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When Red spoke about his sister and the one-eyed man, Rose knew she had to try harder to reach him. The cat had taken her to Merlin’s cave, and every facet of every crystal in that place had proven to be a window—some into other written worlds, some into the world of her mother and the baby and Red and the man that the worm had made its home inside.

The windows had let her reach into the bookshop, but now she needed to be there more fully. It helped that Red was there, wanting her to be there too. His presence made the walls between her and that place grow thin, made them crack where he pressed against them.

His hands on the book cover were hands pressed to the inside surface of the foremost facet of the largest crystal in her part of the cave, a giant over ten feet tall and thrumming with its own power. The timescales over which it had grown, here in the sunless dark far beneath the ground, made an eyeblink not only of human civilization but of their evolution from the small mammals hiding from dinosaurs in the Cretaceous.

Rose pressed her own hands to the crystal’s cold surface, palms and fingers mirroring Red’s slightly larger ones. She pushed. He pushed. A cracking sound rang out, both high like the breaking of glass, and deep like the surrender of rock before geological forces. And in between two heartbeats, she flowed through.

She stood again before Red in the bookshop alcove, his hands in hers, and across every inch of her pale skin, the story of her life, written not in the font that had fled the pages of the book now on the floor between their feet, but with that ink repurposed into the cursive hand of her mother, just as it might have been set down in quill and copperplate in the sadness of the room she had seen in the Rat’s story. All this she knew without reading, with barely a glance, knew it blood to bone, and the knowing stole all the words from her tongue so that it was left to Red to speak.

“Hello…” He looked awkwardly at their hands and flinched—perhaps involuntarily—to recover ownership of his contribution to their union.

“Hello.” With the spell of her dumbness undone, Rose maintained her grip, feeling that if their point of contact were to be broken, she might fall back into Merlin’s cave without saying her piece. And since it now seemed to be that Red was the one whose tongue had become tied, Rose pressed on. “Tell me about the one-eyed man. What did he say? Did you meet him at the hospital? Did he talk about the worm and why it’s chasing me?” She paused, partly for breath, partly because she worried he’d have forgotten the first question if she’d gone on much longer, but mostly because she could feel the pull of the cave, strong already and growing stronger. The other world wanted her back—this was not her place. “Quickly, please. It’s hard to stay here like this.”

“He said his name’s Gar. Dr. Alan Gar.” A visible shiver of revulsion ran through Red’s shoulders and trembled in his hands. “I can’t remember all the crazy stuff he said. But he’s got my sister, or killed her and hidden her body…”

Rose squeezed his hands. “He needs her alive if he’s going to use her to get to you. What else did he say—it could be important. Nothing about the worm?”

Red frowned in concentration. “He said he was the snake in Eden…I remember that. There was something about a library…” He shook his head. “He was raving. I thought he was drunk or drugged up. None of it made sense. I mean…the snake in Eden…that’s the Devil, isn’t it? Every other nutter thinks they’re Napolean or the Devil.”

Rose, who had received her theological education at the desk of Miss Havisham, pursed her lips. “Not in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament the snake isn’t said to be working for anyone or be anyone other than a snake.”

“It’s a third party then?” Red blinked and his grip tightened on her hands.

For a moment Rose thought of the Rat’s claws biting into her skin and his pupils expanding as the worm took over his tongue. She held on to Red though, not prepared to let him go, even if the worm had found him. “A third party,” she agreed.

“He said that. I remember now. Something about a war going on, and him representing a third party.”

“What war, though? Which third party?” She ground her teeth against the cave’s pull, feeling its coldness on her shoulders.

Red shook his head. “All I remember was that he talked about a library, like it was really important…”

“Well, he was carrying the worm. He works for it, rather than it for him, I think.” Rose looked around the room. “And a library brings us back to books. It all does.”

“Can you help me get Sophie back?” Red’s voice trembled, and the squeeze on Rose’s hands became almost painful, giving her the strength to remain despite the cave’s pull.

“I can’t even help myself at the moment, except by running away all the time. But the witch’s book could help us both.”

“Why can’t you use it where it is?” Red asked. “If it’s right there just a few inches behind the other books?”

Rose hadn’t had to put it into words before. The whole idea that the worlds she grew up in were fiction to someone else still seemed very strange. “Most of the books on the shelves I can’t reach either. They have to agree to it. The older ones let me in, but the newer ones, especially those where the person that wrote them is still alive…those won’t admit me.”

“The witch’s book is old, though?”

Rose nodded. “It is…but there’s something about how it was hidden away that’s stopping me getting inside.”

“Won’t it stop me too?” Red asked, frowning. “It’s not going to curse me?”

Rose gasped with the effort of staying in Red’s world, chest tight, breath short.

“Are you…are you OK?” He looked worried for her.

Rose nodded, saving her breath. She avoided saying that it wouldn’t curse him. She honestly didn’t know. But cursed or not, she believed it would help them both. “You can open any of the books here, new or old, and take them home if you pay the asking price. Part of the price of the hidden book is to find it, to dig it out. And once you’ve done that, I’m hoping I’ll be able to look for answers inside it.”

“Hoping?”

“I think…I’ll be able to.”

Red looked uncertainly at the gap leading to the rest of the shop. “I can’t just…” He glanced down at his hands, still gripped tightly in Rose’s overwritten ones. “I don’t even have any tools. I’d need a hammer…and then Xavier will come…and…”