I could convince him to come with me without saying a word. I could overpower his vorpal with mine.
I almost said it again: Come with me. And he would have.
But then I looked at his neon-white shirt, at his soft boots so thin I could see his restless feet flexing inside them. “I wish we could go back home,” I told him instead.
Cole gave me a slow shrug. “There was nothing there, really.” He turned toward the mouth of the alley. The streetlights shone in his eyes. A thousand unblinking cameras waited for him.
I wouldn’t try any longer to change his mind. And I wouldn’t stay.
So I did the disappearing thing I’d gotten good at.
When I was fourteen, Grandpop told me to keep my eyes on the newsfeeds. Watch the waves of famine, the mass migrations, the border wars. The green bloom of algae in the dead zones at the mouths of the Yangtze and the Mississippi alike. He said, “The world is shrinking. It’s drying out. We’ve lived how we wanted to live, and now we’re paying the price for it.”
“The people from the Other Place are going to fix it all,” I said. “Once we find a way to cross over into their world, things will start to get better. It’ll take time, like you said. But everything will get better.”
Grandpop peered at me from his leather chair. For a moment, I thought the creak of springs was the sound of his weary bones shifting. “Yes. They get some of our energy, we get a solution for our problems. And all we have to do is visit their world of wonders. It’s more than fair, isn’t it?”
He settled back in his groaning chair and narrowed his eyes at his pipe. “It’s a nice story, anyway.”
I took the high-speed. The guy at the ticket booth was a fan, so I didn’t have to explain why I had no credits.
One brief glance around the station and then onto the train alone to bullet through bushy Oregon to Washington State.
I used the seat monitor on the train to navigate to a website I’d discovered while I’d been holed up in my hotel room. A forum where people posted maps like the one Grandpop had given me. I left a message there.
Epony 9:56pm
*maybe someday you’ll follow me*
If you can’t meet me, send someone who can. Seattle high-speed station, tomorrow morning.
I left it for Grandpop. Or not for him exactly, since there wasn’t much chance he was still alive. Really, I left it for Hayden, in the hopes his people knew about the map Grandpop had passed on to me.
Grandpop must have sensed about me what I had only just begun to realize myself—the reason people from the Other Place stared at me in coffee shops, on city streets: It was my vorpal. Grandpop’s had been special, strong, and so he noticed it in me too. The way anyone with a strong vorpal noticed another strong vorpal, like a huge red blossom on a radar screen.
And all this time, Grandpop had been trying to decide between encouraging me and warning me.
He had given me his map, covered in a million red dots. Each dot representing the signal from a red bracelet—information he had gotten from a website like the one I’d found, maybe even the very same site. A curious concentration of those signals spread over Washington, parts of Oregon, up into Canada. The overlap between two worlds. The fact that he had never come back to tell me what he found meant he’d probably died at the end of his journey. So I wouldn’t know what he’d found until I encountered it myself.
At the Seattle station, I had hours to mull it over. There could only be one reason the aliens were so keen on advertising themselves with their bright red, government-issued bracelets even while they watched our world go into decline. One reason they let us create stories about the Girl Queen and their world, let us spin illusions.
They knew our fantasies would always have more power than the truth.
Everyone loved the idea of stepping into a better world. And if your own world started shrinking enough, you just might put your vorpal to the test. The aliens didn’t have to convince us to come. We would convince ourselves. More and more of us would cross into their universe, strengthening the bond between two worlds, opening channels that would let energy flow from our world into theirs.
It’s what I was doing now—searching for a world from the stories I loved. And I knew more people would follow.
The only problem was, the stories weren’t all true. We were giving in to an illusion.
And I knew now from experience: Illusions end.
Still, what else did we have?
Hours I waited, and then there he was. Dark from the sun, hair like parched grass. A bit taller in thick-soled shoes. Broader in the chest so that I was surprised to find I ever thought much about his chest. I felt the calluses on his hand when he slipped it into mine. For a moment, I let my palm hover against his, afraid it might push right through. But no, it was solid as long as I wanted it to be solid, and he was silent waiting for me to make up my mind.
I made up my mind. I gripped his hand hard and walked out of the station, glanced a good-bye at the snow-naked mountain, and found my way into another world.