“Shit!” I spat. I kicked a tree root and then yelped at the pain that darted into my little toe. I shouldn’t have left him.

How long should I wait for him to come back? If I left him here, I had no tether to him, no way to find him the way I could my sisters. If I left him here, I might never see him again.

I thought, in that moment, of my parents. I thought of the night we had gone missing and the terrible, gut-eating panic that must have consumed them.

In the end, I waited for what felt like an hour. Until something in me stirred, certain that Tyler was not coming back. That something bad had befallen him in the short minutes I had left him here alone. I used my knife to carve a message into the flesh of the tree, almost certain that he would never see it: WAIT FOR ME HERE.

Then I left him. I left him there, alone in the woods. I left him to whatever fate had come his way because I had no other choice but to press on and do what I had come here to do: find and save my sisters.

22

I wandered through the forest by myself. Beads of sweat rolled down my forehead, made my eyes sting. I was alone now, with no company and nothing to mark my way except the insistent tug in my chest that, yes, my sisters were this way, that each step brought me closer to them.

I tied strips of Tyler’s floral shirt around branches, hoping I would be able to find my way back to him, until I ran out of fabric and had to press on anyway.

Things followed me in the everdusk, things that moved in the corners of my eyes but disappeared when I snapped my head in their direction. Wild dogs, maybe, or something stranger. Dead things with sharp teeth waiting for me to slow, to stop, to sit down.

I kept moving, kept my knife held at my side, but nothing came close enough to try me.

There were more knotted bodies of root and bone and hair: the shapes of dead children curled with their backs against trees, turning slowly to seed; women with their arms outstretched, reaching for something the moment they became more this place than human. There were more structures, too, sloughing into rubble. A junkyard of lost people and lost things.

I kept expecting to see Tyler somewhere up ahead or trailing behind. Whenever a twig snapped or a bird fluttered into flight, I’d swivel in the direction of the sound, momentarily hopeful—but it would only ever be some strange creature, watching me as our paths crossed: deer, cats, squirrels, all of them roaming freely in the half-light of the haunted wood. All were warped, in varying degrees of severity: black-eyed, covered in lichen, little gardens of flowers sprouting from the thick moss on their backs. Creatures from a terrible fairy tale. We would lock eyes for a moment, the animals curious about the intruder who smelled of a different place—who smelled alive—and then they would continue on in the dark, undisturbed by my presence.

My lower back and legs were aching by the time I came across the shoes lying discarded on the forest floor. A pair of Nike sneakers, new enough that I could tell they hadn’t been in the Halfway for long. There was no rot, no mold, no decay.

I picked them up and turned them over in my hands. They were still tied together and the fabric was still slightly damp. They were Tyler’s, the new ones he’d bought in Edinburgh after he’d lost his own shoes at the hospital in London.

Tyler had come this way. Tyler had dropped them here. A bread crumb left for me, perhaps? It was both comforting and ominous—we were headed in the same direction, but I was sure now that Tyler had not come of his own free will.

I turned in a slow circle, searching the forest for any other sign of him, but there was none. I tied the shoes to Vivi’s backpack. When I found him, he would need them.

I kept moving. Time kept shifting in the odd way it did here.

I was weary by the time I reached the clearing, my head smacking with dehydration and hunger. My throat and eyes were grit-dry and my tongue tasted of smoke. If I ever made it home, I was sure my hair would stink of burning wood for weeks.

The clearing was not dissimilar to the one Tyler and I had first arrived in, the ground thick with a carpet of long grass and decaying leaves, and something monstrous in the middle.

“Oh my God,” I whispered when I realized what I was seeing.

Grey and Vivi were here, both gagged and bound to stakes, their wrists tied above their heads. Bundles of wood and dried moss had been stacked at their feet. A swarming garden of carrion flowers grew on them, up their legs and around their torsos and through their hair, breeding on their skin, clustering around their mouths and eyes. I could feel the bird-wing flutter of their hearts, the warmth of them, the life of them, the hot blood that still thrummed through their bodies. Vivi’s was stronger, redder, more vibrant. Grey’s was a faded thing now, thin and thready.

There was a third stake set up between the other two, empty and waiting.

Our father meant to burn us all—but no.

Not our father.

Gabe Hollow was the father of three children buried by a crumbling house in a halfway world. The things he meant to burn—us—were not his children, but the creatures that came back in the shape of his children. Impostors. Cuckoos.

I took my shoes off.

“Damn,” I said quietly at the sight of my feet, turning them this way and that in the low light, touching the sodden, tender flesh I found beneath my damp socks. My toes had begun to blacken. When I touched the nail of my big toe, it came away easily from its bed. There was no pain. A carrion flower bud had begun to unfurl from the bed of my toenail. I plucked the flower from my skin and crushed it between my fingertips.

I shoved my shoes in Vivi’s backpack and moved around the edge of the clearing barefoot, Grey’s knife at my side. I was more nimble without shoes. Years of trailing Grey had taught me how to move quietly across forest floors and down creaky wooden hallways alike. I tried not to look down at my feet as I moved. I didn’t want to see the dying flesh.

Vivi was awake, moving, speaking to someone I couldn’t see. “Let me go!” she muffled through her gag as she threw her head back. “Let me go!” Again, she snapped her head back against the stake behind her as hard as she could. I heard a crack. Vivi fell forward, unconscious, the whole weight of her body borne by the bonds at her wrists. The back of her skull was bleeding. Grey stirred and lifted her head. Her black eyes met mine, unblinking. At first, I wasn’t sure if she could see me or could just feel my presence.