By the time they reached the thick brush that lined the river, Renie could hear the crackling slither of their pursuers.

"There!" squealed the Stone Girl.

The bridge had been almost invisible. Like everything else in More Very Bush, it was made of living branches and leaves, an arch leaping out from the center of the thicket across the water. Renie ran the last few steps and sprang up onto the end of the bridge with the girl in her arms. When the water was beneath her, she finally risked a look back.

The Ticks had stopped at the edge of the river, but clearly knew she was there. They made a few tentative movements toward the bridge, but something seemed to hold them at bay.

"I think we're safe," Renie gasped. "Don't we . . . need to say something now . . . before we cross? About a . . . a gray goose?

"I don't want to cross."

"We have to. We can't go back—look at those things! They're waiting for us." But why didn't they want Klement? "Let's cross," she said to the child. "We'll be all right."

"No, we won't," the Stone Girl murmured, but spoke the nursery rhyme in a tone of flat resignation. "It's the Bad House," she said when she had finished. "This goes to the Bad House."

"It can't get any worse than this." Renie turned back toward the center of the river.

"It can," the little girl said. "It really can."

She had been prepared for the mists that rose as they neared the center of the span, prepared for the way the river vanished beneath them, even its noise becoming so muted as to be little more than a constant, indrawn breath, but the sudden dark surprised her. The few distant stars of More Very Bush abruptly winked out and the black sky oozed down and covered everything like paint. And when the first faint lines of the place the little girl had called Jinnear Bad House appeared out of that darkness, Renie realized she had not been prepared for it at all.

She had half-expected something in the nursery rhyme vein, a quaint cottage of gingerbread—overblown perhaps, even a sprawling edifice like the House world, acre upon acre of crenellated marzipan trim—but she had not expected the utter, utter strangeness of the Bad House.

It had no shape. She could see it only in strange, silver gleams, as though its curves and angles caught light that came from some invisible source—thin crescents and flat surfaces that came and went, as though the thing itself revolved. But it also seemed . . . inside out, somehow, as if the momentary illusions of an exterior shape were immediately succeeded by—or were perhaps simultaneously manifesting—almost incomprehensible inversions, an outfolding into imaginary space of every boundary wall. There was even something rounded about the glimmering, elusive shape, something paradoxically sealed and secretive.

She could no longer see the bridge beneath her feet, but it certainly did not feel like the uneven vegetal construct that had been there before. There was only the feeling of a bridge now, an idea of a span between her and . . . the place. The Bad House. And the mists were rising.

She realized she could no longer feel the Stone Girl's hand in her own. "Where are you?" she asked, then called again, louder. "Stone Girl?" No one answered. Renie stopped, even retreated a few steps, swiping her hand from side to side, but found nothing. She paused, her heart rattling, and thought she heard a thin sound like a child crying in a distant room—but it was in front of her, not behind her.

Horrified, shamed, Renie could hardly think. She had brought the girl here, against all the child's wishes, and now she had lost her. She could not retreat, no matter how powerfully her instincts told her to do so.

She walked forward into the darkness. The Bad House opened to her and then closed around her. She joined it.

This, too, she had experienced before, but it was something for which she could never, never be prepared, a clutching void so terrifying that in the first moments she nearly surrendered everything. This remorselessly freezing grip must have been what killed the old man Singh, she thought, clinging to rationality. Even though she had felt it before, felt it and survived it, it seemed to be only a breath away from extinguishing her entirely, too.

I'm inside it now, she realized. The operating system. Not just in something it made—I'm inside it!

That glimmer of perception brought something else with it, a thought so terrible it almost blasted her from her ragged grip on sanity. Is this what it feels like all the time? Is this what it feels like . . . to be the Other?

As if this revelation had fractured a perfect black crystal, the darkness shattered and flew apart. Flashes of imagery ran through her, some so swift they seemed to laser through her brain in a continuous stream, others substantial enough to register, but only briefly, as though she fell through a universe of broken mirrors, catching glimpses of a thousand disparate scenes.

There were voices in hundreds of languages, children's voices raised in fear and pain, adult voices yowling in terror and anger, agonized faces, searing bursts of cold and intense heat. Then the oscillations slowed and became more regular, resolved into something like time and space in their normal ratios. There was a white room. There were bright lights. Deep voices roared, loud and incomprehensible as the rush of a mighty river, and faces pressed in on her, gigantic and distorted. Then there was a huge convulsion, the universe itself seeming to choke and vomit, and the faces exploded away from her, bloodstained and howling.

The voices shrieked. White and red. White walls, splattered with red. The deep barking adult voices wrenched into a higher pitch. Blood became a fine mist in the air. Dark shapes fell down and lay writhing.

Renie was inside the horror, drowning in it, but it wasn't directed at her. It simply was, and she was in it, like a weakening swimmer flailing in the ocean.

Hang onto something, she thought. Grab something. A stick, anything. Drowning.

Stephen.

But for a dizzy moment she could not even remember who Stephen was, what he was to her. Was he one of these torn faces shrieking at her? Was she?

My brother. Little brother.

She snatched at that thought, threw her weight onto it as the fear battered her, as the darkness and the screaming madness strobed through her. She struggled to build something—Stephen, with his bright eyes and his close-cropped hair, his ears that stuck out just a little too far, his slouchy walk that imitated a teenage strut while making him look more of a child than ever. She had lost him. This thing, this frozen storm of horror, had taken him. She would not forget that. She could not forget that.

I want him back! If she had a mouth, she would have screamed it. I won't give up looking for him. You'll have to kill me like you killed the others.

The blackness collapsed in on her like an avalanche of ice, the pictures gone now, the spikes of madness freezing into something far more deadly, far more implacable.

Stephen, she thought. I came here for him. He's not yours. I don't care what you are, what they did to you, how they built you, how they used you. He's not yours. None of the children belong to you.

The blackness crushed her, trying to silence her. Renie felt herself vanishing, being absorbed into a cold despair as endless as a journey across the universe.

I won't stop. It was a last thought—a lie, a pathetic boast, because everything that she was . . . was stopping. . . .

And then the blackness became something else.

There was so little left of her, it seemed, that for a long time she could only lie with her eyes closed, stretched full length on her back, trying to remember not who she was, or where, but why she should care about either question. It was only the sound of distant crying which finally forced her to live again.