Jack pulled his hands apart so he wouldn’t bruise his fingers.

“He said the Queen paid him to find special people. Somehow, I saw that the guy’s clothes were actually pretty shabby. She couldn’t be paying him much. And now his skin looked old. I thought maybe I’d found myself a realvampire—a poor one.” Ginny’s voice dropped below a whisper. Jack could barely hear her.

The warehouse creaked. Yards off, a cat meowed. The meow echoed around the rafters as if there were dozens of cats.

“He was as afraid of the woods as I was. I knew the Queen wasn’t the woman who started fires, because we passed the car when we walked into the trees—just parked there, on the dirt driveway. Smoke was drifting out of an open rear window. The woman was inside. I saw her veil move. She was looking right at me but I couldn’t see her eyes.”

“You didn’t run?”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think about jumping the lines because I knew the woman in the car would set fires everywhere, and she wouldn’t even need to leave the backseat. I could almost seeher doing it—hundreds of little blazes dropping from the air. She’d burn the woods, the house, any path I tried to take, anywhere I tried to go.”

“Using fires—like wasps.”

Ginny glanced left for a second, chin down, defiant, working hard to get it all out. “I wonder how many of them are out there, hunting us?”

Jack cocked his head. “No idea.”

“We walked between the trees for five or ten minutes. I thought we were walking in a big circle—we kept passing a black lake covered with green duckweed. Everything was getting dark. There was a storm coming in, low black clouds—lightning.”

“Sideways lightning?”

Ginny nodded. “Then he said something about a moth. Maybe it was theMoth. ‘The Moth is coming to introduce you.’ The trees—I noticed that their branches grew down into the dirt. The leaves moved, independently. But they weren’t really moving, they were just changing—getting bigger or smaller, shifting left or right, but without moving—because the trees were black and solid, like stiff tar. I thought, maybe each time a tree seemed to move, it was becoming a different tree—I don’t know how to describe what was wrong with them. The guy with the coin seemed as scared as I was. He said, ‘The Queen in White expects perfection. That’s part of her charm.’ I asked him how old he was, how old the Queen was, and he said, ‘What an odd question.’

“I think I saw another man—but it wasn’t a man. It stretched up and out until I could see right through it—right through him. We came to the center of the woods. I knew it was the center, but we had never left the circle. Maybe the path was a kind of spiral, but special—curving inward, but not in space. There was like a big lake of frozen jade-green water—all carved up, gouged out. I couldn’t see the sky over the lake—it just wasn’t there.”

Jack didn’t want to hear any more. He shifted a few inches to his right, as if she were a package about to explode.

“The clouds dropped and cut off the trees. Leaves fell like little flat rocks, ice cold. They stung when they hit my head and my arms. The light became gray and icy. The shadows had edges sharp as knives—if you walked over one, it could cut you. Everything smelled like lemons and burning gravy and gasoline—I hope I never smell anything like that again.

“‘Don’t say a word,’ the thin man told me. He pocketed his coin, held out his hand, wiggled his long fingers. I couldn’t help it—I showed him the stone, still in its box. He reached out as if to take it, but instead he backed away and said, ‘Don’t move. Don’t look. I’m sorry.’

“He started running. He left the circle we were on, and I heard him crashing through branches. I guessed that the circle was a trap—I had been hypnotized by the spiral. I couldn’t lift my feet.”

Jack covered his mouth.

“The same clouds…in the sky…like the ones that flew in over the city to get you,” Ginny said. “The man wanted to deliver me to something that didn’t belong here, something angry, sad. Disappointed. I stood between the trees. The leaves were spinning around the Queen or whatever it was in the center…I couldn’t see her. But she was tying up everything into one big knot. Her knot was the center of the spiral. I didn’t believe it, but I understood it—everything that couldhappen was goingto happen, and all of it would happen to me, and some of it would even be stuff that couldn’t happen.

“I was about to see everything,all at once. I turned around—completely around—and the trees spun by, but only halfway, and I saw the man in the trees—he lowered his hands and his eyes were like snowballs in his head. I turned around again, completely around, knowing that I would not see the Queen again until I had spun twice. Does that make sense?”

Jack closed his eyes and realized he could see the sense that it did make. “In that place, you have to turn twice to rotate a full circle,” he said.

“I thought you’d understand.”

“It’s got a different logic, like the jumps we make. Did you see her?” Jack asked.

“I don’t call it seeing. But yes, I suppose I did. She was at the center of the jade lake. She wasn’t dressed in white, she didn’t wear anything. At first I didn’t know why the man called her the Queen in White. Maybe he saw her differently, or knew something else about her. She was very tall. If I came from somewhere else, saw with different eyes, I suppose she might have been beautiful. She had limbs or arms or things coming out of her that I didn’t recognize, but they looked right—they fit. Even so, I knew that if I came near her, she would suck my eyes right out of my head. I felt like a piece of bloody ice. She just stood at the center of her knot, watching, infinitely curious, curious like a hunger, curious like fear—she wanted to know everything about me. And so angry, so disappointed. I wanted to tell her what she needed to know, just to end her disappointment, her rage—but I couldn’t explain it in words. Instead, what I had to give her would shoot up out of my skin, all the places I had been and things I had done or would do—past and future, all my selves, just a big, chewed-up mess flowing into her knot. She’d end up wearing me like a dress or a scarf. I didn’t think I was going to die—but I knew that what was about to happen would be worse than dying.”

Jack sat stiff on the cot, hands trembling under his thighs. “Umhmm,” he murmured. She smiled. “But I’m here, right? So relax.”

“That’s not easy,” he said with a nervous grin.

“Well, deal. I had been holding something back—didn’t even know it, lucky for me, because I might have told her. Maybe youknow what I’m talking about.”

“Maybe.”

“Tell me what I did.” Ginny looked straight at him.

Jack made a circular scissors motion with his fingers.

“Yeah. When I was finished—and it took just an instant—I was flat on my face, covered with leaves. Trees had fallen all around and water was everywhere—steaming but cold. Duckweed hung on all the trees. The lake had flung itself up out of the hollow, and I didn’t see the man again—I don’t know where he went. The whole forest was flattened.”

“What about your stone?”

“I dropped it, but then I found it,” Ginny said, nodding. “It was right near the path, still in its box. I picked it up and walked back between the trees. Near the house, I saw that the car was gone. I was alone. You must have done the same thing, Jack. So tell me what I did that made them go away.”

He still couldn’t answer.

“Can we sliceworld-lines?” she asked. “Not just jump between them, but cut them into pieces, killthem?”

He shook his head. “It’s something to do with the stones summing up. They’re part of us. We can’t lose them unless we die.”

“I knew that when I pawned the box. It always comes back to me. Did youcut things loose? In the storm.”