Page 69 of Seasonal Fears

“Right,” says Harry, and he doesn’t mean it at all, and that doesn’t matter.

Harry carries the sack of food and food-adjacent objects as they walk back toward the car, and finds himself weirdly grateful for lunch. Lunch proves all that weirdness really happened: lunch proves he’s not hallucinating. Plus, lunch is a good thing to have. None of them has been eating enough.

(They left the house through the garage to avoid the out-of-season summer, stepping around piles of yard tools and cardboard boxes with unintelligible labels scrawled in Sharpie. It was reassuringly normal after everything inside, save for an unusual number of paint cans on the rack by the door. Kim had paused before opening the door.

“Nothing’s ever perfect for everyone,” she said. “Don’t get so focused on making things perfect for other people that you stop trying to make them perfect for you.”

Then she hit the switch and waved at them out the door, skirting around the edges of the front yard, and now the three of them are walking away from the only people they’ve found who understand any of what they’re going through. They just have to keep going.)

“Does it bother you?” Melanie asks abruptly. He turns, only to realize that she’s talking to Jack, not to him. “That I’m not natural.”

“My mother had this ring she pawned every time she needed to pay for something,” says Jack. “Car repairs, groceries, rent a couple of times. We were going to be okay as long as she had her ring. And then the local pawnshop got new ownership, and the guy said he couldn’t take her ring anymore, because it had lab-grown diamonds. He’d sure been willing to take her cash when she was paying off her ticket.”

Melanie frowns. “So you think … I’m not real?”

“I think her diamonds were good enough to keep us alive until someone decided to be an asshole.” Jack shrugs. “I don’t care how you happened. You happened, and you’re here, and you’re my responsibility, and if I have anything to say about it, you’re going to win.”

There’s the car, and true to Dodger’s word, there’s no parking ticket on the windshield; the meter says they still have almost four hours left. Harry unlocks the doors, and they all get in, and then they’re leaving Berkeley behind. What they’re leaving it for is less clear, but they’re on their way. They’re on their way.

The future is waiting.

Many things in the Up-and-Under were different from the things Avery and Zib had known in the ordinary town where they were born. It would be a lie to claim otherwise, and it is the job of a narrator to tell as few lies as possible, since the people who listen to us will always assume that we have been telling the truth. It is a mean trick for someone whose job it is to honestly account an adventure such as this one to exhibit an unnecessary disregard for the truth when there is no way to verify what’s being said. So I am breaking the veil of the anonymous for a moment to address you, the reader, directly, and make this promise to you:

No matter how strange or improbable the things Avery, Zib, and their friends encounter on their journey through the Up-and-Under, I am telling you the truth as it was seen on those hazy, not-so-long-gone days. There may sometimes be other layers to the truth, things concealed beneath the superficial surface, but I will not say a thing was so if it was not, nor will I tell you a thing was not so when it was. You can trust me on this journey, even as Avery and Zib could trust the improbable road.

It was not long after Avery followed Zib into slumber that the Crow Girl burst into birds once more, flying out the window and finding roosts for herself in the briars and branches of the garden. She filled her many bellies with bonberries, until her beaks and talons dripped with pink juice. And then she closed her many eyes and slept, although it cannot be said whether she dreamt, for the dreams of birds are strange, tangled things, not recognizable as the dreams of children. The Crow Girl was, in that moment, still very close to being lost forever, for all that she was no longer in the cold hands of the King of Cups.

Inside the cottage, Niamh sat in a chair with a clear view of the door, being a silent, steady presence as the others slept. She would rest in her own way when the need came upon her, but the need was not upon her yet, and so she watched with open eyes, waiting to see whether the cottage’s owner would appear and object to their uninvited guests.

The sun sank below the long edge of the sea, having put in an appearance over the high wall of the cliffs, and was gone. Darkness followed, first painting the horizon in pinks and oranges, then tucking all the colors away under a veil of indigo-black night. Stars glittered in the high, clear air, and it was good that Avery was asleep, for not a one of them would have been familiar to him, a stargazing boy who enjoyed evenings in the backyard with his book of constellations and his wide-eyed hunger for the universe. Their strangeness would have been yet another offense heaped on his narrow young shoulders, and he was near enough to the breaking point that he needed no more weight.

Zib wouldn’t have noticed the strangeness of the stars, but she would have known something was wrong when she saw the moons, both of them too small and too dark to be the moon she knew, and most of all, each one cleaving close to the other, twins dancing through the darkened sky, and not a Man in the Moon standing elegant and alone. They would discover the sky soon enough, and inevitably; while there are many oddities that can be concealed from the eyes of curious children, an entire sky is not among them. But for the moment, they slept peacefully, too exhausted even to dream.

And Niamh waited.

—From Along the Saltwise Sea, by A. Deborah Baker

BOOK VIBlow the Man Down

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth … It has no day.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present for the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction.

—Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

Into the West

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 14TH, 2017: WINTER, WANING WORM MOON.

Harry has never driven in this part of California before, but I-5 is a straight line drawn down the length of the state, a spine of stone holding the shifting tectonic plates in place. He knows an earthquake would split the highway without hesitation, but it still feels safer to drive along it, trusting in its strength, its length, its long endurance to see them safely to their destination.

Not that they have a destination, per se. They’re heading south, as instructed, and when they reach the bottom of the state, they’ll turn and head east, until their wanderings bring them to the inevitability of Alabama. He’s never been there before, has a west coast native’s natural trepidation and vague concern about the idea of traveling that deep into what might as well be a foreign country for all that he knows about it. They share a government … technically. Since every community gets to elect their own officials, he can’t necessarily say anyone in a position of authority in Alabama sees the world the way he does, and that’s okay! Alabama should be allowed to make its own decisions about the future! He just isn’t sure they’ll have anything in common. And they share a language, supposedly, but he’s experienced the shifts in slang and regional meaning just between Portland and Seattle or San Francisco. He can’t say the differences in distance and ideology won’t make any difference to their survival.

This is all uncharted territory, and he’s trying not to fret about it as he pulls off the highway in a little city called Crows Landing, looking for a place to fill the gas tank. Eventually, Melanie’s father is going to convince his parents she’s been kidnapped, and they’re going to turn off his credit cards, but until that happens, he intends to use it whenever possible. He’s less worried about being tracked during his road trip than he is about running out of the cash he’s managed to yank out of ATMs and squirrel away, so the longer he can go without touching it, the better.

This doesn’t stop Melanie from grabbing a twenty out of the stash in the glove compartment and throwing herself out of the car as soon as he pulls up to the pumps. “Be right back!” she chirps, before running—running!—for the convenience store attached to the gas station.