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“She said she wanted to wait until you were here to talk too much,” Mel says. “And you’re soaked. And I can hear your teeth chattering from here. Come on, let’s go up near the fire.”
She throws an arm around my shoulder. I lean against her alittle and catch Becca’s hand, just my fingertips hooked to catch hers, on the other side. Kyle and Anthony trail behind.
We reach the firelight and Lucy dances back a bit, elegant little steps to give us room to maneuver. I get close enough to the fire to feel the warmth before addressing her.
“Hi. I’m—”
“Sara,” she says. She smiles, cheeks dimpling. “And I’m Lucy, if you hadn’t guessed.”
John tromps up behind us and then past, turning sideways with muttered apologies to fit by the group. He goes to the far side of the fire, where a stool sits next to a pile of boxes and bags, and sets the box with the hand on top of it.
“Did you encounter any problems?” Lucy asks him.
“Oh no,” he says, blowing out his cheeks. “Just the usual sort of hungries, and the candle’s burning low, but you knew that.”
He rummages in a bag beside him and pulls out a length of wood and a small knife, and sets to carving it with a level of concentration that suggests he’ll have no part in the following conversation.
“John’s been on the road for quite a long time,” Lucy says. “Even longer than I have. I wouldn’t have survived its trials without him, but he’s—he’s not what he used to be.” John shows no visible offense at this, only whistling and working his knife into the wood.
“He’s the man your brother saw you with,” I say.
Lucy blinks at me. “My brother?”
“Your brother followed you into the woods, and he saw youget on the road with a man in a broad-brimmed hat,” I say. “That’s what the newspapers said.”
“Ah,” she says. “I think someone may have told me that story before. Sometimes I have trouble keeping track. I’ve worked hard not to lose my senses quite as much as dear John, but I’m hardly immune. I am eighty years old, after all. Even under normal circumstances, my memory might falter.” She smiles. “I didn’t know my brother was following me. John was already playing ferryman back then. He’s a verygoodperson. Or was. He could have gotten off the road, but he decided to stay behind, and risk himself going back and forth to help people along. He told me I should turn back, but I was quite set on traveling.”
“Why?” I ask. “If he warned you, why would you—?”
“It calls to some people,” Lucy says, a little wistfully. “It’s lonely. It calls to the ones it thinks can make it to the end.”
My skin prickles. Maybe it’s just the cold. “Can you help us get to the end?” I ask.
She sighs. “The thing is, thisisthe end,” she says.
Seven gates. Everything we’ve come across has been consistent in that, at least. “We’ve only been through...” I count them off in my mind.
“Five,” she says. “The Liar’s Gate, the Sinner’s Gate, the Blind Man’s Gate, the Gate of Many Doors, the Sailor’s Gate. Sometimes they have different names. Sometimes they come in a different order, and the details of each change to suit the traveler. But to get here, you passed through five. I know. There ought to be two more. Come with me.”
She turns and walks into the dark. John stays put, whittling his stick and whistling through the bristles of his beard.
Lucy leads us down another hill and up the side of the next, then stops, pointing.
At the base of the hill is a wreck of shattered stone. An eruption of the earth, and the road beyond it utter ruin. Brambles grow over the hills beyond, and then a thick snarl of trees, a forest that stretches to the dark uncertainty of the horizon. Here and there I think I can make out a paler patch among the shadows, far beyond the limits of our flashlights, where another scrap of road remains.
Mel moans as we come to a staggered stop. “That’s it?” she says. “It just ends? Then how do we get off?”
“You have to leave the road,” Lucy says.
“But if we leave the road, we die,” Anthony says, taking another step toward the end of the road and squinting as if a solution will reveal itself.
“It isn’t that clear-cut,” Lucy says. She looks at me. “Sara left the road.”
“When I was running after Kyle,” I say. “How did you know that?”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you all,” she says. “When I can.”
“That beast would have killed you if Trina hadn’t stopped it,” Becca says.
