Whitehall smiled over at her, his eyes crinkling. “You are quite ready, Ms. Meyers-Petrov. No more dallying. Mr. Price will receive you on the other side. In you go.”
And then that was it. He withdrew, leaving her alone in the empty unit.
In you go.As if she were stepping out of one room and into another, easy as pie.
In you go, as though it were as simple as crossing a threshold.
In you go, and she looked again at the place where the sky rent in two. Her heart beat out a painful staccato. This time when she stuck out her hand, she felt it. An edge, soft as spider’s silk. Holding her breath, she stepped forward, following that incessant hum. Sound rose in a crescendo, running through her in a shiver that left her teeth chattering like castanets.
It could have been the blink of an eye.
It could have been an hour.
Her skin felt as if it were slowly peeling away. It didn’t hurt; it only felt as though she were being gripped much too tightly, and by a thousand prying fingers. In her head, there were a thousand whispering voices.Look, they said.Look, look, look.
And then it was over, and she emerged onto the other side.
A half a step before, she’d been alone in a garage. Now she stood waist-deep in a meadow. The day was blue and bright, the sun a blinding corona of yellow. There was no storage unit, no chain-link fence, no nearby overpass. Only earth, wide and empty. The grass around her stood in colorless stalks, bowed low beneath prettily feathered heads. Somewhere in the distance, a bird warbled.
Nearby sat Colton, propped beneath the drooping boughs of a white oak, his forearms flung over his knees, a flash of something black in his hands. Over his head, the tree’s alizarin leaves flickered like a living flame.
The sky tasted different here—clean and sweet. Beneath her feet, the ground was cracked asphalt, rivers of dark riven in fat clumps of mallow weed. Earth, reclaimed. She moved through it and wondered what sort of ripples made this world deviate so vastly from their own—what sort of event could turn the busy Bostonian rush she’d left behind to a sleepy muffle.
Colton rose to his feet as she approached, the inversion of his cheeks made stark by the sun. Slowly, it dawned on her that the thing in his hands was her beret, the felt clutched tight between his fingers.
“You’re late,” he said, and flashed her a private, steel-tipped smile.
“A little.” Her legs wobbled. “But I made it.”
“There was never any doubt.”
His unwavering confidence in her made her feel a thousand things at once. It wasn’t fair. Even when he wasn’t trying, everything out of his mouth felt tailor-made to unravel her.
Striving for a detachment she didn’t remotely feel, she said, “That’s my hat.”
“Is it?” He closed the remaining space between them, grasses bowing in his wake, and placed it on her head. His gaze was inscrutable as he leaned back to examine her. “Perfect.”
A sudden wind tugged the leaves loose from their branches, and they were momentarily engulfed in a crimson flurry. She caught the beret against her head before it, too, was snatched up in the squall.
“Where did you find it?”
Colton’s smile hitched up at the corners. “I wrestled it from a holly bush.”
Frustration blossomed at the obvious lie, and she peered up at him, one eye pulled shut against the sun. “Is everything with you always a secret?”
“No.” The word dropped between them like a pin.
“Prove it, then,” she said.
His eyes went wide. “Prove it?”
“Yes.”
“Right now?”
“Yes,” she said again, more emphatically than before. “Before we go back. Tell me just three things that are absolutely true.”
Sliding his hands into his pockets, he considered the stretch of sky beyond the trees. Finally, he asked, “Have you ever heard of Charon’s obol?”
