The feeling of wrong swelled suddenly, stealing the breath from Ivy’s lungs. She dropped her cup of cocoa. Her knees went wobbly and she reached for Helios just as he was reaching for her. Instinct made him push Ivy behind him, to protect her from whatever onslaught was about to occur, but none came.
The wrongness coalesced into something she recognized, as if it was rearranging itself into a semblance of order for a few frenzied seconds.
The in-between. Its acrid ozone scent sizzled around them, stronger than Ivy had ever felt it before. The air shuddered with the force of it.
Ivy peered around Helios’s torso just in time to see the train barrel through a gash of ink-black darkness that had sliced right through the tracks. As suddenly as it appeared, the tear in the in-between disappeared. And that was exactly what it was: a tear. A rip along a seam that never should have been there.
All was silent for a long, horrible moment.
Then one person screamed, and another. Some people stared dumbly at the tracks, at the space where a train—a train full of living, breathing people—had just been, their minds refusing to process what their eyes had just seen. Others stampeded toward the stairs leading to the street. The artist dropped her portfolio and ran. The woman with the bags and the cup of coins blinked at the now-empty tracks, shrugged, and went back to her nap.
The train was gone. The entire length of it. Every single car. Swallowed up by a gash in the in-between that had opened of its own accord. It was impossible. It should have been impossible. And yet.
A tremor worked its way through Ivy’s body, starting at the top of her head and moving down to her toes. Her entire body shook and her stomach roiled, threatening to expel its contents. She thought she might be in shock, but the notion was a distant one, as if her brain couldn’t quite grasp the enormity of what had just occurred.
Helios was as still as stone, his gaze fixed on the point where the train had disappeared.
He said Ivy’s name twice before she reacted.
Slowly, she raised her face to look at him. She felt as though she were moving underwater, her body oddly weightless.
The wrongness in the air began to dissipate until it was little more than a memory. Helios had removed his sunglasses and was peering at Ivy with eyes a touch too wide, just this side of terrified.
“We have to go,” he said, one hand coming up to cup her elbow. Already, the booted feet of police officers were clomping down the stairs at the other end of the platform. One of the people who’d fled the station must have found them, alerting them to the fact that something had just gone drastically awry. When the police hit the platform, they slowed. There were two of them, and they wore matching expressions of bewilderment. Ivy wondered what they’d heard from the mouths of frightened commuters or what they’d expected to find. An explosion maybe. Or some other disaster that would align with the idea of a train disappearing.
But they found nothing, for there was nothing for them to see.
“Ivy,” Helios said, tugging on her arm. His sunglasses were still off. Weird yellow eyes were probably less suspicious in that moment than two people wearing shades underground and at night.
The first step Ivy took felt like she was pulling her feet free from clinging muck. Each subsequent step was easier as the primitive part of her brain screamed at her to flee in the face of danger. A solid instinct.
Helios ushered her past the befuddled police officers, who were muttering something about drug-induced hallucinations. A mad giggle clawed its way up Ivy’s throat, but she swallowed it before it could escape. The last thing she and Helios needed was to draw attention to themselves. The stage makeup Ivy had plastered over Helios’s scales before they left Avalon was enough to fool a casual glance, but it wouldn’t hold up under intense scrutiny, which they were sure to experience if the cops saw a laughing madwoman fleeing the scene of a potential crime.
The woman with the shopping bags woke with a start when Ivy passed her. Their eyes met and Ivy’s steps floundered. The woman looked at her as though she could see right through Ivy’s tinted sunglasses and her silk scarf to the distinctly avian eyes and feathers that marked her as decidedly inhuman. A gap-toothed grin cracked across the woman’s lips.
“It’s breaking apart,” said the woman. “Breaking down.”
“What is?” Ivy asked, ignoring Helios’s impatient tug on her arm.
The woman raised her hands and spread her fingers wide in an all-encompassing gesture. “The world,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. Then she clapped her hands over her eyes and began muttering to herself in a language that seemed to be made up of nothing but garbled nonsense.
Before Ivy could ask any more questions, Helios dragged her away, past the police officers who were starting to question the people still on the platform. Their dubious expressions indicated they didn’t believe what they were hearing—and why would they?—but the obvious distress of the people they spoke to merited an investigation, even if just an obligatory one.
Ivy stumbled as Helios all but hauled her up the steps. The woman’s words rang in her head and she spared a glance over her shoulder, trusting Helios to make sure she didn’t plummet down the stairs. The woman had uncovered her eyes and met Ivy’s gaze with a piercing look. She smiled that gap-toothed grin again and mimicked an explosion with her hands. She laughed, then fell into a fit of coughing. One of the officers looked at her for a second, then shrugged and turned away, evidently writing her off as just another questionably sane itinerant.
Madness and magic were not so distant from one another. In humans, the former was often a sign of sensitivity to the latter. It was as though the human mind was incapable of adapting to the presence of magic in other races, ones whose life’s blood was full of it, like Ivy’s kind. The woman knew something. And it was driving her mad.
Before Ivy knew it, she and Helios had reached the surface. Never had Ivy been so glad to gulp down stale city air. Compared with the stifling wrongness of the subway platform and the sickening sensation of the in-between tearing itself open and slamming itself closed, the city air felt as fresh as a meadow.
Helios guided her a block and a half away and she let him, glad not to have to think beyond the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other. She was still trying to come to terms with what they had just seen.
The in-between wasn’t supposed to open on its own. That was why they needed shadow dust. It was a key. That door wasn’t supposed to open without one.
And yet.
And yet.
Their frantic pace slowed. Helios released his hold on Ivy’s arm reluctantly, like he didn’t want to lose her solidity. He looked back in the direction they had come. A crowd was beginning to gather around the station entrance, drawn by curiosity like moths to a flame.