We stepped from dawn to dusk.

From cold to humidity.

From ruins in Scotland to ruins . . . elsewhere.

I blinked a few times and tried to get my vision to adjust. My stomach turned, an untethered sac inside me. I tasted fat and metal. My skin fizzed, prickling with the remnants of whatever violent energy had brought us here against the rules of nature, living things transported to a dead place. Tyler was already bent double, elbows on his knees, the contents of his stomach leaking from his mouth and nose in a sour waterfall.

We were in a dying forest. Hazy light filtered through the wiry canopy to the ground below, which was covered with long grass, rotting leaves, and white petals. Tyler groaned and sank to his hands and knees, then vomited some more, flecks of it splashing over his fingers. I stumbled away to keep from puking myself, feeling hungover and shaky. I squatted and cupped my hands over my mouth and tried to take deep breaths to weaken my nausea, but the pain in my chest kept sparking with every inhale.

“God,” Tyler said as he crawled away from his vomit and collapsed onto his back in the grass. “Dorothy and Alice and the Pevensie children didn’t suffer like this.”

I couldn’t help myself. “I didn’t know you could read,” I said through my fingers. My stomach tightened and my vision jittered like I was drunk, but the sick burn was almost worth it.

“You would kick me when I’m down?” Tyler said, almost in a whisper.

I peeled my fingers away from my face and forced myself to take a deep, fetid breath.

“Why do I feel so god-awful?” Tyler dry heaved a few times. “And why does it stink so badly?”

It did stink. It stank of rot and smoke, each breath sticky yellow on my tongue. It stank of my worst memories and worst nightmares come to life. I knew this smell, because I had been here before.

The Halfway.

“It’s putrid,” I said. “It’s a slowly rotting canker somewhere between the realms of life and death.” A decaying tooth, lodged deep at the back of the mouth. A gangrenous limb, turned swollen and black from a lack of blood supply. A dying thing, soft and bloated and bleeding, but still attached by thin threads to our living world.

The forest around us was thick but decomposing and misshapen, stuck in a perpetual state of decay. The tree closest to me was soft with rot, its roots arthritic, its trunk split open and oozing what looked very much like pus. A threadbare smattering of leaves still sprouted from its sagging branches, but they grew gray and moldy, and when they fell, they landed in blighted fens on the forest floor.

Above, the sky was flush with gunmetal light. Vivi had said that in Grey’s stories, the sun never set in this place, nor did it rise. The sky here was jammed halfway, always on the precipice of dusk. The shadows were always stretched and sunken, full of twilight things.

The wood was sick. The wood was angry. It did not feel welcoming.

There was a low moan of faraway wailing in the air, something that sounded almost human but not quite. For a moment, I thought it was the trees, whispering to each other. The ruins of Saint Anthony’s chapel looked almost the same here as they had in Holyrood Park, still a freestanding church wall of harsh hewn stone, except here they were in a forest and were covered in dollops of mold and carrion flowers. Through the door, I could see only more hazy woods.

We had fallen through a crack in the world.

This is where we had come as children and wandered for a month. A place of the dead. What had happened to us here? Why had we stayed so long?

“How can a place be dying?” Tyler asked, but I wasn’t watching him. I was looking at his vomit. It had started sprouting flowers. How long would it be before this place crawled inside him and started nesting?

“Oh shit,” Tyler said, his gaze set on something behind me. He sat up and grappled with Agnes’s shotgun as I spun around. There was a pale man standing in the trees not far away. Dead-eyed and sightless, a slick of dark gloss where his irises should be. Runnels of liquid leaked from his orifices: his mouth, his nose, his eyes, his ears. He was naked and his skin was thick with a garden of green and white lichen.

There were clusters of others behind him. At first I thought they were statues, effigies in the shapes of men and women, sitting in tree roots, standing in the long grass. They reminded me of the death casts of the victims of Pompeii, all captured in moments of movement that had, very suddenly, ceased. The Halfway had grown on them, in them, had pulled them apart from the inside out. Some were so fresh they had fabric decaying on their bodies, and a few still smelled like people: of sweat and oil and the sharp tang of urine. Others were much older, and so misshapen it was hard to tell they’d once been human apart from the teeth and nails and clumps of hair erupting from knots of wood.

“What are they all doing?” Tyler asked.

“I think they’re drawn here by the door.” All of them were facing toward it; some were even reaching out to it. “Agnes said the veil is thinnest at sunset and sunrise and that sometimes the dead whisper to the living. Maybe it goes both ways. Maybe they can hear and smell life, but they can’t cross over, so they wait here—forever.”

“They’re all dead?” Tyler whispered.

I approached the closest man and moved my hand in front of his face. Something registered beneath the dark veneer of his eyeballs, and his black irises slid in my direction. Though his body had ossified and his skin had the texture of rough-hewn stone, there was still something locked away inside him. “They’re whatever is left over after a person dies.” I looked around the wood once more, understanding: Agnes had said that everything that dies passed through here.

These people were ghosts, as were the trees. Everything here had lived, once, in our world and gotten stuck here in the Halfway after they died.

I set off into the forest, weaving through the sea of frozen spirits. “Try not to wake them,” I said to Tyler.

“Do you think all the dead are here?” he asked quietly as he trailed me. “Do you think Rosie is here?”