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GRACE: Come here. And whatever you do, don’t run.
The teens glance at each other, and then at the creature. It’s nearly on them. They dart down the spur of hallway the woman occupies, and she waves them into stillness and silence as the spider advances.
It moves on, past them. It doesn’t seem to realize that they’re there, and soon it vanishes down the hall in the distance.
TRINA: Whatwasthat?
GRACE: Keep your voice down. Something’s always listening, and everything’s always hungry. There’s worse things than the spider in here.
MEL: Uh, sorry—who are you?
GRACE: I’m Grace. Winters. And don’t worry. I’m going to get you out of here.
18
“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVEcome,” Becca says, and my throat feels closed up. “Are you—you’re alone? But you couldn’t have gotten this far without—”
“Shut up,” I say, desperate with emotions too immense to have names, and pull her close. She’s stiff against me for the first moment. In the second, one of her hands creeps up my back with the fluttering step of a cautious insect, and then flattens between my shoulder blades, a pressure that is as much disbelief as love. Then she wrenches away.
“You can’t have come this far alone,” she says, gaze dropping from mine and shifting toward the dark corner of the room like she can’t bear to meet my eye. She stands like she’s resisting the urge to scrape the sensation of my touch from her skin. I want to ask her what happened to her, but I don’t need to know to understand.
A year in this place? I must be stranger than any monster.
“The others are with me,” I say, and she flashes me a look of relief at the chance to retreat into practicality and fact. Feeling is too dangerous. “Anthony and Trina and Mel. Kyle and Jeremy Polk, too, and Vanessa Han was with us, but—”
She holds up a hand. “Wait. They’re all here? In the house?”
“I don’t know. They were, and then I was alone,” I say. I’m babbling. Still not sure I believe what I see—my sister, standing right in front of me.
“It does that,” Becca says. “They’re probably in the halls somewhere by now, though.” She cocks her head, listening. “We have to move. It’s not good to stay in one place too long. Come on.”
She takes my hand again and leads me out into the hall. She’s not wearing shoes, I realize. Her bare feet are filthy, but they make hardly any sound on the floorboards as she hurries forward. I’m not so graceful. She takes a practiced series of turns, then ducks inside another room—an office, maybe, with a desk piled with books and old papers sitting in the middle of the room, a wide book like a ledger open and covered in dust at the middle. The pages are covered in spidery writing, familiar—in the town in the woods on the road are the halls that breathe, I make out, and then Becca shuts the door almost all the way and turns back to me.
“Tell me again who you brought with you,” she says. “How many have you lost?”
“Two,” I tell her. “A girl you don’t know and Vanessa.” I name the others quickly, and she shuts her eyes, lips moving as if she’s speaking to herself. When they open again, they’re shiny with tears.
“You shouldn’t have come. None of you should have come,” she says.
“We came to find you.”
“And it’s no good,” she says. “Two by two. You can only get out two by two, and there’s an even number of you.”
“What?”
“The exit to this place. It’s darkness,” Becca says. “The kind you need a partner to get through. Like the Liar’s Gate—the first one?”
“I know its name. It was in the notebook. What—what happened to Zach?” I ask.
“Zach’s dead,” she says flatly. “I’ve been by myself for... I don’t know how long.”
“You’ve been gone a year,” I say. And however long we’ve been on the road now. A day? I can’t be sure.
“A year?” she asks. Laughs, half-wild. “So you’re older than me now.” I make a confused sound, and she waves a hand. “You don’t change in this place. No getting hungry. No sleep. You get tired, but I don’t think you age. So you’re older than me. Big sister.” She smiles, crooked. I keep wanting to touch her, reassure myself that she’s real.
“We thought you were dead,” I say. “We looked for you. The police—they thought you ran away with Zachary, and—”
“I didn’t mean to leave. I thought—I thought we could get through, and find her, and it would be all right. She promised it would be all right.”
