Renie's soothing seemed to help a little. The Stone Girl stood up, still snuffling loudly. "Okay. We'll look for the bridge some more."

"Good girl."

The light was definitely lessening now, and there had been little enough to begin with. Eager not to spend another night on this side of the river, Renie hurried to keep up with her guide, and even forged ahead in some places where the reeds and riverside vegetation grew too high for the Stone Girl to see.

She had just relinquished the lead to the Stone Girl as they climbed up a rise between two bends of the river, when her companion stopped and cried out.

"Look! A bridge!"

Renie scrambled up after her so quickly that she slipped and had to catch herself with her hands; she was still wiping dirt and moist, too-pale grass off her blanket as she reached the little girl's side. Before them she could see an entire bend of the river valley. A large crowd had gathered on the near side of the river at the first stone of one of the most unusual bridges Renie had ever seen. It was made entirely of rectangular stone pillars stretching crookedly across the river like a linear Stonehenge. Although they were of slightly different heights, none of them seemed to be more than a meter or so from its neighbor. Renie could see how it would be possible to cross by clambering from one to the next, but the look of the thing, like a jaw full of uneven teeth, gave her a moment's sinking feeling.

It's like the mouth on the front of Mister J's, she thought. This whole place is just a crazy-mirror, isn't it? One of those funhouse affairs, but it reflects all the things that the Other has been forced to do.

"Why isn't anyone crossing it?" she asked.

The Stone Girl shrugged and trotted stiffly down the rise.

As they got closer, Renie could plainly see a continuation of the forest on the river's far side, but the middle of the bridge was swathed in mist so she could not actually make out where it touched the opposite shore. Still, that did not explain why so many travelers, a motley assortment of fairy-tale oddities that must have numbered almost a hundred, were gathered silently on the bank, looking yearningly toward the far side but not actually using the bridge.

"Is it . . . broken or something?"

As they reached the edge of the sullen crowd, the Stone Girl asked a woman in almost whimsically colorful medieval dress what was going on. The woman looked them up and down for a moment, paying particular attention to Renie, before answering.

"It's them Ticks, dearie. Dozens of them."

"Ticks?" The Stone Girl's eyes went wide. "Where?"

"On the other side," the woman replied with a certain grim satisfaction. "Some folk already tried to cross over—it's this Ending, you know. They said they weren't feared of a few Ticks. But it's not a few, is it? One or two of the ones what went over got back to tell about it, but the rest got et."

As though whatever had animated her earthen body had suddenly ceased to work, the Stone Girl sagged to her knees. "Ticks," she said hoarsely. "They're so bad."

Renie felt herself go cold inside. "Are they worse than Jinnears?"

"They're bad," the Stone Girl would only say again.

"And some say them Ticks have some new ones still trapped over there," the woman in the colorful dress went on. "Some strange folk—not from anywhere around here."

"What?" Renie could barely resist the impulse to grab the woman by her bodice and haul her close. "What kind of strange folk?"

"Sure I don't know, dearie," the woman said, giving Renie a look that implied she had just been categorized as strange herself. "Heard it off a rabbit, I did, and they're always in a hurry. Or was it one of those squirrels. . . ?"

"On the other side, you're saying?" Renie turned to the Stone Girl. "Those might be my friends. I have to go help them."

The Stone Girl looked up at her, her dimple eyes pools of shadow, her face blank with apathy or helpless terror.

"Shit. Stay here." Renie began elbowing her way through the crowd assembled on the bank, a casting call for a surrealist painting. Most of them seemed gripped by the same mood of fear that had immobilized the Stone Girl; only a few even murmured as Renie forced her way past them.

The first stone of the bridge stretched almost Renie's height above the shallows. She found a handhold and pulled herself up, not without strain. She was tired after the long day's walk, and when she had dragged her belly up onto the rough surface of the stone's top she had to lie there for a moment until she could catch her breath. Sprawled and vulnerable, she could not help thinking of the way the bridge had looked, like a row of chewing teeth.

"Help me up," someone said.

Renie peered over the edge into the dark, upturned face of the Stone Girl.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm not going to stay here. You're my friend. And you don't know anything, either."

Terrified by the thought that !Xabbu and the others might be under attack, she only had a moment to consider. The girl was right about one thing—she knew a lot more than Renie. And with the system apparently dissolving the simworld around them, would the child be any safer waiting here, at least in the long run?

Bullshit justification, Sulaweyo. But what else was there?

"Grab my hand," she said.

When the little girl reached the top of the stone, she gestured for Renie to keep silent.

"Gray goose and gander, Waft your wings together,"

the Stone Girl intoned solemnly,

"And carry the good king's daughter

Over the one-strand river."

"You're always supposed to say it before you cross," she told Renie. Fear made her shrill. "Don't you know? It's very important."

They made their way quickly from tooth to tooth until the warning cries of those still waiting on the bank had faded. Midstream the water seemed faster, blackly turbulent as it washed between the close-set stones, the spray sharp and chilly as hail. The mist Renie had seen from the bank was all around them now, obscuring vision and making the stones slippery. She forced herself to take each step with slow care.

They were only a few stones past what she guessed was the midpoint of the river when the streams of mist thinned. Renie, crossing with a long stretch from one rocky tooth to another, was so startled that she almost lost her foothold and had to scramble to get her weight forward so she could jump to the waiting stone.

The far side of the river had changed completely.

Where before she had seen only primordial forest stretching into the distance on both sides, now she found herself confronted by a very different landscape. For a moment she thought it was some kind of formal garden, full of hedges and topiary shapes, but then the scale of the thing hit her and she realized she was looking at an entire town—a city—completely grown over by brambles and twining, crawling vines, a living green sculpture in the shape of houses and streets and church steeples.

"Is that . . . More Very Bush. . . ?"

The little Stone Girl only whimpered.

Almost the only contrast to the thousand shades of green were the many pale shapes moving over and through the bushes like maggots in a rotting carcass. Like the Jinnears, they were a sickly white, but where those things had been almost completely formless, these had the semblance of some kind of animal life. They were long and low to the ground, scalloped at the edges in what almost seemed a parody of legs, but they still moved horribly quickly, half-scuttling, half-slithering. They were also nearly her own size, and there were hundreds of them. The greatest number swarmed around the base of a green-strangled tower halfway into the town, a writhing white necklace easy to see even in the dying light, the creatures excited as ants who had discovered an unguarded wedding cake.