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"The better," I finished.
"The better for me, too," she said. "I'm already in the Fates' bad books, and once they find out--"
"So the Fates are real?"
"Oh, yeah, only they don't just sit around spinning yarn--" She shot me a mock glare. "Stop that. You're going to trick me into talking, and then they'll find out and I won't just be up to my neck in shit anymore, I'll be drowning in it. Believe me, they will find out--hopefully just not until you're gone."
"How will they find us? Those Searchers you mentioned?"
Eve kept walking.
I continued, "If I need to be on the lookout for these things, then I have to know what to look for."
"No, you don't. If you see them, they've already seen you, and we're both going down. Not a whole lotta laws in this place, but we're breaking most of them."
"What if--"
I stopped and stared. The rocky plains ended less than a dozen yards in front of us. Beyond that was...nothing. They didn't end in a cliff or a wall of darkness or anything so dramatic. They just ended, like hitting the last page in a book. I can't describe it any better than that.
"Well, come on," she said.
I couldn't move. There was something indescribably terrifying about the view in front of me, the yawning nothingness of it.
"Oh, hell," Eve said. "It's just a way station."
She grabbed my elbow and propelled me forward. When we reached the end of the plain, my brain went wild, digging in its mental heels. That response shot down to my legs and they stopped moving. Eve sighed and, without a word, stepped behind me, and pushed.
I'd been tricked. In that last second before Eve shoved me through, I realized the truth. Eve wasn't helping me. She didn't want me going back to Savannah. She hated me, hated what I was doing to her daughter, hated how I was raising her. This was her revenge. She was--
"There," Eve said, stepping beside me. "That's not so bad, is it?"
I looked around. Fog surrounded me, a strange, cold, bluish mist.
I rubbed my upper arms. "So what is this place? A way station between what?"
"Between planes, the nonearthly realms of the ghost world, like where you landed. From here I can transport us to another plane, or to any place on earth. Well, our version of earth."
"But how--"
"Think of it as a cosmic elevator. A modern one, though. No elevator attendant on duty. Can't just walk up and say 'Miami, please.' Don't I wish. No, it's strictly do-it-yourself, and you have to figure out the right incantation to get to each place, like breaking a code. Different place, different code."
"So I assume they don't like ghosts traveling."
Eve shrugged. "They aren't totally against it, but they'd rather you found a place and stuck to it, at least for a while. Frequent commuting is not encouraged. It confuses the older ghosts, seeing new faces popping in and out all the time."
"But you know the codes."
She grinned. "Not as many as I'd like, but I'm racking up far more frequent flier miles than the Fates would like. They've rapped my knuckles a few times. Not about using the codes, because, technically, that's allowed, but they don't always approve of the methods I use to get them."
"Uh-huh."
"And that's all you need to know about that. Now hold on."
Eve murmured an incantation in a language I'd never heard. Then she turned and walked back in the direction we'd come.
"It didn't work?" I said as I hurried after her. "So now what--"
"More walking, less talking, Paige."
