Page 18 of Fall into Place

Tess nodded. While she wasn’t totally sure how she was meant to execute any of Octavia’s plan in a building that didn’t exist, she was still starting to feel pretty anxious.

“Tess,” Octavia asked carefully, “are you sure you want to do this?”

Tess started feeling dizzy as she accounted for all the possibilities—that a vampire would kill her, that she’d somehow fall into an interdimensional wormhole and never return, that she was talking with some random stranger in front of a vacant lot and none of this was real.

But she wanted it to be real. She felt the desire so keenly—for another world, a magical doorway, a fantastic reality. Even if she was only there for a few minutes, she had to see it for herself.

She turned to Octavia and nodded. “I’m sure.”

“All right, then.” Octavia dropped Tess’s hand and folded her arms. “Time for you to take a walk around the block.”

“Excuse me?” Tess peered at Octavia.

“Just a quick walk around the block, get your head clear, that sort of thing.” Octavia gave her a little nudge. “Go on.”

“I—okay,” Tess agreed. “Which way?”

“Whichever way you like.” Octavia smiled placidly. “See you soon.”

Tess didn’t look back as she walked north on Hudson. She turned east on Plymouth, where the wind rustled through the leaves of the many trees. Had it really been only a few hours since Joni’s party, seeing Rick? It already seemed like another lifetime, like she could feel the strings of a new chapter gently pulling her away from the old one. She turned south on Little, and every step felt lighter than the last. A quick turn brought her back to Hudson, where she peered to make out the silhouette of Octavia waiting—except she wasn’t there. Had she already left?

Tess walked quickly toward the spot where they’d just been, gathering speed. Was this really the end of the story? Just a strange interaction with a strange woman, and after all this, Tess was simply going to get in a cab and head back to work? Tess was nearly jogging by the time she got back to the vacant lot, except—

Except the lot wasn’t vacant anymore.

Behind the silver birch tree, there was a small, igloolike building made of stone. And in the center of that building, there was a door.

“Holy shit,” Tess whispered. She closed her eyes, wondering if this small gesture might make the building evaporate just as suddenly as it had appeared. But when she looked again, the dome was still there, and she could faintly make out a warm orange glow coming from behind the door.

She approached the building carefully, looking hastily around—someone was always awake in New York. Was someone looking at her right now? Could a restless woman in Vinegar Hill be sitting at her window, smoking a cigarette, watching Tess Rosenbloom walk through a doorway into another world?

As Tess got closer, she saw that the stones of the building were glossy and black, splattered through with splintery white patterns—obsidian, maybe. The door was ebony wood, carved with intricate patterns that looked to Tess like a series of ancient runes, but she couldn’t be sure. The handle was wrought iron, a graceful arch finished with a small filigree.

Tess reached out and touched the handle—it was cool and smooth, and felt like any other door. She didn’t know if she’d be asked for a token, or to answer a riddle, or otherwise interrogated by some sort of intergalactic bouncer. But when she pulled on the handle, the door opened, and Tess simply walked inside.

—

The first dome—because the “bar” was actually an interconnected series of domes, like a massive subterranean maze—was dimly lit. The warm orange light Tess had seen emanated directly from the walls, which had a mossy quality. The room was empty except for a bored-looking, androgynous person in a slinky outfit that looked like chain mail glimmering violet and red as it caught the strange light. They were lounging on a cushiony chair that looked like an outgrowth of the wall itself, paging through a paperback novel in a language Tess didn’t recognize. They didn’t even look up as they waved Tess through.

Tess walked slowly into something like a hallway—it had an arched ceiling, and it continued far enough that Tess couldn’t see what lay at the end of it. Dark, vaguely electronic music pulsed through the space; it reminded Tess of Joni’s Portishead phase. The hall was covered in the same mossy material as the entryway, but the lighting in here was deep blue-green, sparkling brightly through some spots on the wall that seemed more sheer than others. Tess wasn’t sure if she should touch the moss, but her curiosity got the better of her and she laid a palm on it—it reacted immediately, pressing back against her hand with a gentle buzzing not unlike a purring cat. The sensation was intoxicating, and Tess had to fight a bizarre desire to lean her entire body into the moss. As she pulled her hand away and kept walking, she saw that some other patrons of the bar had not been able to resist that urge.

As Tess moved through the hall, she began to see openings toward other rooms, each one totally unique. One had walls that were slick and iridescent, as if they’d been covered in black oil, where half a dozen people dressed in spotless white nylon drank cocktails on high-backed sculptural chairs. Another room was nearly pitch dark, lit only by towers of glowing lily pads that people wandered around like a moonlit garden.

One dome was larger, filled with clear glass tubs that looked like they were floating in a night sky projected on the floor, walls, and ceiling. Tess couldn’t resist wandering in for a closer look: The tubs were filled with something that looked like foaming bubble bath, but when one of the people in a bath moved, Tess saw the substance was more solid than any bath she’d ever been in—the foam was thick and crunchy, tinted in pastel pinks and blues, and seemed to coalesce around the bodies of the people bathing.

Tess understood why Octavia had told her to go directly to the main bar and not to waste time exploring Bar Between. She easily could have spent weeks in this place, visiting different rooms, asking the other patrons endless questions about where they’d come from, where they were going, and how they had ended up here. And while she didn’t rush through the hallway, exactly, she also didn’t linger. She didn’t know how quickly time passed here—and besides, she’d be back soon enough once she successfully delivered her message to Callum.

At the end of the hall, Tess walked through a plain wooden door that turned out to be the entrance to the main bar. Given the varying sizes of the rooms she’d passed, Tess had expected it to be a cavernous space, the most spectacular setting of all. But it was the opposite—the closest thing Tess had seen to an actual bar in Brooklyn.

The room still had a vaguely rounded shape with a low, curved ceiling, but the walls were straight enough to hang paintings—dozens of them, oil portraits of all different kinds of people, some of whom Tess recognized from her walk through the bar tonight (like the white-nylon wearers), others more strange than anything she’d yet seen. The walls were a pleasant mushroom taupe, covered in a claylike substance, and the wood floors looked centuries old. The room was full of vintage, mismatched furniture: a velvet couch here, a leather wing chair there. Torches on the walls and a crackling fire in an iron hearth lit the space with a homey glow, and the music was both odd and comforting, muted pop electronica with a dash of jazz, or maybe funk.

There were only a few people in the room: two teens with green-tinged skin playing cards in a corner, a pot-bellied man in a fur coat dozing by the fire, an older woman with an extremely long neck wearing a dress trimmed with ostrich feathers, thumbing idly through a magazine. At the dark wooden bar, a woman in a gray skirt-suit was arguing with the bartender—their styles were radically different, so it took Tess a second to realize they were sisters.

“Honestly, Flora, I don’t see why it’s a big deal for you to make me a portal!” the skirt-suit woman said. “It’s literally the only kind of magic you can do, so why not just do it?”

“Because you can take a cab!” the bartender huffed. “Or a train, or a private jet, or literally what-the-fuck-ever. I create portals between dimensions, not to make it easier for you to go to Boston.”

The women both had dark hair and nearly interchangeable faces with wide eyes, button noses, full lips, and pudgy cheeks—but the similarities ended there. Where the skirt-suit woman was reedy and prim with a chic little pixie cut, the bartender was retro and goth, short and curvy, her hair styled in pin-up curls, eyes rimmed in black liquid liner. She wore a fitted halter dress that showed off the dozens of black tattoos snaking around her neck and down her arms, even onto her fingers, drawing Tess’s eyes to her nails, which were painted black and filed into talons. If this was New York, Tess would have guessed they were both Dominican, but trying to narrow people down by ethnicity (or planet, even) in this bar seemed a bit reductive.