NETFEED/LIFESTYLE: Mayor Declares Dying Illegal

(visual: Ladley Burn High Street)

VO: The mayor of Ladley Burn, a charming rural village in Cheshire, England, has declared it against the law to die within the town limits. What sounds like a quixotic attempt to turn back death is actually a pragmatic move to save the village's thirteenth-century graveyard, which is already almost full and whose few remaining plots are the object of fierce competition among local residents,

(visual: Mayor Beekin in front of churchyard)

BEEKIN: "It's rather simple, actually. If you die in Ladley Burn, you break the law, and the penalty is you get buried somewhere else. Where? That's not our lookout, I'm afraid."

 

Baffled and defeated, Renie slumped to the ground beside the black waters, which were still rippling from the disappearance of the Witching Tree. The Stone Girl had edged away from her, frightened by the strength of Renie's anger.

"Come back," Renie said. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have shouted. Come back, please."

"You made the Witching Tree go away," the little mud girl said. "That never happened before."

Renie sighed. "What did it tell you? Am I allowed to ask? I heard something about the Ending, and some boys-and-girls rhyme. . . ."

The Stone Girl looked at her curiously. "You said the tree stole your brother."

"It . . . it's hard to explain. But not the tree, no." A sudden thought struck her; however unlikely, it was worth asking about. "Do you know anyone named Stephen? A little boy. . . ?"

"Stephen?" She giggled. "What a funny name!"

"I take it that's a no," said Renie. "Jesus Mercy, what have I done? What kind of foolish, crazy place is this?" She let her shoulders slump, conscious for the first time in a while that the forest was turning chilly. "What else did the Witching Tree tell you?"

Her guide became somber again. "That things are bad. That the Ending is going to come closer and closer until there's nowhere left to go. That I should come to the Well with all the other people, because that would be the last place left."

"The Well? What's that?"

The Stone Girl furrowed her earthen brow. "It's a place like this, except way more big, across the river and across the river and across the river. Where the Lady comes, sometimes, and talks to people."

"The Lady?" Renie's neck prickled—she knew who that must be. "She comes to this Well and . . . what?"

"Tells people things that the One is thinking." The Stone Girl shook her head. "But she doesn't do it anymore. Not since the Ending started to come." She got up. "I have to go. The Witching Tree said I need to go to the Well, so I'm going to start walking." She hesitated. "Do you want to come with me?"

"I can't, I have to wait for my friends." Renie felt events slipping through her fingers. "But I don't even know where I am. How can I get back to the place I was before you found me?"

The Stone Girl cocked her head to one side. "Where did you come from?"

Renie did her best to describe what she could remember of the rolling meadows, the distant hills, their translucency. Trying to remember it now, it felt like a distant dream.

"You must have been at Over Thaw Hills, in Faraway," the little girl decided. "But it's probably all gone now. The Ending was already there when I was looking for the Witching Tree. That's how come it was all empty in some of it, like you said."

And she had been so sure she had found a place that was becoming more real! Renie felt a harsh pang of fear for !Xabbu and Fredericks. What if they were not lucky enough to stumble on a crossing, as she had been? She had to go find them.

Yes, but find them how? Wander around these weird places by yourself while it all evaporates around you? What good will that do?

But what was the alternative? To follow a fairy-tale creature like this Stone Girl deeper into madness?

I shouldn't have lost my temper. Just for once, why couldn't I have kept my mouth shut? Maybe I would have got some useful information out of that thing if I'd been nicer. She should have remembered what it was like to deal with Stephen, how shouting and scolding just drove him deeper into sullenness. The operating system was so much like a child, and what had she done? Treated it as though she were an angry parent. And not even a particularly smart angry parent.

"What was that you said the . . . the tree told you? That you were supposed to go to this Well, and that all the other people were going there, too?"

The Stone Girl nodded, still standing at the clearing's edge.

What if Stephen really is here? Renie thought. What if he's one of the people drawn or sent to this Well? What if I could finally find him, reach him . . . touch him?

So here was the balancing point. Renie was exhausted, but she couldn't put off the decision. The little girl was leaving, with her or without her. Did she abandon !Xabbu and the others, or perhaps abandon the chance to find Stephen?

Years of university, and for what? How can you make a decision like this—no facts, no discernible logic, no real information. . . ? It was agonizing to think of !Xabbu, who she knew would be looking for her just as diligently as she had been looking for him. It was no less agonizing to think of Stephen, her beautiful, shining little man, so close he was almost her own child, now curled in a hospital bed—a thing of sticks and skin like a broken, discarded kite. She felt bruised inside, helpless, miserable.

And just think—here in the network, I'm really nothing but a living brain. A brain with a bad case of heartache. . . .

The Stone Girl scraped her foot against the ground, swaying a little. Clearly it was difficult, even painful for her to wait once the Witching Tree had told her what to do. "I really have to. . . ."

"I know," said Renie. She took a deep breath. "I'm coming. I'm coming with you."

 

I don't have any choice, she kept telling herself, but it felt exactly like treachery. !Xabbu and the others might never have made it out of that gray . . . whatever it was. They might have been tossed into another part of the network, or they could even be. . . . It was almost impossible even to consider it. I could look for them forever. And this could be my last chance to help Stephen.

Of course, that's assuming I can do anything for him even if I find him, she thought grimly. Considering I can't even get myself offline, that's a pretty big assumption.

"Are you angry at me?" the Stone Girl asked.

"What?" Renie realized they had been walking for a long time without speaking. She had a sudden recollection of what it meant to be with an angry adult, thinking that she was the cause, and was ashamed. Even in the days before her mother had died, her father had been prone to sullen silences. "No! No, I'm just thinking." She looked around at the sparkling trees that still surrounded them, an endless series of leafy tunnels through the forest. "Where are we, anyway? I mean, does this place have a name? Is it called Witching Tree or something?"

"The Witching Tree isn't a place, it's a thing." The Stone Girl was clearly relieved: even Renie's invincible ignorance did not draw the usual look of disbelief. "There are lots of places it can be—that's why we had to go look for it."

"And we found it . . . where?"

"Here. I told you, it's always in the Wood."

"And where are we going?"

The Stone Girl considered for a moment. "I don't know for sure. But I think we'll have to go through More Very Bush and maybe even Long Done Bridge. It's really hard to cross there."

"Cross. . . ?"

"The river, silly." Renie's companion frowned. "I just hope we don't have to go through Jinnear Bad House. That's too scary."

More Very Bush and Jinnear Bad House. Those would be . . . Mulberry Bush and Gingerbread House, Renie guessed. She was beginning to get the knack. "Why is it scary?"

The Stone Girl put her hand up to her mouth. "I don't want to talk about it. We don't want to go there. But there are Ticks and Jinnears there, lots of them."

Ticks and Jinnears. For some reason, the phrase stuck in Renie's mind, but unlike the place names, which seemed to be childish malformations of things like London Bridge, she couldn't find an easy explanation. But having seen the things, she was just as eager as her companion to avoid something called Jinnear Bad House.

"What are Ticks? Are they as bad as Jinnears?"

"Worse!" The little girl gave a theatrical shudder. "They're all starey. They have too many eyes."

"Ugh. I'm convinced. So if we have a long trip ahead of us, shouldn't we stop and sleep? I'm tired, and you, if you'll excuse me saying so, are definitely up past your bedtime."

Now her small guide did indeed put on a look of disgust. "Go to sleep in the Wood? That's a stupid idea."

"Okay, okay," Renie said. "You're the boss. But how far do we have to go before we can get some sleep?"

"Until we find a bridge, silly."

Properly told off, Renie subsided.

As the flying-saucer moon hovered overhead, showing no signs of moving toward a horizon, they walked deeper and deeper into the forest—deeper, Renie knew, because the trees got taller and taller around them. They had long since left the black lake and its sentient tree behind, but Renie could not help feeling observed, although she was not sure whether by the small, secretive eyes of invisible forest dwellers or by some larger, more godlike entity. The clearings, with the branches arching cathedral-high overhead, glittering with fairy-lights like a sky full of bright stars, seemed particularly watchful. The weird, cartoonish beauty of the setting could not overcome the hackle-raising sensation of traveling through enemy territory.

Well, why shouldn't it feel this way? she thought. If I'm right, I'm not just inside the network any more, I'm inside the operating system itself—right in the belly of the beast.

Pulling her blanket-cloak tighter around her to ward off a forest breeze, Renie suddenly touched the lumpy shape of the lighter underneath her top, pressed against her breast.

"Oh, no! I called Martine. . . ." In the unceasing strangeness since then, she had completely forgotten her distress call from the hillside, with the Jinnears coming down on her from all around. "She must think. . . ."

The Stone Girl stopped, eyebrow dents raised in astonishment, to watch Renie pull the small shiny object from inside her clothing and speak into it. "Martine, can you hear me? Martine, this is Renie, can you hear me?"

No answer came back to her. Renie shook the lighter as though it were a stopped watch, conscious even as she did so how stupidly RL the gesture was. It made no difference, anyway: the lighter remained as silent as a stone.

They walked on, Renie adding the horror she must have visited on Martine and anyone else with her to her list of sins.

It's getting to be a long list, she thought. Failed to find my brother, didn't do anything useful to interfere with the Brotherhood's plans, deserted !Xabbu and Sam, and also called my other friends and made them think I was about to get killed.

Yes, but you really were about to get killed, she reminded herself. Ease up, girl.

As they walked on through twinkling trees and woodland dells carpeted by dark grass that wavered without wind, studded with circles of pale, dully-shining mushrooms, Renie began to feel a different kind of liveliness to the Wood. She began to hear rustles in the foliage and once or twice thought she saw shadows just disappearing around a bend of one of the long open pathways before them. She mentioned it to the Stone Girl, who nodded sagely.

"Other people going to the Well," she said. "The Ending is coming fast, I guess."

"So they're not . . . Jinnears. Or Ticks."

The Stone Girl managed a tiny smile. "We'd know."

The vast moon had still not moved noticeably from one side of the sky to another, but Renie had just decided that it had perhaps slipped a bit lower when they saw the camp-fire on a small knoll ahead of them through the trees. The Stone Girl hesitated for a moment, peering at the flicker of light, then lifted her stubby finger to her mouth for silence and led Renie forward. Strange shapes were clustered around the flames. The Stone Girl slowed again, leaning forward and squinting, then straightened.

"It's just dwarfs," she said cheerfully, taking Renie by the hand.

A sentry shape at the edge of the knoll lifted a stick and said, "Who goes there?" in a high, querulous voice.

My God, Renie thought. More children. Is everyone in this place a child?

"We're friends," the Stone Girl announced. "We won't hurt you."

The creatures huddled around the fire watched their approach warily. Renie was at first secretly pleased to see that the dwarfs numbered exactly seven, but discovered a few moments later that she was a little less comfortable with how they actually looked. They might be someone's idea of dwarfs, but as with so many things she had seen lately, it was a very curious kind of idea.

The little men were all dwarf-high—the nearest, the stick-wielding sentry, stood no taller than Renie's hips—but although the Other, if it was indeed the creator, apparently understood that dwarf meant small, it had accomplished this not by miniaturizing a normal person, but by leaving out or rearranging parts. The dwarfs had faces that grew right out ol their chests, and after she had studied the awkward gait of the sentry, who had fallen into step beside them, she realized that his legs ended at the knee: there was no joint in the middle, which made the little fellow walk something like a penguin. His arms, however, were of normal length: he used them to aid his movements, knuckle-walking like a chimpanzee.

Renie forced herself to remain calm, although it reminded her unpleasantly of the grotesque patchwork creatures in the Kansas simulation—not only cruelty made monsters, it seemed. As Renie and her friend reached the fire the little creatures rose and greeted them with awkward bows. The tallest, whose shoulders were as high as Renie's waist, asked, "Are you searching?"

"No," the Stone Girl replied. "Just walking. Are you going to the Well?"

"Soon. But first we must find what we have lost. And we have lost everything, even our home!"

One of the other dwarfs was staring right at Renie. "Say Dives," he said mournfully.

"Um . . . dives," she answered after a moment, wondering whether this was a greeting ritual or some kind of test.

"No, they're from Say Dives," the Stone Girl whispered.

"Say Dives is gone!" the leader said, his mouth open from floating rib to floating rib in a gape of woe. "The meadows, the mountains, our beautiful caves! Gone!"

"The Ending has t–t–taken it all by now," said the one beside Renie, choking back a sob. "When I came home from work, my house was gone—and all my wives! The cats and sacks—all gone, too!" The other dwarfs echoed his misery in a wordless chorus of moans.

"The stepmothers came and told us we had to run away," the leader said. "The people that we meet here in the Wood say we must go to the Well. But we cannot go until we find our wives and our sacks and all our cats! There is a chance that they escaped!"

"A man without wives and kits and cats is no man at all," another proclaimed heavily. A deep, tragic silence fell on the gathering.

"So . . . so you people have stepmothers also?" Renie asked at last, finding herself a seat on a log near the fire, trying very hard not to stare at what to her was a pattern of ghastly deformities. The dwarfs beside her slid down to make room. She had to remind herself that however bizarre this seemed to her, these events were just as terrible to them as to any real-world refugees.

The shy-eyed fellow beside her, his face set so low on his belly that his belt looked like it must be strangling him, offered her a cup of something that steamed. "Stone soup," he said quietly. "It's good."

Renie's guide looked over, her face solemn with worry. "You eat . . . stones?"

The leader shook his head. "We would never harm you, friend—we eat only unliving minerals. Besides, if you will forgive me, you look to be mostly sediment. No offense, but that is not to our taste."

"No offense taken," the little girl said in relief.

"Does everyone who lives in . . . in these places . . . do they all have stepmothers?" Renie asked.

The dwarfs could not cock their heads, since they had no necks, but they bent themselves into several strange positions to indicate surprise. "Of course," said the leader. "How else would we know when danger is near? Who else would guard us when we sleep?" His lower lip drooped toward the fork of his legs. "But they can't stop the Ending."

So the stepmothers are part of the operating system, Renie decided. A kind of monitoring subroutine—maybe a harsh one, like the wicked stepmothers in all those stories. But where do the monsters, these Ticks and Jinnears, fit in? She tried to think of a nursery rhyme with a tick in it, but the closest she could come up with was "Hickory Dickory Dock," which wasn't very close at all.

"Where are you from?" one of the dwarfs asked Renie. She looked helplessly at the Stone Girl.

"Where The Beans Talk," the little girl answered. "But we went to the Witching Tree, and it told us it was time to go the Well."

It didn't tell me that, Renie thought morosely. It didn't tell me much of anything. A sudden thought led to her to ask, "Have any of you seen any others like me? A brown-skinned man and a girl with skin a little lighter?"

The dwarfs shrugged sadly. "But the Wood is full of travelers," one said. "Perhaps your family is among them."

Renie said nothing, struck by the idea. !Xabbu and Sam Fredericks, her family. It was true in a way, and not just in shared skin color. Few people had ever suffered greater hardships with their real families, and certainly no one had suffered anything more consistently peculiar.

Conversation wound down quickly. The dwarfs had made a heroic effort to be good hosts, but their hearts were clearly not in it, and Renie and the Stone Girl were exhausted. They curled up on the ground to rest while the dwarfs went on talking among themselves in quiet voices full of confusion and loss. Although she had proved herself much less bothered by cold than Renie, the Stone Girl pushed herself tight against Renie's body and within moments seemed to be asleep—so much so that Renie could detect no breathing at all. She wrapped her arms around the compact little form and watched the firelight glimmering in the treetops above her head. She was wandering now in a weird, childish dream-world—a dream-world under siege. She had lost everyone and everything. Of all who had come to Sellars' summoning, only she remained. Even the operating system, the god of this small world, had admitted defeat. What was there left to do?

I can hold this child, she thought. Even if it's just for one night, I can give her a little comfort, a sense of safety—even if it's an illusion.

So, as the huge disk of the moon crawled down toward the horizon and Renie eased into a sleep she desperately needed, that was what she did.

 

When she awoke, a diffuse glow had spread across the world, a sad gray light that did little to make things seem more hopeful. The dwarfs had gone, leaving only the embers of their fire behind. The Stone Girl was already awake, squatting by the dying fire, poking in the ashes with a stick.

Renie yawned and stretched. Even in this sickly dawn it was good to have a blanket to wrap around herself, good to have someone to talk to. She smiled at the little girl. "It feels like I slept a long time, but I guess I didn't. So if there's a moon here, why isn't there a sun?"

The Stone Girl gave her a quizzical look. "Sun?"

"Never mind. I see our friends are gone."

"A long time ago."

"Why didn't they wait for the sun . . . I mean, for morning?"

"They did. It's been this way since before they left." Renie now noticed for the first time that her companion was frightened. "I don't think there's going to be any more light than this."

"Oh." Renie glanced around. It was dark, the sky a mournful, shadowy gray. "Oh. Does this . . . happen very often?"

"That it doesn't turn into day?" The little girl shook her head. "Never."

Jesus Mercy, Renie thought, does this mean the system's shutting down now? Is this part of the Ending everyone's so afraid of? If the operating system were a person, Renie would certainly have diagnosed severe depression at the very least. "So is the damn thing just going to give up on us?" she said aloud.

And what if it does? If we're inside it, somehow, do we go, too? It was hard to believe that, locked as they were within the system, subject to damage and death just as in real life, she and her friends would survive a complete collapse of the network.

And Stephen, and all the other children here, trapped, helpless. . . .

"We have to get going." Renie struggled to her feet. "To the Well, I guess. But you'll have to lead us there."

Her guide balanced on her haunches and looked out at the encircling forest. "We need to find a bridge," she said listlessly. "Then we can go to More Very Bush. Or maybe to Counting House. There's a king there," she added.

Renie wasn't certain she wanted to meet this odd fairy tale's version of royalty—for all she knew, he might incline toward the Alice's Wonderland, off-with-their-heads model. "So we find a bridge." She hesitated. "Does that mean we have to find the river first?"

The Stone Girl snorted. "Of course."

"Give me a chance." Renie was glad to see a more normal response from her companion. "I'm just getting the hang of all this."

What had been mysterious, twinkling fairy-paths in the night had become something less charming now—a series of winding ways through a dank, dark forest—but no less confusing. Even in the glum half-light, Renie could see other travelers passing through the Wood, although few even made eye contact, let alone stopped to converse. Many had carts or wagons drawn by strangely unconvincing beasts of burden, horses and goats and oxen that seemed to be three-dimensional mock-ups created from children's drawings. Renie recognized a few as refugees from the storybooks of her childhood, like a trio of pigs and a nervous-looking wolf who were traveling together, having apparently made common cause, but there were far more she could not identify, some so bizarre they made the dwarfs look like net-show models. But all the travelers trudging or hurrying through the dim byways of the Wood had one thing in common, the worried expressions on their faces—at least among those that had faces. Some were openly weeping. Others staggered, blank-faced as shock victims.

The Stone Girl stopped in a clearing to talk with the leaders of a large party, perhaps three dozen refugees in all. As the little girl shared news with a buck deer and a tiny bumblebee-man perched between his antlers, Renie found herself staring at the faces of the group they were herding, looking for Stephen.

But he won't took like Stephen, she told herself. Which means he could be any one of these—he could be anyone we've seen today!

Nevertheless, she walked over for a closer inspection.

"Have any of you seen some people who look like me—with skin like mine?" she asked. Several faces, animal and human, turned to look at her in dull hopelessness. "A little boy, or even a man and a girl? They would be newcomers—people you hadn't seen before."

"The Wood is full of strangers," said a woman carrying a hedgehog wrapped in a baby blanket. She spoke as if each word were a heavy stone that must be lifted.

"But I mean real newcomers. From outside." She tried to remember how the others had phrased it. "From beyond the White Ocean."

The crowd stirred, but only a little. The buck and the bee-man turned to look at her, then resumed their conversation with the Stone Girl.

"Nobody has crossed the White Ocean in a long time," the hedgehog-mother said. "Since before the Ending began."

"What does it matter?" asked a fish-faced man. "Who cares?"

"I care. . . ." Renie began, but she was interrupted by a little boy with a nose as long as a finger.

"There have so been newcomers," he said shrilly. "Stepmother told me."

"What kind of newcomers?" Renie asked. "What did they look like?"

"Don't know." He introduced a long finger into his finger-length nose and began to pick meditatively. "She just said they were strangers, and that strangers were dangerous, and that was why the Ending was going to take away our house."

"Where was this? Here in the Wood?

The boy shook his head. "Cobbler's Bench, where our house is." His finger paused. His face grew sad, struggling with the enormity of loss. "Was."

"And where is that? Are they still there?"

Another child, this one with the russet ears of a fox, yipped in derision. "Not nohow! The stepmothers chased them out of town!"

Finger-nose nodded. "They got Weasel to help, 'cause Monkey's sick."

"Renie!" The Stone Girl was beckoning to her. "We have to go."

As they left the refugees from Cobbler's Bench behind, Renie tried to stay buoyant. So there were newcomers—someone had seen them. That had to be !Xabbu and Sam. Unless it was Martine and the others . . . Renie had assumed that because they were not on top of the black mountain when the dust settled, Paul and Martine and the rest of her companions had been dispatched somewhere else—but who was to say that this nursery-rhyme world was not that somewhere else. And if everyone was being drawn toward this place called the Well, they would surely all find each other.

As the gray day wore on into what Renie felt must be afternoon, they found the river at last and began to pick their way along the marshy ground beside it. The dark, gurgling water lulled Renie into a dreamy routine of one-foot-after-another. Strangely, despite all the travelers they had seen in the forest, they met few along the riverside, and those were just as likely to be hurrying in the opposite direction. All wore looks of desperation. None would stop to talk.

Renie was beginning to wonder about her companion, too. The Stone Girl, previously so steady in her walking that Renie often found herself hurrying to keep up, seemed increasingly tired and confused. Several times she stopped and stared out across the river as though looking for something, although Renie saw only empty forest there.

At last, as the daylong twilight was just beginning to slide into something deeper and darker, the Stone Girl flopped herself down on a fallen tree. Her little shoulders were rounded, her earthen face somber.

"I can't find the bridges," she said. "We should have got to one of them by now."

"What bridges?"

"The places to cross the river. It's the only way to get out of the Wood unless we go all the way back through the trees to the other river." She made a little snuffling sound. "Then we could go back to Where The Beans Talk. If it's still there."

"The other river? There's another river?"

"There's always another river," the Stone Girl said dolefully. "At least there used to be. Maybe that's gone now, too."

Through careful questioning, Renie at last began to grasp that every single one of these lands—the Wood, the place Renie had met the Stone Girl, even the places she had not seen but had heard of, like More Very Bush and Say Dives—were bounded on either edge by a river. You had to cross a river to pass into the next land. The whole thing reminded her a bit of Lewis Carroll's chessboard world, where Alice found a different adventure in each square.

Yeah, but "curiouser and curiouser" doesn't cut it here, she thought. More like "worser and worser." Aloud, she asked, "So if we don't find a bridge, are we just stuck here?"

The Stone Girl shrugged miserably. "I don't know. Why would the Witching Tree tell us to go to the Well if we couldn't get there?"

Because the Witching Tree, or whatever's behind it, is running down, Renie thought. Or giving up.

It was Dread, she realized suddenly. On the hilltop, he had said something about inflicting pain on the operating system. It might have been a metaphor, but it seemed pretty obvious that there was a core of truth. Whether on purpose or not, Dread was slowly killing the thing that held the Otherland network—and most especially this part of it—together. "We can't do anything if we sit. Come on! Let's keep looking."

"But . . . but all my family. . . !" The Stone Girl looked up at Renie imploringly. Two little trickles were running down her dirt cheeks. "They're back there, and the Ending. . . !"

The tears shattered Renie's impatience. She dropped to her knees beside the small child made of earth and stones and put her arms around her, "I know, I know," she said helplessly. What could she say? What had she ever said to Stephen when he had been scared, or heartbroken with disappointment, except the thing that all grown-ups said to children? "Everything will be all right."

"But it won't!" The Stone Girl sniffed angrily. "I shouldn't have gone away! Polly and Little Seed and Tip, all the baby ones, they'll be scared. What if they don't get away? The Ending will come and take them!"

"Sssshh." Renie patted the little girl's back. "The stepmother will get them out. Isn't that what stepmothers do? Everything will be all right." It was hard not to dislike herself for making assurances she knew nothing about, but she could see little good for either of them in a long trek back across the Wood to the land of giant shoes and jackets.

Renie's soothing seemed to help a little. The Stone Girl stood up, still snuffling loudly. "Okay. We'll look for the bridge some more."

"Good girl."

The light was definitely lessening now, and there had been little enough to begin with. Eager not to spend another night on this side of the river, Renie hurried to keep up with her guide, and even forged ahead in some places where the reeds and riverside vegetation grew too high for the Stone Girl to see.

She had just relinquished the lead to the Stone Girl as they climbed up a rise between two bends of the river, when her companion stopped and cried out.

"Look! A bridge!"

Renie scrambled up after her so quickly that she slipped and had to catch herself with her hands; she was still wiping dirt and moist, too-pale grass off her blanket as she reached the little girl's side. Before them she could see an entire bend of the river valley. A large crowd had gathered on the near side of the river at the first stone of one of the most unusual bridges Renie had ever seen. It was made entirely of rectangular stone pillars stretching crookedly across the river like a linear Stonehenge. Although they were of slightly different heights, none of them seemed to be more than a meter or so from its neighbor. Renie could see how it would be possible to cross by clambering from one to the next, but the look of the thing, like a jaw full of uneven teeth, gave her a moment's sinking feeling.

It's like the mouth on the front of Mister J's, she thought. This whole place is just a crazy-mirror, isn't it? One of those funhouse affairs, but it reflects all the things that the Other has been forced to do.

"Why isn't anyone crossing it?" she asked.

The Stone Girl shrugged and trotted stiffly down the rise.

As they got closer, Renie could plainly see a continuation of the forest on the river's far side, but the middle of the bridge was swathed in mist so she could not actually make out where it touched the opposite shore. Still, that did not explain why so many travelers, a motley assortment of fairy-tale oddities that must have numbered almost a hundred, were gathered silently on the bank, looking yearningly toward the far side but not actually using the bridge.

"Is it . . . broken or something?"

As they reached the edge of the sullen crowd, the Stone Girl asked a woman in almost whimsically colorful medieval dress what was going on. The woman looked them up and down for a moment, paying particular attention to Renie, before answering.

"It's them Ticks, dearie. Dozens of them."

"Ticks?" The Stone Girl's eyes went wide. "Where?"

"On the other side," the woman replied with a certain grim satisfaction. "Some folk already tried to cross over—it's this Ending, you know. They said they weren't feared of a few Ticks. But it's not a few, is it? One or two of the ones what went over got back to tell about it, but the rest got et."

As though whatever had animated her earthen body had suddenly ceased to work, the Stone Girl sagged to her knees. "Ticks," she said hoarsely. "They're so bad."

Renie felt herself go cold inside. "Are they worse than Jinnears?"

"They're bad," the Stone Girl would only say again.

"And some say them Ticks have some new ones still trapped over there," the woman in the colorful dress went on. "Some strange folk—not from anywhere around here."

"What?" Renie could barely resist the impulse to grab the woman by her bodice and haul her close. "What kind of strange folk?"

"Sure I don't know, dearie," the woman said, giving Renie a look that implied she had just been categorized as strange herself. "Heard it off a rabbit, I did, and they're always in a hurry. Or was it one of those squirrels. . . ?"

"On the other side, you're saying?" Renie turned to the Stone Girl. "Those might be my friends. I have to go help them."

The Stone Girl looked up at her, her dimple eyes pools of shadow, her face blank with apathy or helpless terror.

"Shit. Stay here." Renie began elbowing her way through the crowd assembled on the bank, a casting call for a surrealist painting. Most of them seemed gripped by the same mood of fear that had immobilized the Stone Girl; only a few even murmured as Renie forced her way past them.

The first stone of the bridge stretched almost Renie's height above the shallows. She found a handhold and pulled herself up, not without strain. She was tired after the long day's walk, and when she had dragged her belly up onto the rough surface of the stone's top she had to lie there for a moment until she could catch her breath. Sprawled and vulnerable, she could not help thinking of the way the bridge had looked, like a row of chewing teeth.

"Help me up," someone said.

Renie peered over the edge into the dark, upturned face of the Stone Girl.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm not going to stay here. You're my friend. And you don't know anything, either."

Terrified by the thought that !Xabbu and the others might be under attack, she only had a moment to consider. The girl was right about one thing—she knew a lot more than Renie. And with the system apparently dissolving the simworld around them, would the child be any safer waiting here, at least in the long run?

Bullshit justification, Sulaweyo. But what else was there?

"Grab my hand," she said.

When the little girl reached the top of the stone, she gestured for Renie to keep silent.

"Gray goose and gander, Waft your wings together,"

the Stone Girl intoned solemnly,

"And carry the good king's daughter

Over the one-strand river."

"You're always supposed to say it before you cross," she told Renie. Fear made her shrill. "Don't you know? It's very important."

They made their way quickly from tooth to tooth until the warning cries of those still waiting on the bank had faded. Midstream the water seemed faster, blackly turbulent as it washed between the close-set stones, the spray sharp and chilly as hail. The mist Renie had seen from the bank was all around them now, obscuring vision and making the stones slippery. She forced herself to take each step with slow care.

They were only a few stones past what she guessed was the midpoint of the river when the streams of mist thinned. Renie, crossing with a long stretch from one rocky tooth to another, was so startled that she almost lost her foothold and had to scramble to get her weight forward so she could jump to the waiting stone.

The far side of the river had changed completely.

Where before she had seen only primordial forest stretching into the distance on both sides, now she found herself confronted by a very different landscape. For a moment she thought it was some kind of formal garden, full of hedges and topiary shapes, but then the scale of the thing hit her and she realized she was looking at an entire town—a city—completely grown over by brambles and twining, crawling vines, a living green sculpture in the shape of houses and streets and church steeples.

"Is that . . . More Very Bush. . . ?"

The little Stone Girl only whimpered.

Almost the only contrast to the thousand shades of green were the many pale shapes moving over and through the bushes like maggots in a rotting carcass. Like the Jinnears, they were a sickly white, but where those things had been almost completely formless, these had the semblance of some kind of animal life. They were long and low to the ground, scalloped at the edges in what almost seemed a parody of legs, but they still moved horribly quickly, half-scuttling, half-slithering. They were also nearly her own size, and there were hundreds of them. The greatest number swarmed around the base of a green-strangled tower halfway into the town, a writhing white necklace easy to see even in the dying light, the creatures excited as ants who had discovered an unguarded wedding cake.

"Jesus Mercy," Renie said, her fear turning sharp and cold, so cold. "And those . . . are Ticks?"

The Stone Girl's voice barely rose above the noise of the river beneath them. She was weeping again, the words fracturing.

"I w–w–want m–my s–s–s–s–stepmotherr."