IF

Clayton Smith

Part II: Boundarylands

Chapter 1:

In Which We Discover the Importance of a Valid Passbill and Are Mindful of Our Precious Fingers

Cole gave himself a good shake. Walking through the portal was like walking through a giant dryer sheet as it drew in and dissipated the static electricity of the world’s largest sweater. He felt fibrous, and waxy, and his skin crackled with energy.

“Where are we?” whispered Emma, her eyes round and searching.

“The Way Station,” the Stranger answered. But a more precise answer might have been, “On a dock— a massive dock, along with hundreds of other people.” There was no sign of the pink portal they’d just tumbled through; there was only a great body of water on one side, and a huge brick building on the other. Most of the people on the dock seemed to be milling toward a row of turnstiles set before the building entrance. A long sign that ran the length of the structure read WELLWHICH WAY STATION.

“Where’s the pink door?” Polly asked, biting her lip nervously. “How do we get back?”

“That was our way in,” said the Stranger, “not our way out.” He pushed forward into the crowd of people and beckoned for the children to follow.

Cole peeked over the edge of the dock and into the water below. It was blue, a bright, turquoise blue, the color of postcard oceans that never quite lived up to the hype when you saw them in person.

“Ooo…pretty,” Emma breathed, joining Cole at the edge of the dock. Cole agreed, but as he gazed down at the water, something nagged at his brain. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something was wrong with the water.

“Does it look normal to you?” he asked Emma. “The water, I mean.”

She nodded. “It’s pretty,” she said again, with a bashful smile.

It was Willy, of all people, who saw the problem with the water as he poked his head over the dock. He picked it out immediately. “It’s going the wrong way,” he said.

Cole was so completely surprised by both the truth of this statement and the fact that it came from Willy’s lips and not his own that he nearly fell into the ocean. The waves were rolling backward. Instead of flowing in toward the dock, like waves should, they rolled out toward the center of the ocean. “That’s wrong,” Cole murmured, amazed. “Why is it doing that?”

He suddenly felt a presence very close behind him. An old man with a grizzled beard and pinched temples leaned over his shoulder, following his gaze down into the water. “Yar, that’s the way of it, lad,” the old man said. He wore a heavy-knit sweater and smelled of tobacco and salt. “Backwards is forwards, an’ forwards is backwards, for that thar’s the Sea of Confusion.” The old man gave him a knowing little nudge, then turned and hobbled across the dock, his one wooden leg going thump-thump-thump.

“Come on, let’s go,” Polly pleaded.

Cole looked up and saw the Stranger disappearing into the crowd. “We’d better stick with the cowboy,” he agreed.

The children hurried through the milling throng and fell in step behind the Stranger. He weaved through the crowd, dodging sailors, fishermen, shoe shiners, a mime, a group of astronauts, a troupe of circus folk, and more than a few creatures that didn’t look quite human. The Stranger led them to one of the turnstiles near the far end of the building.

“It’s an elf!” Polly shrieked, delighted. Sure enough, an extremely small man sat at a high desk just behind the turnstile, his stunted legs swinging freely between the bars of his stool.

Upon hearing Polly’s proclamation, the small man scowled down at the group. It was an extremely effective scowl; the little man had tough, weathered skin, bushy white eyebrows, and a scraggly old beard to match. The children shrank back from the venom in his eyes, but the Stranger just chewed his cheroot. “Got some visitors,” he said, knocking a shelf of ash from the cigar.

The elf gave a sour frown. “Lemme see your passbill,” he said. Little flecks of drool flew from his lips when he talked. One of them landed on Etherie’s cheek. She swabbed her face with her sleeve. Cole didn’t know about her aura, but her face had sure flushed a pale shade of green.

The Stranger turned his back to the angry little creature and pulled down the back of his collar. The elf climbed up on his stool and peered over the nape of the Stranger’s neck. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him; he clamored back down onto his seat with a grumble and made a note on a pad of paper on his desk. “Go on through,” he said.

“The five of them are with me,” the Stranger said, gesturing toward the children.

Now the elf grinned. Two crooked rows of yellow teeth ground against the insides of his cracked lips. “Where’re their passbills?” he hissed.

“They’re with me,” the Stranger repeated. His right hand eased itself down toward his holster, but his cold, piercing eyes never left the elf’s.

“Aye, mayhap, but you ain’t a passibill, are ya? Or if you are, you’re the ugliest I ever seen,” the creature snarled back. “No one gets in without a valid passbill. Stay with them or be about your business, but if they ain’t stamped, they ain’t going through.”

“Maybe we can get passbills?” Cole offered helpfully. It occurred to him that he had exactly two dollars and seventy-five cents in his pockets, and that probably wasn’t enough to buy a single passbill, much less five of them. But maybe the people in the Boundarylands operated on a barter system or something. It was worth a shot.

The gnarled old elf just laughed. “Get a passbill! Har-har-har! Sure, you go get a passbill. Turn around and go ask a mermaid, maybe she’s got a spare in her clams!” He choked on his own laughter.

“I’m not gonna say it again,” the Stranger said through gritted teeth. “They’re with me.”

“Tell you what.” The elf leaned over his desk and brought his nose within inches of the Stranger’s cigar. From somewhere beneath his desk, he pulled out a silver hunter’s knife that was bigger than his arm. The sharp edge of it gleamed in the sunlight. “They can go with you, and I’ll take naught but their precious fingers for passbills. Hm?” He gestured toward Cole with the knife. “How ‘bout you, Skipper? Bring me your hands, boy, and let’s make you pass-worthy.”

The Stranger moved like a flash of lightning in a midnight storm. He grabbed the hand that held the gleaming knife and twisted it back, slamming it against the desk and rendering it useless. In the same motion, he pulled the six-shooter with his right hand and had it cocked and pressed against the elf’s temple before he could utter his first moan of surprise.

“They’re coming with me,” the Stranger said, his voice even. “Fingers and all.”

“You wouldn’t dare shoot an officer of the Boundary! I know you wouldn’t!” the elf cried. But even Cole could see that his eyes told a different story.

The Stranger clicked his tongue and motioned toward the turnstile with his head. “Go on,” he said to the children.

Cole didn’t need to be told twice. He hurried through the gate, both terrified and relieved to be on the other side.

The other children weren’t exactly close on his heels. Emma and Polly stood gaping at the Stranger, their hands balled into fists at their sides. Etherie stood serenely tapping her lips, as if trying to discern what made the little elf tick, exactly. And Willy was a kid in a candy store. He hooted and hollered, jumping excitedly from one foot to the other. “Bang, bang!” he cried, making little guns with his fingers. He ran forward and slugged the elf in the leg. The Stranger hissed at him, and Willy high-tailed it through the turnstile. The girls eventually followed, edging their way through the gate. Their eyes never left the barrel of the gun.

When all five of the children were through, the Stranger pulled back on the elf’s knife hand until he released the blade. It went clattering to the ground. The Stranger kicked it under the gate and told Cole to pick it up. Cole did so reluctantly, holding it like he might hold a rattlesnake.

“Keep this between us,” the Stranger said to the elf. The elf nodded his agreement, wincing at the pain in his wrist. The Stranger released him, then he holstered his gun and pushed through the gate. He plucked the knife from Cole’s hand and tossed it into the Sea of Confusion. “Let’s go,” he said.

He crossed into the station house, and the five children followed.

Chapter 2:

On the Finer Points of Flexible Cartography

“How do we find Broken?” Cole asked, half running to keep up with the Stranger’s long strides. The gunslinger didn’t answer; he simply walked on, with undeniable purpose.

“Slow down!” Polly whined. Her legs were faltering, and she had no servants here to carry her.

“Keep up,” panted Emma, who was huffing and puffing along, “or we’ll never stay together!”

Cole was surprised to see that Etherie was matching the Stranger’s hurried pace easily. “Most of these people have no auras whatsoever,” she confided as they walked, looking around at the other creatures in the building. “It is most intriguing.”

They were inside the station house now, hurrying across a marble floor toward a line of merchant stalls against the far wall. The ceiling towered high above, supported by massive marble columns. In the center of the expansive room stood a tall, four-sided clock perched atop a post of intricately molded green cast iron.

The Stranger led them across the station to a kiosk situated in the back corner. It was a small, square stall of wooden construction, tucked in among a number of much larger, garage-style shops. The little sign on the front of the kiosk read, “The N.E.W.S. Stand.” The Stranger strode up to it and rapped his knuckles on the counter.

“Oh, let me guess!” A short, plump grandmother with half-moon spectacles rose to her feet inside the kiosk and settled her weathered hands on the counter. “You’re in the market for a pan-directional globule.”

“We need a map,” the Stranger said, his eyes squinting in the glare of the station’s fluorescent light. “I’d have you be quick about it.”

The old woman smirked at the Stranger and peered over the counter at the children with her rheumy old eyes. “This your lot?” she asked suspiciously. The Stranger made no reply. He just chewed on his cheroot and drummed his fingers on the wooden counter. The woman’s mouth turned down at the corners. “All right, all right, I’ll get you your map.” She turned and hobbled over to the far corner of the stall.

“Why do we need a map?” Cole asked, suddenly worried. “Don’t you know where we’re going?”

“I do,” said the Stranger. “It’s getting there that’s the tricky part.”

“Broken can’t have gone far,” said Etherie. “Perhaps we should spread out and search for him here in the station. If we work to project our astral beings into the further corners, we’ll be twice as quick about it.” She put her fingers to her temples and concentrated.

“You won’t find him here,” the Stranger said, sounding irritated. “Too much time has passed.”

“It has not,” Polly protested. She looked at her watch, a plastic Cinderella piece with a digital display. “It’s only...32:71? Oh no, my watch is broken!” she cried, stamping her foot. “Look!” She held up her watch to the rest of the group. The numbers flashed from 32:71 to 003:456 to 12:52 to -6:99.

“Clocks must not work here,” Cole mumbled. He remembered what Gaia had said about time moving differently in the Boundarylands. Maybe their real-world watches couldn’t keep up.

“Then what about that, genius?” Willy asked, pointing up at the cast iron clock in the center of the hall.

Cole raised his eyes to the clock’s face and gasped in surprise. “It’s not a clock at all!” he said. “Look!”

The face of the non-clock had only one hand, and instead of twelve numbers painted around the outside, there were four words; Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, and Never. The hand currently pointed at Today. Cole found himself drifting toward the non-clock, wholly mesmerized by its incongruous nature. He approached the base of the post and saw a small silver plate tacked on to the side, near the bottom. He squatted down and read the words stamped into the plate: Chronological Barometer. A product of Schlupp & Schloop, Inventors- and Chronologists-at-Large. Pinch Rim, the Boundarylands.

“What’s a chron—chron—ch—”Emma sounded out over his shoulder.

“A chronological barometer. I don’t know…but a regular barometer measures atmospheric pressure,” Cole explained. “I think this one is meant to measure chronologic pressure.”

Emma blinked. “Huh?”

“I think it’s supposed to tell us if we’re moving forward or backward in time,” he said with a frown. The notion of time fluctuations—measured time fluctuations, to be precise—was rather troubling. “I guess we’re moving like we’re supposed to be,” he said, nodding up at the hand pointing to Today. “So that’s good at least.” But as he said this, the hand began slowly easing itself down around the clock face until it came to a rest halfway between Tomorrow and Never.

“Almost never? What’s that mean?” Emma asked.

“Must be broken,” Cole murmured. He shrugged. “Come on, let’s get back to the others.”

By the time they’d returned to the kiosk, the little old lady had unrolled a map and spread it flat on the countertop. “Here, now!” she said in her sweet, grandmotherly croon. “One map of the Boundarylands. You’ve got the Wellwhich Way Station, where we are, here...the Sea of Confusion...the Place of Doors, here...Sandman’s Corner...oh, this patch of land is Dougal’s Unicorm Farm, you lot will like that!”

“A unicorn farm!” Polly squealed.

The old woman smiled down on her. “That’s right, dear. It’s all here. Why, if you leave now, you could be there by moonfall!”

The Stranger set his knuckles on the fresh white paper of the map and leaned so close to the old woman that she could hear his teeth grinding as he said, “I want a map, crone.”

The smile vanished from the woman’s face. She glared at the Stranger over the rim of her glasses. “This is a map,” she insisted, stabbing the paper with her finger for emphasis.

“This is a souvenir,” the Stranger grumbled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a match. He struck it on the counter and lit the end of his cheroot. Smoke rose from the tip in lazy curls and made the woman’s eyes water. She broke her gaze and looked down sullenly. “You take us for tourists,” the Stranger continued. “Not very smart.” His blue eyes blazed. “Go fetch us a map.”

The old woman scowled at him, but she whirled around just the same and scurried over to a locked drawer on the far end of the stall. She pulled out a key that hung on a chain beneath her red and white paisley dress. She slipped it over her head, unlocked the drawer, and pulled out another sheet of heavy paper, this one battered and yellowed with age. Creases crossed the surface like train tracks, and the edges of the paper were frayed and soft. But as she spread this new map on top of the other, false map, it wasn’t the frayed edges or the creases that caught Cole’s eye. It was the ink with which the lines of the map were drawn. It was black as tar, and shiny, as if it had been dipped from an inkwell just moments before. But the ink must have been as old as the rest of the map, and by the look of it, the rest of the map was very, very old.

And the sheen of the ink wasn’t even the map’s most intriguing property. As he looked at it, certain lines and boundaries faded away and were replaced by new, different lines and boundaries. One second the map showed an open pasture near the top right-hand corner, and the next second the pasture was gone—a lakeside village had taken its place. Off to the left, a rectangular city morphed into a river, which in turn faded into a forest, and then to a mountain range.

The ink disappeared and rearranged itself all over the map, first here, now there, so that the shiny black marks rippled and roiled across the page like a pot of boiling water. In the whole map, there were only two pieces that never changed; the Wellwhich Way Station, and the very center of the map, a circular area labeled “the Pinch.”

The Stranger reached for the map, but the old woman slapped his hand down and pinned it to the counter. Cole half-expected their fingers to come away covered in ink. “Not so fast, there, charmer. You ain’t bought it yet.”

“How much?” the Stranger asked warily.

The woman rubbed her wrinkled chin. “Hmmm…a rare specimen like this? Fetches a goodly price, I’d say.”

“I have two dollars and seventy-five cents,” Cole whispered to the Stranger.

The old woman cackled. “What’s this? Dollar-money? Oooh—let’s see it now, sonny!” Cole dug in his pocket and retrieved two neatly folded bills and three quarters. He placed the cash on the counter. The woman took off her spectacles and held them out a few inches from her face, examining the coins. “Real one-quarters!” she cackled. “I’ll be!” She replaced her glasses and slid the coins back toward Cole. “About as useful as a third shoulder.”

Cole was crestfallen. “It’s not enough?”

“Not enough? I should say not!” she hooted. “We don’t truck in coins or paper here. Do I look like an alchemist?”

Cole, who had never seen an alchemist, had no idea if she looked like one or not. “I…don’t know.”

She squinted at him suspiciously. “Well, I’m not. You’ll need a better currency than this, dearie!”

“What’s your price?” the Stranger said.

The woman pulled herself up on her tiptoes and studied each of the children in turn. “The plump one there will do,” she said, licking her lips hungrily. The old woman patted her belly. “She’ll do quite well.”

“Me?” Emma gasped, her eyes wide with horror.

“That girl’s worth a dozen maps, witch. We gonna do business, or we gonna waste daylight?”

“Fine, fine,” she said, throwing up her hands. “Keep your piglet.” Emma sighed with relief. She untied the sack of éclairs and stuffed one into her mouth whole. She smiled as the creamy filling squished soothingly into her cheeks. “But you know as well as I, this map is worth a pretty song.”

“Then tell me what you would hear,” the Stranger demanded.

“Well...I could let it go for...say...an eyetooth,” she said with a sly grin.

The Stranger’s eyes widened. The old woman was sharp, much sharper than she let on. “You know that ain’t possible,” he said.

“Oh, I think it is, dearie,” she said, all sweetness and smiles. “Unless I miss my mark, these young ones aren’t branded, are they? And this one here has real dollar-money. There’s only one reason I can think of that accounts for that.”

“You’re wrong.”

The old woman shrugged. “Too bad, then.” She gripped the edge of the map and began to roll it up. “I was so hoping to have a little business today.”

The Stranger spat a curse loud enough for the children to hear. Willy clamped his hand over his own mouth and giggled. The Stranger turned and hunkered down in front of the children. “This is your journey; I leave it to you,” he said, looking seriously from one to the next. “What she asks is no small thing: a canine tooth, though I’d wager any tooth’d do. I’ll tell you this, without that map, we’ve no hope of getting to the Royal, and he’s the only one who can tell us where to find your friend.”

“Why does she want a tooth?” Etherie asked, picking thoughtfully at her incisors.

The Stranger hesitated. “They’re valuable,” he finally said. “To some, anyway. There’s a sort of magic in teeth—real teeth—and I don’t know what she’ll use it for. But I reckon it won’t be good.”

“Is she the Tooth Fairy?” Polly asked, intrigued.

The Stranger snorted. “Far from it.”

“Anyone have any loose teeth?” Cole asked. He’d lost his latest just a week ago. He still caught himself tonguing the little socket it had left behind. That little tooth was responsible for one of the two dollars in his pocket. It was the only loose one he’d had, though. The rest weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Not naturally, anyway.

“I got one,” Willy said. He spread his lips wide and wiggled one of his lower bicuspids with his tongue. It was definitely loose.

“Give it to her, you dumb-dumb!” Polly said.

“It’s still in my mouth!” Willy protested.

“Your call, kid,” the Stranger shrugged.

Willy screwed up his face and tried to look down into his own mouth. “Is it gonna hurt?”

The Stranger shrugged again. The other children exchanged nervous glances. Cole suppressed the impulse to say, Of course it’s going to hurt; it’s a tooth attached to nerves, and she’ll rip it right out of your head! But that, he knew, would almost certainly be counterproductive to obtaining the map, which they desperately needed. So instead, he tried to smile encouragingly…though he was pretty sure his mouth just ended up looking grotesque.

Luckily for their mission, Polly stepped up to the plate.

“Naw, it won’t hurt,” she said. “It’s a tooth, and tooths are made of rocks, and rocks don’t get hurt.”

Willy nodded. That made sense. “Will there be blood?”

Polly closed one eye and thought. “Mmmm...yes,” she decided.

“Cool!” Willy jumped up and down with his fists clenched in excitement. “Let’s do it!”

Cole, who was rather squeamish when it came to blood, tried his best not to watch the operation. But he wrestled with his curiosity, and he did snatch a few glimpses out of the corner of his eye…

He saw Willy open his jaw so side, his whole head practically came unhinged.

He saw Polly pushing at the tooth with her finger.

He saw her using her light-up star wand like a crowbar.

He saw the tooth flying in the air, just a split second before it knocked against his forehead and tumbled to the floor.

“I did it!” Polly cried.

Willy ran his tongue cautiously over the socket. “Hey—there’s hardly any blood at all!” he complained.

The Stranger reached down and picked up the little tooth between his thumb and forefinger. “You made a hard sacrifice,” he said seriously. “Prayers up it doesn’t come back to bite us in the end.” He stood up and set the tooth down on the old woman’s counter. She snatched it up and examined it closely.

“This is no eyetooth,” she whined.

“So it isn’t,” the Stranger confirmed. “You don’t want it, give it back.”

“Now, hold on, hold on,” she said, shielding the tooth from the Stranger by twisting sideways. “I suppose, seeing as how it’s a genuine tooth, I could trade it for half the map.”

“It’s the whole map.” The Stranger pulled the cheroot from his lips and knocked the ash to the floor. “Or nothing at all.”

The old woman frowned. “Fine,” she snapped. “Take your blasted map.” She flung the roll of parchment at him.

He caught it deftly with his left hand. “Much obliged,” he drawled, tapping the map to the brim of his hat. “Mind if I use your counter for a spell?” The woman glowered, but didn’t refuse. She waved her hand at him dismissively and wandered over to an ancient telephone set into the corner of the stall. “Obliged again.”

He unrolled the map and looked over its ever-shifting inkscape. Almost as an after-thought, he reached down and pulled a short-bladed knife from his boot. He wiped the blade on the sleeve of his shirt, then pushed the point of the knife into the pad of his forefinger until it broke skin. A little ball of blood beaded above the cut. The Stranger turned his hand over and squeezed the drop of blood onto the map.

“Oh, gross,” Polly said, her face going sour.

“Cool!” cried Willy. He clamored up to the counter and pulled himself up onto his tiptoes so he could see the stain. But instead of spreading, the red splotch was actually getting smaller, as if the paper were sucking the blood into its old, yellow fibers. The spot grew smaller and smaller, then vanished altogether.

“Look!” Etherie breathed, pointing excitedly at the bottom of the map. Cole craned his neck up over Willy’s shoulder and saw that a red circle had appeared inside the map’s Way Station, near the western wall.

“Gimme your finger,” the Stranger said to Cole.

The boy eyed the knife warily. “What for?”

“It’s important.”

Cole frowned. “Just me?”

The Stranger gave a rare grin. “They’ll get their turn,” he said.

The other children watched Cole with wide eyes. If he didn’t donate a drop of blood to the map, some of them wouldn’t, either. Cole bit at his bottom lip nervously.

The Stranger wouldn’t have bled himself if it weren’t important...right? he thought to himself.

He gulped hard and held his shaky finger out to the cowboy, who grabbed it, not unkindly, and held it steady above the map. He squinted at Cole from under his hat. “Ready?” Cole nodded and gritted his teeth. He drew in a sharp hiss when the cowboy pushed the tip of the blade into his skin. A red bead dropped from Cole’s finger and disappeared into the map.

A second red circle appeared in the Way Station, overlapping the first.

The Stranger wiped the knife clean on his jeans and held it up to the other children with a smirk. “Who’s next?”

Chapter 3:

In Which Mother Earth Throws Quite a Fit

“Well. What shall we do now?”

Miss Twist sat perched on the edge of her desk. The children had just disappeared through the chalkboard, and now she was left with IFs for company.

“We shall walk barefoot into Pan’s forest on the slope beyond these walls, and together we shall become one with his gentle blanket of pine boughs,” Gaia suggested.

“I suppose I should have known better than to ask,” Miss Twist sighed. “I think it’s best you all stay inside, and out of sight.”

“I say bugger-all to this, we should go in after our Anchors, and protect them as we were made to do,” the Servant pouted.

“And have the portal close behind us?” Frau Mütter snapped. “I don’t like this any more than you do, but we’re stuck in it now until they return.”

“We could have a snack,” Mr. Puffles suggested. He reached behind his back and produced a pineapple upside-down cake. “Ooooooo!”

“It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard,” Miss Twist decided.

“Look. This is still a school, is it not?” asked Frau Mütter, rising from Willy’s desk. “I see no reason for us to carry on any differently than you would on a typical day. Teach us something.”

Miss Twist laughed. “This is a third-grade classroom, Frau. I assume you already know how to do simple math, point out France on a map, and make abstract art out of macaroni,” she said.

“Surely there’s something you could teach us,” Frau Mütter insisted. “Personally, I’d be interested in learning more about humans. You must be something of an expert on human beings. And you are particularly qualified to teach us what we don’t know, having a foot in both worlds, as you do.”

“Yes, you spend time in both the real world and the imaginary,” the Servant agreed. “You would know what knowledge we lack.”

Miss Twist shook her head and sighed. “Humans are harder to understand than you would think,” she said.

“What about children?” Frau Mütter asked. “What can you tell us about the children?”

The Servant padded over to the desk next to Frau Mütter’s and took a seat. “Yes…shed some light on that particular dark corner, would you?”

“Oh, yes! Teach us about Emma!” added Mr. Puffles, squeezing into a desk at the back of the room. His round belly bulged from the sides like a balloon being hugged by a python.

Only Gaia seemed reluctant to take part in this lesson. She stood near the outer wall with her palms on the windowpanes, yearning glumly against the glass.

“Would you like to know about your Anchors specifically, or human children in general?” Miss Twist asked.

“I doubt there’s much difference,” said the Servant, his nose high in the air.

Mr. Puffles protested that a study in Emma would be for the greater good of all, but Frau Mütter silenced him with her hand. “Children in general, I think.”

“You already seem to know enough about them to get them to behave,” Miss Twist observed.

“I know what William needs to hear in order for him to behave like a proper human being,” Frau Mütter said. “I know this because he formed me with this knowledge. I do have some additional insight into human children...we all do, I suppose...but it comes from the children we’ve encountered in the Boundarylands, and those are just imaginary creations, and therefore their ideas may not be wholly accurate.”

“Children do not act in dreams as they act in life,” Gaia put in sadly from the windows. She pulled the crank and cracked one of the windows open, letting the warm August breeze hit her full in the face. She smiled.

“The air conditioning is on,” Miss Twist pointed out with a frown.

“Air is wholly and perfectly conditioned by nature,” Gaia shot back. “It is man who has corrupted it.” But she closed the window anyway and planted her forehead against the pane. With her swirling, colored gown, she looked not unlike a caged bird.

“Please, have a seat, Gaia. There’s no telling how long we’ll be here. We might as well be as comfortable as possible.” Miss Twist gestured to an empty desk near the front of the room. Mother Nature sulked her way over to a different desk, one in the back corner, and she heaved into it with a dramatic, rattling sigh.

“All right. Children,” Miss Twist said. “Here’s what I know about human children: They’re not as educated as adults, but they sometimes know quite a bit more; they understand the value of both snacks and naps, which most grown-ups seem to discount; they have extraordinary worlds inside of them, and their imaginations are limitless, though I suppose you all already know that part.”

“Urrrrrrrrrrngh,” Gaia moaned from the back of the room. Her eyes were closed, and she was swaying in her seat like someone lost at sea. She reached into her long, brown hair and rifled slowly through it. “Urrrrrrrrrrngh.”

“What on earth is the matter with you?” the Servant asked.

“She’s hungry!” offered Mr. Puffles. He winked a chocolate cupcake into existence and set it on her desk. But Gaia didn’t even look at it.

“She’ll be fine,” Frau Mütter said, waving off the goddess of the Earth. “I would like to hear more of this lesson. The things you say of children, they are all positive things. But where do their weaknesses lie? I am interested in learning where they fall short.”

“Why would you want to hear of their shortcomings?” the Servant demanded. “We should only strive to build children up.”

“I agree, children should be celebrated,” Frau Mütter replied. “But if we know where they fall short, we can guard against those pitfalls and help them to be good human beings.” She gave the Servant a chance to respond, but he didn’t seem to have anything to say. Satisfied, Frau Mütter nodded, and returned her attention to Miss Twist. “Where do children fall short?”

“Well,” Miss Twist said, rubbing her nose, “my educational experience is mostly with younger children, and not with those in adolescence. I understand that is the point at which so many of them fall. But I know that children who have an improper amount of creativity—either too much or too little—can often become either very dangerous or very boring as adults. I know that that is why we send them to school; so they can learn enough facts to balance out imagination and enough imagination to wage war against some facts.”

“Wage war against facts?” asked the Servant. “Shouldn’t education strive to reveal and enforce facts?”

“Yes, of course,” Miss Twist said, standing up from her seat and pacing the length of the room. “But we strive to balance whimsy with those facts. Too many facts can be detrimental to a child’s heart. For example: Imaginary friends are, in fact, imaginary, and they do not exist in the real world.”

The Servant’s face turned a bashful red, and he sank down in his seat. “Erm…yes, I see your point.”

“Do you mean to say that the entire point of education is not to actually educate the mind, but to regulate the amount of creativity that flows through it?” Frau asked.

Miss Twist nodded. “That’s how I see it.”

Frau Mütter considered this. “Education is a very strange thing.”

“Urrrrngh!” Gaia started rapping her hands quickly on the desktop. It vibrated so hard that the cupcake bounced right off and fell to the floor with a plop. Mr. Puffles gasped in horror. “Please,” Gaia whimpered to no one in particular. “Please, please, please.” Her palms slapped the desk, faster and faster.

“Gaia, are you all right?” Miss Twist asked, bewildered.

“Wait, one moment,” Frau Mütter said, “I want to discuss this further.”

“Let me out!” Gaia wailed. “Let me out!” She jumped up onto the seat of her desk and stomped on it with her bare feet. “Let me out! Let me out! I have to get out!” She leapt from her desk to Mr. Puffles’s desk, then to the Servant’s. “I need to get out!” she cried, grabbing the Servant by his sideburns and shaking him into oblivion. He tried to pull away but was confined by the desk, and the whole piece of furniture went tumbling over instead. The Servant pitched to the floor, but Gaia was thrown clear and fell into Frau Mütter’s arms. “Out!” she screamed, knocking her own forehead against the broad expanse of the larger woman’s. “Out!” She spun herself free and ran toward the classroom door. Her feet slipped on the dry linoleum, and she went careening into the bulletin board. She flailed her arms and caught two fistfuls of construction paper. She ripped the red and white scalloped border as she fell, throwing her hands wildly and flailing the pieces about her head like a pair of circus whips. Then she clamored to her feet, dashed to the door, pushed it open with her hip, and was gone down the hall, pumping her fists in the air and screaming, “The confinements of mankind have rendered nature mad!” Then she was down the hall and around the corner, shrieking and laughing and causing a general ruckus.

Miss Twist stood at the front of the room, rubbing her forehead with her hand. “Great,” she sighed. “Just great.”

Chapter 4:

In Which the World Freaks Out

Cole stood at the Way Station’s exit and decided that he must be having a stroke.

His complete inability to speak certainly gave this theory legs.

The massive exit doors were made of glass, and through them the children caught their first true glimpse of the Boundarylands. Polly screwed up her face in confusion. “What is it...doing?” she asked.

“It’s freaking out,” Willy breathed, his eyes wide.

The world outside was, quite literally, slipping by. When they approached the doors, the landscape on the other side was quiet and peaceful. It was twilight, and the land in front of the station fell gracefully away to a shimmering pond, where a pair of gazelles dipped their heads to drink. But five seconds later, that world began sliding to the left, turning like a carousel, moving slowly at first, so slowly that Cole wasn’t sure it was actually happening, then kicking into overdrive and whirling with sickening speed until the pond was a pale blue blur. This blitz of movement stopped almost as soon as it had started, but when the blur cleared into an image, the landscape was completely different. Gone were the lake and the gently sloping hill and the pair of gazelles. Now, the street outside the doors was New York City in the dead of night. The Empire State Building towered above the station, its lights twinkling in the electric-brown night sky of the Big Apple. Then the world whirled again, and now there was a lake of fire lapping at the station doors. Emma cried out as a wave of lava crashed into the glass, certain that the doors would melt, and that the lava would dissolve the flesh from their bones. But the doors held, even when a great fire demon rose from the pits of the flames and spewed a stream of steaming hot obsidian shards at the station from its sulfur-lined throat. Thousands of pieces of smoking rock pinged and cracked against the doors, but they held firm. Then there was another blur of movement, the fire demon was gone, and the children found themselves staring out the doors at the deep recesses of outer space, an entire imagination’s worth of galaxies spinning lazily in the absolute darkness.

In other words, the world was freaking out, just as Willy had said.

“That’s why the map changes,” Cole said, more to himself than to his classmates. “It shows what’s where at every given when.”

The Stranger nodded. “’Bout the size of it,” he said.

“We’re going out there?” Polly asked doubtfully. The landscape changed to a land of ash, with tall gray towers reaching up into a gloomy sky.

“We have to,” Cole said, watching the ash give way to the ocean floor. “Broken is out there somewhere.”

“Maybe we should wait here for him to cycle past,” Etherie suggested. Cole, dismayed at the sight of infinite worlds swiping past the doorway, actually found himself hoping the Stranger would take this unlikely plan and tweak it to make it work.

But instead, the cowboy snorted. “We could wait for centuries,” he said, pulling a new cigar from his back pocket. The ocean slid away and became a nighttime desert landscape crawling with life-sized, melting plastic soldiers. Polly yelped and clung to Emma, and even Willy looked like he might take the opportunity to faint. But the Stranger ignored them all. “No telling which ‘when’ your friend’ll spin by in. No telling which land he’s even in.”

Cole furrowed his brow. “Isn’t that why we have the map?”

The Stranger stuck the cheroot between his lips. “Nope.”

Cole waited for the cowboy to elaborate. “It’s not?” he finally asked.

The Stranger shook his head and sighed. His breath came out like the bone-dry rattle of the desert. “All right…gather ‘round. We’ll go through this once.” He squatted down, and the children formed a half-circle before him. He unrolled the map and laid it flat on the marble floor. “This is a map of the Boundarylands; it ain’t the whole Boundarylands, but it’s near as anyone can get on paper. The whole world...” He paused and tried to figure the best way to explain it. “The world exists sort of on top of itself. This here’s the main floor, but it changes.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the big glass doors. Now, outside, it was morning on a farm. “Your friend, Broken—he’s out there somewhere. No idea what floor he’s on, and without his blood, there ain’t no way of finding out by using the map.”

“Then how do we find him?” Cole asked, trying not to sound desperate. But the last thing he wanted after traveling between dimensions was to feel like the trip was a waste.

“We go to the Pinch.” The cowboy stabbed a leathery finger at the center of the map.

“What’s a pinch?” Polly asked.

Willy reached over, clamped his fingers over a bit of skin on her arm, and twisted. “That’s a pinch!” he said, jumping up and down excitedly.

“Ow!” Polly glowered and rubbed her arm.

“The Pinch is the center of the kingdom,” said the Stranger. “Right smack in the middle. It’s where we’ll find the Royal.” Something passed over the Stranger’s eyes, a dark cloud of sorts.

Cole wondered what their guide was thinking about.

Nothing good, he thought. That’s for sure.

“The Royal’s got certain powers. Can pinpoint anyone in the realm. First we head to the Pinch, then, if we’re lucky, he tells us where to find your friend. It’s gonna be a long trip. And it ain’t bound to be easy.”

“This Royal, he’s like a king?” Cole asked. The Stranger nodded.

“Is he a good king?” Polly chirped. Visions of a handsome young prince made her curl her arms together and coo.

But the Stranger shook his head. “No,” he said flatly. “He is not.”

“When do we go through?” Emma asked quietly, watching the spinning worlds and hugging the bag of éclairs tightly to her chest.

“Right now!” Willy said as the space beyond the doors switched into a mammoth ball pit. He made a mad dash for the exit, but the Stranger caught him easily by the collar.

“When we go, we go together,” the cowboy said. “No one crosses the lintel alone.”

“What’s a lintel?” Polly asked.

“The line between imaginations.” The Stranger grasped the handle of one of the doors. Red, blue, yellow, and green plastic balls were piled three feet high against the glass, but when the Stranger pulled the door open, the balls didn’t come tumbling into the station; they remained piled up, as if restrained by an invisible wall.

The Stranger pointed down at the spot where the station floor met the plastic balls. A wide, black band of rubber was set into the floor and ran the length of the boundary between the Wellwhich Way Station and the imagination outside. “These are the Boundary’s boundaries. Aside from the station and the Pinch, they’re the only constants. Got it?”

The children nodded. “Got it.”

“When you cross a lintel, you cross it all the way. Got it?”

They nodded again. “Got it.”

“What happens if you don’t cross all the way?” Etherie asked. “What happens if the imagination changes while you’re stuck crossing over, half in, half out? If your back half doesn’t make the spatial journey?”

“Then your back half goes off on its own journey without you,” said the Stranger, lighting his cigar.

Cole gulped.

The cowboy puffed on the cheroot and let the smoke seep out through his lips. “We cross the lintels together. Every time. On my say so. Together. And quickly, all the way.”

“Got it,” they all said, unprompted.

“Good. Now line up.” He held the door open, and the five children formed a straight line, their toes not quite touching the rubber lintel. The Stranger pulled open the next door and sidled up to their line. “Don’t go till I say.”

Cole felt something crawling into his hand, and he jumped. When he looked down, he saw it was Emma’s fingers. And they were trembling. “I think we’ll be okay, Emma,” he said, giving her hand a squeeze. She didn’t look at him; her eyes were glued to the moonscape now before them. But she squeezed his hand back.

The next imagination was a swamp filled with metal alligators. Pass, thought Cole. The one after that was a kingdom in the sky weathering a hectic lightning storm that singed the gray storm clouds a sooty black. Nope. Then came a little cottage, set right outside the doorway, with a werewolf crouching on its roof and howling furiously at the full moon above. Nuh-uh. Then a knight facing a monstrous dragon in a dirt ring, red-and-blue fire streaming from the beast’s jaws. No way. Then a normal-looking city street filled with normal-looking people passing normal-looking skyscrapers and darting between normal-looking cars at normal-looking crosswalks.

“Now!” said the Stranger.

Cole’s heart leapt in his throat. He slipped on his first step and nearly tumbled, but Emma held his hand firmly in her own. She yanked him across the lintel behind her. Cole cried out as he hit the pavement...but when he opened his eyes, all six of the travelers were safely on the city sidewalk, and every limb was accounted for. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the doors they’d jumped through belonged to an innocuous office building on this side of the lintel. Through the glass he could see the interior of the Wellwhich Way Station with its marble floor and tall chronological barometer…and then there was that streaking blur, and the space behind the doors became a snow-covered glacier dotted with little igloos.

Cole climbed to his feet and dusted himself off. The six travelers looked around at the hustling crowds in this new cityscape. Every single man and woman speed walking along the sidewalk was dressed in a business suit. The streets were clean; the buildings sparkled; the trashcans were empty; the newspapers were stacked neatly in their bins. It was the cleanest, most organized city Cole had ever seen. Even the traffic moved in orderly fashion.

“This way,” said the Stranger. He set off across the street, and the children hurried after him, struggling once again to keep pace with his long strides. Even though the group was dressed oddly for this world—jeans and sneakers didn’t exactly fit in with the motif, and the Stranger’s cowboy duds threw the idea of blending in right out the window—none of the busy passersby seemed to notice. Each person was focused on his or her own path, and the ones who were talking did so quietly into wireless headsets. Not a single suspicious eye was cast toward the ragtag band of wanderers.

A few blocks down, the Stranger made a hard left and led them along the edge of a park. They strode down to the end of the block, then turned right, and the park opened up to a towering skyscraper made of metal and blue glass. As they were passing this building, they encountered a woman in a smart black business skirt suit, with her dark brown hair swept up in a tight chignon. One hand carried an enormous smartphone; the other held a venti macchiato with soft red lipstick stains kissed onto the lid. Tucked under her arm was a tasteful leather handbag. A huge pair of Coach sunglasses hid her eyes. She didn’t seem to notice the children as she walked toward the building, but they certainly noticed her…or, to be more specific, they noticed the glittering diamond brooch that she wore pinned to her lapel. It was large, the size of a child’s fist, and it was in the shape of a crown.

Polly stopped dead in her tracks. “A princess!” she gasped.

The Stranger gestured for the woman to pass before the group, and she did so without any sort of acknowledgement. She slid into the building through its revolving doors as the Stranger resumed his quick gait down the sidewalk.

It was another three blocks before they realized Polly was missing.

Chapter 5:

“When Life Gives You Layoffs, Make Layoffalafel.”

Polly heaved against the revolving door with all her might, but it just wouldn’t budge. She put her hands directly on the glass—something her mother forbade her to ever do—and pushed with her legs, but her feet slid back on the slate entryway floor like she was on a treadmill. “Hmph,” she said, jamming her fists to her hips and frowning at the door. She could see the princess inside, heading for the elevators. Soon she’d be whisked away to some unseen floor, and Polly would never find her. She backed away from the door, all the way to the street, then planted her feet, took a deep breath, and sprinted at full speed toward the heavy glass. She stuck out her arms, wand clutched tightly in her hand, and gave a warrior’s cry as she charged. Just as she reached the door, a man arrived at the other side, on his way out. He pushed the door easily, and it spun the instant Polly was safely between two panels. The door rotated, and she ran straight through, clearing the revolver and screeching to a halt on the polished lobby floor.

She smiled proudly.

That particular mission had gone very well.

The princess pushed the call button by the elevator bank on the other end of the lobby. Polly lowered her head and ran, ducking beneath the electronic security gate. “Hey!” cried a man in a blue wool suit as she slammed into him with her shoulder and barreled on past.

She arrived panting at the elevators just as the door slid open. The princess stepped into the lift, still lost in her phone screen, and Polly hurried in after her. The princess pushed the button for the 116th floor, the very top of the building. “The penthouse,” Polly’s mother would have said. The doors slid closed, and they began to rise.

“Unbelievable misery,” the woman murmured, scrolling frantically through her screen. She stood as still and as straight as a statue, not one hair out of place, not a single wrinkle in her suit. She had removed her sunglasses, and even her eyes looked orderly and rational, but Polly thought maybe they were really what her dad sometimes called “crazy-calm.” Polly’s mother’s eyes got crazy-calm sometimes, usually on the nights her dad slept on the couch. She wondered if this princess’s prince had said nasty things about the princess’s mother, or if he’d accidentally spilled a gallon of gasoline on the grass in the front lawn. Those were the sorts of things that usually made her mother’s eyes go crazy-calm.

The woman’s pointer finger moved like lightning over her phone screen—side to side, up and down, pinching, scrolling, tapping, sliding. Her finger was an angry blur…until they reached the 32nd floor, and she lost reception. “Argh! Technology!” she wailed at no one in particular.

And it was at no one in particular because she still hadn’t registered the presence of another human being in the elevator, despite Polly’s labored breathing. The poor girl wasn’t out of breath so much from running—she was first in her age group in swimming lessons—but because she was standing just two feet away from a real, live princess. Of course, she wasn’t wearing a flowing pink gown like most princesses do, but she had a beautiful jeweled crown, and that was really all it took. It was the most important part. You might just be another pretty rich girl until you put on the crown. Then you were a princess, and the commoners knew it.

The pin sparkled in the elevator’s blue LED lights. There must have been a hundred diamonds set into its face—maybe even two hundred. The light shot through them, ricocheting from one facet to the next, and the brooch seemed to radiate with its own crystal blue glow. A pin like that must be worth a bajillion dollars, Polly thought. And that was just the crown pin! How wonderful the actual crown must be!

The elevator slowed in its ascent and finally slid to a smooth stop at the 116th floor. The doors opened, and the princess hurried out, walking with purpose and mumbling under her breath.

Polly peeked her head out of the elevator and gazed across the penthouse. It was full of people—busy people, bustling people, all dressed in business suits and all saying things like, “Have you prepared the P&E statement yet?” and, “If we don’t find a way to augment our EBIT, we’re sunk!” They ran to and fro, some with papers in their hands, most with tablets, not exactly looking where they were going, but not running into each other, either.

Polly hopped out of the elevator and started off after the crazy-calm princess. But she only made it a few feet.

“Ahem,” said a nasally voice to her right. She raised her head and saw an impossibly thin man sitting behind an impossibly large computer screen at an impossibly clean desk. The desk was attached to a long, turquoise counter, and on the front of that counter hung a big sign that said “Princess Lemon’s” in sparkly yellow letters. The words arced gracefully over a cutout replica of the princess’s crown pin. The crown on the sign wasn’t quite as dazzling; it only had sequins, not diamonds. But it looked pretty all the same.

This must be her castle, Polly thought, and this person is her manservant.

“Can I help you?” the manservant asked, sneering down at her.

“No, I do not require anything,” Polly said with a regal air.

“And where do you think you’re going?” he asked, crossing his arms.

“I go wherever I want.”

“Not up here, you don’t.”

“Oh, yes I do,” she said. “And if you lay one finger on me, I’ll have you thrown to the alligators.”

The Servant leaned in close and whispered, “Sweetheart, if you haven’t noticed, these are the alligators.” He gestured with his eyes to the men and women racing around the office. Polly wasn’t sure quite what he meant. They all looked perfectly human to her. Still, it was best not to show confusion in front of the servants.

“Of course I’ve noticed,” she said. “Now go...polish the silver.”

The Servant closed his eyes and massaged his temples. “Oooh, don’t you push me, Rainbow Brite. I am one expense report away from a nuclear meltdown.”

“If you melt on the floor, make sure someone cleans it up,” Polly commanded. She turned down the hall and caught sight of the older princess sweeping into a big, glass meeting room at the far end. But before she could take another step, the servant reached around the desk and grabbed her by the arm.

“You’re not allowed ba—” he began to say, but Polly swung her wand and clocked him in the temple. The servant gasped. “Well, I never!” he cried. Then he threw up his hands in surrender. “Fine. By all means, have a blast. I hope someone puts you down the mail chute.” He huffed back into his chair and jabbed furiously at his keyboard.

Polly rolled her eyes. Servants.

Just then, the elevator doors behind her dinged and slid open. “Polly!” Emma cried, bounding out of the lift. The rest of the crew followed her. The Stranger looked particularly annoyed, but Polly didn’t have time to worry about that. “Come on,” she said, waving them forward with her hand. She turned to the servant. “They’re with me.”

“Of course they are.”

Polly ran down the hallway, followed closely by Emma and Willy, who bounced off the walls like a pinball, spinning and slamming his way down the corridor. Etherie, Cole, and the Stranger followed at a calmer pace. “We don’t have time for this,” the Stranger muttered after them. But if Polly heard, she didn’t let it show. She bounded to the end of the hall and pushed her way into the conference room at the end.

“There’s good news, and there’s bad news,” the princess was shouting from the front of the room. A large, rectangular table filled most of the space, and it was crammed full of important-looking businessmen and businesswomen sitting elbow-to-elbow and scribbling furiously on notepads. “The good news is...” She stopped and squinted into the back of the room. “Oh, come on, guys, it’s Bring the Kid to Work Day again?” She sighed deeply, but beckoned Polly and the others into the room. “Go on, find a space to stand, if you want. Yes, that’s it. Who are you,” she asked when the Stranger pushed through the door, “their caretaker?”

“Unfortunately,” he grumbled.

“Wonderful. A rodeo clown for the circus. All right, all right, you come in too, find a place to stand.”

The Stranger joined the huddle of children in the corner of the room. He placed a hand on Polly’s shoulder. “We need to go,” he whispered. But she shrugged him off and pushed deeper into the crowded room.

“As I was saying. Good news and bad news. The good news is, the annual income statement has been finalized, and Princess Lemon’s has netted a fafillion dollars!” A mighty round of applause erupted around the table. Polly didn’t know how much a fafillion dollars was, but it sounded like a lot. She clapped too.

“Yes, for the tenth year in a row, we’ve made a fafillion dollars, making us the best and largest lemonade stand corporation in the whole world!” More applause followed. The princess let this play out a bit, then she raised her hands for silence.

“But there’s some bad news, too. Looking at next year’s projections, well...I’ll just say it. We’re not going to hit a fafillion next year, not even close. Honestly, we’ll be lucky if we clear a kajillion.” A chorus of groans rose up from the employees. The princess nodded along empathetically.

“How is that possible?” one man asked. “Aren’t people still going to drink lemonade next year?”

“Yes, Peter, people will still drink lemonade next year.” She spoke with the weary patience of a schoolteacher. “People will always drink lemonade. It’s delicious, it’s thirst-quenching, and it’s nostalgic. The product is solid; that’s not the issue.”

“Then what is?” someone piped up. Others murmured their support of this question.

The princess raised her hands for quiet.

“There are a handful of factors impacting our forecasts negatively. Melissa, can you get the lights, please?” A thin girl in glasses pushed back from the table and flipped the light switch by the door, plunging the room into darkness. The princess pulled a small remote from her pocket and pushed a button. A projector hanging from the ceiling whirred to life. “The failing economy is hitting us hard, no doubt about it,” she said. “Take a look at lemon prices over the last five years. Mostly steady, with a slight increase, an average of 3% per year. It’s been more or less in line with inflation. But look at next year.” She motioned toward the far end of the line graph. “Prices are projected to increase by 17%. That’s factoring in the per pound lemon price and inventory transport, and doesn’t include sugar processing, packaging, or delivery, either. So it could go even higher.” She clicked the remote, and the line graph was replaced by a pie chart. “People don’t want to pay as much for lemonade. When times are good, people will pay a dollar, maybe a dollar-fifty for a cup, no problem. Look at the portion of our sellers who were able to sell one unit of lemonade for a dollar-fifty in the last three months.” She pointed to the tiniest sliver of the pie chart. “Less than 2%. Another 5% sold at a dollar, 14% sold at 75 cents, and 18% sold at 50 cents. Now look at this.” She waved her hand over the remainder of the pie. “61% of our sellers had to price their units at less than 50 cents each.” There was an audible gasp from the men and women around the table. “Our profit margins are bad.” She clicked the remote again, and another line graph appeared, this one starting high and dipping low. “This is the average temperature for our biggest sales regions. According to the almanac, we’re in for record lows. Amy…what’s the ideal temperature for drinking lemonade?”

The woman named Amy flipped through her notebook. “Ah...give me a second, here...our research says...ahm...86 degrees,” she announced.

“86 degrees. The typical average for this time of year is about 89. But our current forecast shows an average of just 74 degrees—well below the ideal temperature. Certainly there will be warm days in there, but the almanac has been pretty reliable, and in a few months a lot of our stands will have to close for the season.” She clicked off the projector and motioned for Melissa to turn the lights back on. “So, ladies and gentlemen,” she continued, planting her fists on the table and leaning over them. “We need ideas. Or the simple truth is, we’ll be looking at over a gajillion layoffs by winter.”

The table exploded in gasps and whispers. A gajillion layoffs? How could it be true? A zillion, maybe, or a meggitymillion, tops. But a gajillion?

One man near the end of the table fainted and fell right out of his chair.

“People! People!” the princess shouted, clapping her hands loudly. “Ideas! Let’s hear ’em!”

The room fell silent. Most of the people took a sudden interest in their thumbs and the particular way in which they twiddled. A few cleared their throats as if they might speak, but backed out at the last moment. One man even went so far as to raise his hand, but then apparently thought better and lowered it again.

“Well?” the princess demanded.

“We could offer more colors,” one woman suggested.

The princess shook her head. “Colors don’t test well. Pink performs, eh—so-so,” she said, wiggling her hand, “but green, red, purple, blue...all the other colors are non-starters. They make people nervous.”

“What about different flavors?” a man near the front asked. “Appleade, orangeade, grapeade, pineappleade?”

“You mean apple juice, orange juice, grape juice, pineapple juice?” she asked, arching her eyebrows like it pained her to speak to such a terrible idea. The man’s cheeks flamed red. He shrank back and started doodling importantly in his notebook.

“Maybe it’s the sales team,” another man suggested. “The kids running those stands, they’re...well, they’re just kids.”

“You want to replace them with adults?”

“Well, not just any adults. Seasoned salesmen. Right?” he added uncertainly, looking around the table for support. But his co-workers only increased their concentration on their thumbs.

The princess beckoned him with a finger. “Come up here,” she said.

The man pointed to his own chest, as if to say, Me?

She nodded.

He pushed back his chair and rose from it slowly, beads of sweat already popping out on his forehead. He approached the front of the room cautiously and finally came to a full stop four feet away from her. He turned his body to the side a little, as if she might take a swing at him. Instead, though, she gave him a wave.

“Hi. I’m a grown woman pulling down five figures a year. I have a mortgage, a husband who’s okay at chores, three kids, two dogs, and a stack of credit card bills thicker than a phonebook. I fired the kid who used to run this stand, and now, instead of working at headquarters on Seventh Avenue, I’m standing behind this cardboard box selling tiny cups of lemonade at a 1,000% mark-up. Wanna buy some?” she asked, holding out a small, imaginary cup of lemonade. The man flinched a little, but didn’t respond. “Well? Do you? Do you want to buy lemonade from me?”

“No,” he admitted sheepishly. “Not really.”

“No. You don’t.” The man turned to slink back to his seat, but the princess stopped him. “Wait a second.” She pushed up onto her tiptoes and craned her neck over the crowd at the table so she could see the children in the corner. “You there! Blondie. Come up here for a second, will you?”

Emma, who had been about to take a bite of another éclair, froze. She dropped the pastry onto the thin, corporate carpet. Her mouth, which had opened in delectable anticipation, remained that way, even as she said, “Who, me?”

“Yes, you. Come on up. Please,” the princess added, giving her best I’m-not-a-mother-but-I-understand-that-children-respond-to-kindness smile. Emma stepped forward slowly, her eyes darting back and forth between the princess and the working stiffs at the table. She took a wide turn when she reached the front of the room, skirting around the man who stood helplessly in his expensive loafers, and came to a tentative halt near the leader of the group. “There we are,” the princess chirped. She bent down and whispered into Emma’s ear. The little girl nodded, but looked a little confused all the same.

“Why didn’t she call me up there?” Polly huffed, stamping her foot. “I’m the princess!”

Admittedly, Emma looked less than regal as she listened to the princess’ instructions. She pushed rapidly from one foot to the other and tugged nervously at the hem of her shirt.

When the princess was finished, she plucked a plastic cup off the table and walked over to a small, decorative tree standing in a large pot in the corner of the room. She bent down and shoveled some dirt into the cup. She came back and handed the dirt cup to Emma. Emma looked up at her for confirmation, and the princess smirked down at her and nodded. Emma shrugged and approached the gentleman standing at the front of the room.

“Excuse me,” she said, her voice soft and quavering. Her eyes were round and moist with not-quite-tears of fear. She lifted up the cup of dirt with both hands; her shirt pulled up a bit, revealing her tummy. “Would you buy this dirt, please?” she asked.

The man’s mouth turned to water and quivered on his face. His cheeks got wobbly, and his eyes practically gushed from his eye sockets. “Of course I will, little girl,” he said in his best I’m-a-father-and-am-completely-helpless-against-this-trickery voice. He jingled some coins in his pocket. “How much?”

Again, Emma looked at the princess, and the woman held up three fingers and nodded. “Three dollars?” she said shyly.

The man flinched at this, but he reached for his wallet all the same. He searched through it and in the end pulled out a single bill. “All I have is a five. Is that okay?” Emma nodded, and he handed her the money in exchange for the cup of dirt. Emma’s eyes lit up as she stared at the bill. Five whole dollars!

“And that is why we will never, ever replace our sales team, Johnson. Now sit down and drink your dirt.”

“Excuse me,” Polly said, storming up to the front of the room. She’d had enough. The princess whirled around and raised an eyebrow in the child’s direction. “Are you really Princess Lemon?”

The woman laughed. It was a surprising sound, more of a gravelly bark than a proper chuckle. Cole guessed she didn’t get much practice with it. “No, dear. Princess Lemon is old, sitting on a beach somewhere with a drink in her hand and a crown on her head. I’m just a member of the court.”

Polly’s face fell. This woman was nothing more than a common servant! And Polly had followed her like a lovesick puppy. The idea of it! The very idea! “You should take off that crown,” she said sourly, pointing to the sparkly pin. “It’s a lie.”

The woman who was no more than a servant sighed. “It usually is, kiddo. It usually is.” Polly stomped back to her friends in the back. Emma was still gaping at her brand new five-dollar bill. The woman clapped her hands to get everyone’s focus back on the problem at hand.

“What else, people? What else? Because if we don’t find a solution here, at least twenty percent of you will be homeless for the holidays.” Her eyes had taken on a mad gleam. “Someone tell me how we’re going to sell more lemonade. Someone please tell me how we’re going to get people to drink more lemonade!”

Emma snapped out of her reverie and glanced up at the woman. “Give them cookies,” she suggested.

The woman furrowed her brow and looked down at the little girl. “Excuse me?”

“Give them cookies,” she repeated. “Cookies make you thirsty.”

The servant woman straightened up and crossed her arms. “Interesting...”

One of the men at the table raised a finger. “Cookies make you thirsty, sure, but they’re best with milk. Everyone knows that. Cookies and lemonade...they just don’t go together. Sorry, little girl, it was a nice idea, but it just won’t work.”

But Emma shook her head. “Not coconut cookies,” she said.

“Coconut cookies?” the man asked uncertainly.

Emma nodded. “Chocolate chip cookies go with milk,” she explained, ticking the list off on her fingers, “cinnamon raisin cookies go with chocolate milk, peppermint cookies go with hot chocolate, spice cookies go with apple juice, and coconut cookies go with lemonade.”

The woman with the princess pin stood amazed, her mouth hanging slack. “You know,” she mused slowly, “coconut cookies would pair well with lemonade. Now that’s an idea.”

The man started to protest. “No one’s going to want cookies with their—”

“Out,” the woman said, cutting him off.

The man rocked backward, as if he’d been physically struck. “Out?” he asked.

“Out, get out. You’re wrong, and I don’t want to listen to you anymore. Out.”

The man gasped, but he gathered his things and headed for the door.

The woman continued: “Cookies would offer a complementary expansion to our line.”

“Cookies would double the cost of production,” one woman said.

“But we could charge three times as much for them. And the more cookies they eat, the more lemonade they’ll need to drink. This could increase lemonade consumption by at least, what, 30 percent? Forty? And even if we make only an additional fifty cents net revenue per cookie sold...and I think we’d make more, but even at fifty cents more...we’d be able to avoid layoffs altogether! And maybe even top a fafillion dollars next year!” A series of cheers went up around the table.

Emma clapped happily. The other children looked at each other, uncertain of what exactly had just happened. The Stranger checked in on the map and frowned at the distance they still had yet to travel. They needed to leave, and soon. But he was willing to give Emma a little bit more time in her triumph. He got the sense that she needed it. He got the sense that all the kids might end up needing something like it.

“We’ll need a name for these cookies,” the woman continued. “Something catchy.”

“Lemon buddies?” someone suggested.

“Coconutties,” someone else offered.

“King Coconut!” Emma cried. The woman snapped her fingers and pointed at the little girl.

“That’s it. Not King Coconut, but...Coconut King Cookies! Princess Lemon’s Coconut King Cookies!” She winked at Emma, and Emma smiled bashfully back. The woman nodded at an empty chair. “Have a seat, you little genius,” she said, “and tell us what else you’ve got.”

An Interlude

He watches with satisfaction as Zeus slinks away with his tail between his legs. Once the Master of Olympus, once the King of the Gods, he has now been brought low before the Royal. They’re petty, these feelings of triumph, and he knows this. Even so…he enjoys them.

It’s not every day he gets to break a god.

Zeus and his merry band of has-beens won’t be the first Deletion. The actual process is currently little more than theory, and it will take several tries to get it right. And he wants it to be right when he wipes the Olympians from the face of the Boundarylands. Once the system is tested and perfected, the Olympians will be the first to go publicly. The Royal has come to understand that fear is power, and the Deletion of Olympus will make him more powerful than ever.

He savors the feel of that phrase in his mind. Deletion of Olympus.

But Deletion is months, perhaps years, perhaps eons away. Time is difficult to pin down, and there are other matters that require his more immediate attention.

He beckons Roark with a nod, and the faithful servant steps forward. “Yes, Majesty?”

“There are children in the realm.” His words are blunt, but he does not like to waste them if he can help it. And anyway, these particular words have their desired impact. Roark turns a ghostly pallor.

“Children? In the Boundarylands? Who are they?”

“They’re at the edge of the Boundary, still near the Way Station, not yet near enough for me to see their faces. But they are coming.”

“Here, Majesty?” Roark appears as if he might be sick. The Royal nods. “How shall I deal with them?” the good servant asks.

The Royal smiles, a crooked twist of the lips that slashes his face like a scar. It is horrible to look upon, and he can see Roark struggle to keep from averting his eyes. “Send the Scabs.”

“The Scabs,” Roark says, a small smile of his own playing across his lips. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

Chapter 6:

On the Imperative Nature of Dental Propriety

Dr. Mandrill rapped his knuckles on the weathered counter board and looked doubtfully into the kiosk. The old crow was nowhere to be seen. He sighed and rubbed the side of his taut belly, a habit he’d fallen into since his gut became a paunch. Not that one would say Dr. Mandrill was a fat man; he had a belly, yes, but he was tall, with broad shoulders, and what weight he gained, he carried well, and on a much thinner man’s legs.

He leaned forward and inspected the stall. The counter creaked and groaned under his weight. If she’s not here, I’ll send one of the nurses back with a sickle probe, he decided, in the same manner that any other man might decide to have potatoes with dinner rather than peas.

He knocked again. “Hellooooo,” he called. His voice was powerful, but blunted somehow, softened, like the voice of God through a thundercloud. “Someone rang the doctor?”

The old woman peeked her head into the little storefront from the shopkeeper’s exit in back. “Who’s there?” she asked. Dr. Mandrill didn’t respond, but simply stared at her over his glasses. The old woman came shuffling out of her hiding place, inspecting her visitor through her own half-moon spectacles. She wiped her hands nervously on her red and white paisley dress. “Is that the dentist?” she asked.

He held up his hands, palms pointing toward the sky. “You’re looking right at me,” he said evenly. “You know that it’s me.”

“Hmpf.” The old woman stopped fiddling with her dress and approached the counter. “I suppose you’d like to know why I called you.”

“Yes, I would,” he sighed. “I’d like to know that very much.”

“I want an assurance first,” she said, wagging her finger at him.

Dr. Mandrill closed his eyes and tented his hands against his face so they covered his nose and mouth. “I don’t need to tell you what the journey here was like, Maude. I’m not in the mood for games. Show me what you have to show me so I can be on my way. I left a patient for this.”

“Ah, and a fat lot of good he’ll do you!” she laughed.

Mandrill tapped his knuckles on the counter twice. “Okay. I’ll send my nurse around next week.” He started to walk away.

“Wait!” the old woman shrieked. Mandrill stopped, his back to the storefront, and smirked. “Wait, wait. Don’t let’s be hasty, dear. I just want an assurance, that’s all.”

“So you said.” He turned back to the counter. He raised three fingers and crooked them bluntly. “Let’s have it.”

“What I have is valuable. Very valuable. I want assurances that you’ll pay me what it’s worth, and that you’ll leave my shop in peace. And in one piece,” she added.

Mandrill let a huge gust of wind blow out through his lips. “Maude, what have I ever done to make you think I’d do otherwise? Hmm?”

“Left me a widow, for one thing,” she said, stabbing his forearm with one thin finger. Mandrill rolled his eyes. This was well-worn territory, and he was far too weary to get into it with her again.

“You’ll be paid what it’s worth, if it’s worth anything. And you and your trinkets will go unharmed.” He ran a hand up along his bald scalp, another habit he’d picked up somewhere in the later portion of his life. The beard would be next, he mused, someday...but for now, that, at least, was lustrous and thick, albeit mostly gray.

The old woman bit her lip and looked like she might call the whole thing off, which would have been a very poor decision on her part. But in the end, she turned and headed to the other end of the store, to the safe tucked back on the lowest shelf. “I’m doing this as a special favor to you,” she said as she lowered herself down and fiddled with the combination. “I could’ve called any number of people, but I knew you’d want it first, and I knew you’d be fair.” The lock clicked and the door fell open. Maude reached in and pulled out a small, gray bundle. She held it close to her chest and shuffled back over to the dentist.

He looked down at the rag, unimpressed. “What is it?”

Now the old woman smiled and set the rag down on the counter. She slowly pulled back the top of the rag and revealed the boy’s tooth.

It was everything Dr. Mandrill could do not to snatch the thing up and run screaming through the station.

“That’s not real,” he said, his voice high and tight. His right hand—his surgical hand—trembled. He stuffed it in the pocket of his white coat to get it out of sight.

“Oh, it’s real all right, dearie.” Maude smiled smugly. “Saw it removed with my own eyes.”

His other hand was trembling now. His knees, too. “Where?” he demanded.

“Right here. Not three feet from where you’re standing. Right there.”

His heart pumped with the power of a diesel engine. He forced his lungs to pull in three deep breaths before asking his next question: “When?”

“Right before I called your office.” Her smile was one of pure triumph. She folded her arms across her chest and lifted her chin in the air. “They were still standing here when I rang. Five kids in all.” Mandrill instinctively turned and searched the station with his eyes, though of course whoever had been the donor was long gone by now. It had taken a fair bit of time for him to reach the Way Station, even with his advantages. “You won’t find them here, dearie,” she said, reinforcing what he already knew.

He turned back to the little tooth resting on the rag. “May I?”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Don’t go running off with it,” she warned.

He waved her off, then reached down and gently, carefully, lifted it with his thumb and forefinger. He cupped his other hand below, in case he dropped it. An outsider would swear the man in the doctor’s coat was holding a bona fide sacred relic from a real-world saint. The tooth was a small bicuspid, the lower right, and had originated inside a child’s mouth. A real child. It held almost no weight, this little tooth, and it gleamed with a clear, unspoiled varnish of enamel. It was a little yellowed, and the root was still flecked with dry blood.

It was a real tooth.

“Where did they go?” he asked, working to keep his voice calm.

Maude nodded toward the station doors. “They went out into the ’lands. They could be anywhere by now.”

“But they came to you for a reason, hmm?” Dr. Mandrill carefully tucked the tooth back into the rag and folded it up into a tight bundle. “Not many reasons that I can think of for that to happen. They wanted a map? Or a compass?”

“A map.”

“And which did you give them?”

Her face darkened, and she gritted her teeth. “A shifter.”

Mandrill’s eyes widened in surprise. “A genuine shifter?” Maude nodded. “They weren’t traveling alone, then.”

“No. They had a guide.”

“A guide who knows his maps,” Mandrill mused.

“An IF,” Maude said.

Dr. Mandrill shook his head. Was there no end to this day’s surprises? “An IF? Are you sure?”

“I saw the mark.”

Mandrill placed the wrapped tooth in his coat pocket and rubbed at his bristly chin with the other hand. “He’ll be taking them to the Pinch,” he decided.

Maude shrugged. “He didn’t tell me where he was going.”

“There are only two destinations you can find with a shifting map. This station and the Pinch. Though I can’t fathom what would possess them to think an audience with the Royal would be worth the travels.”

“That’s not my concern, dearie. And I get the feeling they won’t be reaching him anyway,” she said with a wink. Mandrill smiled gently. “Now how about we settle the matter of my payment?”

Mandrill reached into his coat’s other pocket and pulled out a small brown sack. It was tied closed with a leather drawstring and bulged at the bottom. The dentist hefted the bag, approximating its weight. “Eight ounces covers it, I think.” He tossed it onto the countertop, where it fell with a heavy thunk. The old woman snatched it greedily and pulled open the drawstrings. She peered into the sack and smiled broadly. “I think that’ll do quite nicely,” she agreed.

Dr. Mandrill slapped the counter with his palm. “Well, I’ll be off. Sorry to swoop and run, but I’ve got busy days ahead, Maude. Busy days ahead.” And he walked toward the Wellwhich Way Station doors, whistling a tune of no particular melody.

Chapter 7:

In Which We Examine the Possibility that Cole is Batty, Cracked, Derailed, Mental, Off His Rocker, Out of His Mind, Rabid, Raving, Screwy, Touched, and Plain Old Certifiably Insane

By the time they left Princess Lemon’s and found the next lintel a few blocks away, the sun in that particular imaginary world was beginning to fall behind the wall of skyscrapers, though Cole noted with peculiar interest that despite the amount of time that had passed since they’d arrived, and despite the lateness of the day, he didn’t feel the least bit drowsy.

Emma was still glowing. After the company meeting at Princess Lemon’s, where Emma had gone on to suggest the best type of coconut cookie (macaroon) and the best varieties (chocolate, lemon drizzle, and white chocolate with crushed macadamia nuts, in that order), the woman with the pin had bestowed on her a small plastic card that entitled her to “NEARLY-UNLIMITED* FREE LEMONADE AT ANY PRINCESS LEMON LEMONADE STAND FOR LIFE (*valid for up to eleventy zillion uses).” Despite the severe unlikelihood of ever actually coming across a Princess Lemon lemonade stand, Emma clutched the little yellow and turquoise card like it was a ten-thousand-dollar bill. It was her new favorite thing—“better than cookies, even,” according to her—at least for now, and every few minutes she either waved it in the face of one of the other children or kissed it with a loud smack.

“I think you might be in trouble for leaving us to go follow the lady with the princess pin,” Emma confided in Polly as they walked, “but I’m glad you did it.”

Willy had gotten lost six times since they left the tall glass and metal building, but at least he was always easy to find. When Polly had wandered off, it had taken a little bit of effort to track her down; it was Cole who’d finally figured out where she’d gone, remembering how she’d seemed so taken with the woman’s princess pin. But when Willy broke ranks, it was to chase after a stray cat, to stomp in a puddle, or to kick over a metal trash can. He was always easy to find; they just followed the noise.

The group turned the last corner, and the lintel was unmistakable. Even if the rubber strip itself were difficult to see in the fading light, there was just no missing the next world. This one wasn’t stored away behind a set of doors; it was out in the open, a mammoth wall of new reality with the city’s roads, sidewalks, and buildings dead-ending at its base.

The imagination on the other side of this lintel was a towering jungle in the middle of a much brighter day. They could see harsh sunlight bursting between tree leaves overhead, though none of that light actually reached the city in which they stood. The sun on their side sank lower and lower, and what sun there was on the other side cutting through the branches seemed to grow brighter and brighter. Tall, twisting trees arched overhead, their wide, waxy leaves creating a dark green canvas a hundred feet above the jungle floor. The terrain was so thickly blanketed with trees that all Cole could see as he peered into it were the wide, brown stalks of the tree trunks. It was like someone had built an immense privacy fence out of whole trees. The floor of the jungle was carpeted with wild ferns, each one standing taller than the Stranger. Some of them had softball-sized berries clinging to them, red berries with blue dots. This expanse stretched to the right and left as far as the eye could see, all the way to both horizons.

The six travelers wandered up to the lintel. The children looked on in awe, but the Stranger was more reserved, his eyes calculating their odds against some unseen variable.

“Those ferns are impossibly large,” Cole said. “They can’t grow that big.”

The Stranger looked at him askance, as if he’d just said he’d like to splash around naked in some mud. “Not in your world, they can’t,” he said.

“Mother Nature has favored this place,” Etherie said, twirling a lock of her long hair. “She has made it bountiful. It’s a blessed place. We should go in.”

She took a step toward the lintel, but the Stranger grabbed her shoulder. “Wait,” he said.

They paused, and for a moment, nothing happened. Cole looked doubtfully from the Stranger to the jungle, and back again. All was still. But then some movement caught the corner of his eye. One of the treetops way off in the distance shook like a breeze had taken hold of it. Then the tree next to it, the one that was a little closer, shook as well. Then the next, and the next. Closer and closer, one by one, each of the towering trees shook and rattled.

Something was coming through the jungle.

Emma’s hand crept into Cole’s again, and he squeezed it. She reached into her pocket for her éclairs with her other hand, but it was holding the Princess Lemon card, and she couldn’t let it out of her grasp. She didn’t know what to do, so she stood, trembled a little, and watched the path of the moving thing as it pushed toward them.

“What is it?” Polly asked, her voice lilting. She crept closer to the Stranger and clutched at his leg.

“Not sure,” he admitted. “But whatever it is, it can’t get past the lintel.”

“But we can go past the lintels,” Cole pointed out. “How do you know it can’t?”

“Because it’s part of that imagination. It’s bound there.”

Now the trees nearest the lintel were shaking, and despite the Stranger’s words, Cole felt his heart creeping into his throat. The entire jungle seemed to be vibrating now. Then something cut through the leaves, something barely visible, making a sound like a running chainsaw blade. Or beating wings, like those of insects...

Cole’s mouth turned to sandpaper as six gargantuan legs descended from the branches, followed by a sticky-looking purple body the size of a school bus. The creature’s wings tore at the leaves, shredding them and raining organic green confetti down on the ferns below. It hovered lower, and its snout came into view, a long, hairy, serpentine thing with three rows of teeth set into its gnashing mouth. And just as its fragmented eyes broke into view, the imagination spun into a blur and whisked the terrifying insect with it.

“Whoa!” Willy cried, standing stick-straight on his heels. “Cool!”

The next imagination, which looked suspiciously like the surface of Mars, wasn’t much more hospitable. They let it whir by. “Line up,” the Stranger instructed. “We need to be ready to jump.” They passed on a world made entirely of flames; they passed on a series of hand-dug, underground tunnels; and they passed on a deserted island in the middle of an ocean of boiling tar.

In the next world that flashed into view, it was nighttime, and across the lintel was the grassy yard of a large house in long-ago Japan. As they watched, a ninja clad in all black crept over the property wall and landed in a smooth roll on the grass. He reached into his belt and pulled out three gleaming throwing stars. He began to creep toward the teakwood structure with its curling roof corners when one of the temple’s heavy paper doors slid open, casting a rectangle of flickering firelight over the yard. The ninja rolled away from the light just in time and lay flat against the darkness of the fence. A tall man with white hair and a long, white beard stood in the doorway, peering out into the darkness. A lantern in his hand illuminated his tattered gray robes and the slender katana secured at his hip.

Meanwhile, above him, three more ninjas crept over the crest of the roof and lowered themselves to the loosely fitted shingles just above the man’s head.

Clearly, this was about to get messy.

Cole relaxed a bit and waited for the scene to skip, but to his complete astonishment, the Stranger shouted, “Let’s go!” and leapt over the lintel, pulling Polly with him.

“Yesssss!” Willy cried, jumping into the imagination. Emma let go of Cole’s hand and hurried after them.

Cole couldn’t believe his eyes. They were going into that bloodbath?! But he didn’t have time to protest; the others were through, and if he didn’t move quickly, they’d be whisked away, and he’d be on his own. So with an exasperated cry, he jumped over the lintel and tumbled into the certain death awaiting them in feudal Japan.

Every nerve in Cole’s body was on fire. They landed in the far corner of the yard, far enough away from the action to not be noticed. He knew he shouldn’t risk speaking; the ninja who had crept over the wall was only about 50 feet away, and who knew how many more were hiding in the shadows. But he was completely and utterly exasperated by the Stranger’s carelessness. “What are we doing here?” he hissed.

The cowboy stood and looked casually around the yard. “We’re making camp,” he said at his voice’s regular volume.

Cole winced, and the blood drained from his face. He took a deep breath and waited for a throwing star to slice his head in two. But there was no throwing star. In fact, none of the ninjas seemed to have heard the Stranger speaking at all. Nor did they notice when Willy, untended by the group, bounded over to the koi pond and splashed his hands madly against the water.

Cole stared at the ninjas in bewilderment. They remained focused on the old man, and the old man remained focused on the night and on the sword at his hip. None of them paid the visitors the slightest bit of attention.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity. The three ninjas leapt from their perch and landed soundlessly before the old man, just outside the door. They screeched a trio of high-pitched war cries and raised their hands in preparation for battle.

With a fluidity that belied his age, the old man crouched in the doorway, whisked his sword from its sheath, and held it up, the blade crossing horizontally in front of his eyes. “You disgrace your fathers,” he said in a ridiculous accent. “You dishonor yourselves.”

And the fighting began.

The sword flew like a maestro’s baton. Its clean silver blade flashed in the firelight, swirling and dipping and slicing and stabbing. The ninjas twisted from its deadly edge as if their bodies were made of water. Their hands moved with alarming quickness, their actions blurring into one long, fluid motion. But the swordsman stepped and ducked and deftly evaded every punch, slap, and chop.

The old man kicked his way out into the yard, and the fight followed him. Whenever he did manage to land a devastating strike to one of his assailants, two more ninjas leapt in from out of nowhere to take the fallen man’s place. A ninja near the fence somersaulted into the fray, and at least a dozen more poured over the walls and joined in. They all attacked the old man with great ferocity, but his beard whirled and his sword flashed, and not one of them made contact.

“Willy, look out!” Polly screamed. Willy, who had been trying to catch a fish with his bare hands, looked up just in time to see the old man’s sword arcing toward his head. His throat let loose a whimper of fear. Terror rooted him to the ground; his feet refused to run…not that it would have made much difference. The swordsman’s skills were sharp and quick, and Willy barely had time to blink, much less roll out of the way.

The sword came hurtling down toward him. Polly shrieked, and Cole heard himself cry out. But just before the sword sliced into Willy’s skull, the blade bowed outward as if it were made of rubber. It curled in on itself as the old man swung it down, breezing by Willy’s head and leaving it whole and unscathed. A split second later, when the hilt had swept completely over him, the blade snapped back to its normal, rigid state, the heel of it missing the skin of Willy’s neck by no more than a few centimeters.

And the fight raged on around Willy, but every time it looked as if he might catch a fist or a foot or a blade or a throwing star, the offending item always just missed him, usually defying physics to do so. It was almost as if the boy were protected by an extraordinarily strong and entirely invisible bubble.

Cole whirled around to face the Stranger, his mouth hanging open in shock. “We can’t be hurt here?”

The Stranger shrugged. “Hurt, sure. Just not by them,” he said, nodding toward the ninjas.

“How did you know?” Cole asked, amazed.

Now the Stranger actually grinned. “’Cause this ain’t a normal imagination,” he said. “It’s a moving picture.”

“A moving picture?” Polly asked.

“A flicker, maybe. That what you call ’em? Or a film?” The Stranger plucked a new cheroot from his pocket and stuck it between his teeth. “You know. A movie.”

“We’re in a movie?” Cole asked.

“Yep.” The cowboy struck a match against a nearby stone and held the flame against the cigar until the tip glowed cherry red. An errant throwing star flew at his chest, but he ignored it. The sharp piece of metal broke left at the last second and planted itself in the temple wall instead. “And movies go on scripts. If it ain’t in the script, it don’t happen in the movie. I’m guessing ‘Cowboy and five helpless children fall into backyard and get slaughtered by ninjas’ ain’t in the script.”

Cole’s eyebrows arched with curiosity. A million different questions raced through his mind, and he plucked one out as it flew past. “How did you know it was a movie?”

The Stranger pointed up toward the sky. “The black bars.”

Cole raised his eyes, startled to discover that there was no sky in this place, but a massive expanse of black instead. It wasn’t just darkness; it was much too solid for that. It was as if a great block of pure obsidian had been laid over the world like stone coffin lid. It seemed to Cole that he could almost reach up and scrape his fingers along it.

And he noticed something else, too; there was another black block beneath their feet, extending out from beneath them as far as the eye could see. It was partially covered by grass—in fact, it looked as if the grass were actually growing through it. Cole crouched and put his hand into the grass and down into the blackness. His fingers pushed right through it, and he felt nothing—no pressure, no temperature change…nothing at all. But his fingertips were lost in it, all the way up to the second knuckle.

And suddenly, Cole knew what it was.

“It’s widescreen,” he breathed, his eyes widening in amazement. “We’re in widescreen!”

“If that’s what you call it,” said the Stranger, far less impressed by it all. “Best get your hand out of it now, before you lose it.”

The group began to wind down, and the Stranger set to building a makeshift camp in the old kung fu movie for the night. He started a fire with scavenged wood and a piece of flint he kept in his pocket, and they ate some sort of meat from an animal he d caught in a crude, homemade trap. He wouldn’t tell the children what sort of creature it was and had made them go play on the far side of the yard while he skinned and roasted it. The children weren’t particularly hungry, but they ate anyway, seeing as how the cowboy had gone to so much trouble.

Even so, they ate cautiously.

And they didn’t eat much.

The brawl had wrapped up, and a host of ninjas lay strewn across the grass, unconscious, and perfectly still and quiet. After a while, Cole didn’t even notice them anymore.

By the time dinner was done, the fire inside the temple died down, and the orange glow diffusing through the paper doors blinked into almost-darkness. Polly, having decided that Emma could be trusted now that she had earned the approval of Princess Lemon’s servant, was busy teaching the other girl some of the finer points of wandsmanship near the pond. They’d found a stick that was more or less straight, and Emma was mimicking the swoops and spins of Polly’s light-up star wand. Every so often Polly would set the star alight, and Emma would run to the fire, stick the magic end of the wand into the burning embers, and wait until it was tipped with red light. Then the two girls would dance across the yard, hurling magical spells into the air and being generally good witches.

Willy was playing with a stick of his own, one that he’d chewed into a sort of point. He’d taken off his shirt and tied it around his head and smeared mud on his cheeks, and he was now crouched at the edge of the pool, stabbing at the water with the not-quite-lethal spear, shouting, “For the Republic! For the Republic!”

Etherie, meanwhile, had found a quiet space to meditate at the base of a cherry tree. Its bright pink blossoms drifted down around her and collected in her lap. Her lips moved softly and silently, and her hands massaged the spongy earth at the base of the trunk as she sent her spirit into the roots of the tree and became one with the world around her.

But Cole found himself much less able to carry on as if it were just another night. His mind was sorely troubled. He needed to speak to someone, if only to hear his thoughts come out of his own mouth, in his own voice. Any sort of conversation seemed to make the Stranger weary, but there was really no one else. After all, he was the only adult in the group, and adults usually had advice to offer…even if it was sometimes terrible advice. He didn’t think the Stranger would give bad advice, though. Plus, he was supposedly from this world, the world of imagination, and he might have unique insight into the matter that was trouble Cole at that particular moment.

The cowboy sat cleaning his gun by the firelight. Cole approached him shyly, making sure to clear his throat and rustle the grass as he walked so the Stranger would hear him coming. This was unnecessary; it had been centuries since anyone had taken the Stranger by surprise. Cole stood nervously at the edge of the fire’s glow, wondering how best to interrupt the cowboy’s work.

“Well, you gonna have a seat or not?” the man said without looking up.

Relieved, Cole hurried over and lowered himself onto the grass. Now, he wondered, how to begin?

Finally, he asked, “Where are we? Really?”

The Stranger raised an eyebrow, but kept his eyes trained on the empty cylinder of his six-shooter. “Big question,” he said.

“I don’t mean this specific place…or imagination. Or movie.” Cole gestured to the temple and its serene yard. “Or whatever it is. I mean all of it—the whole of the Boundarylands. Where does it exist?”

The Stranger snapped the cylinder into place, gave the barrel one last wipe with his oiled rag, and slipped the revolver back into its holster. Then he tucked the rag into his back pocket and shook out his cramping fingers. “Still a big question,” he said, not unkindly. “Truth is, I don’t right know how to answer it.”

“Can you give it a try, at least?” Cole asked.

The Stranger sighed and thought a minute. Then he laid one hand out flat in front of his chest. “Say this is your world—the real world.” Then he laid his other hand directly on top of it. “And this is the Boundary. Okay?” Cole nodded. But the Stranger frowned. “But it ain’t really one on top of the other…they’re sort of...” He spread his fingers and locked them together. “We can cross over to your world, if we have an Anchor, and sometimes the two worlds are pretty much one and the same.”

Cole chewed at his bottom lip. He understood what the Stranger was saying, sort of, but it didn’t clear anything up, and it didn’t really answer his question. “So that’s how it works…but it doesn’t tell me where it is – where we are.”

The Stranger raised an eyebrow. “Where do you think we are?”

Cole’s thoughts felt sticky in his brain. “I guess what I mean is, are we really in some land of imagination? Or are we in a land of my imagination?” And now, he realized, he’d hit it square on the head. “Is all of this happening in my head?”

The Stranger leaned forward, his eyes serious. “Truth told, I’ve never thought about that,” he admitted.

“It’s possible, right?” Cole asked. “You’re imaginary, and you think you’re Miss Twist’s imaginary friend, but how do you know you’re not from my imagination? If I imagined that Miss Twist imagined you, you’d be an imaginary who thought he was an imaginary friend, when you’re really just from my imagination…”

The Stranger snorted. “You’ll want to watch that line of thinking,” he said. “It’s the sort of thing likely to send you right over the edge.”

“What if I am over the edge?” Cole said desperately. Now that the words had unstuck themselves, they just flowed. “What if there’s something wrong with me—the real me? What if I couldn’t handle the stress of school and friends, and I just snapped? What if the real me is in a hospital bed, or a padded cell, and you’re really a pillow, or a broomstick? Or what if I had an accident on the way to school this morning? Maybe I got hit by a car, and I’m in a coma in some emergency room, dreaming that we all went on this insane mission in an imaginary kingdom. That’s possible, right? I mean, that makes more sense than actually going through some magical portal into a whole world of imaginary friends. It would mean that this— all of this—is almost certainly in my head.” He gestured to the world around them. “Right?”

The Stranger removed his hat and set it on the ground. “If what you’re saying was true, I’d be a figment of your imagination, and not an IF. Yeah?”

Cole shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. Though technically, you’re imaginary either way, and we’re sort of friends...” He let the sentence drift. He was glad for the darkness; it would make it hard for the Stranger to see his face flush red.

“Not the same,” the Stranger said. He turned his back to the boy and pulled down the collar of his shirt. “Look here,” the cowboy instructed. Cole pushed himself up to his knees and peeked over at the nape of the cowboy’s neck. Stamped into the skin were two overlapping circles, one solid, and one broken.

“That mean anything to you?” he asked.

Cole squinted thoughtfully and examined the circles. “No,” he decided. “What is it? A tattoo?”

“Something like that. The solid circle is the Anchor,” the Stranger explained. “The dashed one is us. The IFs.”

“Were you…born with that?”

The Stranger flipped up his collar and turned back toward the fire. “It’s always been,” he answered. “It’s an IF mark. Every IF has one. It’s how you tell us apart from the other imaginations.”

“That’s your passbill,” Cole realized, remembering the scene back at the turnstile into the Wellwhich Way Station.

“Among other things,” the cowboy grumbled. “If you ain’t never seen it before, then I don’t think we’re in your head.”

“Why not?”

“Every IF in the Boundarylands has this mark. Every IF. And there’s a lot of us. It’s the most well-known brand in the realm, even more than the Royal’s mark. Those circles are important. Wars have been fought over them. Kingdoms have fallen over them. You get me? They’re important.”

Cole bobbed his head from side to side, working out the Stranger’s point to its logical conclusion. “And if they’re so important here, they would have to be important to me if this were all in my head.”

The Stranger shrugged. “Seems like it.”

He drew his knees into his chest and stared into the fire. “I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.”

The Stranger raised an eyebrow. “You don’t take comfort knowin’ you’re not crazy?”

“Not really,” he admitted. “Because if all this is real, I have a feeling we’re going to have much bigger problems than me being insane.”

The Stranger settled down against his log, picked up his hat, and dropped it over his eyes. “Tell you one thing,” he said, settling in for the night. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

Chapter 8:

“Well, This is Going Well”

Miss Twist sighed. This whole thing may have been a bad idea, she thought, and not for the first time.

“We need to find Gaia, fast,” she sighed as she paced in front of the chalkboard.

“Yes,” Frau Mütter nodded. “Who knows what sort of awful accident might befall her, alone in a strange world?”

“That is a concern,” Miss Twist agreed. “And also, if Principal Ortenour finds a strange woman running around the school campus and comes around to investigate and finds that I’ve let the children pop through a trans-dimensional portal on the chalkboard into an imaginary world…” Her words trailed off as she considered the consequences of such an event. “Well, I don’t think he’ll be thrilled.”

“Without her here with us, the doorway’s not as strong,” Mr. Puffles said sadly, nodding toward the chalkboard portal, which had indeed lost some of its sparkling pink luster.

“If we don’t find her soon, it’s possible the portal may close,” the Servant agreed.

“Even with all of you here?” Miss Twist asked.

Frau Mütter shrugged. “Who can say? Doorways are unstable to begin with, and they usually work the other way around.”

“Even if the doorway remains, her tie to Etherie may be severed if she wanders too far,” the Servant said, inspecting the cleanliness of his fingernails.

Miss Twist sighed. “I’d better go find her, then. You three stay here, out of sight. If anyone comes in the room, hide.”

“I’m too big to hide,” Mr. Puffles cooed sadly. He pushed a finger into his round belly.

“The coat closet should be big enough for all of you,” Miss Twist said. “Just be quiet, and be careful, and if you see a short, self-important-looking bald man walking around, for heaven’s sake, do not let him see you.” Her shoulders slumped as she headed toward the door. “I hate going outside in the summer,” she sighed.

She pushed her way out of the classroom and headed off in search of Gaia.

Chapter 9:

On What It Means to Have Reel Trouble

The next morning, the children awoke to find that the movie was moving on without them. As they yawned and stretched in the morning light, the Stranger nodded toward the horizon and said, “Look there.” Cole squinted toward the rising sun, which was flickering strangely in the distance. He looked closer and realized it wasn’t the sun that was flickering; it was the air, quivering and causing the sun to shimmer.

“What is that?” Cole asked.

The Stranger grunted. “It’s our cue to leave.” He kicked dirt over the fire’s remaining embers and set his hat on his head. “Everyone ready?” The children gathered their scant belongings and looked expectantly at the cowboy. He nodded once and turned to face the wall behind them. “Up we go.” He laced his fingers together and crouched down in front of the wall.

Willy ran up first, planted one foot in the Stranger’s hands, and leapt as the cowboy pushed. The poor boy nearly launched over the wall and past the lintel into the passing imagination beyond. “Careful!” the Stranger growled. “Don’t cross till we’re all up.” Willy settled himself atop the teakwood wall and kept his feet drawn in close to his body.

The Stranger helped Etherie up next, then Polly and Emma. As the girls climbed to the top of the fence, Cole looked nervously back toward the sunrise. The flickering was intensifying. The world looked like it was flapping now, and it wasn’t just on the horizon. Some of the trees in the distance shimmered and waved like a mirage. They weren’t actually shaking; their branches and leaves were completely still. But the trees themselves were bending and warping…

And then the sun on the horizon disappeared altogether. So did the part of the sky surrounding the sun, and the distant mountains that met that portion of the sky. The world flapped again, the horizon vanished, and in its place appeared a great expanse of total whiteness. “What’s happening?” Cole yelped, his voice trembling.

The Stranger squinted into the distance. “We’re running out of film. Gotta move.” He laced his fingers again, and Cole set his foot in them. He reached up as the cowboy hoisted him, and he grappled for the top of the fence. His fingers slipped; he almost toppled back off the Stranger’s hands. He gasped and shot an anxious look over his shoulder. Now the trees just on the other side of the fence were waving like sheets caught in a windstorm.

The flapping was closing in on them.

“Up!” the Stranger urged. “Now!” He lifted with a grunt, and Cole flew up to where the black rubber lintel ran perfectly along the top of the wall. He came to a hard landing on his knees and pitched forward, but Willy and Polly grabbed his shoulders and kept him on the wall.

The flickering was closer still, and now the garden wall on the far side of the yard was wavering like it was caught in a tide pool. The Stranger leapt and pulled himself up to the top of the wall. The wooden planks below the lintel began to shift and sway, and they all threw out their arms to keep balance. Cole shot a panicked glance down into the lawn. The world bounded up and down like a ribbon. The imagination across the lintel before them was a smoldering junkyard full of busted tires, rotten fruit cores, oily rags, spoiled diapers, twisted metal, melted plastics, and filthy stacks of garbage piled three stories high.

“Jump!” the Stranger cried, grabbing Emma’s hand.

Cole pictured a small army of mutant Rottweilers straining against rusty chains just around the mountains of trash, and he hesitated.

“Now!” yelled the cowboy.

The fence beneath them pitched up and down. Polly was thrown into the air and over into the junkyard. She broke the lintel with a cry that was lost the second she moved beyond their imagining and into the next. The Stranger dove after her, pulling Emma with him. Etherie and Willy tumbled in next.

Cole took a step toward the edge of the lintel, his heart hammering in his chest. But the fence buckled just as he shifted his weight, and he was thrown backward. He cried out and teetered on the back edge of the fence, his arms whirling like pinwheels. The ground bucked so wildly now that it actually rose up to the top of the fence. The temporary hillock gave Cole’s heels a boost, and he fell forward, his top half hanging over into the junkyard, his bottom half straddling the lintel fence. The Stranger reached up, grabbed his outstretched arms, and pulled. Cole slid over the lintel and tumbled into the junkyard, hitting the rocky ground with a hard thump. Tiny bits of gravel sprayed out from under his hands and knees, cutting his skin and drawing shallow channels of blood from his palms. He rolled over and saw the Japanese garden as it gave one last giant wave. Then the whole scene was gone, flapping away to the horizon like the tail end of a rolling film reel. Only the pure white of complete nothingness remained.

Chapter 10:

In Which We Discover That Pranayama is Mightier Than the Sword

The Stranger pulled off his hat and mopped his forehead with the back of his wrist. “That was close.”

The junkyard in which they found themselves was more like a junk planet. The children grimaced as they wove their way through the mountains of putrid garbage, and each time they moved around one huge pile, three more rose up to take its place.

“It smells like throw-up here,” Polly complained, wrinkling her eyes and holding her nose.

“It smells like my bedroom,” Willy said, confused.

Eventually they came to a heap of broken cement and larger boulders, and the Stranger deemed it solid enough to climb. Emma and Polly elected to stay behind, but the others picked their way carefully up the rough slope…all but Willy, who bounded up the mountain from one concrete block to the next with absolute abandon, and who reached the top well before the rest of them—and with surprisingly little injury.

At the summit, they drank in the view of this new world.

The junkyard stretched on and on as far as the eye could see in every direction. The stack of rubble on which they stood was by no means the largest peak in the junkyard. Several of the trash piles loomed quite a bit higher, some of them leaning over at the tip like some madman’s version of a Dr. Seuss mountain. They looked on the very verge of collapsing in a series of rusty metal avalanches. Down below them, muddy paths wound through countless trash piles, trash pits, and trash compactors.

Cole shook his head in wonder. “Who would imagine a place like this?”

Sticking up here and there like candles on the world’s saddest birthday cake were huge iron cylinders. These pipes stood taller than the junk piles, and they belched fire every few seconds. Whatever fueled the flames seem to come from underground, where the pipes disappeared beneath soggy cardboard boxes, banana peels, broken dishwashers, crumpled plastic bottles, rotting turkey carcasses, and stained, crumpled sandwich wrappers.

“This is a horror,” Etherie whispered. “The horror of inorganic living.”

“Where’s the next lintel?” Cole asked, squinting against the brightness of the flames shooting out of a nearby pipe.

The Stranger pulled out the map and unfolded it on a piece of concrete the size of an end table. Their six red circles clustered together near one edge of this particular imagination, the edge from which they’d just come. “There,” he said, pointing off into the distance. He gave a low whistle and shook his head. “Quite a ways.” He sounded weary. Their route through this imagination would draw them farther away from the Pinch.

“Why don’t we just go back the way we came? Wait for some other imagination to fill in the movie’s place and go that way?” Cole asked.

The Stranger shook his head. “The Void makes that lintel unstable.” He folded the map and tucked it away.

“What do you mean unstable?” Etherie asked.

“What do you mean, ‘the Void’?” Willy said.

The cowboy sighed. He was ill used to so much conversation. “You saw the film reel go past?” The children nodded their heads. “Behind it was the White. The Void. You saw that too?” More nodding. “The Void is...” He paused, looking for the right word. “...dangerous.”

“What is it?” Cole asked.

“It’s what exists behind imaginations. It fills in the gap when one runs out.” The Stranger considered his words carefully. “It’s like…it’s sorta like the driest desert sand on the hottest day. Ever been to the desert?” All three children shook their heads. “Some places, you take a drop of water, let it fall on the ground, the sand sucks it right up into itself and leaves no trace that there was ever any water there at all. The Void is like that sand.”

“And we’re the ones dropping water,” Willy cried, jumping up and down on the concrete blocks and pretending to spit with the force of a fire hose.

The Stranger leveled his cold blue eyes on the boy. “No. We are the water.”

“This Void exists behind all imaginations?” Etherie asked nervously. She lifted one foot gingerly, wondering if stepping too hard on the rubble might cause her foot to punch right through this level of reality and rip a hole into the Void. It was a dizzying thought.

“Yep—including this one, if that’s what you’re thinking. But the imaginations in the Boundarylands proper are solid enough. They’ve been here a long time, had plenty of minds to help make them real. The newer imaginations, though, the ones on the outskirts, it’s them you gotta worry about. And films,” he added. “Never trust a film.”

They skidded their way back down the trash pile and rejoined the two girls on the ground below. “What’d you see?” Polly asked, rubbing her hand under her nose.

“Trash,” Cole said glumly. “Lots and lots of trash.”

The Stranger led them down the winding path toward the far end of the junkyard, where it disappeared against the horizon and where they would find the lintel.

They’d gone a few dozen yards when the Stranger threw up a hand. “Stop,” he hissed. He crouched behind a tower of garbage and motioned for the children to do the same.

“What is it?” Cole asked, but the Stranger shushed him. Cole strained his ears and heard nothing.

The cowboy signaled for them to flatten themselves against the trash pile. “Stay,” he whispered. He crawled forward and peered around the trash mountain, his gun drawn and cocked. He cursed under his breath. He spun around and crooked a finger at Cole with his free hand. “Come here.” Cole crept up and hunched near the cowboy, who nodded across the alleyway to another path that wound its way deeper into the heart of the landfill. “I need you to lead everyone that way. Got it?”

“What about you?” Cole asked, alarmed. The tips of his ears burned, and his hands were suddenly damp with sweat.

“I’ll be right behind. Covering the rear.”

Cole bit his lip and looked back over his shoulder at the four children huddled nervously against the rubble. “What is it?” he asked, swallowing hard. “What’s out there?”

The Stranger gritted his teeth. “Nothing good. And it’s almost here. You ready?”

Cole swallowed hard. “Yeah. I think so,” he nodded.

The cowboy nodded back.

Cole turned to the other children. “Listen,” he whispered. “We’re going to make a run for it. Okay?” The others nodded.

The Stranger hissed. “Go!”

Cole darted across the path and ran into the junkyard artery, weaving around a rusty, battered unicycle and cutting in behind a pile of soggy Archie comic books. He didn’t need to look back to know that the rest of the group was following close behind; he could hear the raspy shuffle of Polly’s princess slippers on the trash-strewn path and the sound of Willy’s excited breathing not far behind.

The Stranger crouched, gun in hand, and watched the children disappear into the junkyard. He allowed himself three seconds to curse his fate, then he slipped the gun into its holster and began to climb.

“Hey, Cole!” Willy said, his voice mercifully muffled by the walls of garbage on either side. “Where we going?”

“We’re just...going,” Cole replied. He pumped his arms and ran, wishing that his mother had pushed harder for him to join peewee football. His legs felt like jelly, and his lungs were transforming into rapidly expanding and contracting balls of fire. He slowed to a jog, then stopped altogether. He turned to ask the Stranger if they’d gone far enough, then realized with despair that the Stranger wasn’t there at all. He hadn’t followed behind them. “Willy! Where’s the Stranger?” he demanded.

Willy shrugged. “I dunno. I was following you!”

“He said he’d be right behind us!”

“He left us,” Etherie said, bewildered. “Why would he leave us?”

“What do you mean, he left us?” Polly demanded, folding her arms.

Emma began to cry, and Willy stuck his fingers in his ears to drown out the sound of her whimpering.

Cole held a finger to his lips. “Quiet! Listen…something might’ve happened to him. I’m going back to check. You guys stay here. Okay? Stay here.” He didn’t wait for confirmation before turning and plunging back down the path the way they’d come. He was running straight back into what he assumed was some sort of great danger.

It was an extremely illogical thing to do.

The Stranger pulled off his hat and set it on a rusty pipe jutting out from the trash. He eased his head around the curve of the mountain and eyed the approaching army below.

“That ain’t good,” he muttered.

At the head of the army was a small man in an oversized denim jacket with the sleeves torn off. He wore ragamuffin gloves with the fingers cut out, and every few seconds he used those fingers to adjust the mesh ball cap that sat backwards on his head. The Stranger didn’t know General Squeak, the leader of the Scabs, personally, only by reputation. And if the reputation was anything close to the reality, it was going to be a long day.

Or maybe a short life.

There were more Scabs than the cowboy could fathom. It was true that most of the stories told around campfires in the black of night attributed unthinkable numbers to the Scab army, usually describing them as “a plague of locusts descending on the town” or “more numerous than the stars in a prairie sky.” But storytellers are prone to exaggeration, and in all the scrapes and shaves the Stranger had found himself in, he’d never seen an army come close to matching those kinds of numbers.

Not until today.

He made a quick estimate of the soldiers he could see using an old Native American trick passed on to him by Chief Winged Foot, an old friend from the Blogadaw Tribe. His eyes fluttered over the swelled ranks of marching bodies, and when he was done, he counted them a second time, and then a third, because the number was just too incredibly high to be accurate. By the Stranger’s count, there were no fewer than 50,000 Scabs marching through the junkyard, and those were just the ones he could see. They continued to spill out into the path from behind a series of trash piles off to his right, with no end of the line in sight.

The Stranger wasn’t used to feeling panic.

If he’d had his druthers, the cowboy would have left then and there. He would have crept away in the opposite direction, crossed the first lintel he came to, and never looked back. He wasn’t one to run from a fight, but this wasn’t a fight. This was a massacre-in-waiting.

This was death.

But of course, he didn’t have his druthers; he had five other lives strapped to his shoulders instead. He didn’t see a way through the impending doom marching down the path, but he couldn’t exactly abandon the kids, either. Cuss it all, he thought. He was going to have to make a stand.

There was a good chance it would be his last.

He fell away back behind the cover of the garbage and bent his head to the side, giving his neck a thick crack. He had a plan that wouldn’t do a whole lot of good, not with that number of Scabs, but it would do some good, and some good was better than no good at all. And it would give him a few precious seconds to hightail it after the children, and that itself was worth something. If they were going to have any chance at survival, they would need every second he could give them.

He holstered his gun and laced the grip in place with a leather thong that he untied from around the holster. He plucked his hat from the rusty pipe and pulled it down firmly on his head. He pushed up the sleeves of his dusty white shirt and rubbed his hands together, waking up the blood in his fingers. Then he took a few careful steps down on the trash pile until he found solid footing on a broken cinder block. He bounced up and down on his toes a few times to test the block’s strength. It gave a little, but it would hold. The cowboy peeked around the rubble and saw that the Scabs were still a dozen yards from his hiding spot. He willed his nerves to stop jangling and stood as still as stone, waiting for the Scab general to lead his troops into position. They moved with alarming silence, especially considering their great number. They were quick, too; it was only a few seconds before the lead ranks were coming around the base of the Stranger’s trash pile. The cowboy took a deep breath and placed his hands on the enormous mountain of rubble before him. And with all of his strength, he began to push.

The mountain wouldn’t budge. The garbage was so tightly packed that the shredded candy wrappers under his hands barely fluttered. The pile of trash rose about 50 feet above where the Stranger crouched, and the considerable weight of it all seemed to have cemented the cowboy’s chosen breaking point in place. Sweat streamed down his forehead, and he wiped it on his arm. His eyes flared stubbornly as he reset himself on the cinder block. He cracked his neck again, took three long breaths, and heaved against the trash, pumping his legs like pistons and straining his arms until dark red veins stretched out on his neck in a vicious web.

The trash creaked. Then it shivered.

Some small pieces of rubble fell loose on the far side and plinked their way down the junk mountain. The Stranger pulled his hands back and rammed his shoulder into the trash, then he stepped back and rammed it again, then again and again, and with each smashing contact, the pile gave a little more. He stepped back onto the back edge of the cinder block, breathing hard. He crouched down, bobbed his knees, and then dove at the rubble with arms outstretched. He tackled the side of the mountain, and the ragged peak broke away under his weight and toppled down onto the army below, an enormous junkyard icicle that came crashing and shattering against the Scabs below. The soldiers cried out in surprise and pain. A few dozen of them were instantly crushed beneath the weight of the concrete- and glass-strewn rubble; a hundred others caught debris or were trampled in a panicked attempt at flight, but the Stranger barely heard their screams. As soon as the mountain broke, he turned and skidded down the side of the hill, the muscles in his arms and legs on fire, and leapt down onto the littered ground below.

On the other side of the hill, the front third of the Scab army had dissolved into chaos. The masses of troops still winding their way through the distant rubble piles were completely unaware of the catastrophe that had befallen their front-line brethren, and they marched on, forming a pinched mass of confusion as they moved forward and the front lines tried desperately to move backward. That was good. But the Stranger spied General Squeak among the men who had made it past the collapsing trash pile before it toppled over. He cursed under his breath and spat. He’d allowed himself to believe that if he snuffed out the general, they just might have a chance. But chances, it seemed, were in short supply.

“Halt!” General Squeak screamed at the legions on the far side of the rubble barrier, raising one gloved fist in the air. “Halt!” He scrambled up the pile of concrete and glass, screaming like a banshee. “Haaaaaaaalt!”

With the general’s attention occupied elsewhere, the Stranger took his chance and sprinted across the pathway and into the alley down which he’d sent the children. He darted around a corner and smashed into a one of the little soldiers.

“Oww!” the Scab cried. Before he’d finished moaning, the cowboy had untethered, drawn, and cocked his revolver. He stuck the barrel under the Scab’s chin. The boy gasped up at him with wide, horrified eyes.

“Cole?” The Stranger released the hammer and twirled the revolver back into its holster. “I thought you were a Scab. What are you doing back here?”

“I came to get you,” Cole said, his terrified voice little more than a whisper.

The Stranger grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him to his feet. “Come on. We gotta go.”

“No. Stay,” came a voice from above. The Stranger moved his right hand to his hip, but the voice tsk-tsked. “I wouldn’t.” The cowboy raised his furious blue eyes to the figure perched on the trash mountain to their right. He was small, like all the Scabs. His scruffy orange hair fell over his eyes and past his shoulders. His stonewashed jeans and White Snake t-shirt were ripped and filthy. Chipped teeth filled his mouth like flea market China when he smiled. And the cowboy figured he had plenty to smile about; the crossbow he held was loaded and nocked with a heavy metal bolt that was pointed directly at the Stranger’s chest.

“General Squeak!” the Scab called. His pre-pubescent whine carried over the din of confusion, and many of the soldiers fell silent and attentive. “General Squeak! I got ’em!”

The five children and the Stranger stood huddled at the bottom of a wide pit dug into the debris. Cole felt a little like a gladiator in an extremely poor man’s Coliseum. Around them stood the scruffy, snarling spectators, tens of thousands of Scab soldiers, each one scruffier and snarlier than the last. They surrounded the travelers like trees in a dark, stunted fairy tale forest.

“Nice piece,” General Squeak said admiringly, turning the Stranger’s six-shooter over in his hand. The way he handled it, it might as well have been a banana instead of an instrument of death. “It work?”

“Give it back, and I’ll show you,” the Stranger growled. Squeak gave a signal, and one of the little ruffians stepped forward and cracked the cowboy on the back of the head with a plank of wood. Not hard enough to knock him out, but enough to send him to his knees. His hands were tied behind his back, and with nothing to stop himself, he skidded cheek-first onto the gravely ground.

“Guess that’s a yes,” the general shrugged. “The Royal’ll want it.” He tossed it to the redhead, who stuffed it into the waist of his pants.

“Hey! What’re you doing?” Willy demanded, nudging the Stranger with the toe of his shoe. The Scabs hadn’t bothered tying up the children. “Are you a cowboy or not? Get up and mow these bozos down, they’re just kids!”

A murmur of protest rose among the Scabs. “I’ll show you a kid!” one of the soldiers cried, running forward with a huge branch raised above his head.

General Squeak stepped out and stopped him with a fist to the chest. “I get first blood,” fussed the leader. “Me. You got that?” The little ruffian nodded sullenly, then slunk back into the crowd. General Squeak turned back to the group of children and flashed them a smirk. “We ain’t kids.”

They sure looked like kids, Cole thought. They were the right size, and the right proportions, and they had the right kinds of snotty noses and reckless scabs. But there also was something distinctly old about them. Something in their eyes, or maybe in the fleshy areas around their eyes, belied a deep, world-weary fatigue. Their eyes were dim and hooded with dark circles above and below.

Cole’s father had worn those eyes, just once, and just for a day or two. It was right after Cole’s grandmother had retired from her fight with pancreatic cancer. That was how Donald Slawson had put it: retired from the fight. He had smiled as he said it to Cole, to soften the blow, but it was a weak, watery smile, like the one playing on General Squeak’s lips now.

The Stranger heaved himself back up to his feet. “What do you want?” he said between gritted teeth. His eyes blazed with fury.

“Batting practice!” Squeak said pleasantly. He snatched the baseball bat that one of his soldiers was leaning on, and the Scab went tumbling to the ground. Squeak hoisted the bat and gave it a few Babe Ruth swings. “What do you think, cowboy? Whose head’ll fly the farthest?” He stepped up to Emma, who hadn’t made a sound since their capture by the Scab army, but had only stood and trembled, her knees literally knocking together. “This one looks like it’s got some heft to it,” he said. He raised the bat so the thickest part of the barrel rested against Emma’s ear. Tears leaked from the corners of the little girl’s eyes, but still she made no sound. “I bet it carries at least twenty feet. What do you think?”

The Stranger lunged at the general, but four little soldiers stepped forward with spears leveled at his chest. The tips of the blades pushed in on the Stranger’s vest. “Touch one hair, and I swear to the gods I’ll tear your spine from your back,” the cowboy snarled.

The general smirked. “Dramatic. Biff, put him in his place.” The Scab named Biff stepped forward from the crowd. He was a small, blond thing, with a black leather jacket, ripped-up jeans, and a red bandana wrapped around his head. He hefted a crowbar in his hands and took a mighty swing at the cowboy. The Stranger leapt back, narrowly avoiding the iron, but he jumped back into a solid line of Scabs who shoved him forward. He skidded in the loose trash, and Biff swung the crowbar again, connecting with the cowboy’s hip bone with a sickening thud. The Stranger moaned as he buckled onto one knee.

“You know what’s funny?” General Squeak asked. He was speaking directly to Emma now, but it was obvious enough he wanted all of them to hear. Emma shook her head slowly. “I don’t even like baseball.” He shoved the end of the bat into Emma’s stomach. She moaned as she doubled over and fell to the ground. “Guess I’m just a natural!” Squeak laughed.

“Hey!” A sudden fever seized Cole, and he lunged forward, his fingernails stretched out like a cat’s. But although Squeak was only the size of a child, he was the size of a much older child—13 or 14 at least—and he danced easily away from Cole’s attack. “Oh-ho-ho! A little firecracker!” Squeak stuck out his foot, and Cole tripped over it and went sprawling into a loose pile of trash, sending banana peels and empty tin cans flying.

“Leave them alone!” the cowboy barked. He leapt back to his feet and shoved his way toward the general, but the Scabs with the spears jabbed their weapons at his chest. Three of the metal points dug through the Stranger’s vest, puncturing his skin and drawing blood. He hardly seemed to notice.

General Squeak threw the cowboy a sniveling smirk and stepped forward so he was almost an arm’s length away. “Mind your manners, IF.” He pronounced the word as if it tasted disgusting as it tumbled out of his mouth. His eyes flashed dangerously. “Your kind isn’t welcome here. And you ain’t gonna be the hero this time.” He nodded over the cowboy’s shoulder.

The Stranger turned, a bit too late; the heavy wooden plank caught him on the side of the face, breaking in half with a loud crack that Cole couldn’t be sure came from the board and not the cowboy’s jaw. The Stranger spun on his toes like a cartoon fighter who’d just taken a knockout punch. Then he collapsed onto the ground, his head twitching gently against the trash.

General Squeak turned back to the children, tossed the bat to a nearby comrade, and clasped his hands behind his back. Biff lifted Cole roughly from the trash pile and threw him back into line with the other kids. Squeak paced back and forth before them like a disappointed father. “What’re you little rats doing here?” he asked.

The children looked from one to the other, none of them particularly wanting to speak up…none, that was, except for Willy. “We’re going to see the king,” he said. “When he hears about this, holy cow, you goons are dead!”

“The king?” General Squeak laughed, wheeling on the boy and sticking his nose into Willy’s face. “The Royal don’t wanna see you. He don’t want you to make it to the Pinch. Why ya think he sent us?”

“The Royal sent you?” Cole blurted, surprised.

“That’s right, Susie Q. He don’t want you at the Pinch, he don’t want you in this junkyard, he don’t want you in the Boundarylands. You and your kind ain’t welcome here.”

“Your grammar is exceedingly poor,” Etherie observed.

Cole winced.

Squeak turned on her, his face boiling over to a deep red. “Grammar?” he snarled, grabbing her by the shoulders. “I don’t give a rip about grammar!”

He pushed her back, but Etherie stepped fluidly and managed to keep her balance. In fact, she seemed rather nonplussed by the whole ordeal. Squeak noticed this and seemed ready to try to get a different reaction with his fist, when suddenly Emma wailed, “I wanna go home!” She pulled out a handful of her comfort éclairs and stuffed two of them into her mouth at the same time.

The redheaded Scab stepped forward and snatched the half-full bag of pastries out of Emma’s hands. “Check it out, boss!” he said, swinging the bag over Emma’s head. “Hostess!”

“They’re homemade special!” Emma replied.

“Divvy ’em up for the colonels,” the general commanded, ignoring the girl. “Save the biggest one for me.”

“Yes, sir!” The redhead scampered off into the crowd.

Emma burst into tears. “I wanna go home,” she whimpered.

General Squeak snorted. “Home. I got news for you, Pudgy Patty: you ain’t never going home again.” The general turned and beckoned one of his nearby lieutenants. “Gopher! Come here.”

A brown-haired Scab with his hair formed into huge, wet spikes ran forward. The dog chain around his neck matched the one around his waist, and his black leather jacket was studded with metal points. “What do you need, boss?” he asked. His lips smacked on a huge wad of bubble gum that shot globs of pink spittle from his mouth when he talked. “You want me to beat ’em to a pulp?” He smacked his left fist into his right palm to demonstrate his pulping skills.

“Not yet,” the general sneered. “First things first. Get their lunch money.”

“Lunch money? We don’t have lunch money, you twerp!” Willy cried, spinning around like a tornado with his hands stretched out wide.

That was a bald-faced lie. Willy did have lunch money; his mother had given him a five-dollar bill before sending him off to school, reminding him that it was to be used only for lunch. But Willy was determined to spend it on Spark-Sugar Chews and Green Slime Bubble Gum when he got back to the real world, and there was no way he was forking it over to these bullies.

“Grab him,” Squeak snarled. Two of the Scabs darted forward, but Willy’s spinning palms held them at bay, at least for a few seconds. They stood at the limits of the whirling dervish’s reach, bouncing on their knees and timing their approach like two kids about to jump into a Double Dutch. When they’d caught the rhythm, they waited for another quarter turn, then they both dove at his knees, knocking him over and pinning him down. “Hold him upside-down,” Squeak instructed gleefully. “Shake it out of him!”

They started to do just that when Etherie spoke up from the end of the line. “Might I intrude?” she asked lightly.

The air filled with the collective thop of thousands of jaws falling open in surprise. Etherie merely stood, lost in her own peaceful world, as Squeak considered her through harshly squinted eyes. Slowly, his hard stare softened into something closer to indulgence. “Sure,” he smirked. “Intrude away.”

Etherie nodded pleasantly and drew her hands together before her chest. The two Scabs who had recently been engaged in the retrieval of Willy’s milk money withdrew clumsily, shooting each other questioning glances. Etherie glowed at the Scab general and said, “Before we result to violence, I suggest that you take one deep breath, a breath that fully and truly expands your lungs, to clear the anger from your heart.”

General Squeak smiled. “Is that right?” he said, kneading his knuckles. He flashed a cruel smile that he liked to reserve for special occasions. “Is that right?” he said again, louder, so his soldiers could hear. “A deep breath!”

Etherie either didn’t pick up on the danger lurking behind his smile, or else she was indifferent to it. She simply nodded and replied, “Yes.”

General Squeak rubbed his gloved hands together. A deep breath. That was a new one. “A great idea!” he called out loudly. “A deep breath! Come on, gang. Let’s all take a deep breath.” A general buzz of confusion rose from the Scabs, but Squeak shook his head and grinned his sharp-toothed, indulgent grin. “Don’t worry. She’s going to show us how it’s done.”

Etherie stepped her feet in line with each other and stood tall and straight. She pressed her palms together and closed her eyes, ignoring the cacophony of snickers from the dangerous throng around her. She drew in a long breath through her nose, held it in her swelled lungs for one second, then expelled it slowly through her mouth with a slow, steady ffffssssshhhhhhhoo.

General Squeak was fit to burst. The girl’s serenity made the beating she was about to get so much more delicious. He motioned for the Scabs to follow his lead, and, like Etherie, he stood up straight and tall. The army mirrored him with a dreadful scraping of sneakers on trash as loud as a thunder roll. Squeak smiled his ghastly smile as he clasped his hands together at his chest, then took a long, slow, deep breath.

It was that very moment that he realized the junkyard air was poisoned.

It must have been. There was no other explanation. A gas leak, or toxins dumped in the landfill, something. The air had to be poisoned, because as he drew in that breath, the largest breath he’d ever taken, General Squeak’s head began to spin. It lolled to the side, like it had just been inflated with helium and was ready to bob right off his shoulders and float up into the graying sky. He opened his eyes, and the trash around him swirled. He had to take a staggering step to keep his balance. He snorted the air out through his nose like a confused bull…and he wasn’t the only one. The Scab legions around him looked as if they might topple over like toy soldiers. A few of the Scabs actually did fall, stumbling and rolling down the hills of trash, colliding with the soldiers in front of them at the knees and taking them down like dominoes.

General Squeak’s head cleared, and the world snapped back into stillness. What was that? he thought, bewildered. It was…it was…

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” Etherie beamed.

And that’s exactly what it was.

“More,” he commanded. He held out his hands, palms up, and flexed his fingers back at his chest in quick little bursts. “More. Give me more.”

“Let’s try Bhastrika pranayama,” Etherie said, clearly delighted to have a captive and willing audience. “Hold your hands like this,” she instructed, holding her arms down straight so her hands fell comfortably at her waist. She touched her thumbs to her forefingers and let the remaining fingers hang loosely curled. Squeak positioned his arms likewise, as did the soldiers who were close enough to hear the instruction.

Cole and the rest of the children looked on in absolute bewilderment, transfixed by Etherie’s total control over their captors and would-be assailants.

“Now. Empty your mind of the day’s troubles. Focus on a higher state of unity and purpose. I want you to take ten quick breaths, through the nostrils, like this.” She pulled in air through her nose, held it for less than a second, and expelled it again, then immediately repeated this exercise, again, and again, demonstrating the quickness of the breath. “Okay?”

General Squeak nodded enthusiastically. “Okay.”

Etherie smiled. “And…begin.”

The sound was truly incredible. Every Scab in sight, the thousands of soldiers crammed onto the hills of trash, and even many of those beyond the hills, began sucking in breath through their noses and pushing it back out in quick, uniform measure. Etherie watched them with serene pleasure, clasping her hands behind her back, a thin, young Socrates beaming over her students’ efforts. “Five more like this, then a deeeeeeep inhale. Let your breath travel through your nostrils, into your lungs, through your entire body, down your arms, down your legs, let it tingle your extremities and bring life-force oxygen to every single fiber of your physical being. Nine, aaaaand ten. Deeeeeeeep breath!” She breathed deeply to illustrate the yogic breath for them, but there was no need. The entire Scab army was caught in the gentle gossamer web of repetition and structure, and the soldiers filled their lungs of their own accords. “Hold that breath in your physical body,” Etherie said, “hold…hold…now bring your chin back to center, like this,” she said, demonstrating, “and slowly release your breath through your mouth.” The great ffffwwwwooooooooffff that arose from the Scabs was as strong as a fire hose. Etherie nodded sagely, pleased. “Your energy is revitalized. Your body heated, your mind cleared, your lethargy dissipated.” Etherie eyed the Scabs shrewdly. “Shall we do another breath exercise?” she asked. “And then perhaps a chest-opener? Is your inner being prepared for the next step?”

“Yes!” General Squeak answered quickly.

She walked them through lion’s breath next, and then camel pose. Squeak’s spine took control during this advanced movement and held him rigidly in place; otherwise, he might have melted right into the wrappers beneath his legs and spilled across the feet of his captives. His head spun, the lights behind his eyes bursting with easy, magnificent colors, his entire body tingling with the magic of oxygen and endorphins and movement and exercise. As he twisted back over his ankles, and as he felt the satisfying burn in his thighs, his memories escaped to the front of his mind—completely unbidden, though not entirely unwelcome. He remembered his earliest friends, the Scabs who had risen with him through the ranks, fighting side-by-side in dust-ups and schoolyard skirmishes. One by one, they’d all fallen, all except for Squeak. He remembered his first crush, a tough little tomboy named Daun who’d socked him in the jaw on their first meeting and who had stolen his heart from that very moment. He recalled his parents, and while he couldn’t actually remember them, he saw visions of the dark shadows of the face of his mother as she turned and left him on the orphanage doorstep.

And he remembered his first victim: a small boy, a boy whose real-world self was probably Squeak’s own creator…a boy with large, dark eyes and properly combed hair. The boy had wandered into the playhouse ruled by then-PFC Squeak’s division, and Squeak had had the honor and privilege of pounding him to a pulp, having first removed the boy’s shoes, then emptying his pockets, and finally pulling his shirt up over his head. Squeak had taken delight in the sport until the frightened boy had cried out, sobbing, for his mother. With his arms waving frantically through his pulled-up shirt and his voice muffled by the thick red cotton, he had seemed so pitiful.

All these things and more floated to the surface of General Squeak’s memory, all these things that had been long forgotten...they bubbled up without warning, all at once, and he felt an unfamiliar heat rise in his throat. Tears stung at his eyes, hot and salty, but oddly welcome, even though he’d never cried in his life. It was something in the pose, in the breath, that ripped his heart apart and forced the fire of anguish into his throat. And he didn’t care. His shoulders shook above his ankles; tears dribbled down his cheeks, and the warm ball in his throat escaped in a heaving, shuddering sob.

Then General Squeak, commander of the Royal’s ruffian army, leader of the bully legions, scourge of the Boundary wimps, began to bawl in front of his men.

He wasn’t the only one, either. The entire army began to cry. Their heads swam with an overload of fresh oxygen, and their memories ran adrift on the shores of tender yesteryears, and these tough, mean soldiers, who only minutes before had been ready to bash in the heads of the little group of third graders for no more than a fistful of lunch money and a “Job well done” from the Royal, now convulsed in one enormous blanket of sniffles and sobs.

Several long minutes later, when General Squeak finally managed to stop the flow of his tears, hoist himself back into a normal sitting position, and reassert his awareness of the situation, he scrubbed the remaining tears out of his eyes and glared angrily at the five children and their unconscious cowboy friend…or rather, he glared angrily at the space where the captives had recently been. Now, there was nothing there but an unconscious redheaded Scab, the cowboy’s six-shooter missing from his waistband.

The prisoners had escaped.

An Interlude

The Royal watches the five children and their protector slink off among the trash and the filth, winding their way through a host of soldiers distracted by their own awkward movements. He watches the captives steal past their aggressors and slip across the lintel into the first world they see, a world where everything is made of peanut butter. Even the great beasts that prowl the dream and prey on visitors are made from it. The Royal is disgusted yet again by the number of crude and useless imaginations in his kingdom. Then he watches them cross out of that dream and into one of floating rocks.

All of this makes the Royal angry.

His junkyard army has failed. They allowed themselves to be made a mockery of, and this embarrassment, in turn, makes a mockery of the Royal and all he has built in his centuries at the heart of the Boundarylands. General Squeak will pay for his failure, but he will pay for his weakness, as well. And the price will be far greater than anything the glorified rabble-rouser can imagine.

The children are moving steadily closer. Not quickly, but steadily. He can begin to make out their features now. Nothing so telling as an eye color, or a scar, or a birthmark…but their faces are beginning to take shape. The curve of a nose here, a loose tuft of hair there. They are children, all right, just as his instincts have assured him, all of them except their guide, the grown man with the trail hand’s hat. He does not know who this cowboy is. He does not care. This stranger aligned himself against the Royal the moment he crossed the threshold with these children, and that is enough to seal his fate.

He beckons to Roark, and the servant scampers to the base of his master’s throne. “Yes, lord?”

“The lesserbeings have failed me,” he said. “See to the Scabs.”

Roark bows low, scraping the stone floor with his knuckles. “Yes, liege. Will there be anything else?”

The Royal nods slowly. “I would speak to the dentist,” he says, picking at the bones that are laid into the carved marble of the arm of his chair. “He need not waste time traveling here, but see that I speak to him within the hour.”

Ever the faithful servant, Roark bows once again and backs slowly away from the throne. “Yes, Your Grace.”

The servant slinks back into the shadows, and the Royal feels himself relax. There was a time long, long ago when nothing could cause the Royal tension. But the appearance of these children, whomever they are, has stirred something in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps it is destiny. Perhaps he is meant to match wits against this band of intruders. Perhaps he is meant to destroy them with his own misshapen hands.

Perhaps these children are a reckoning.

Or, to be more exact, perhaps he is a reckoning for these children.

This revelation brightens his disposition somewhat.

He will face these children if it is what the Fates decide. He feels neither fear nor hesitation toward them, yet if he can spare himself the effort, he will.

The Royal has some tricks up his sleeve.

The dentist is one of them. He has seen that the dentist shares his hunger for these troubling wanderers. He will play that hand and see whether the intruders fall to the suit. If they do, all the better. If they do not...well, there are other cards to try, and other hands to play.

The dentist will serve his part.

And so the Royal turns his attention to other pressing matters.

-

The IF series will continue in Part III: Gods and Monsters

About the Author

Clayton Smith is a Midwestern writer who once erroneously referred to himself as a national treasure. He has been described as “too tall to live,” which hardly seems fair.

His work includes the novels Apocalypticon, Post-Apocalypticon, Anomaly Flats, Na Akua, and Mabel Gray and the Wizard Who Swallowed the Sun; the plays Death and McCootie and The Depths; and the short story collections It Came from Anomaly Flats and Pants on Fire: A Collection of Lies. Some of his short stories have appeared in such publications as Canyon Voices, Write City Magazine, and Dumb White Husband.

Clayton would like very much to hear from you. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as @claytonsaurus.

And if you’re enjoying this series, you should join his email newsletter! It’s fun there. There’s cake! (There’s no cake.) Find more information at StateOfClayton.com.