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Red hammered down onto the worm with both feet. The worm, with a hissing shriek, coiled up around him, and both went to the ground together. Rose, finally surmounting the wall, raced toward them, still a hundred yards away.

By the time she got there, Red was getting to his hands and knees. The worm lay in pulsing, gory ribbons, its stink overpowering. Red tossed aside the piece of sharpened iron he’d used to gut it. The “knife” looked as if it could once have been a book hinge. He looked at his hand as if he might have hurt himself, but Rose couldn’t see any cuts there. The light around him twisted strangely, as if ribbons of glass threaded the air…some effect of the worm’s enchantments perhaps. She looked away.

“Oh no…” Rose spotted the wounds on Sophie’s arm. A half-moon of triangular cuts, blood leaking from them. But more worrying than the blood was the flesh around the cuts that was already beginning to darken.

“Sophie!” Red fell to his knees beside his sister, half lifting her, shaking her, trying to get her to wake. She hung in his arms like a rag doll.

“Worm bite.” Hannah finally arrived, face grim, casting glances at the worm’s remains. “It’ll kill her. I can’t stop it.”

“The hospital!” Red looked up, hunting for the portal that had delivered him and finding it gone. “Fuck! Can you get me back there, with Sophie?”

“Doctors won’t save her.” The witch shook her head. “Even if I could get you there. And I can’t.” Her frown deepened. “There’s supposed to be a place of healing at the center of this chamber—but she’ll die before we could carry her there.” She sounded uncertain for the first time, even a little afraid. “It’s a mile at least and that’s only if we don’t get lost…”

“There must be a way.” Red tried to lift the dying girl, but her weight defeated him. He looked so beaten and broken. Rose would have been surprised if he could even stand by himself. “There has to be. I’m not letting her die. She’s all…” Emotion choked him off.

“The Exchange links places to places,” Rose said. “You could try—”

“Where is it? How do I get there?”

“This pool might—”

Red took no more convincing. “I’ve jumped into much worse today.” He glanced at Hannah for confirmation. “The pool?”

The witch nodded.

Red dragged his sister to the water’s edge. The curious fractures in the air moved with him. “You’re coming too? I need help.”

“Yes.” Rose hurried after him. “Of course.”

With a great heave Red pitched himself and Sophie into the water, and the pool swallowed them with barely a splash, as if it had been a perfect dive.

“Hannah.” Rose looked back at the frowning witch. She seemed distracted. “You’re coming, right?”

“Something’s wrong…” Hannah looked around, right and left, searching.

“We have to go!” Rose took a step to the water’s edge.

“Something at the bookshop!” Hannah looked up as if a giant were looming over her. “The Great Smith—” She jolted forward, arcing her body as if struck by a powerful blow in her lower back. An iron point, longer than Rose’s arm, slammed out of the woman’s chest, a massive nail driven through her. And without a cry, she fell to the ground.

Chapter 26

Red

The Exchange looked a lot like a park that my mother used to take me and Sophie to, back before she got bad. Something about the trees, how they invited you to climb them, or at least try to. And the ponds. There were more of them, sure, lots more, and they were smaller, but all of them reminded me of that boating pond where kids floated their model ships and I watched. I was always going to bring my own, when Mum or Dad finally got around to coming up with one for a birthday or Christmas. I spent so long imagining joining in, finding my way between those other kids to the water’s edge, launching my little boat. So long that maybe the real thing couldn’t ever hope to live up to what I’d built in my head. Maybe that was why they never gave me a boat of my own.

Something about the place, the utter peace, the order with a hint of chaos, rows of trees and pools stretching away beyond sight, something managed to make me forget for a moment that I was, in strict contravention of the loading limit for my body, carrying my dying sister in my arms.

Even when I remembered and got her to the ground as gently as I could, the panic that had been all-consuming felt dulled, like one of those fires that goes underground, leaking smoke through the soil and threatening to leap out at some later date.

I didn’t understand how the worm had done this to her. It had bitten me multiple times while I carved it up with the knife I’d seen on the ground. Its teeth had left marks on my flesh—I could see them now, tattoos in crimson. But I wasn’t poisoned. It hadn’t even broken the skin. I must have weakened it back in Saint Rose’s. That was why it had tried to escape.

A voice broke into my confusion. “You do not belong here, Frederick Archer.”

I turned, again with less urgency than the situation required, to see what most resembled a gleaming white shop mannequin, female in the hips and chest. All the details smoothed away, just the generic topology of a face: nose, dents for eyes, a hint at lips set in narrow disapproval. “I am Yamala.”

“My sister! You’ve got to help me. She’s poisoned!” I knelt to try to pick Sophie up again, as if I could thrust her into this creature’s arms and demand she fix her. “She’s dying!”

“She is dying.” The mannequin’s voice maintained its level. We could be discussing the weather. “But she will not die here. Time only pretends to pass in this place. There are things we must discuss, you and I. The necessary pantomime of choice. Here many illusions can be sustained, even true paradox.” She raised a white hand. “When our conversation is finished, I will ensure that your sister is delivered to any destination you decide upon.”