Regent closed his eyes.
“Timothy Ward,” he said.
X understood in an instant why the lord had withheld the name so long. The others seemed to know as well.
“That is not a name from the Lowlands,” said X.
Silence spread, like water seeking out every empty space.
“No,” said Regent, “it is not.”
X looked down at his battered boots to steady himself.
“My father is still alive,” he said.
“Yes,” said Regent.
“Is he … Is he an innocent, then?” said X.
“Yes,” said Regent. His voice warmed. “Like his son.”
The lord paused.
“I see that your thoughts are wheeling,” he said. “Your father cannot help your mother, nor can he help you escape the Lowlands. Your father does not even know that the Lowlands exist.”
“What if—” said X.
“No,” said Regent.
“Can I not even complete a sentence?” said X.
“There’s no need,” said Regent. “I have known you every moment of your life. Do you imagine I’m uncertain as to what you will say next? I cannot send you to the Overworld to find your father. You have broken too many laws, and the retribution from Dervish and the others would be catastrophic. I am sorry. You cannot look in your father’s face, nor grasp his hand.”
“No, I cannot,” said X. “I know that. Yet there is a girl up there who loves me—and who can.”
part three
A Sudden Leap
sixteen
Zoe’s phone vibrated on the windowsill, like a pair of windup teeth.
It was a text from Val.
On my way. Give me 10. Do NOT text back bc I’ll be DRIVING. Texting while driving is hazardous to my beauty. I WILL NOT endanger my beauty for you.
It was April. Friday night. It’d been a little more than a week since Ripper came and went, since Zoe and X met on the dock. Val and Dallas had spent the days in shock over what they had learned about X and the Lowlands. It was as if they’d stumbled away from a plane crash in a cornfield. Then, a few days ago, Zoe’s friends seemed to come back to life. They pummeled her with questions. Texts flew between them like arrows in the sky in a movie about the Middle Ages.
Zoe’s friends wanted her to promise she’d never see X again. She refused. She said she’d be lying if she agreed. Already, she was letting her mother believe it was all over, though she desperately hoped it wasn’t. She wouldn’t lie to her best friends, too. Val was angry. Dallas seemed … mopey. Zoe assumed it was a drag to find out that the girl you’d made out with in the handicapped bathroom at Walmart—Zoe was positive that it had been Walmart—had graduated to a bounty hunter from the underworld. How could you not feel insecure?
Today, for the first time, there seemed to be a calm in the air. Dallas had texted to say that there was something he wanted to do tonight but he wouldn’t tell them what it was. Val grudgingly agreed to go. Zoe was so sick of being inside her own head—so sick of wanting to help X but having absolutely no idea how—that she would have agreed to anything.
YES YES YES! she texted back. I am DYING to do the thing you won’t tell me! Can we do something I won’t tell YOU after??
Zoe was camped out on the bed in her weird bedroom at Rufus’s house, and waiting for Val to pick her up. Technically, she was reading a novel for English, but she couldn’t remember the main character’s name or why the main character thought that her Big Plan (Zoe couldn’t remember what it was) was a good idea when it obviously wasn’t. (Or was it? She couldn’t remember that either.) Really, Zoe was hiding until it was time to go—not from anything in particular but from everything in general, from the overwhelming evidence of life moving forward without X, which she refused to accept.
She could hear Rufus and her family beyond the door. Uhura had gotten sicker and thinner, like something was eating away at her from inside. She never moved from one particular spot on the living room rug unless they carried her. Jonah was with her every second. So was Spock, who was making his awful wincing sound, confused about why Uhura didn’t want to play.
They were only going to live with Rufus a little while. Bert and Betty had left the Bissells their A-frame house by the lake in their will. Once the place had been emptied and cleaned, Zoe’s family would move in. As for the Bissells’ former home on the mountain, it was still rubble—a milk carton that some kid had crushed with his sneaker. The insurance money would be slow in coming, if it came at all, because the house had been wrecked by a supernatural storm for which there was no earthly explanation or evidence. State Farm ordinarily covered that kind of destruction as an “Act of God.” Zoe’s mom thought it best not to tell them what it had actually been.
Rufus had been fantastically welcoming to the Bissells. In deference to Zoe’s mom, he removed every non-vegan item from the kitchen—which left tea bags, ketchup, and soy sauce. He bought them down comforters so soft that they seemed to sigh when you lay down and cotton sheets in colors he thought they’d like, based on the clothes they wore. (Zoe got purple, which would not have been her first choice, but still.) Zoe’s mom slept in the main bedroom, Zoe in the small one. Jonah and the dogs resided in the living room in a complicated pillow fort that was constantly falling down. Every morning, Jonah lay on his stomach next to Uhura, eating breakfast and begging her to eat, too. Whenever Zoe passed by, she’d pet Uhura without quite looking at her. It hurt too much.
Rufus himself had moved into the sagging, moss-roofed shed in the backyard, where he made his chain-saw sculptures of bears. He still didn’t know the truth about X, the lords, the Lowlands, any of it. He saw that Zoe’s family was traumatized, and didn’t bug them for answers. “I’m just goin’ with flowin’,” he said. Rufus slept in a red sleeping bag atop a folding plastic lounge chair from Home Depot. He had his electric guitar in there (it was covered with skateboard stickers from when he was a teenager) and a tiny amp. He had three space heaters arranged like a futuristic city; a stack of books about stuff like the souls of trees; and a mini fridge he called “my secret shame” because it was packed with Swiss Miss chocolate pudding and Dr Pepper.
Jonah had caught the kindness virus from Rufus. A week ago, he’d secretly given Zoe’s room a makeover. He had taken everything that had been recovered from the house on the mountain, and tried to re-create her old bedroom so that she’d feel more at home at Rufus’s. It was a sweet thing for the bug to have done.
But seriously, the room looked insane.