“When?”

I shook my head. “Henry needs to make it okay. I need to ask him to let us go, so he can help us.”

Ben watched me, like he was waiting for me to say something more. Then he looked at Ethan.

“I’m not stupid, you know,” Ethan said.

Ben spit in the dirt and turned away from the kid. “I guess putting up with all the shit those fuckers do to you makes you smart, then.”

Something like that would have been the first act in a fistfight with any one of the other boys. Not the English kid, though.

Ethan shrugged. “I know you’re not Odds. I know why you’re not like them.”

“Because you fit in so well, right?” Griffin said.

“Him, too,” I said. I lowered my voice and scooted in closer to the other boys. “He went through the lens today.”

I watched Ethan to see if what I said made any difference to him. But I just couldn’t figure out that kid at all.

“He went through?” Griffin said.

He knew what it meant. Griffin and Ben couldn’t see anything in the glasses. Because you don’t see anything when you’re dead and inside a fucking trash can in some twisted and rearranged goddamned not-world. And the first lens, the broken lens, the one that caused it all, could only destroy things now.

Nobody went through the broken lens. It only let things out. Ben and Griffin saw what it did at the market when we were attacked by Hunters, and again on the roof deck at Quinn’s firehouse.

They knew what it meant.

“Where did you go?” Ben asked.

I watched the knobby Adam’s apple in Ethan’s neck twitch as he considered what he should say.

“Well?” I said. “You can tell us.”

“You were there, Jack. You had to have seen it,” Ethan said. “It was real.”

He glanced around nervously. It was like he was trying to gauge our expressions to see if we thought he was crazy, or stupid. And he looked carefully, too, across the way at the other Odds.

Ethan’s voice fell to a whisper. “It was morning. I think it was the most pleasant place I’ve ever seen. We were inside a room, our room. We lived there, and it was clean and felt cold beneath my feet, too. There was a window on a wall, between our two beds. Outside, it was raining, but I could see trees and the most fantastic colors I have ever seen.”

I knew where it was.

Of course I knew.

Ethan looked directly at me. “You were still lying in bed.” He looked down, embarrassed, and said, “I had just taken a piss. In a toilet. With water in it. And you asked me about some news. And I remembered we were leaving that morning, that we would be catching a train somewhere.”

“London,” I said.

“Yes. That was it. Do you remember, Jack?”

I shook my head.

Ben leaned in closer to us. “Fuck that. How come we couldn’t get through, then? Fuck that, Jack.”

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I messed it all up.”

“That’s why he talks like Henry,” Griffin said. “He’s English. That’s why, isn’t it?”

“He’s from my school,” I said. “St. Atticus.”

Ethan’s brow tightened. He was excited. “That’s it! That’s what it was called. St. Atticus Grammar School for Boys. You remember!”

“No. I just know it. But it’s a good thing, Ben. Maybe he’s right. Maybe we are all home, where we belong. We just need to—”

And Griffin said, “What? We need to what, Jack?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. Change the fucking channel or something.”

Ben stood up. “Fuck this place, Jack. So, where’d you leave the goddamned remote?”

Ben had every right to be as angry as he sounded.

Ethan cleared his throat, obviously confused. “How can I go back there?”

I kept my eyes on Ben. He started off, up the trail to the ridge.

I stood up. “You can’t go back, Ethan.”

Griffin got up, shaking his head. “Everything’s fucked out of shape, Jack.”

“Let’s get Ben,” I said. Then I figured there was nothing else I could do, and added, “Come on, Ethan.”

The Odds watched us with untrusting eyes as we crossed the clearing and followed Ben up to the ridge where Henry was waiting for me.

thirty

“We need to leave before something else happens,” I said.

When I saw Henry’s eyes, the slate haze of the Marbury night made him seem so old and tired.

And for just an instant, he looked like the old preacher, and it scared me.

I believed in that moment that Jack had jumped across again, landed on another string; and I realized this was how my brain worked now—that from now on I would always wonder, or doubt, what not-world I’d quietly fallen into.

“Something else always happens,” Henry said. “It’s the only thing we know for certain, isn’t it?”

The other boys stood away from us. They waited, shifting their feet impatiently at the top of the trail. I knew how bad Ben and Griffin wanted to leave, and Ethan, he was helplessly tied to us now.

Just another string in our knot.

“I’m afraid the Odds will fight us if we take horses. You can make it be okay.”

Henry took a deep breath. He thought about it, but I already knew he wouldn’t refuse. It had to happen.

He said, “One day soon, I expect to have another beer with you at The Prince of Wales.”

“I’ll buy.”

“Will we be real friends, I wonder?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suppose we’re always certain of that, too, aren’t we? The not-knowing, I mean.”

I nodded. “Will you come down with us?”

“You will be back. I’ll tell them that.”

“What if we don’t?”

Henry smiled. “It has to be, doesn’t it? You know what still has to happen, Jack.”

Then Henry touched my side, just above my hip, with the point of his index finger. “You know. This. In. Out.”

He raised his eyebrow as though asking if I remembered the arrow. The first time I’d set my feet down in Marbury.

I said, “It doesn’t have to happen, Henry. This isn’t the world. This is not the same place.”

Henry waved his arm across the air between us, like he was painting the scenery with the sweep of his fingers. “Then what is it, Jack? Of course this is the world.”

I shook my head. “This might be the only way for me and the boys to get back home.”

“You know, Jack, everything we do, no matter how ordinary and insignificant the action, continually reinvents our future.”

I thought about seeing Ben and Griffin in photographs, and inside a fucking barrel hidden in Freddie Horvath’s garage.

“Maybe it’s all my fault. Maybe I’ll never go anywhere that’s close to being home again. But I have to try. For them.” I pointed to Ben and Griffin. “And everything’s already been rearranged behind me, so it doesn’t much matter what you do now, Henry. Scratch your head, don’t scratch it, throw a rock off this wall, whatever. All things have been accomplished. That’s what the preacher always says, so it doesn’t matter. I saw … I saw…”

“What?” Henry said.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Henry said, “I suppose I’ll see you again.”

“In a better place.”

Henry patted my shoulder and walked around me toward the waiting boys. “What could possibly be better than this?”

*   *   *

Five of us rode out from the encampment that night.

Ben, Griffin, Ethan, me, and Frankie.

Frankie refused to let us go without him, despite Henry’s assurance that we would come back before morning. Frankie considered the horses, like most of the things transported on the caravan, to be his property. He argued that it was he who’d orchestrated the theft of the horses from the Rangers’ holding pens, and he was the most capable rider of all the boys.

“I want to see for myself what that rider out there is trying to do,” Frankie said. “If I have to, I’ll kill him myself.”

And I told him, “I think we’re all going to die out there.”

That was all we said about it.

With or without us, Henry decided, the Odds would all be leaving in the morning. They had rested long enough, and he was certain the Hunters were coming soon.