Tooth Hill?”
Anush remembered his disastrous early attempts to collect data there, and kept his mouth shut.
“You will meet and mingle with the finest of our kind. I can show you off, and you can ask all Windreed’s Trueblood guests your most impertinent questions. It will be vastly amusing: They will all be furious, but none will dare retaliate, as you’re under my protection.”
“Protection?” Anush looked up between his hairy hands. “Is that what you call it?”
“Well …” He shivered as she stroked his hideous head. “You cannot be spelled by two of the folk at once. It’s beyond rude, and Windreed’s crowd are very point-device.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I’d sure hate to be ugly day and night. I’d sure hate to upset any more Truebloods. I’d sure hate for my questions to be—”
Her silvery laughter silenced him like a slap. “It’s so funny, when your voice gets all squeaky like that—”
“Then fix it!” he shouted—or tried to. He sounded ridiculous, even to his own ears. She was laughing again. He jumped for the table (jumping was something he did well) and swept off a candelabra that only last night had lit a feast for them both, sending it crashing to the floor.
“Beware,” she said coldly. “Just because you wear a beast’s form does not mean you may behave as one in my presence.”
“You want questions?” Anush cried. “Well, here’s a question for you! Did
you know all along about this thirteen years thing? Was it you? Was it your pals in the Realm, just finding a new way to mess us up and ruin all our lives?”
The woman looked coolly at him. “That was three questions, my creature. You will never thrive in your quest for the truths of the Realm if you do not learn to count.”
Anush took a deep breath. It was true; he’d grown up on a diet of myth and fairy-tale books. He did know better. And he dimly remembered being that promising young student out in the World, believing that he’d be the one to crack the secrets of the Realm with his fabulous bicultural understanding of myth and magic. It was just that, when it was real, it was so complicated. He’d landed in the middle of a story himself. And the Truebloods hadn’t read the same books.
He tried again, as calmly as he could: “Was it the Truebloods who made thirteen years in the World pass as thirteen days here in Bordertown?”
She walked to the other end of the room. He was learning that when she didn’t look him in the eye, didn’t face him directly, she was most likely to be telling the truth.
“We do not meddle in the World’s affairs. And I know of none with such power, in the Realm or on the Border. This little spell”—she waved her fingers at him in that irritating way—“is the strongest that I can work here. And even that will break when you pass out of the Borderlands.”
