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“A baby?” Miss Havisham can be forgiven for stating the obvious. She is, after all, half clad in fire and in the grip of the tragedy of her life.

“You have adopted a girl child before,” the Muse says.

“I was cruel.”

“Not to the child.”

“To a child. To him.” Miss Havisham points at her savior, still trapped between the beats of his heart. “To both of them.”

“Raise this baby,” the Muse says.

“I cannot.”

“You can’t not,” the Muse says.

And the woman who is neither young nor old sees that a truth has her in its grip, every bit as cruel and inevitable as that of the flames. She can’t not.

Baby Rose passes from ivory arms to ones clad in trembling lace.

O Rose, thou art sick.

Rose blinked away the house and its dark corridors. She had spent her youngest years there. She remembered her mother-in-the-burning-dress, the man-in-the-hall, a statue that moved more slowly than the hour hand of the grandfather clock but who closed the gap to the lounge door over the course of the years Rose had lived there. Miss Havisham had been distant, severe, but Rose had never resented her because she could tell, even when very small, how hard the woman tried to let her know that she was loved. She remembered lessons in the tangle of the garden, birdsong and sunshine. Summers were the best. Winter would wake strange memories in her guardian, but, though she might be drowning in old sorrow, Miss Havisham had tried beyond measure, and in that trying had earned a child’s love.

The invisible worm—

“B-B-Badger!” Rose hugged herself against the ice-laden wind. “Badger! Stop this!”

And, as if instruction had been all he ever needed, the Badger shook himself, shook himself again, and shed the glamour that had had him snared.

“Oh, that tricksy worm!” The Badger hacked like a cat with a furball. “He nearly had me then. I’m so sorry, dear child, you must leave immediately. This place is not safe for you.” He threw himself back down the hole he’d dug. “Follow me. Quickly!”

Rose crouched and followed into the unbroken darkness beneath the earth. None of it felt safe, not the damp smell, the soft grave-fresh stink, not the newly broken ground shifting beneath her feet on the steep slope, not the low grunting ahead of her. But compared to the wild night above, it was a haven into which she would willingly throw herself.

“Rose.” The Badger was close enough for the twitch of his whiskers to encompass her. “You have to go on alone from here, child. I can’t know where you’ve gone.”

“But where am I going?”

“The Muse your mother gifted you could wander from any book to any other, such was her power. Our options are more limited now, but—”

“Books?” Rose furrowed her brow. “What have books got to do with it? I know Ratty’s story was about a book and a bookworm. And Toad talked about jumping between editions. But it’s nonsense, surely? I’ve read plenty of books, Badger, they’re not really worlds. I don’t understand—”

“We haven’t time, dear girl,” the Badger snuffled. “Follow me.”

If the world was a book then Rose had read this plot before, and she wasn’t about to allow herself to be in too much of a hurry for an explanation, not even in the dark with the worm trying to chew its way in. She put her foot down. “I have to know! You’re sending me out by myself. I need something to hold on to.”

The Badger huffed. Rose felt rather than saw him deflate in defeat. “Of course there are books in books in books, and worlds in worlds in worlds. Every book is in a world, and every world in a book. We’re reading and being read. We are authors and we are characters. That is just the way things work. Some people do not understand these truths and that is both their burden and their freedom.

“The Muse could take you to any book and sometimes, briefly, to any of the worlds. Our options are more limited. As I understand it—and this is from owls and ravens, so take it with a pinch of salt—you and I, us burrowers, are limited to our own layer. Which seems wrong to me. We should be able to dig from one layer to the next, but that is not the way of it.

“There is a layer above ours—don’t pay too much attention to the word ‘above.’ But, there is a world above us, a world in which the Riverbank and its people are a book. We cannot dig our way into that world any more than we can dive into the books in Toad’s family library. But in that world where we inhabit a book, there are many other books. Toad brought you from the copy of this book on your mother’s table to the copy we now inhabit, one which might rest on the shelves of a private individual, a public library, a bookshop, or even in the family collection of a well-to-do Toad.

“According to Ratty’s story, you found your way into our world—our book—through your digging, because that book touched your own, the world of the garden and the Muse to which you returned after your fosterage. And now, as you try to escape our story, you will find that you may most easily dig your way into the closest books. Ideally those touching this one. Its neighbors on the shelf, if you like. I say ‘most easily’ but forgive me, it will not be easy.

“Old books are the least difficult. Time has softened their borders, they have fewer protections, and less need of them. Your task, Rose, is to feel your way to a new haven, because the worm has found you here and it’s only a matter of time before it finds a way in.”

“But, what about you?” A guilt more pressing than the darkness descended on Rose.

“Perhaps it will not come if you are gone,” the Badger said kindly. “And if it does, our story is legion, we have havens on many shelves. Worry about yourself, dear child. Dig deep and take care.”