This is not a finished piece. This is my NaNo as of...well, I think yesterday. Yeah. deviantART is a pain in the patooty, so I'm posting this here. I would like very much to get feedback on this, but I was really hoping to use dA's forum-like system of comments to get it, so reviews are appreciated, but if you're a deviantART member, please go here http://kid-apocalypse. deviantart. com/ journal/ forum/ 25649/(remove the spaces) and talk to me! Please.

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David's hair was sticking up. That wasn't altogether unusual, but the wind was making it even worse. His next door neighbor and sometimes-friend Paige Allen was watching him and giggling, poking his hair with a twig she'd pulled off a dead bush. "It looks like a dead beaver in a hurricane," she commented.

He slapped the twig out of her hand, sending it on a week-long journey to what some might argue was not the ground. David didn't understand those arguments, so he tended not to think about either side of them. What was concerning him now was how his supposed friend had insulted his hair. "It does not! Beavers are brown, my hair is black…"

"Fine then, a wet dead beaver in a hurricane. Hurricanes make things wet, don't they?"

"I don't remember."

"Oh."

Sulking at Paige never did anything useful, so David turned his attention back to the city. It usually held his attention, except when someone came up and spooked him into almost falling. There was something endlessly fascinating about the Vertical City, but he could never tell what it was. The buildings were everywhere, tight enough that bridges between them were almost unnecessary. Safety was still a worry, though, so the bridges were in many places that they weren't actually needed at all. Some of them, like the one that David and Paige were sitting on, were unfinished, but still sturdy.

Something wet touched his cheek. He touched it and brought his fingers back to look at. They felt funny…he rubbed them together. They were slightly soapy. "Did you bring the bubbles today?"

Paige answered by blowing a barrage of them into his face. He had almost been prepared for it, so he didn't get any in his eyes, but it still took a moment before he could see again. When he could, he had to smile. Paige was twirling the bubble wand between her fingers and whistling through her teeth. "I always bring the bubbles."

"That's probably true."

"It's definitely true." Another sheet of oncoming bubbles. "I want to go see the Auntie."

Unlike the bubbles, David could not have predicted her saying that. The Auntie was what Paige had named the scary old witch lady who lived below everyone else's apartments. David didn't like her, or the location of her home. It was too close to the infinity beneath where they slept. Even worse, it smelled funny and the one time he'd been to the Auntie's apartment, everything had seemed to watch him. Just thinking about that place made him nervous. But there was no way he'd tell Paige about that. He flicked a piece of lint off his shoulder and half-pouted at it. "But there are all those stairs… It'd take forever just to get down there." He knew he was being ridiculous, but that was against his point.

She blew some more bubbles at him, then put the wand back in the bottle and twisted the cap on. Her short tangerine-colored pigtails had been doing much better in the wind than David's hair, but if they came loose, he could have his turn to tease. She hated it when he called her Rag Doll, especially since she knew she looked like one. "It takes forever to get you to do anything fun," she pouted at him, "you always want to sit here and stare at the city. Like it ever changes."

"It might." To make both of their points, he looked back to the exact spot where he had been looking, at one of the red and green flags flapping in the wind above someone's window. There were more windows than walls, some places. They'd have to be filled in soon. Too many windows made the building they were in sway and look a little nervous.

Another twig—where had she found a bush that sharp?—stabbed him in the side, but when he looked up, Paige had run off into the nearest stair apartment. David let out a little laugh of triumph, but then he started to feel bored. Paige was right, the city never changed, and he'd been watching it for five years. Mostly what fascinated him about the city was that it was. Where he and his family had lived before, the buildings had been tall, but even at the top, you could see the ground. Here, there was just more down, without any bottom in sight.

Unless you actually went to the bottom.

He remembered when they'd moved here, not why, but when. They'd started at the bottom then, only to take an elevator up very very high, and now they'd lived there for almost as long as they'd lived in their old home. It was getting harder to remember real grass and soccer, but he did. Paige had never played soccer outside, and all of the grass in the vertical city was deliberately planted in rooms the grownups called 'parks'. Playing soccer there wasn't the same as it used to be.

They tried to replace things that were down there, but it wasn't the same. David wasn't old enough to know how the city planners had failed or come up short, but he still knew they had. "So come back and fix it, people," he muttered at the wood in the bridge.

Sitting out there was getting boring without Paige to bother him. He pulled a leg up to his chest to lean his chin on, and let the other one just swing over the edge of the bridge. Maybe it would rain. The rain was always right, it was fresher and cleaner up here. It had probably been his parents' reason for moving to this place. Everything was cleaner than it had been in their other city.

Still boring. He scooted back so he could stand up, slowly, so he wouldn't get dizzy and fall. People fell sometimes. Others jumped. Neither was a good idea, in David's opinion, but no one ever listened to his advice. And it wasn't because he was short. Paige was short, David was much taller, even taller than the other boys his age, which was more impressive than just being taller than Paige.

She would probably be halfway to the witch's apartment by now, skipping steps and humming to herself. David hoped she wouldn't be careless and trip. Falling down the stairs could be almost as dangerous as falling off the edge. He shook his head. Paige had grown up here, she didn't need to be constantly reminded of all the things she couldn't do. Lots of them, she didn't know she could do them if she were somewhere else.

There were other kids he could play with, he didn't need to go down the stairs to gawk at an old lady he wanted to stay away from. In Delta 17-B, there was a boy his age, a stocky kid with a face that looked like it needed a beard. His name was Jacob Markus. He was kind of bossy and sometimes it was apparently hard for him to not be mean or nosy, but he was fun to play soccer with.

David sauntered towards the elevators. Sauntering was something the he'd picked up from his older brother Loren. Loren was the very definition of cool. He had two bookcases, and they were full.

The elevator doors were stuck. That happened a lot, something to do with the moisture, Dad had said. David didn't care what it had to do with, it made his hands hurt to push them open. They were automatic, he shouldn't have had to open them himself.

"Ow." Once inside, he leaned on the wall and looked at his hands. They were red, and still cold from being out in the wind. He could feel the skin on the tip of his index finger change color when he pushed the button for Delta 17, but then it was red again. Soon he'd just forget, and then remember in a few hours only to see that everything was the same color it was supposed to be.

Ding. The doors opened, this time without any of his help, and David sulked his way out into the hallway. He turned around to glare at the elevator, but it had already shut the second set of doors and schloop'ed off to whoever else needed it. As irritating as the elevators' behavior was, they were the single-most important invention in this place. Without elevators, no one would want to live in the vertical city. Unless they were stupid. Or if they liked stairs the way Paige did.

17-B wasn't very far from the elevator, so David went on sauntering down the hall, trying to be as awesome as Loren. It was too bad he didn't have an allergy bracelet, then it would be much easier to look that cool. It was also too bad that there was no one walking past to see him. He kept it up though, the practice would come in handy for when he got older.

He reached Jacob's apartment and wiped his hands on his shorts before knocking. It wasn't very close to actually washing his hands, but it was all he was going to do. As long as no one pointed out how much dirt and things were on him, he had no intention of doing anything about it.

The door creaked open a tiny bit, and someone's eye tried to appear. Unfortunately, something was keeping any of them from showing at all. "Whadda you want?"

"Hi, Jacob."

"Oh, it's you. Wanna come in and play cards?"

David shook his head and stepped back a little, so Jacob would have room to step out into the hall. It took the other boy a few minutes of grunting and struggling with the door, but he managed it. When he was free of the apartment and had closed the door behind him, the reason for his trouble was suddenly clear.

Jacob was wearing a football helmet that was too big for his head. He was also holding a soccer ball, a combination that only made sense to someone who knew Jacob. It made sense because Jacob never made sense. He bounced the ball a few times, which didn't turn out too well, since soccer balls weren't supposed to bounce, then tucked it under his arm. "Where's the pest?"

David frowned and raised a fist. "She's not a pest." She could be a pest sometimes, but she was his friend, and only he could call her names.

"Yeah she is, or you wouldn't know who I was talkin' about."

It was a good thing that Paige wasn't there, she would have either stepped on Jacob's bare feet or emptied her bubble bottle into his pants. Although that would have been funny to see, David didn't really want to know what would happen afterward. He decided to change the subject before they started fighting. "Let's go play soccer. You've already got the ball."

For a second it looked like Jacob was going to argue or put up some other kind of resistance, but then he shrugged, dropping the ball in the process. "I'll go get my shoes on." He opened the door, kicked the ball inside, and then disappeared himself into the apartment.

That left David to lounge uncomfortably against the wall, tapping his fingers to keep it from being too quiet. If only someone would—and then someone did. One of the doors went through all the sounds and motions of unlocking and opening. The person who came out of the apartment was a large woman with a sunhat covering the top of her long blonde hair. Her hat was secured to her head with a ribbon tied under her chin, the bow set fashionably to the side.

She didn't seem to notice David at first, but when she did, she looked startled. "Oh, hello, little boy…"

He sighed and tried not to roll his eyes. He wasn't a little boy, and he'd be even less of one in a few days when he had his birthday. "Good afternoon, ma'am." Politeness was always important, and this lady probably knew his mother. If he was rude, she'd tell on him.

Her hat bobbed a little as she looked around. "Are you playing a game?"

"No."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"Waiting."

She smiled, it was one of those grownup smiles that meant, 'Oh, you dear cute thing, it's such a pity you're so stupid.' It was a smile that David saw very often, and it had gotten old the first time. "What are you waiting for?"

He was getting tired of standing there and letting her ask him questions that he didn't think he had to answer, but he still couldn't be rude. But he could lie. …Well, make something up, anyway. "My imaginary friend is painting a picture of me. I have to stand very still, or he'll mess up." That should fit with her perception of him as a dumb little kid.

Sure enough, her smile slipped into the all-too-familiar 'aww, what an absolute darling!' one that David liked much better than the other. "Isn't that sweet," she cooed. "I suppose you wouldn't want a bit of candy then, would you?"

His ears perked up and sent a danger sign through him. His first reaction was to be offended at this new jab at his age, he was not young enough to get excited about cheap Smarties and shiny pennies. But as nice as candy outside of Halloween could be, even if Sunhat Lady knew his mother, he didn't know Sunhat lady. And he had never been allowed to accept gifts from people he didn't know, especially candy. Apparently she didn't know that, which was silly—it was a basic Rule of Mom. Maybe she didn't have kids. Or a mom. "No thank you, I don't want my imaginary friend to mess up his painting."

Sunhat Lady looked like she was going to offer again, but then she adjusted her purse strap over her shoulder and smiled. This time, David couldn't tell what the smile meant. "Alright then. I hope you like how your painting comes out, you're being very good standing so still. Goodbye...what is your name?"

David didn't want to tell her his name. "Clarence," he said, giving the name of his pet goldfish. It was named after his grandfather, so he knew it was a real name for a boy.

"Such a nice name. Goodbye, Clarence."

David watched her until she had disappeared into the elevator and the schloop had faded away. The hall felt bigger now that she had left, and he didn't think it had anything to do with the fact that she was kind of fat.

"Is she gone?"

He jumped, then glared at Jacob, who'd popped his head out the door. "Is who gone?"

"You know, the big lady with the hat."

It didn't look like Jacob was going to leave the apartment all the way until he knew the Sunhat Lady had really left. "Stop being such a baby, I'm the only one out here."

The football helmet was nowhere to be seen, leaving Jacob free to show off his newly balded head. David had heard that his friend had been planning to shave his hair off for some time now, but he hadn't thought Mrs. Markus would actually let him do it. That was more of a shock than the sight of Jacob's sort of bumpy egghead. It did look kind of funny though, especially since he was wearing an uneasy frown. "That lady creeps me out…" He even shuddered a little.

"For serious?" David hadn't particularly liked her, but she'd been the kind of annoying adult that didn't seem to know what kids were. It was hard to like people like that. "What's wrong with her?"

"You didn't see it? She's got all those rings and stuff. Like a walking jewelry store." Jacob shuddered again. "It makes my braces vibrate just being around her!" As the only kid in the Delta building with braces, Jacob commanded a strange sort of status, and he liked to flaunt it whenever he could. But David wasn't sure that was what his friend was doing. It seemed more like he was being literal than just taking a random chance to brag about his dental work.

He pushed himself away from the wall and started towards the elevator, going slower than he would have if the Sunhat Lady had take a different route. "There's nothing wrong with wearing lots of jewelry…" There wasn't, but it was kind of tacky, according to David's parents. Both of them usually just wore wedding rings, and the only thing that his mom ever added was a pair of elephant earrings for parties and special times.

Jacob ran back to pick up the ball that both of them had forgotten, then rushed back before the elevator could close and shut him out. He leaned on the rail for a second to catch his breath, then said, "Maybe not, but it's something in the metal, I guess. It really does mess with my braces, I'm not kidding."

It was the truth then, David wasn't being gullible. That was good to know, he didn't like the thought of being gullible. Paige was like that sometimes, where she would believe anything someone told her, depending on the person. It was fun to be the someone she was believing, but it wasn't fun when that was someone else and he was the one she was dragging along on some wild goose chase.

The Sunhat Lady was almost completely forgotten by the time they reached the park, just a weird shadow neither of them wanted to bother about. A big fat shadow. Even though she wasn't around, David couldn't help being at least a little mad about how she'd treated him. Little boy. Hmph.

There were a couple of younger kids playing in the sandbox, but other than that, the park was virtually empty. That was good, they would only have to be careful to keep the ball away from the sandbox area.

David got a box of the chalk from the public domain shelves along the south wall. It was the special kind of orange chalk they could use to write on the grass. He gave one to Jacob and they each drew a goal line. "Be careful not to hit the little kids," David warned him. It was a sad thing, but Jacob was the type of boy who needed to be reminded of that sort of thing. He just shrugged and dropped the ball. David decided that he'd just pound Jacob's egg baldy head if one of the little kids got hurt.

Before Jacob could even pull his leg back to aim a kick at the ball, a blur of orange and white rushed into David, whooshing his lungs flat.

Paige was hugging his midsection and…her face was wet. Either she was crying, or she'd run so much that her face was sweating. "It's after me it's big big TEETH!"

Completely at a loss and trying to avoid the nonplussed glare coming from Jacob, David patted her head and tried to figure out what he was supposed to do. It sounded like Paige had had a nightmare, but it was the middle of the day, and she hadn't said anything about taking a nap. She was too old for those.

"Um…what's after you?" He wanted to ask about the teeth, but he didn't think that it would be a good thing to bring up. She was shaking, which probably meant that she was really scared and not just playing a dumb little kid game.

She wasn't crying as much now, but her face was still wet and probably getting itchy. David's mom made him carry around a handkerchief—he didn't know why—so he took it out of his pocket and gave it to Paige.

Sniffling big enough to make her shoulders jerk, Paige took the handkerchief and wiped her eyes and cheeks. "The big man with a hairy face. He has teeth like this," she opened her mouth wide and held her hands to her cheeks with her fingers poised like claws. "And he told me he eats little girls like me!"

A snort made David look up from his distressed little friend. Jacob was bouncing the soccer ball on his head, which was apparently easy enough to do that he could talk at the same time. "She's just making it up. Send her to her mommy so we can get back to the game."

Just because Jacob wanted him to do something was not a good motivation for David to do anything, so he just ignored his sometimes-but-not-right-now friend. And if he didn't ignore him, he would have to pound the crap out of him for even mentioning Paige's mom. David picked Paige up and settled her around his waist, then set her head on his shoulder. She was heavy, and almost too tall for him to do all that, but he would worry about that when she was all done crying.

"Don't let him get me…" She sniffled, he could feel his shirt getting wet and kind of icky from her running nose. Ew.

"David!"

His fist started to clench, but then Paige started to slip, and he had to get a better grip on her. He also had to fix her dress. Why couldn't she have been wearing shorts that day? "Shut up, Jacob. If you can't wait, go play by yourself. I'm taking Paige home." That wasn't what he'd wanted to do, he didn't like taking Paige back to her apartment. Her father always looked so sad, and he never shaved, even though he didn't quite have a beard. It was like a grizzly shadow on his face.

Something hard hit him in the back of the legs and he almost fell. He turned around to see Jacob standing in the classic pose of throwing what David's mom called 'a big fat hissy fit'. "She can go home by herself, you don't have to go!"

David bent to put Paige down to stand by herself, but she hung onto his neck so tight that he choked loudly. The sound must have scared her, because she let go and backed away, closer to the other little kids. They were all quiet now, just sitting in the stand and watching, their mouths hanging open and their toys forgotten. David felt his ears start warming up, so he turned on Jacob to poke him in the chest with a not-nice finger. "Stop telling me what to do, Bossy Mcmeany Pants!"

"I'll do what I want!"

"Fine! I will too. I'm taking Paige to her dad, and then I'm going home."

"No!"

There was a loud sound and then David realized that his fist was shaking and Jacob was curled up on the grass, holding his hands over his nose. "You jerg! I'b bleedig!"

The first word that wanted to come out of David's mouth was 'oops', but he didn't think would work out very well. Instead, he said, "Sorry. But you shouldn't act like that."

"Oh yeah?"

If someone had asked him out of context, he would have thought that a kid as chunky as Jacob could not have gotten up from the ground very fast. But the time it took for him to stand up and swing a fist at David was remarkable.

Remarkable enough that David did not see it coming, not soon enough to dodge or duck. Fatty knuckles slammed into his face and he stumbled backwards, not in control of anything. It was not a good feeling. It was an even worse feeling when he bumped into Paige and knocked her down.

She let out a shriek and hit the ground with a little thump. David caught his balance enough so that he wouldn't fall and squish her, but the damage was already done. Even though she wasn't crying, she was scrunching up her face and curling her toes inside her sandals. The grass must not have been much softer than other types of ground.

David didn't have a chance to stop and help her, though, Jacob was still mad, and he was not going to stop the fight just because somebody outside of it had gotten hurt. His head was bright pink, and he wasn't really bleeding from his nose, but it had probably been pretty painful. David hoped it still hurt.

If it did, then it wasn't enough to slow Jacob down. His chubbiness wasn't either. He kicked David in the shin, hard, drawing a shout. David countered with a hard right hook to the ribs, gaining exactly the result that he wanted—Jacob staggered sort of to the side and hugged himself. He didn't look so eager about exchanging blows anymore.

That was good, because David wasn't in a hurry to hit or get hit. Especially get hit. That wasn't any fun at all. He didn't understand why boxers and wrestlers on TV liked it so darn much.

"What is going on here?!"

Uh-oh. He knew that voice. Not very well, but it was definitely familiar. Cold and drippy in a way he couldn't really describe, and also pretty, but not in a way that he liked. "N-nothing…"

Sunhat Lady had sent all the sandbox kids packing, and she was kneeling on the ground next to Paige, handing her a fresh handkerchief. The one that David had given her before was laying a ways away, dirty and trampled. There was a very clear imprint of a shoe on it. It looked like it belonged to David. He wondered if there would have been a similar footprint on Paige's dress if she'd been wearing a longer one. The thought made him feel almost as guilty as he would have if he'd actually stepped on her. Which he almost had.

"Well? If one of you doesn't hurry up and explain himself, I shall have to bring this up with your mothers." The Sunhat Lady was alternation between a menacing glaring for David and Jacob and a look of affectionate pity for Paige.

The glare was working, because Jacob was hiding behind David now. Apparently his fear of the Sunhat Lady was bigger than his desire to go on with the fight. A lot bigger, if he was sacrificing his pride so easily. That made it catching. David could feel himself beginning to grow apprehensive.

He cleared his throat loudly, dimly aware of the fact that his face hurt. "We were just fighting, Miss S—" Oops. He'd almost called her 'Sunhat Lady' to her face. But he'd stopped soon enough that it just sounded like he'd stretched out the word 'miss'.

At any rate, she didn't seem to notice his almost-slip. "My name is Miss Cowslip. And if you must engage in fisticuffs with your barbarous little friend, it would serve you well to leave innocents out of your squabbles."

She started to pick Paige up, but the little girl screamed and kicked, forcing Miss Cowslip to move away hastily. She looked very surprised, shocked, even. As if she had expected Paige to just go with her, a stranger. David look over his shoulder at Jacob and shared a frown of mutual and grudging apology. Then he went over to help Paige to her feet.

It was obvious that she wanted him to pick her up again. She gripped his hands persistently and kept her legs slack. David blushed and tried not to look at Jacob or Miss Cowslip. Of all times for Paige to misbehave, when he was the only one who could get her to behave even this well. He must have looked very stupid, letting her dangle from his hands like the obstinate rag doll she resembled. "Come on, Paige, you have to walk by yourself."

"Nuh-uh. Uppie!"

"Stop talking like a baby, you're a big girl!"

"Am not." She planted her feet long enough to pull on him then, and he almost fell. But Miss Cowslip surprised him by grabbing his shoulders to keep him upright. She wasn't rough, but her hands were strangely warm. Even so, he shuddered at the contact on his bare shoulders. What a day to have worn a shirt without any sleeves.

He moved away from her as quickly as he could, dragging Paige with him. Before, when he'd first met Miss Cowslip in the hallway, she'd seemed like any old regular lady, but now he wasn't so sure. There was only one explanation that he could think of, even though it seemed a little too easy. "Have you been to the bottom?" he asked, certain that he already knew the answer.

"No," she said, righting her hat and straightening her dress so that she didn't look as much like a frazzled fat woman. "And I have no desire to. It sounds like such a ghastly place."

The urge to defend his former home rose up in David's chest like the mercury in a August-exposed thermometer, but he swallowed it back down. When he thought about it, he did remember that it had been quite dirty. There was more crime there, and a lot more people. The vertical city was a much nicer place to live.

More importantly, he'd been wrong about Miss Cowslip. How could she be so different if she'd never been to the bottom? She wasn't different the way that David and his family and others who'd been to the bottom were, but still…

Paige wasn't tugging on him anymore. Instead, she'd opted to clutch his arm and start acting her own age. She still looked scared, and he knew that as long as Miss Cowslip was around, Jacob would be scared too. David wiggled his arm free and then slipped his hand into Paige's. "We have to go home," he said, quiet, but firm.

Miss Cowslip got one of her weird smiles then—David wondered how many she had. This one didn't seem to really say anything. Nothing he could interpret, anyway. It was just mysterious in an annoying way. He decided that it was creepy. …That word was starting to describe Miss Cowslip very well. She should get a T-shirt with 'Creepy Lady' printed on it, to warn people who hadn't met her yet. That would be helpful. After all, not everyone had braces like Jacob, or some kind of weird extra sense like Paige.

"I can take the little girl back to her daddy," Miss Cowslip said, her high voice like honey. Sticky and not easy to walk through. " He must be worried about her."

A few more scary points attached themselves to her. How had she known that Paige only had a father? Paige lived in Alpha-16, and her dad didn't let her wander around past Charlie-14, she was too little to go to the Delta tower. So how could Miss Cowslip know anything about Paige? Most people would just assume that her mommy would be worried and say that. Wouldn't they?

At any rate, David wasn't so stupid that he would just let a random creepy woman take Paige anywhere. He gripped her hand tighter and shook his head, biting his lip. "No. I have to take her." A thousand excuses flitted around his head, but then he decided that he didn't need them.

For a second it looked like Miss Cowslip was going to argue with him, but then she rolled her eyes smoothly away to one side, then tilted her head back to them. "Be careful walking back," she said. "It would be horrible if one of you tripped out of carelessness."

David shuddered. That had sounded like a threat… maybe he'd just gotten used to thinking badly of her, and now he was just being paranoid. No matter what it was, he was in a hurry to get away. More than that, he was in an even bigger hurry to get Paige away. Something was not right, Miss Cowslip was too interested in Paige. It made David uneasy.

And the way that Jacob was afraid of the lady didn't help. David used his free hand to push Jacob along in front of them, walking briskly out of the park. He didn't meet with any resistance, which was good. Even when they were out in the hall and he didn't have to push Jacob anymore, no one did anything to slow them down. They didn't even talk, they just tried not to run.

Finally they reached an elevator and escaped inside. It felt safe in there, but David didn't let go of Paige's hand. He looked down to give her a reassuring smile, and noticed that Jacob had taken hold of her other hand.

"I didn't know that she could be that creepy…" he said softly. "Do you think she followed us?"

"I hope not…" Somehow, his words felt hollow, as if he had only said that to make his friends feel better.

Paige patted his arm lightly. "Your mouth is bleeding," she said matter-of-factly. David touched his bottom lip and realized that she was right. His lip stung where he'd touched it, reminding him that his fingers were still dirty. He'd have to clean them and the wound when he got home, the thought of having an infected lip was not a nice one.

The elevator came to a stop, but the doors didn't slide open. Jacob walked over and gave them a kick, which worked sometimes. This time it didn't work. He laughed nervously and went back to leaning on the wall where he'd been before. "Don't worry, the doors stick all the time."

"Yeah," David chipped in. "All we have to do is call Kimberly and wait for her to fix it." It was Tuesday, and Kimberly was the engineer who took care of the elevators in towers Alpha and Beta that day.

But even though they were successful in comforting Paige and keeping her from panicking, it was not doing much for David. He couldn't help thinking of what Miss Cowslip had said. If this had been a movie about the mafia, he would have been expecting an armed hitman to burst through to small door in the roof of the elevator. Then he'd shoot David and Jacob, and drag Paige back to the Godfather.

Except that that was stupid.

Miss Cowslip may have been fat, but that didn't make her Jabba the Hutt. …David gave himself a jab in the ribs. Stop mixing metaphors. Neither of them makes sense in the first place.

Now that he was out of his mental hamster maze of strange thoughts, David realized that Jacob had opened the little phone cabinet underneath the elevator buttons. He was holding the red telephone to his ear, but he wasn't saying anything. Maybe he was waiting for Kimberly to answer the phone.

"Hey, uh… David, could you come over here for a second?" His voice was dry and a bit raspy.

Apprehension was spreading through all of David's nerves, so that he couldn't feel his toes and his fingers were starting to cramp. "What is it?"

"Just get over here and I'll tell you." Now Jacob was gritting his teeth while he talked. That made the message much clearer. Something was wrong and it would be very bad if Paige figured that out.

David did as Jacob asked, making sure that Paige stayed where she was. "Isn't Kimberly answering the phone?"

"No, man, I don't think it's working…"

"You mean it's broken?!"

Jacob looked like he would have liked to hit David with the telephone. "Yes. Shut up." He put the phone back and closed the door. "If that big baby finds out, she'll cry and we won't be able to make her be quiet."

His bad attitude wasn't exactly helpful to their situation, but he did have valid point. As much as David would have liked to deny it and defend his much nicer friend, she'd been acting very excitable. It had to have something to do with whatever it was she had said was after her. He'd never seen her act up to such an extent before, even when she was really mad.

Finding out what was going on with her would be a lot easier than trying to fix the elevator doors, and it would also get him away from Jacob's snappishness. David turned around and went back to where Paige had sat on the floor, her legs stretched out in front of her. She was knocking her feet together, intent on the noise this made.

He sat down beside her and pointed to her scraped knees. "Is that from when I bumped into you?"

She shook her head.

"Then what happened?"

"I fell on them when the hairy man was chasing me," she said, still staring at her noisy feet. "It hurt." Then she looked up at David and shoved her hands in his face, fingers spread. "These got scraped too."

David knew from experience that scraped hands hurt more than scraped knees. No wonder she'd been so upset. He gave her a sympathetic look and gently moved her hands away. "We'll have your dad take care of those for you." Then he coughed into his own hand and went on to ask the important question. "What is the hairy man?"

An eerie quiet settled around all of them, and it set David down a small anxious spiral. Paige fisted her hands in her the skirt-like part of her dress, looking for all the world like a rabbit staring down the barrel of a gun. "He's too big to go through the doorway like regular people," she said, almost in a whisper. "and he has big ol' sharp teeth, an' he drools lots and lots."

Already this hairy man sounded nothing like any kind of man and completely like a made up monster. At least, David hoped he was made up.

"He sounds like a dog."

Jacob had sat down a ways away from them, propping his elbows up on his knees. He was trying to look casual, but was not meeting with much success. It was hard to tell, but David knew that his friend was starting to really worry. The bare skin on the top of his head had begun to get goosebumps. And he was moving his mouth a little, as if he wanted to open it and work his jaw, but he was refusing to do so.

That prompted David to ask him a question. "Are your braces okay?" They vibrated when Miss Cowslip was around, if they were vibrating now, then she might have had something to do with the elevator malfunctioning.

For a second it didn't appear that Jacob was going to answer at all, but then he shook his head. "They're making my mouth itch…"

Paige frowned at him. "Why does your mouth itch? David didn't hit you there." David put his face in his hand. Leave it to her to mention the fight right after they'd seemed to put it behind them.

But it didn't look like that had any effect on Jacob. He looked down at the floor between his feet and said, "That lady makes my braces go all funny on me. It's pretty bad right now."

"How bad?" David put a protective arm around Paige's shoulders, just thinking about all this was making him worry about her. He tried to reassure himself that they were perfectly safe, but it was hard. They were stuck in the elevator, and if the doors wouldn't open from the inside, then they wouldn't open from the outside either. Besides, they might not even be in a place where the doors could open. The elevator might have stopped right in the middle of the shaft.

Jacob hadn't answered his question. Instead, he'd asked Paige one, David hadn't been listening, so her answer didn't make sense to him. "I do not! Just don't say that."

"I'll say what I wanna say," Jacob grumbled.

Looking from one of them to the other and back a few times, David tried to figure out what was going on. It had to have been Jacob's fault, though, Paige wasn't as prone to starting fights as he was. She was also better at controlling them. "What are you guys bickering about now?"

"He said that Miss Scary wanted to take me home because I cry all the time!"

"Well, you do. And no one likes you."

David growled out a sigh. "Be quiet, you two. It's not helping."

"Nothing is helping! We're just stuck here and we can't get out."

For all that Jacob had been the one most adamant about keeping Paige in the dark about their situation, it was oddly predictable that he'd been the one to forget and say something. Paige's eyes widened and she snapped her head around to look at David. "We really are stuck? But what about Kimberly?"

Glad that she'd turned to him, he nodded solemnly and said, "She didn't answer when Jacob called her. The phone might be broken." Back when he and his family had lived in one of the cities on the bottom, he'd remembered lots of people having phones they could carry everywhere, but that wasn't possible in the vertical city. His dad had explained it to him once, but it had been too hard to understand. He wished it was possible. Then they could have used one to call for help.

Paige sighed and got to her feet. "I'm gonna fix it."

"Huh?"

"Move, Bighead Jacob." She didn't wait for him to obey her, she just walked past him, shoving his shoulder on her way. That probably would have made him take a swing at her knees, but she'd pushed him hard enough to knock him to the floor. David tried not to laugh.

Then he watched as she strode up to the doors and kicked. The doors didn't do anything, but she kicked it again. David jumped to his feet to stop her, she was wearing sandals. Kicking metal elevator doors would hurt her toes if she didn't cut it out soon.

He reached for her to pull her back, but then the doors gave way… In the wrong way.

Paige's foot ripped through them, literally. She was as surprised as the others, and only David's reflexive grab at the ribbon tied at the back of her waist kept her from falling face-first. She cried out and leaned back so she would fall in the right direction. David readjusted himself so he could catch her.

While he steadied her, he heard Jacob whistle through his teeth. "That's crazy… They just—like paper or something!"

It was crazy. David held Paige's hand and stepped away from the doors. They looked very wrong, out of place and warped. Like in a cartoon when some silly character had somehow gotten their face pushed through a painting, and the canvas was poked out around their neck. The metal of the doors where Paige had put her foot through was hanging out in the same way.

Looking at it was apparently a bad idea, so he turned around and looked at Jacob instead. His mouth was hanging open, and he was scratching his bare head. The goosebumps were on his arms now, and his jaw was still twitching. "Guys, I think we should just rip the doors all the way and get out of here."

"That's a good idea…"

The fact that Paige was agreeing him made it that much clearer that they were all too scared to argue with one another. David nodded and handed Paige over to Jacob's care. He couldn't ask Jacob to go first, and he couldn't take Paige with him if he did it. "I'll go and see if it's safe."

Jacob pulled Paige a little closer and gave David a grim look. "Be careful."

David didn't answer, he didn't know how. He approached the doors and stretched his arms out to poke at the doors. They felt like thick paper. The scraps of cardstock and paper samples his mother sold in her scrapbooking store were like that. Thinking of it that way made him feel a little better, and he gathered up the courage to tear his way through.

The sight of the Beta terrace greeted him. Nothing looked any different from how it usually was, but after the way things had been happening, he couldn't just accept the assumption that everything was all back to normal. He looked back at his friends. "Stay here, I'm gonna check it out."

He stepped out onto the terrace and nearly cried out. The wooden deck felt the same as the elevator doors, except a bit more solid, like graphite. The more tentative steps he took, the thinner the ground felt, until he couldn't move for fear of ripping what was under him.

"David?"

"Stay in there!" he called back. "Something's wrong…" If only he knew what it was.

Something whizzed by his ear, buzzing loudly. A bee. He stayed perfectly still. As if he hadn't had enough to be concerned about, now he had to worry about getting stung. He wasn't allergic, but a bee sting would still hurt like crazy.

He was doing okay until the bee charged at his face. With a gasp, he raised his arms up to protect himself, but in the process he took a subconscious step backwards. The heel of his sneaker dipped through the floor, and then suddenly the rest of him did the same.

He shouted as he fell, and kept on shouting and falling until he didn't have the breath to do the latter. Each time he neared the terrace of another floor in the Beta tower, his hopes rose up to his throat. But then they choked him as he continued to fall through the paper floors, one after another until he didn't see another coming up beneath him.

It wouldn't be much longer before he had an extremely violent meeting with the ground. Reunited with the bottom he hadn't seen in years… He closed his eyes and prayed that his friends and his family would be safe, that they wouldn't fall through the paper city the way he had.

Something whacked across his shoulderblades and he winced, surprised more by the lack of mortality in the pain rather than the pain itself. He slid forward and came to a stop, his eyes still shut tight. The falling had stopped completely, but there was no ground touching him. Just something sharp pressing into his back and scraping his neck. He opened his eyes.

And nearly threw up. He was hanging from a tree in a clearing ringed by other trees. That wasn't what was making his stomach turn. There was an enormous furry animal on the ground a few feet away from him, smelling terribly and covered in blackish gore. Spears and other long things that didn't look like spears were sticking out of its body like a porcupine's spines. David wanted to shut his eyes again, but he couldn't look away.

Where was this place? This couldn't possibly be the bottom, the bottom was more of a city than the vertical city was. He tried not to sniff away tears. Even more so now that the vertical city had become some kind of pop-up children's book.

A tearing sound made his ears twitch and his heart speed up. It was different from when the paper terrace had given way, this was fabric tearing. He started to fall again, in jerking motions. "Oh, that's just great," he mumbled to himself. "My lip is bleeding, my family is probably in mortal danger, and now my snotty shirt is going to rip and let me fall and break something on the ground. Thanks a lot, God!"

God must have been listening, because after David said that, his collar ripped off of his shirt completely and he dropped to the ground rather quickly. He laid there, flat on his back with his arms and legs out, as if he was going to make a snow angel in the grass. His back hurt too much for him to even enjoy the feeling of cool damp grass tickling his neck.

The smell of the dead animal was getting stronger as well, and his stomach was reacting to everything. He rolled over and pushed himself up just in time to empty his guts. As soon as he could get up without having to bend down again to throw up more, he staggered as far away from the corpse as he could. Then he found a tree to lean against and tried to piece himself back together, mentally and physically.

"This isn't the bottom, is it?" He looked around, half amazed and half frightened out of his skull. There were plants everywhere, mostly trees, but also lots of wildflowers and a few things he recognized. Herbs that his mother cultivated in the Alpha conservatory, the ones he could never remember the names of, and some that he couldn't even identify by sight. Except for the dead animal, there didn't seem to be any others. They were probably hiding from him, scared away by all the noise he'd been making. It had been a long time since David had been camping—and even then, the campgrounds he'd seen didn't look anything like this—but he remembered enough to know that something wasn't right about this forest. Or whatever it was supposed to be called.

He pushed himself away from the tree and started walking. Wherever he was, he needed to find some place that he could clean up and get clothes that hadn't been cried on by a particularly juicy kid. His lip was starting to really hurt, and his head was throbbing from when he'd banged it on the ground, but he kept walking.

It became difficult when his eyes started losing focus at irregular intervals and he saw a few spots dancing in front of him. But stopping didn't seem to be an option, so he didn't. Feeling more than a little stubborn, he decided that nothing short of a wall would stop him.

Having made that decision, he realized that God must have still been a little peeved over his early comment, because he hit something solid only a few moments later.

"What the devil?!"

The voice was healthy and belonged to an adult, two things that David definitely wasn't at the moment. Mostly he was hurting, feeling like a lost two-year-old, and not far from flat-out crying. He blinked at his knees for a moment to clear his vision, then looked up.

The wall that God had sent his way was a person, which explained the voice. It was a tall man wearing a tunic, pants, and padded leather armor strapped around his entire body. Like some kind of unconfident skater going to a renaissance fair. He also had a green headband half-obscured by his dirt-brown hair trying to fall into his eyes. The tails of the headband were long and kind of ridiculous, reminding David of video games with ninjas and stealthy snake spies. There was also something about the man that made David wonder if he was annoyed. It probably had something to do with the fact that a dirty little kid had crashed into him with all the grace of a hammer.

"I'm sorry…" he said, but he couldn't say anything else, his lip hurt too much. More than ever now, the man had some kind of metal thing strapped to his back. That had been rather painful to walk into.

He cracked a smile that was both reassuring and amiable. "Poor guy. It's nothing for me, but you look like someone really did a number on you."

David just nodded. More than one someone had done just that. He thought of Jacob and wondered how everyone was, whether the city had somehow gone back to normal after he'd fallen. That would make it worth it, even if he never made it back home.

"Kid? Somethin' wrong?" The man crouched next to him. "You look like you've gone off somewhere without walking."

"I'm fine." David didn't know why he was saying that, but it wasn't too hard to figure out. The vertical city had somehow turned to paper and he'd fallen all the way through it into a place he would have never even dreamed about. "Except…I need to clean up…"

"No problem." With an almost silent whoosh, the man stood up and helped David to his feet. "My name is Derek, by the way."

"I'm-I'm David…"

"Alright then, David. We're too far away from town to really get you what you need, but there's still the blessings of nature." It was evident that Derek was joking about nature having blessings, because he laughed after he said that, and ruffled David's hair. "We'll go over by the stream and I'll make a fire."

David ducked away from the hair-ruffling. "Why?"

"Oh, so we can boil water to clean your face with."

He nodded silently and concentrated on keeping up with Derek and his comparatively long legs. They stopped at the stream and Derek said to sit down. Then he started whistling while he set his pack on the ground and took out a box and a bundle of sticks.

David watched him for a while, then asked, "…how bad is it?"

"What, your face?" Derrek untied the stick bundle and dumped them on the ground, then arranged them carefully. "It's not that bad. Just a little fussed around." He pointed to the stream. "Take a look, judge it yourself. It's highly likely that I'm more used to that type of thing than you are, so I'm pretty sure I'm not a good person to ask."

As much as he would have liked to ask what Derek meant by that, David figured that sizing up the damage he'd sustained from the fight was a little more important than curiosity. He turned around and crawled over to look at his reflection in the clear water of the stream.

It was even worse than he'd thought. His lip had already begun to scab, which he knew was a good thing, but it wasn't that far into the process, and the blood had crusted on his chin. As if that wasn't bad enough, the parts of his face around his eye were swelling and growing up into a black eye. If his mother ever saw him look like that, she'd haul him into the bathroom and make him take a bath with meat over his eye while she covered him with antiseptic.

It wasn't very likely that Derek was the type to do anything like that. At least he hadn't said something about gathering herbs. That popped up in fantasy books all the time and had never really made sense to David. He believed in aloe and all other plants could go hang in somebody's garden.

"Right, now we've got us a fire." Derek wiped his hands on his pants and took a small pot out of his pack. It looked like it was made of the same metal as the flat frying pan David's mother kept for making tortillas and grilled cheese. "Lemme just get the rest of this set up."

David moved to one side so that Derek could get to the stream and fill the pot with water. It was interesting to see this odd person who resembled Robin Hood in the strangest way. The padding and the headband ruined the image, as did the lack of bow and the shield with a big crack in the middle. He pointed to it and asked in a surprisingly roughed-up voice, "Why do you have that? The shield."

At first he thought he had treaded onto an uneasy subject, but then Derek brought back the water and smiled. "It's my ticket to adventure. An old soldier gave it to me and asked me to take it to a blacksmith in Torrance."

That sounded like the name of a city in California. David scratched his slightly aching head and tried to make that fit in his mindset. It didn't really work much as well as imagining Derek as a younger, not British Robin Hood. Thinking of which, he also didn't have a beard, or a funny hat with a merry feather. And Will Scarlet was nowhere to be found. David couldn't decide if that was a good thing or not, but it probably was, since his mind was battling itself plenty already.

Something wet prodded him in the shoulder and he nearly jumped out of his skin. "What?!"

"The water's good an' hot. Go ahead and clean your face up." Derek took David's wrist and put a damp rag in his hand, then moved back to tend the fire. It didn't put up much of an impression in the midday sunlight and noise of daytime, but it was apparently trying its best. While David set to wiping off the dried blood and dirt, Derek poked the fire with a stick. He got bored with that rather quickly, and started fussing with the (probably) leather strap crossing his chest from his right shoulder to his hip. After a moment of what David was certain were muttered curses, Derek managed to loose the shield from his back. It hit the grass with a heavy thud.

He twisted around to pick it up, then righted himself. "So… I don't know what you'll do if I ask, but—my curiosity'll get the better of me sooner or later, so I might as well get it over with now. Why were you wandering about like a lost pup?" He crossed his legs and propped the shield up against his knees.

David wasn't sure if he could even begin to answer. It wasn't very likely that… that just about anybody would believe how he'd gotten to the forest. He didn't believe it himself. He also didn't want to think about it. Thinking about it made him go back to worrying about everyone he'd left behind, no matter how much of an accident it was. He hung his head and sniffed. Water must have gotten up his nose, it was irritating his eyes, too.

"I take it I should have brought it up…" Derek pulled the shield up closer to himself and focused his eyes on it. "Never mind me, I'm as much a busybody as a bored housewife."

David was starting to like the way this person talked. It was interesting. "That's okay." He crawled closer to the fire so he wouldn't feel so far away from everything. Closer also meant that he could see the shield better.

It was bigger than what he would have expected, but he was used to cartoons and book illustrations. There wasn't a picture of anything on it, no lions or griffons with vicious sharp bits and fire drawn randomly around them. Just a lot of dents and the big crack down the middle. He wondered what could have caused all of that damage to such a tough-looking hunk of metal.

Derek pulled another rag from somewhere and started shining the shield with a fond look of affection on his face. "It's ridiculously dinged up, but I like it anyway."

"Looks like it." David put his arms back and made himself comfortable. "It's kind of plain, though."

"That's why I like it so much."

"…That doesn't make any sense."

"Nonsense. It makes perfect sense."

As far as David was concerned, the only thing making any sense was his own rumbling stomach. It had been a few hours since lunch, and there was no telling how much time had passed since he'd fallen down here.

Falling, things making sense, a shield that put him in mind of an enormous and abused toaster… They felt like puzzle pieces. He didn't know if he wanted to put them together, but it seemed worth a shot. Puzzles were so hard to finish without knowing what the picture was beforehand, though. It was a funny thought, comparing all of this to something he did on rainy days.

Unfortunately, he'd always been incredibly bad at putting puzzles together. None of the pieces ever seemed to fit where he thought they should. Loren always had to help him.

But Loren wasn't there. Neither was their dad, who was best with puzzles. But there were times that pieces went missing, under the table or 'fallen' into Loren's pocket. Those were the times when David was the best person to have around. "Derek, is there magic here?"

Derek looked up from the shield and stared blankly at him. "Magic?"

Apparently that had been the wrong piece to look for. David would have liked to just drop it, but that would be rude. "So that's a no."

Setting the shield aside, Derek shook his head. "Hold on, I never said that. I just wasn't sure I heard you right."

Hope renewed, but it was just a spark, nothing like the fire that Derek was getting ready to douse with the rest of the water in the pot. David watched the flames go out. "I wanted to know if there's such a thing as magic in this—I mean, here."

"Well…"

This stringing along was something that, in David's experience with adults, meant that a ready lie wasn't coming to mind with enough ease. He frowned. "If there isn't, just say so. I'm kind of in a hurry." There. He could lie just as well as any old grownup.

Derek rolled his eyes. "For some reason, I find that hard to believe."

"Believe it, buster."

"…Buster?"

That was not the first puzzle piece that pointed to the possibility that David had fallen into a fantasy comic book, but it was a pretty weak one. "Never mind. Just hurry up and tell me if there's magic or not."

He still had to wait through an uncomfortable sigh and the classic scratching of the head, but then he finally got an answer. Sort of. "I… That is to say… You might—well, you see, I don't actually know. For certain."

David glared. "It does or it doesn't. Which one." This was a fairly vital thing to know, he'd decided. For one thing, it would probably help him to figure out what direction he should go in next. It didn't look like Derek was going to be much help if all he did was talk and worry about the stupid shield.

"As I said, I don't know."

"How can you not know? You live here!"

Derek held up a pointing finger, directed at the sky. "That isn't the case, pup."

"I'm not a dog!"

"Then stop acting like one."

"Argh. You can't help me." David clambered to his feet… and fell back onto his rear, but then he got up again, more carefully this time. Once he was sure he wouldn't hit the ground again, he headed off in a direction that looked to be relatively clear of trees. They weren't too bad during the day, but when night hit him, they'd be too scary to deal with on top of everything else.

Unfortunately for him, he didn't even get that far. Derek must have been pretty fast, because he managed to chase David down and grab his arm. "This is a dangerous place to run around in by yourself. And I doubt you know your way through to safer places." He let go. "…If it'll keep you from sprintin' off, I promise I'll help you in whatever way I can."

David mulled that over, wishing he had some gum to chew and help him think. That was a big promise, and when grownups made big promises, sometimes things happened to force them to break those promises. David understood that kind of thing, it had happened to him, but understanding it didn't mean he didn't mind being disappointed when it happened.

But if nothing else, Derek deserved a chance. Even if he didn't, David couldn't see that he had many other options left open for him. There weren't any other people around, and he could see that the sun was already disappearing. "What if you can't keep your promise?"

"Look, do you want me to swear on my daughter's head that I'll help you?" Derek pushed his hair out of his face and tightened the knot keeping the bandana on his head.

"No… Wait, swear on—you have a daughter?" If he was a father, then it was very irresponsible of him to be out here in a place that was probably very dangerous. David thought of the dead animal he'd seen when he'd first… arrived in the forest.

Derek got a goony smile on his face. It was recognizable as the one that belonged to a brand new dad. He wasn't any good at it yet, in David's opinion, putting himself at risk. "Not yet, but soon. That's why I'm taking the shield to a blacksmith. He'll only deal in trade, but there's an arms dealer back home what's lookin' for a black iron sword."

"Oh." Swords to go along with the shields, that had to mean something. Magic was still an open question, but David could worry about that later. These were something to work with, although they weren't really much. He started walking back to where Derek had left all of his things, by the charred sticks. Thinking of the what Derek had said about danger, and the obvious effect it had had on the animal, he wanted to know just what he'd stepped in. And if he would ever be able to scrape it off of his shoe. "I saw an animal back there," he pointed, "somebody with a lot of spears killed it."

"Did you now? I wouldn't worry about that too much," Derek said, nonchalant as a cat. "There are hunting parties around here fairly regular. They keep to their own, you won't even see them. "

But they did leave a kill to rot in the sun… They hadn't even stopped to skin the thing or cut off any meat. That was not something that hunters did, even David knew that. The animal had just been lying there, dead as a crunchy leaf. He decided to try another line of questioning, to see if he could approach it from a different side. "If I told you what it looked like, could you tell me what it was?"

Derek paused in the middle of strapping the shield to his back. He pulled his bottom lip into his mouth and bit it, looking completely ridiculous. "Possibly. I don't see why we can't have a go at it, at least."

Although that wasn't the encouraging reply David might have hoped for, it was good enough for the time being. He closed his eyes and drew up the mental image out of his memory, like taking a folder out of a filing cabinet. "It was really big, like a—" He'd been about to say 'baby elephant', but he wasn't sure that there were any elephants here. Probably not, if there was only forest for more than miles. And he didn't think that they'd have animal picture books here, either. "Like a… It was laying on its side and it was still taller than me . And as wide as…" Using himself as a measurement must have been acceptable and sufficient, Derek was paying attention in a respectful way that made David want to be nice to him. "As wide as four of me."

"There are a few things here like that…" Derek rubbed his chin and frowning off into space. "Was it furred, or scaly like a lizard?"

"Furry."

"Did it have tusks?"

David thought about that. There had been quite a few pointy things sticking out of the animal's body, he hadn't stopped to see if any of them were natural. "I don't know… Maybe."

"Maybe?" Derek laughed. "That's sounds a bit like an answer I had for you a few moments ago."

I'd just fallen out of the sky, smarty pants. I wasn't exactly ready to make a National Geographic exploration tour! David took in a shallow breath and let it go just as quickly. "It's hard to pay close attention when you're covered in blood, snot, and vomit." The last was a bit of an exaggeration, he hadn't gotten any vomit on him, but that was against the point.

Derek's amused expression turned sympathetic, pitying even. "I'm sorry, pup—I mean, David." He was quiet for a second, then he reached into his pack and took out a square of folded brown cloth. "Here, you can change into this. Your shirt is rather… in disrepair."

David took that to mean that he needed to change as soon as possible. He accepted the offered clothing, flashing a very grateful and polite smile, to keep his mother in mind, then quickly exchanged it with the poor battered shirt he would never want to wear again.

The thing he was wearing now was a tunic like Derek's, probably a spare, and it was more than a little oversized. But that actually made it more comfortable, he liked it. Sort of like wearing a nightshirt in the middle of the day, or getting to stay in his pajamas even when he had to go to school. His breathing got a little shaky then. Mom had let him do that a lot, she thought it was fun to see the looks on his teachers faces every time he did it, so she walked to school with him. They always had good long talks on the way, too.

"You've gone off again… Would it bring you back here if I tell you what I think your dead animal is?" Derek was holding his pack in his lap and looking worried. "It could be a boar," he said, sounding hopeful, as if he really wanted his answer to be the right one.

But… a boar. David knew what boars were, those had been in his animal picture books just like the elephants. Boars weren't supposed to be that big, not even in video games. Unless they were monsters in a video game, but if that was the case, they'd be called something else.

When David didn't answer, Derek kept talking. "That's the best hunting to be found here, a full grown boar, it must have been scary for you to see a picked-at corpse like that. It's no wonder you threw up."

David shook his head. He'd thrown up because of a wild combination of things, the most of which had to do with his fall. And Derek had made the wrong assumption. "It wasn't picked at," he said, "it was just dead, with spears sticking out."

Derek snapped to attention, as if he had turned into one of those slap-on bracelets Paige liked to wear. "What color was its blood?" His voice was like a razor, thin and sharp, but calm.

It was scarier than that thought of a half-eaten giant boar. David frowned. "It was dark, almost black…"

"The color of ink?"

That sounded more like a song title than something that blood might look like, but he was pretty sure that it was an accurate description. Or close enough. He nodded.

"Where did you find this thing?" Now that Derek's attitude had changed, he resembled Robin Hood much more closely, even though his lack of beard still got in the way. He tied his pack to his back, over the shield, and stood in a defensive stance that was just short of being a pose, to David's eyes.

David looked around, trying to figure out where he'd been. Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea to wander around while he'd been dizzy… There really wasn't any way to tell where he'd actually come from, except to say that he'd never woken up that day. He pinched his neck, and sure enough, he winced. If cultural literacy was worth anything, that meant he wasn't dreaming all of this. "I was kind of out of it when I was walking away…" It sounded lame, especially to his own ears. "Is it important?" The only thing he could think of that might make the area around the dead thing significant was the fact that he'd fallen there. It was possible that it worked backwards.

But that thought didn't last long, Derek just snuffed it out with a handful of words. "If you can't find your way back, then we'll just worry about that later." He scowled around the forest, then turned back to David. "As long as you didn't eat anything from there—did you?"

"Of course not! I threw up," David said indignantly. The mention of eating reminded him how long it had been since he'd had lunch, but he was too proud to ask for something. Besides, this didn't seem to be the right time.

"Good. Look, I know I'm a complete stranger and you've every right to refuse outright…" Derek sighed. "That boar was poisoned somehow. Black blood, hunters abandoning their spears in it—there's no other explanation."

"Poisoned?" That did explain the inky blood, but David couldn't see why Derek had gotten so worked up about it. Or why he'd started worrying about the water and something David might have eaten. Water wasn't poisonous, and most animals were smart enough to stay away from food that was poisonous, that was how Dad had taught him to stay away from things. If the birds wouldn't eat something, it was something to avoid.

Derek nodded distractedly, bouncing on the balls of his feet and generally looking nervous. "Yes. That's why I must ask you to come with me to see my wife. She…deals with this sort of thing."

The first thing that David considered doing was to ask what exactly 'this sort of thing' was, and how Derek's wife dealt with it. The second thing he considered was just spilling out everything that had happened to him so he could get it out and ask for help. Instead of doing any of that, he scratched a bug bite on his wrist and pretended he'd been thinking about what Derek had requested. "Is she far away?"

Some of the anxiety faded from Derek's face, replaced by something sad. "A day's journey, at least, unless you know of something faster than walking."

It was hard to repress the urge to make a joke about bicycles. David shook his head. Then he smiled inwardly, here was an opportunity to finally get his question answered. "What about magic?"

"Sneak of a pup," Derek said, through a rueful smile. "You win. There… there is a kind of magic available to me, but you can't be a party to it."

David's new surge of victory ebbed immediately. "Why not?"

All he got was the classic response: "Because I said so."

He turned around and grumped at the stream, feeling more than a little aggravated. "Fine." At least he was getting help, and he had gotten his puzzle piece. It wasn't the right color, but the shape fit. The analogy was starting to be stretched and nothing but an unfunny joke. Sighing, David looked over his shoulder enough to see that Derek was too far away to hear, and was standing in such a way that nothing he did was really visible, even if David had turned around completely.

Bored with being annoyed, David stepped over to the stream, until he was close enough to sit down and watch the water moving with itself. He wondered if it was warmer than the air above it, or cooler. Even when he'd lived on the bottom, he'd never seen…well, wild water. The campgrounds his dad had taken him to were landlocked.

Something small and dark swam around in it, not quite the shape of a fish. And fish were one of the things this place couldn't beat the vertical city in. In the Echo building, there were three floors dedicated to aquariums. Whatever type this one was, it had to be either too tame to make it into an aquarium, or it was something that didn't exist in the world David had come from.

A childish desire to stick his hands in the water almost made its way into his fingers, but he caught himself before he jumped up and fell in. Derek had seemed to think something was wrong with the water.

A wave of it splashed out at him, knocking him onto his backside. A girl with dripping, knotted hair the color of pickled seaweed, had shot out of the water, so fast that he hadn't seen the little fish swim away. This girl was definitely enough to scare away anything, especially a little defenseless fish. Her face looked like someone had take a perfectly round sphere and pinched and pulled the bottom down to form a chin, then scratched in the eyes and rest with a very angry X-acto knife. It must have been particularly angry with her eyes, they looked so deepset in her head…

She folded her arms on the bank, then waved one long-fingered hand at him, sending another spray of water to slap his cheek. "Don't gawk at me, bleeder, I might become upset with you."

David stared long and hard, more to annoy her than for any other reason. Her face and general body shape—from what he could see of it, anyway—were the only things that could make her seem human. The rest made him believe more than ever that he'd died in the fall and had just missed the memo telling him so. The girl, or whatever she was really called, was too skinny and too thin, and even a little green… more like a plant than a person.

"Are you deaf, pretty young bleeder?" She pushed herself up from the bank stayed that way, just holding herself up with her arms. In the process, some of her wet hair moved out of her face. David realized that her eyes weren't set that far back, she just had very deep bags under them. As if she'd never slept, ever.

Everything after the fall had seemed completely unreal, so he made up his mind to treat it as such. "I'm not deaf," he said calmly, silently adding and I'm not pretty either. Most of what he'd seen could be explained away as being related to things he'd read about or seen in movies, but not her. He was going to ask her what she was, but then she relaxed her arms a fraction—and pushed herself right back into the water.

There was no splash, it was as if the water had been in a hurry to cover up the fact that she'd appeared. If she had been there at all. David was beginning to wonder. This place didn't seem to have any rules, beyond a few of the basics. At least his head wasn't hurting as much, and it looked like he'd heal up alright. He still wondered about that plantwaterwhatever girl, though.

He shrugged and turned around to see if Derek was done, and nearly whack the man in the stomach. Armed with his new approach at this world, David felt confident enough to just laugh. "Sorry. I didn't hear you come up behind me."

Derek raised and dropped his eyebrows in quick succession. "Apparently so. What were you doing?" He indicated David's wet tunic-front.

For a second, he almost decided not to tell, but then he remembered that Derek had promised to help him. And the boar he'd seen had been an important thing to share, so maybe the water girl's appearance was important information too. "There was a little dark thing in the water, but then this girl came out and splashed me."

Derek raised his eyebrows again. "A girl?"

"Yeah, but she wasn't really like a girl, her fingers were too long and creepy, sort of like a shredded rubber band—"

"Whoa, whoa, hold on a moment…" Derek held his hands up and waved them a little, shaking his head slightly. "You saw a girl come out of the stream? It isn't near deep enough for anyone to—" He let his arms drop and closed his eyes, then made the kind of face that David's mom made when David did something he really wasn't supposed to do. Derek's eyes were shut tight enough to make tiny little wrinkles show up around his eyes, and he was almost-but-not-quite pressing his lips together while his eyebrows tilted to try and meet each other.

"Am I in trouble?"

Derek dropped out of his 'perturbed mom' expression and looked surprised. "What?" Then he forced a laugh and shook his head. "No, of course you aren't in trouble." He mumbled something, but before David could call him on it, he started talking at a normal volume again. "You just found a water spider, that's all."

"A water spider?!" David squeaked. Unreal or not, that was just… more than ridiculous, it was just plain stupid. "Weren't you listening, I said it was a girl—!"

But he might as well have smiled and nodded like a good little mommy's boy. Derek smiled at him as if David was the one mixing things up. "No, she was a water spider. Don't worry, they're mostly harmless."

"Mostly?"

"Come along, we still have the better part of the day to spend walking."

About an hour after the sun had gone down, David was still mad. He'd gotten past the stomping and glaring phase pretty quickly, and then become very bored with the sulking silent treatment. He was still mad, but he was actually talking to Derek, asking questions and getting something sort of like answers. This imaginary quasi-Robin-Hood man was clever. Maybe too clever.

For one thing, David had noticed that when he got brave enough to try to sneak in a question that would explain the 'water spider' incident, Derek evaded it without even seeming to notice. "Are we gonna have to sleep out here?"

"Of course not." In all the time they'd been walking, everything had seemed to be the same. The stream to their left continued on without getting wider or narrower, and the forest never cut in front of them. It was like almost like… walking through a hallway.

A hallway with wind that was blowing colder now that the sun was gone. David forgot what the answer to his question had been, but it didn't matter too much. Even if they did have to sleep out in the open, or under a tree, or in a tent if Derek had one—there wasn't anything that David could do about it. He wanted his bed and a thick blanket. His borrowed tunic was warm, but it left his arms free to deal with the cold on their own. And board shorts were for the beach, not nighttime strolls through a forest.

He looked over at the water again. So far Derek had dodged tricky questions, but what about a painfully direct one? Like the kind Paige often asked. "Hey, before…" No, he was doing this wrong. He had to think like Paige… What he wanted to know was simple and more important than anything else, he would repeat it until it got answered, and the more he had to ask, the whinier his voice would get.

Maybe he would leave that last part to Paige's expertise. He could do simple and repetitive, though. "What is a water spider?"

Derek let out a sigh and stopped walking. The only other sign that he had heard David was an uncomfortable hitch in his breathing. It sounded like a series of half words. Then he cut that off with a real sentence, "They are not malicious creatures…"

A promising beginning. David hoped it wouldn't be like his dad's stories that always started with, 'there was this one time when I was in the army' and ended with David just falling asleep. He figured that unlike his dad's stories, if he said something before Derek was done, Derek would find some way to drop the subject completely.

Apparently Derek was aware of that as well, he even had the courtesy to look annoyed at himself for it. "Water spiders are what their names say they are, spiders that live in the water."

"And turn into girls."

Oops. David nearly covered his mouth with both hands, but he reminded himself that he was not a little kid. It was hard to remember when he had just messed up like that. After all those lectures about not interrupting people.

The sound of Derek laughing nearly made David forget the lectures about not leaving his mouth hanging open. "Too true, pup—er, David. They take the form of young girls." He stuffed his hands into slits in his tunic that must have been pockets. "More for their own amusement than any other reason, it seems."

Taking that into account, water spiders sounded more like something out of a fairy tale. That made the green girl fit with the other things better. David wondered if he was supposed to be comforted by that. …it was probably better not to dwell on that too much. "Are they dangerous? I mean for serious."

"What?"

Another blatant reminder that he was very far away from Loren and Jacob, and everyone else. David forced himself to hold his head up so he wouldn't treat himself to another viewing session with the ground. "I just want to know if water spiders are dangerous or not. Sometimes it's hard to believe you, and I'm not…" He swallowed. "I'm not from around here."

"Ah. Of course." Derek took his hands out of his pockets and smiled, looking tired and almost as if he understood. "Unfortunately, I am the second best person to ask about Tilcaty fauna as well as flora." Then he took on a jokingly stern look and wagged a finger at David. "My wife is the absolute best person to go to, and she'll tell me off proper when she finds out that I didn't just knock you out and dragged you to the nearest grandmother."

"Why would you do that?"

"It's what we do with lost children in Tilcaty."

That was the second time he'd said that word, and David was pretty sure he was referring to a place larger than the forest. Maybe it included the forest as part of that place. The wind grew stronger, reminding him of just how what poor protection from the cold there was to be had from shorts. He started walking again, wondering for the umpteenth time if they would have to sleep outside.

"Hold," Derek called after him. "This is as good a place as any to wait." And then he just sat down on the grass, as if he were waiting for a bus.

David wondered if that was what he was doing. Not exactly, but in a way that worked in Tilcaty. "Okay." If that was how it was, then he would just have to go along with it. He sat down and pulled his knees up to his chest so he could rest his head without laying down. "Will it take long?"

"It might, I'm not sure how fast the midwife'll let her go."

That was too long a string of new hard-to-understand things for David to take in without a problem. He looked up.

The shield was lying on the ground next to Derek as if he'd forgotten it… or wanted to forget it. His pack was lying on top of it, covering some of its hard-bitten surface, but it was way too big to cover with a the predecessor of a school backpack. "She isn't supposed to leave the village, but I know she will." He closed his eyes and made the Mad Mom Face again. David was more than a little relieved that this face was not intended for him. "Senna's too pigheaded for her own good."

If the Senna that Derek was talking about was his wife, then David could understand why he was so upset. At least he thought he could. It was too dark and cold and late at night to be sure. He yawned. "I bet you like that about her, though."

He'd caught Derek by surprise. "Uh! Yes, but that's no reason for her to—!" Derek sputtered at the grass hugging his boots until he finally stopped trying to talk. Then he just looked very sad and frustrated.

There was a long period of silence, so long that David almost fell asleep. Oddly enough, he was the one who ended the silence. "My mom is like that sometimes. You shouldn't have a fight with her about it, she'll just win and make you feel stupid." All moms were good at doing that. It was like a law of physics. That law applied where David had come from, and he felt that it would be safe to assume it was just as true in Tilcaty.

It must have been, because Derek didn't answer it. He went on and made up his own conversation. "That water spider of yours was a young one. She must have been lookin' for a friend."

David rolled his eyes. If he heard any cracks about young love, he'd jump in the stream and catch a nasty cold. "Why? Do they do that?" Sounded like the Roo-soaky, that undead lady water spirit that killed guys that had the nerve to think she was pretty. Or however that worked. David hadn't been paying attention to whoever had told him whenever they'd told him.

"They might. You should ask her."

Just considering bringing back the water spider for any reason made David want to stick his head in a tree. Being called 'pretty' by anyone was not on his list of good things. "I could ask Senna."

Derek sent him a cautious glare. "You'd best watch your tongue. My wife is the most skilled hedgewitch in the territory, and she'll have your fingers for sausages if you toe off the line with her." He reached into the pack and took out a sleeping roll.

That pack must have been the pack of ages or something—David could just imagine finding out that he was right—because every time something came out of it, it didn't seem to get any smaller or flatter. It just looked the same. There shouldn't have been more than some food, a change of clothes, and some random odds and ends. The sleeping roll was bigger than the pack.

It got even bigger when Derek set it out on the grass. "Looks like we are going to have to sleep outside," he said, before moving back to a place for himself. "But it won't be long." In spite of the tired look on the rest of his face, he grinned cheerfully. Maybe he'd resigned himself to the fact that moms could do anything they wanted, especially when the dads said they shouldn't. Even future moms.

Resigned himself to, not made himself be about. Derek laid down on his side without even taking the shield off his back. He even grumped at his arms while he tossed and turned seventeen times. David tried not to laugh.

When the tossing and turning had stopped, there wasn't anything left to laugh at, so he had to try to make things up. If he wasn't laughing or trying not to, then he'd have to pay attention to the darkness and the cold, and the suddenly frightening sound of what he thought were crickets. It didn't help that those were all completely foreign in the vertical city. He flopped onto the sleeping roll, flat on his back so he could focus on the sky.

Then he smiled. All of the stars were the same. The constellations weren't in the same places he was used to them being, but he still recognized every one that he saw. "Thank you, Dad…" he whispered. David's annual early birthday present had been a new telescope to replace the one that Loren had knocked over the edge of the deck. To make up for it, Loren had wrangled Dad into spending an entire night up showing them both things in the sky, and they'd even made up some of their own constellations.

David pointed them out to himself, so he could tell the stories to the crickets and maybe get them to sleep so they'd stop scaring him. "That's the Dancer. A famous female astronomer named Artemis Leroy discovered it when there were only the Alpha, Beta, and Charlie towers in the vertical cities." In addition to being famous, Miss Leroy had been in the possession of a very peculiar sense of humor. When Dad had drawn out a kiddie star chart to explain the name of the constellation, it had looked like a breakdancer in the middle of a performance.

'See, boys?' Dad had said. 'Our Miss Leroy came from a city on the bottom, just like us. Can you imagine anyone up here knowing how to breakdance?"

The next morning, Loren immediately set to teaching himself how to do just that. He didn't like things to be missing, not one bit. Sometimes he even complained about the vertical city, something David could never bring himself to do. It was home.

He reached up to pinch his left shoulder with his right hand. No crying, David! "And over there is Point-the-Way. It's my favorite, because it doesn't really point anywhere as far as anyone knows." That had been his plan. To grow up, get some friends together, and follow Point-the-Way until they found something. It didn't really matter what they found, he just wanted to go.

"Well, you got what you wanted, jerkface," he told himself bitterly. He'd gone. And if he was reading the sky right, which he knew he was, then they'd been traveling in the right direction the entire day. Old Point-the-Way was doing just that. One of the smaller hitches was that David had been planning on considering to maybe think about letting Paige tag along. And she was stuck back in the vertical city, wherever it was now.

If it was anywhere. David sat up and looked over at Derek. The grownup was facing away from David, hunched up with his shoulders still angry, even though he was definitely asleep. Secure in the knowledge that no one was looking, David hugged his knees to his chest and cried into his knees.

Something dripped onto his neck and he snapped his head back up. "Wghuh?!"

"How articulate you are, little bleeder." Her voice was a soft and rather scratchy whisper, but David recognized it anyway. Even if he hadn't, the water spider's face was a sight he wouldn't be able to erase from his memory with a rum jug full of acid.

The question of whether she had a mermaid tail or legs was answered, although he would have preferred the tail. It would have prevented her from kneeling next to him and tilting her head to an extreme degree, so she could poke him with her gaze.

"Go away," he growled. Being caught crying was bad enough, but when the person who'd caught him was somebody who'd already made it onto his 'I really don't like you' list… Double ouch.

Oddly enough, she didn't mention the fact that his cheeks were wet. And itchy. He wiped his face and scratched a little. The water spirit sat up straight and held her head up properly. "You're rather a far way from the one who sent you here," she said, still rasping. She sounded out of breath.

David hugged himself tighter. If he ignored her, maybe she would go away. Or maybe she'd keep talking and give him a puzzle piece. From what she'd just said, it was possible that she was giving up a pretty big one.

She stretched herself out to lounge on her side, barely bending the grass around her. The wind had died down so much that her hair was barely getting blown about. Being a soaking wet mess of knots did a lot to try and keep it perfectly motionless. "I know who she is, but it seems you don't, or you wouldn't be going that way." She pointed. "That way lies danger for you, little bleeder."

Ignoring her was not working out the way he wanted. Time for a different approach. He looked her right in her… completely black eyes… then shuddered and lost his nerve. It was like looking at black glass, but with only half as much light being bounced back. The only thing he could manage to say was, "Stop calling me that."

Her laugh was actually not as scary as he would have thought. It was a little too human, but that shouldn't have been creepy. It just didn't match. At all. "Then I'll call you Beloved, if you like."

He stuck his tongue out and gagged. "My name is David—"

"That is a long enough name," she pressed down on the grass next to her elbow with her other hand. "If I allow you to continue with your self introduction, it will take me as long to address you as it will take you to address me."

The only part of that that David managed to do anything with was the part about addressing her. It was obvious that she was planning on sticking around, and he didn't know her name. He decided to play along with the way she was talking, just for fun. "As long as we're on the subject, miss, how shall I address you?"

"I am Ehhulad G—"

Suddenly the wind picked up, and the water spider let out a shrill cry. Without stopping to think, David shot forward and grabbed her by the wrist. She twisted her hand so she could hold onto his wrist in turn; her fingers wrapped so tight around it that he could feel spindly bruises forming.

The wind wasn't strong, but it pulled her right off the ground, into the air like a piece of… paper. David felt his heart squeeze itself into a little niche between his neck and his shoulder. He nearly fell on his face as he snatched at Ehhulad's other wrist, but he kept his hold and managed to make it more secure. Both of her wrists were safe in his hands, and he was keeping them that way, even though he was using his elbows to push himself up, which was awkward and hard.

"Don't let go!" It was a squeak, like the soles of sneakers sliding on a tile floor. A desperately scared pair of sneakers. The sharp pain in David's chest got more distinct when he realized that he was the one who had squeaked.

Weather had never ever made sense to him, and there would probably never be anything in Tilcaty that made sense to anyone—if they would only admit it—but even though it didn't make sense, he was glad that the wind changed and let Ehhulad fall back to the ground. Actually, she fell on David, but that was perfectly fine.

Her face wasn't as scary close up, but it was still disturbing and harshly supernatural. As was the fact that even though she was laying on top of him, he felt very little pressure. She weighed hardly anything. "No wonder the wind almost took you away…"

The only response she offered was a haughty look that still managed to contain some kind of apology. "Thank you, bl—David," she whispered.

"See, pup, I told you she only wanted to be your friend."

David nearly dropped out of his own skin. It occurred to him, now that Derek was standing and grinning down at them both, that this was one of the moments in David's life that would stand out as being utterly embarrassing. His face set fire and it was all he could do to keep himself from pushing Ehhulad away. There was still plenty of wind, and he'd rather be embarrassed for the rest of forever than let someone else fall, whether she would fall up or down.

He couldn't even let go when Derek pulled them both up and wrapped a heavy-looking blanket around her shoulders. It took a nod from Ehhulad, as well as what she said afterward. "I will be fine. Your concern is noted and—"

A loud cough from Derek cut her off. "Our ride is here," he said lightly.

"What are you…?" David started to ask, but then Derek's normal person hand pointed out a dark shape a few feet away. Part of it moved. David nearly shouted in surprise—whatever he'd been expecting, it had not been a ride of any kind.

It made noise, too. "Horses?" he croaked.

Derek had put a careful arm around Ehhulad's shoulders and was holding her carefully still against the wind. She radiated annoyance, which, combined with her natural appearance, made her look like an evil ghost bent on revenge. David shivered, but he couldn't bring himself to be truly afraid. He'd saved her, after all, and he was a good person. Good people didn't save evil spirits. Besides, she was alive, a spider, not a spirit. Otherwise she wouldn't have needed him to save her at all.

"Yes, David," she said, some of the rasp had gone from her voice now that she had abandoned the whispering for an everyday tone of voice. "Horses. The fastest way to travel in Tilcaty."

He wasn't sure if he really believed that, but he had to. He nodded and hurried to take her from Derek. It made him feel better to do that, it meant that he and Ehhulad could shield each other from the furious-looking pregnant lady making her way over to them.

But the one who really needed a shield was Derek, and unfortunately for him, he'd left his on the ground where he had been sleeping. The pregnant lady—Senna, David assumed—had short black hair, darker than David's, that was so short it looked like feathers blowing around as the wind picked up again. "Derek Grupenski, you village idiot!" She paused to leap-frog her gaze from David to Ehhulad and back to her husband. "A little boy and a water spider."

The hair on the back of David's neck went up at being called a 'little boy' again, but he kept his mouth shut. To tell the truth, he was thinking about what Derek had said about Senna cooking his fingers, except that now he believed it. "H-hello, ma'am," he chirped, not meaning to be half as squeaky and nervous as he sounded. …Forget half, he hadn't meant to sound like that at all.

If Ehhulad's black eyes had caught him off guard, then Senna's did the opposite. They were the exact shade of soft green he would have expected. Her eyes had to be soft, or Derek would have been too scared to even date her. Not because Senna was really all that frightening, but because Derek was obviously a big old wimp. He wasn't doing much to help change that opinion of himself while he was standing there stuttering at his wife and rubbing the back of his neck.

"Swear on the land Senna, it was just the one when I called you!"

She put her hands on her hips, with a bit of trouble, and rolled her eyes, even though it was barely visible. The only light other than the moon and stars was the orange glow of a lantern hanging from a pole fixed to the wagon. "Even so," she said, her voice softer and less harsh. "Send them both home."

David took a few steps closer to the back of the wagon, pulling Ehhulad with him. The back of the wagon seemed the closest safe place he could reach then. The horses didn't seem very friendly, and Derek and Senna were already fighting about him, so he wasn't in a hurry to be in the physical middle as well.

"You know his situation as well as I do," Derek was saying now, so agitated that his bandana had started to slip over his eyes. He pushed it back up, only to let it slide down to dangle around his neck like a scarf.

Senna glanced hurriedly at David, then turned back on Derek and launched into a flurry of words and sounds that David couldn't begin to put together. They weren't English, but they weren't some kind of fantasy language either. He'd heard it before, on some language tapes that Loren had to listen to for one of his classes. David just couldn't remember what it was.

He put up a little mental victory flag in his head. If this unfamiliar thing wasn't completely off the wall, then maybe he wasn't as far away from home as he had been thinking he was. Warmed by that, he felt comfortable and charitable enough to turn his attention to Ehhulad and ask how she was, while the grownups argued on.

"I am well, and you have my gratitude," she said, not grudging, but proud. As if she was doing him a favor by saying thank you. "Doubtless you wish me to explain myself."

He blinked. Explain… Well, he wanted everything explained, but that probably wasn't what she was talking about. It had to be something specific. What had she been talking about before the wind had started to blow her away? That was probably what she meant. He went the safe route and nodded.

If she knew that he had forgotten, she didn't say anything about it. She just freed an arm from the blanket to poke him. "You're one of hers. Her mark is on you."

David felt goosebumps start to rise on his arms. "What are you talking about? I'm not anybody's anything!"

Ehhulad shrugged her arm back under the blanket and leaned on him casually. "It is etched on your very face. That flower is her mark. A cowslip."

Of all the familiar things David wanted to be handed back to him, that had not even been on the list. His breathing caught in his stomach and he had to cough to get it out. "Cowslip?!"

"Yes. It is a flower."

…He'd thought that it was just a stupid name. But that calmed some of the panic in his chest, enough that he didn't have to worry about embarrassing himself. "Oh. " He cleared his throat, just in case his voice was going to try to squeak again. "Then what do you mean about me being somebody's something?"

Her eyes were closed and her hair was soaking his borrowed tunic, but he was just glad that she was on the ground. He'd never liked it when people killed spiders, and she was one, wasn't she? Spiders were good. "I'm not sure I should tell you about her. She might send another wind."

"The wind wasn't—it's just wind!"

"Nothing is ever 'just' what it is," she said, her voice dropping off. Like Paige's did when she was starting to fall asleep in the middle of a movie. "You aren't. I'm not. They aren't either." She waved at Senna and Derek who seemed to have finished arguing and were coming over.

"Our sincerest apologies, children," Senna said, with a tiny dip, as opposed to a bow. "My husband and I have certain duties and rules that bind us." She gave Derek a dirty look. "Those rules make matters difficult at times."

The scent of peppermint and some kind of tea made David sneeze. It must have come from Senna, maybe something to do with her job as a hedgewitch. He smiled at the stern worried frown she sent his way. "It's kinda cold," he said sheepishly. It would have been more than a little dumb to tell her that the way she smelled had made him sneeze. It wasn't even that he was allergic, the smells had just been too strong and too sudden.

Her face softened and she lead him away from the wagon so she could loosen and pull down the back plank, sort of like a door. Whatever the argument's content, it looked like even though Senna had won—because mom's always won—no one was being sent home. David sighed. He hadn't expected to go home anyway, but this was better wasn't it? If they'd told him to go home, he wouldn't have been able to do anything but leave and figure out what to do next by himself.

Ehhulad wasn't too happy when instead of being allowed to get in the wagon on her own, Derek took her from David and swooped her up like a baby. "Know your place, cook," she sniffed, "or I shall have to bite you."

"Understood, Miss Spider," Derek chuckled. "Now, you've a choice. I can set you back in your stream or—"

"Or you can save yourself many days of trouble by not demanding information of me."

David had to laugh, and he could see Senna biting her lip and trying not to grin at the dismayed shock on her husband's face. Her hair still looked like wild feathers, but it was the soft kind that baby birds had. After she had her baby—and it looked she really only had a few days left—he wondered if her hair would grow out long enough for the baby to be able to pull on it by the time she could try.

He didn't know why he had assumed that the baby was going to be a girl, but it didn't seem too important at that time. Had Derek told that it would be? He didn't remember. Maybe he would be around to find out if they were both right. He'd never seen a baby be born.

"Huh what hey!?"

Derek had set Ehhulad in the back of the wagon and was now giving David the same treatment, although his was more like the 'sack of potatoes' treatment. "All aboard!"

He wasn't very steady where he'd been set down, so he almost fell on Ehhulad. That wasn't good, he might squish her if he was very very careful. At least he hadn't bothered her. She was sitting with her back pressed up against the wood and canvas that made up a wall for the wagon. Derek had been nice to her, she didn't even look jostled.

Inversely, David was all ruffled feathers and he even had a scraped elbow. He would have to get back at Derek for that later, somehow. One of David's greatest advantages in life was that he liked vegetables that even grownups wouldn't eat. He chuckled evilly to himself. Derek looked like the kind of person who couldn't even chew a mouthful of eggplant. It probably wouldn't be too difficult for David to gain Senna as an ally and then he could—

A thin pointy finger dug lightly into his side, jerking him out of his visions of pointless revenge. Apparently Ehhulad hadn't fallen asleep like he'd thought she had. She caught his gaze and held it; her black eyes still ate up the available light like matte lines, but they also had their own kind of light. David glanced subconsciously at the wall, but he didn't see any bouncing light coming from her eyes. "Are you brave?" she whispered.

That would require some careful thought to answer. "Why do you ask?" he'd have to stall. After all, in fantasy worlds, bravery and honor were two very important virtues. If he didn't have one, the other, or either, he would have to be honest about it. Lying about important things was never a smart course of action.

"There are many things about what might happen to you that I know, but you yourself are my mystery." She held her hand out a bit in front of her and flexed her fingers out a few times. The fifth time, a black comb just appeared in her palm, as if the flexing had been an animation with a few completely undrawn frames.

It wasn't like the black pocket combs that David was forever 'losing', it was curved, for one thing, and also much more ornate and girly. There was even a ribbon dangling from one end of it. Given Ehhulad's trend of black and drippy, it was no small surprise that the ribbon was a very bright blue and didn't look the least bit wet.

"As safe as I know I am with you," she gave him a sincere smile, making him blush, "this form gives me no comfort in such weather." The ribbon danced sleepily as she reached up to start combing her hair. "Have you a jar?"

"Uh… No."

She sighed. "Pity. I'll have to be a dog, then."

Before David could ask her what she was playing at, the comb hit the wooden planks of the wagon floor and he was alone.

Alone except for a small black terrier. David bit his tongue and tried to find Ehhulad's blanket so he could hide under it. But that wasn't an option, the dog had the blanket.

It looked like a regular old terrier with curly wiry fur, except for the fact that it should not have looked like anything because it shouldn't have been there. It sniffed David's bare arm and he nearly shrieked. Its nose was even cold and wet.

The curtain of canvas separating the back of the wagon from the driver's bench moved, and then Derek popped his head in. "Still awake back th—oh."

David swallowed a whimper. He wasn't crazy, there really was a dog here. He hoped it hadn't eaten Ehhulad, he'd been on the verge of wanting to be her friend. That would be a painful death, to be eaten by a tiny little lap dog. With tiny little sharp teeth. Another whimper rolled up his throat, but this one got out.

"Poor guy. Hey, kid, that's your friend the spider. I told you she can change forms, didn't I?"

"Oh, Derek, you're so hopeless."

His head disappeared and then the canvas really started moving. There was another fast argument in the same language from before, and then they slowed down so much that they almost stopped. Senna pushed the curtain back so she could crawl over to David. She was too tall to walk in there, and it reminded him of what a small space they were in. With the scary black dog from no place.

"What's the matter, David?" she asked, sounding for all the world like David's mom. He sniffed. Being scared and missing Mom were always the right combination to make him cry and he wasn't going to. He also wasn't going to be a big baby like Paige and point at the dog with a trembling finger. …Darnit. Yes, he was, that was his finger.

Senna looked at the terrier and then back at him. "You poor thing, honey, that's just the water spider." She started to call it over, but then caught the look on David's face and got up to pet the dog instead. "See?" It didn't do any of the normal dog things, like wag its tail or loll its tongue. While Senna scratched its ears, it acted like a little kid getting attention, sitting mostly still so that the attention wouldn't go away. "This form is smaller than her human form. Her weight doesn't have to spread out as much, so this way she's heavy enough that the wind won't be a concern."

That didn't make it any less frightening, it just made it more confusing. David nodded anyway, keeping his back pressed as hard against the wall as he could. He could feel the canvas rubbing roughly into his neck, but he just let it.

"Are you afraid of dogs?"

Denial was as automatic as it always was. He shook his head violently, scraping his cheek on the wagon canvas. But it wasn't likely that Senna would believe him, what with the way that he was whimpering. Again.

She picked up the dog and put it in her lap. She wasn't petting it anymore, but she was holding it firmly, so David let himself have a few deep breaths. As long as it didn't jump up and try to lick his face, he would probably be okay. "Is it really Ehhulad i-in there?" He was still positive that the dog had eaten her.

Senna nodded. "Here, why don't you hand me that comb of hers, and I'll ask her to change again." She waited very patiently until David kicked the comb in her direction. He was so glad that she was getting rid of the dog that he didn't care when she rolled her eyes at him. "You're just like Derek and mice. Silly man can't stay in a room with even one of the things for more than three seconds." Chuckling quietly to herself, Senna ran the comb through a few patches of the dog's fur.

There should have been a poof. If there had been a poof, David would have been able to forgive this stupid world—Tilcaty—for the dog incident. But Ehhulad's reappearance was as abrupt as blinking. One second, dog, and then blink—Ehhulad. At least she looked sorry for what she'd done.

Her hair wasn't as messy as he had gotten used to it being, probably because of the comb, but her face was still striking. And the bags under her eyes looked just as permanent as ever. He wondered if they would go away if she slept for a whole year, but he doubted it. "You should have told me you were—"

"I'm not," he huffed. It had been bad enough when Paige had made fun of him for the time he'd ran away from the Auntie's Pomeranian. He'd been lucky that it had only taken her six months to forget about it, and even more lucky that he'd managed to convince her that he had a million other reasons to want to avoid the Auntie's apartment. …which he did, but the one reason was enough to make those completely unimportant. "Just stop changing like that, it's freaky."

He was almost sorry for being so harsh when Ehhulad frowned and hung her head. But then he thought of when the dog had gotten him with its nose and he shivered. No one said anything until Senna set the comb on the floor and patted a place on her other side. "David, come here. I need you to tell me some things about yourself."

"Okay…" Avoiding Ehhulad's sad hopeful look, he dragged himself to the indicated place. Then he crossed his legs and held his shoe-covered toes, putting himself on his favorite level of comfort. "What kind of things?" He doubted she wanted to know his favorite color or what grade he was in.

Sure enough, she didn't waste time with the usual dumb things grownups asked when they first met him. "Do you know how you came here?"

He bit his lip and stared at his hands, clutching his toes tighter. It hadn't seemed like a good idea to tell Derek, but Senna was different. She didn't seem as flaky, and she was also a mom. Fixing things was what moms did, so maybe she would be able to help him get home. "Not really… But I know what happened before I got here." He looked at Ehhulad. "Do you know, too?"

Before Ehhulad could do more than shake her head, Senna lifted her up and onto her own place on the floor. "I'm very sorry, Miss Ehhulad, but this is a very private discussion. Unless you want to be sent back to your stream, I'm going to have to ask you to become very interested in a good night's sleep right now."

The only answer was less than the headshake Ehhulad had given David. She wrapped the blanket tighter around herself and laid down on her side, then made a big show of going to sleep. David snickered into his hand. "Are all water spiders like her?"

Senna was smiling too. "In many ways, yes. It's a pity they don't leave their streams more often." Her smile turned a little bit sad. "But you've seen for yourself how dangerous that can be. They generally visit small villages during the summer."

So that was why the weather felt so severe. It had been the beginning of summer in the vertical city. "What season is it now?"

"You've come in time for the onset of winter." Senna put a comforting arm around his shoulders and gave him a little hug. "What happened before you found yourself here? Was it very frightening?"

He sniffed. "…yes…" It was hard just thinking about it, but he knew he'd have to tell her out loud. Even if someone had brought some paper and a pencil, his handwriting was terrible, and his spelling was almost as bad. He just hoped he wouldn't cry too much. "I fell. All the way down."

"From where?"

"The vertical city. Everything turned into paper," his shoulders shook and he had to stop and take deep breaths. "Jacob and I thought we were just stuck in the elevator, but then Paige ripped the door down." Their worried faces flashed in his memory, but he refused to hang onto them. He'd think about them when he had some time to be by himself. "I walked out to see if it was safe, and then I fell. Right through the floor, and then the next one and the next one and the next one…"

Senna started stroking his hair and it got even harder to keep the tears in. He leaned his head on her shoulder anyway. "The floors were made of paper?"

His cheeks felt wet, but with two arms holding him in place, he didn't mind anymore. "Everything was." It had even started to turn brown the longer he had fallen. "I was careful, but I fell anyway. The bee flew right in my face!" Of course, this whole thing was the bee's fault, David just had to figure out how that worked.

"It did?" The hand in his hair stopped moving, he looked up. Senna was perfectly still, staring ahead at—nothing. She was just looking intently into space. "Are there many bees in your vertical city?" The words sounded strange coming from someone who wasn't David. He liked it. It made the city sound closer to him. He smiled and relaxed in Senna's arms, pretending he was with his mom.

Oh, yeah, she'd asked about bees. "Not really, only in the parts with lots of flowers outside." That pretty much meant the Echo tower exclusively. Most of the tenants with green thumbs seemed to live there.

"Strange…"

David had to agree with that. He'd been in the wrong place to run into a bee. But that hadn't been the strangest thing that had happened to him that day—excluding everything that had happened since he'd arrived in Tilcaty. He glanced at Ehhulad. She was really sleeping now, little bubbly-sounding snores escaped her occasionally. Before the wind had threatened her life, she'd said something about a mark. On his face.

He wriggled around a little so he could touch his face. The mark that Ehhulad had said was there, a cowslip… he couldn't feel anything. "Senna?"

"Yes?"

How to say it? Or ask. He didn't know if it was information or a question. "Ehhulad said that someone put her mark on my face. What does that mean?"

Senna pushed him gently away so that he would sit up by himself and let her get a good look at him. She looked like his mom did when she was making sure he'd washed his face thoroughly enough before dinner. "It could mean any number of things. Your eye does need some ice—we'll get you some when we reach the village—but…"

Then she fell silent. It was an odd silence, not the kind that meant she'd lost track of what she'd been saying, but the kind that meant she'd shut herself up on purpose. David started to get anxious again. "What's wrong?" he asked, almost keeping the squeak out of his voice.

She shook her head slightly. "Nothing. I just…" Then she was quiet again, but only for a moment. "David, I'm going to need you to be a brave boy, can you do that?"

"I… I can try…" There was the bravery thing again, he didn't like where this was going.

"Did you talk to anyone peculiar before you fell through the paper city?"

It was impossible to turn his head away with her holding his chin like that, so he didn't try. He just looked awkwardly back at her, and the war against crying began to swirl in the pit of his stomach all over again. "The Sunhat Lady. She… um, it was… She said her name was Miss Cowslip, and she was big and wide and scary!" His voice wavered and he had to sniff. "It's her fault isn't it? What happened to everyone else?!"

Suddenly the war got easier, Senna had let his chin go and was hugging him again. He would never ever doubt the power of moms as long as he lived. "Shhh… It's alright. I'll help you get home, David, I promise."

He nodded without meaning anything by it. He'd lost the war, he could feel his shoulders shaking and his throat hurt while he tried to keep his sobs quiet. As long as Senna and her unborn baby were the only ones who ever knew that David had cried, he would be able to salvage his pride in the morning.

Bump.

Roll to one side, then roll back…

Bump, bump.

…Roll over a few times, then stop…

Bump!

"OW!" David scrambled onto all fours and moved away from the wall. He laid back down and rubbed his head. "That hurt…"

All of him hurt. His legs were covered in scrapes, his head was throbbing, and his face felt like a soggy piece of defrosted steak that someone had gone after with an ice pick. And putting it that way made it hurt even more, what a good idea. He turned off his imagination muscles and tried to go back to sleep.

That wasn't going to happen as long as the bumping and rolling continued, though. They hit another big bump and he finally just grumbled and sat up, determined to spend the rest of the day grumpy. There weren't even any windows to look out of, the wagon canvas didn't have any openings at all. Ehhulad was still asleep, and she was being jostled even more than David had been putting up with.

Watching her made him feel guilty, both because he wasn't really that bothered by the jerky ride, and because he was fairly certain that he was the reason she had to deal with it. His brain was still feeling fuzzy, so he didn't dwell on what he couldn't completely remember, but he did sit down next to her so he could hold her relatively still.

He yawned until his jaw nearly popped, then glared blearily at his sneakers. They had kept his feet warm all through the night, but they weren't a blanket, the rest of him was still cold. He looked around, he was sure that Senna had tucked him in somehow last night after he'd…

Never mind that, he just wanted a blanket. There it was. He stepped on Ehhulad's blanket to hold it in place while he stretched himself out to grab the other one. "Gotcha." In a quick series of movements that he slurred into one, as well as he could, he rolled back over and wrapped the blanket tightly around himself.

It didn't get warm right away, but at least he wasn't as cold now. He smiled to himself and inched closer to Ehhulad so she wouldn't start rolling around. She was moving a little, which probably meant that she was waking up, he didn't have to worry about squishing her. He yawned again. Whatever time it was, it was way too early to get up and acknowledge the daytime.

"David."

He groaned. "David isn't here right now. Please leave a message and he'll get back to you as soon as he can." Then he promptly pulled his head into his bundle of blanket.

The cold came back when someone pulled the blanket off of him and he had to bite back a whine. It was not time to get up, it was time to hit the alarm clock and go back to sleep. He looked around blearily, trying to find the alarm clock so he could give it a good whack. "Where are you?" he mumbled.

"I'm right here, now get up. We've arrived."

His eyes snapped open, clearing away most of the bleariness. "Whuh?"

Derek was standing at the end of the wagonback, holding the back curtain of canvas to one side. The bottom plank was down and he was leaning on it. "If you want to sleep longer, you'll have to do it inside. I have to take the wagon back to the tanner."

Reluctantly, David crawled over. While he was climbing out of the wagon, he saw Ehhulad going through the motions of waking up. She was much better at it than he was. Showoff. He wanted to lean against something, but the only thing readily available was Derek and David wasn't about to lean on him.

"Where's Senna?"

Derek was busy helping Ehhulad get her own footing; he answered without looking back at David. "She went into the house to get breakfast started. You can go in and help her if you like."

Cooking was not something that David excelled at or even liked. But it didn't seem likely that he'd be able to go inside and search for a bed or a couch without getting roped into helping with breakfast, so he didn't bother arguing. "Bweh." He didn't realize that he was leading Ehhulad by her hand until they were in the house and Senna asked him where Derek was.

All David did to answer was drop Ehhulad's hand and point and mumble, Senna could figure that out. He needed to go back to sleep, his eyes weren't staying open.

"Why don't you two find somewhere to sit while the tea cools?" Senna hustled them each into surprisingly cushy armchairs. Her hands were wet, but they were still warm, and kind of soapy. She must have been doing the dishes. David wondered if she had to boil water to do that.

He curled up into a little ball, resting his head on the chair's armrest. Of course she had to boil the water, there couldn't be running water here. It was a fantasy world, it even had a ridiculous name to go with everything, and if they had running water, then they'd probably have things like antiseptic and bug spray. And that would ruin the effect for anyone who traveled there by accident on purpose. He hugged himself and snoozed, thinking of all the other things that shouldn't be in Tilcaty. Toasters, for one. Enormous boars and transforming spiders that lived in water were perfectly normal, of course, but if anyone stopped to pay attention to his sneakers, they'd have widespread panic on their hands.

Wait. Why hadn't anyone noticed his shoes? They obviously weren't part of Tilcaty norm, both Derek and Senna wore boots, and Ehhulad went around barefoot as a daisy. David covered his face with his hands and tried to go back to sleep. It was almost impossible now that he was curious about something. His shoes were still on his feet, the laws of reality—or unreality—hadn't disappeared them, and no one had taken them off to examine them. No one had even said anything.

Sighing, he got up and wandered towards the kitchen sounds, naturally assuming that an actual kitchen was the source of those sounds. Fortunately for his state of mind, he was right. Senna was putting plates and mugs on the table, all of them the same rough size and shape, except for one plate that was a little too big. That was probably Derek's plate, he was pretty chubby, now that David thought about it.

Senna smiled at him and tucked her hair behind her ears. It might have stayed if it was longer, but it wasn't, so it just went right back into her face. "You can't have gotten enough sleep yet," she said, looking worried. "Only a few hours worth, at the most."

That was easy to agree with, but David needed to ask her questions, lots of them, and he'd never get to sleep if he didn't get at least one of them answered. "How did I get here? Do you know? I told you about Miss Cowslip, who is she? What is she?"

He hadn't expected to get any answers right away, and he didn't, so he sat down in one of the worn wooden chairs and leaned his elbows on the table. Instead of trying to distract him or stall, Senna sat down across from him and tapped her fingers lightly on a plate, obviously thinking seriously about at least one of his questions.

It had been too dark last night to really look at her, but now that he could see her with regular light, he realized the Senna was very young. Much younger than his parents, maybe even younger than Derek. She was still older than Loren, she had to be. People Loren's age weren't nearly old enough to get married and have babies. Even her nose looked young, kind of pointy and too short.

"Come here, David, you need to get cleaned up before breakfast." She pushed the chair back and stood up, with some difficulty. David hurried to his feet, more to help her than to do what she'd told him. "I'll answer your questions while you wash your face."

That didn't sound like a good arrangement to him, but this was her house, so she got to call the shots. Plus, she was the one who'd made breakfast, he had to be grateful that all she was asking him to do was wash up. She could have made him set the table or wash the dishes. He followed her into a room with a basin on stand, a tub, and a water pump.

There were dozens of shelves on the wall with bottles and containers, and the whole room smelled like a botanicals shop. He sat down on a bench next to the basin stand and looked at Senna, silently asking what he was supposed to do now.

She didn't answer, apparently she thought he was big enough to figure it out for himself. He grinned, proud of giving such an impression, and took off his tunic so he wouldn't get it wet. The water was too cold, but he didn't want to look like a wimp. So he bit the insides of his cheeks and ignored it.

"I suppose it'd be best if I start by telling you what I can about this Miss Cowslip…"

He dropped the soap. It bounced off his toes and skidded away, too far to just reach for and pick up. He stared at it, willing it to become the color and shape of a brand that he recognized, not that obviously homemade brownish lump. "You know what she is?" He didn't care that his voice was too high, this was the kind of puzzle piece he really needed.

Senna walked over to the bar of soap and kicked it gently back to David. "If only I did…" While he tried to become an oozy puddle on the floor, she walked back and patted his shoulder. "I can only speculate that she would like to take credit for your… arrival here in Tilcaty. But she didn't send you here." She got a chair that was near the door and dragged it over, making loud scraping sounds. "But I think I might know how you got here."

This time there was no soap-dropping. He was in the middle of washing behind his ears—a complicated task at the best of times—and he'd used up his drama already. Feeling discouraged, he soaped up the rest of his face and then dunked his entire head in the basin.

When he came up sputtering and gasping a second later, he heard Senna laughing. He started to shake his head like a puppy, but caught himself before he could make a mess. "Towel…" he said, water dripping down his forehead and into his mouth.

One made its way into his hands and he dried his hair while Senna began talking again. "That bee you told me about… You're certain that it was in an unusual place?" She sounded all business. David wondered if he'd have to remind her about breakfast. All this washing was making him hungry.

"Yeah," he said out loud. It would be hard to do so much as describe the layout of one of the towers, let alone the setup of the entire vertical city, so he didn't try. "In that part of the city… Well, there's mostly businesses and stores and things there." And the school. What if he missed school while he was here? It had already let out before he'd left, but he didn't know quickly time passed in Tilcaty. Maybe the days were shorter. Or the weeks, or months.

A hand on his shoulder popped him out of his musings. Senna was taking the soap from him; he hadn't realized he hadn't put it down yet. "Did you hear me?"

He shook his head slowly, 'oops'ing to himself.

"That bee sent you here."

He couldn't help it, he started laughing. "How?"

She rinsed the lather off his hands and then took hold of the towel so she could start drying his hair for him, rougher than he would have done it himself. He grumbled and bounced along with the drying motions. She gave him a light whack on the back of the neck. "Sit still and I'll tell you."

What else could he do? He sat still.

"Last night I asked if you could be brave." A few more seconds of towel-rubbing, and then it stopped. "Personally, I think you're old enough to learn, if you haven't already. But more important than bravery, is discretion."

That was a word that David didn't know. It made him wish that he'd paid more attention in class. Maybe if he had, then he wouldn't feel so lost in this place. He hoped Senna wouldn't ask about his grades, he didn't want her to think he was dumb. "Okay…" he said, hoping that would pass for the right response.

The towel was handed back to him, probably so he could dry his hands and arms. By now, the legs of his shorts were pretty wet, but not so much that he would have to change. Senna made a pained noise and relaxed back in her chair. "What I mean is that I need to know you can keep secrets."

"Oh." So that was what it meant. He finished drying his arms and set the towel down next to him. "I can keep a secret. I'm good at that." He was, too. Mom and Dad still didn't know that it had been Jacob's fault that the rose vase in the living room got broken.

Senna smiled, still looking like she was hurting. "Wonderful." She winced. "Now, I—"

"Are you okay?" He got up and looked at her face very closely. The pain on her face made her look older. He didn't like it.

She closed her eyes and looked down at her belly. "No, but… it will pass. It's not time yet."

By 'time', he assumed she was talking about the baby, that was a comfort. For a moment he'd started thinking that something was really wrong, something unexpected. He'd had more than enough of that sort of thing. "What secret were you going to give me?"

It took a little more than that small verbal push to move the conversation along. First he had to help Senna up and out of the washing room, then he found her a more comfortable chair. It didn't help that she half-fought him the whole time. "I'm fine, get your hands to yourself, little man," she grumbled. Her hands were cold, so cold that when Ehhulad came to help him, the water spider's skin was warm in comparison. David sent her a quick, commiserating smile and together they managed to get the stubborn pregnant lady into the biggest armchair.

Senna glared at them from her place in the chair, looking tiny and evil. David tried not to giggle. "I hope you're happy now," she said, her glare not giving in an inch, "the speech I had prepared has leapt straight out my head."

He wasn't sure what he meant by that, but he didn't care if what she had to say was pretty, he just wanted to hear it. "Make up something new then. What's the secret?"

When she stopped to glance suspiciously at Ehhulad, he thought he was going to scream. But before he could do anything that extreme, Senna set her hands on her belly and sighed. "You're a big boy, I don't think I'll have to press the importance of this on you like a tattoo. It concerns Derek and myself."

"Is there something wrong with him?" That was terribly likely. David had been considering the possibility of Derek's not being all there since… for a while.

Senna just laughed. "Not technically, although I do understand what you mean. Unfortunately, that's one of the reasons I love him." She looked over at Ehhulad and her smile hardened. "He is not from here, you know this."

"Neither of you are." Ehhulad hugged the blanket around herself and lounged in her own chair. "And I understand that better than other creatures."

While they had a charged staring contest, David scratched his shoulder and wondered if he should remind everyone of the fact that he wasn't wearing a shirt. Maybe later. "Where are you from, then?" Not from the vertical city, he would have remembered someone who acted like Derek. The misplaced action hero of Sherwood Forest, accessories not included.

"Entirely different worlds…" Some of the pain returned to Senna's face, but this time it didn't look like physical pain. "Derek is from a place very much like Tilcaty, while I was born only a few days drive away from here."

"Drive? Like… like in a car?" In the vertical city, cars weren't necessary, but they weren't unknown, either. People remembered them, children played with toy cars, and they were in movies. It didn't seem right to think that anyone in Tilcaty knew what a car was. David almost couldn't bring himself to say the word out loud. Ehhulad looked at him, blank-faced and confused, confirming his theory, and making him uncomfortable into the bargain.

But Senna didn't look confused, or even very surprised. "Yes, in a car. You see, Tilcaty is…" She sat up. "Ehhulad, I need you to go into the kitchen and set the food at our places. Derek will be home any moment, and I am not quite up to moving around just yet." For effect, she dug herself deeper into the chair.

The water spider rolled her dark eyes and grunted an incoherent reply, but she did get up and stomp off to the kitchen. David couldn't help noticing that she didn't succeed in making much noise, and she nearly tripped herself on the blanket trailing behind her.

After she was gone and the sounds of dishes clanking together drifted in, Senna turned back to David. "Tilcaty is a hole. Things and people fall into it regularly, and I am one of the scientists who help them to adjust to their new home."

If there had been a bar of soap to drop, or a glass, or even just something soft, David would have dropped it. Instead, he just let his mouth hang open. He stared at Senna until he couldn't anymore, and then he looked around the room, trying to find something that made sense.

There was a mixture of what he knew he was supposed to see and what he didn't think he should have. No pictures, there should always be family pictures in living rooms, flowers and clay knick-knacks—there was a basket of embroidery and knitting, baby things like bonnets and booties. He got up to sit next to the basket and pick through it. The small part of him that had grown up without permission left him to play with the yarn and needles, and talked for him. "So this is a big fat fake world then, isn't it?"

He didn't turn around to look at Senna, to see whatever she was doing. "Not fake," she sounded indignant, "just… on purpose. In technical terms, it is a bio-dome. The phenomenon of the hole was discovered decades ago, but—"

"But there was nothing here then."

"Correct."

None of the knitting needles were very sharp. They were made of wood, and had a nice smooth feel that was like its own kind of cloth. David had never understood why they were called 'needles' when they were so big. There was no danger of thumb-pricking with these things. "So scientists built a home."

"Yes, and then creatures just continued to fall here." Senna was hurting again, he could hear it in her voice. He hoped Derek would come home and take care of her soon. Or a doctor…

He unraveled a ball of yarn while winding the tail of it around his wrist. "Why is everything like fairy tales, then? Did Snow White fall in?"

Senna actually stopped being serious long enough to laugh then, and he felt some of his cloud go away. "In a way. For years, all of the creatures and plants that appeared were like Ehhulad, right out of a medieval fantasy that didn't make any sense." He looked up, she had gotten out of the chair to kneel on the floor beside him. "But then people started falling in, like Derek. He came from another world, like Tilcaty, and so did others like him. It became imperative to set down rules and physical laws to define the world." She tucked her hair behind her ears, then did it again when the hair escaped. "You're the first new arrival in three years. We'd thought that the hole had been stopped up, or even moved…"

"But here I am." He looked down at his yarn-wrapped hands and smiled, then giggled. So he wasn't in a fantasy world that he could escape by clicking his heels together or finding the right wizard with the right magic spell. Instead, there was science mumbo-jumbo and needles that weren't needles. "Can I go home now?"

Senna was hugging him again, and he didn't want to admit that he needed it. "Oh, David, I wish I could just say yes and send you back right this moment! But…"

"No one ever goes home, do they?" He sniffed, then decided he didn't care about crying and just let himself be held.

The arms around him tightened, "That isn't completely true. Not the ones like Derek, the ones who belong in worlds like this, but there was one other like you…" She pulled back to smile and tweak his nose. "A teenage girl with piercings and a top hat. She found a way back to where she came from."

He pushed his face into her shoulder. "But you don't know how."

At first, Senna didn't answer, which told him he was right. Then she rocked him back and forth a bit, humming softly. "Remember the bee that you told me about? That was what we have dubbed a 'particle rip', more to make it sound trendy than any applicable reason. The younger scientists named it. Basically, when a number of coincidences all string together into a long enough chain, the one common factor they share becomes an anomaly in the time-space continuum. It got too close to you, and then you got pulled in."

It wasn't any easier to take in than when Derek had reacted to being questioned about magic. David took a very deep breath, then pushed it out slowly. "I asked Derek if there was magic here. He started acting weird."

"That doesn't surprise me at all." Senna let him go and started to push herself back to her feet. It was obvious that she couldn't, so David helped her. "Poor Derek doesn't understand the technology that my position allows me, and neither do the regular Tilcaty citizens, so the laws we have call it magic." When she was upright and standing on her own again, she smoothed out her clothes and even fluffed her hair. "That's one of the reasons they call me a hedgewitch. I'm a trained nurse, but only in battlefield medicine."

"You were in a war?" He tried to picture her in a GI Joe outfit, and found it surprisingly easy.

She didn't answer, but retaliated with a question of her own. "How did you get by without a shirt for so long? Heavens, I've lost my head since you've arrived." She took his wrist and dragged him over to a closet. He watched as she went through a few piles of folded things until she found a tunic. It was like the one that Derek had lent him, but nicer, and not quite as big. "Derek tried to make his own clothes once." She giggled while David put the tunic on. "As you can see, he was skilled with everything but taking measurements."

David had to laugh with her, the tunic fit really well, and he was nowhere near Derek's size. "Thank you."

"I wish I could do more for you…" She pulled on the shoulders of the tunic to fit it better, and somehow found microscopic pieces of lint to pick off. "That's why I wanted to know if you can be brave. No coward can remake their life."

He nodded, everything swimming rapidly through his brain. He'd never see his parents again. Whatever had happened in the vertical city, whatever was happening now, he wouldn't know. If the city had turned into a wadded up piece of paper, he wouldn't have any way of finding out. "Can we bring people here?"

Senna blinked and took a step back. "No, David, don't start thinking like that."

"Why not? I came here, so other people can too!"

"You're the first in three years, and besides, there's no way—"

"Breakfast is getting cold."

A small avalanche of clothes tumbled out of the closet, piling at Senna's feet. Ehhulad was holding a mug with steam climbing out of the top and staring for all her coal-black eyes were worth. She looked at Senna, one eyebrow higher than the other, then turned a worried smile on David. Her spindly fingers tightened around the mug, and then she walked carefully around the mess of clothes, so she could stand closer to David and Senna.

He let his hands hang limply at his sides and resisted the urge to look away. "Coming."

"No you aren't." She took one of his hands and put the mug in it. "Both of you, stop all this sobriety and eat before you grow ill." While David sipped the reassuringly warm contents of the mug, Ehhulad took Senna's arm and lead her away from the mess and towards the kitchen. For a moment, he wondered if he should set the mug down on the floor and put everything back in the closet, and then he just went ahead and did it. Even though he wouldn't see his mother again, he felt better showing himself that he had learned good habits from her.

After the last pair of pants was folded and put away, he picked up the mug and made his way to the kitchen, downing the rest of his drink. Everyone was sitting at the table, even Derek. How long had it taken to put everything away? He hadn't paid much attention to anything. "Good morning…"

Derek got up and helped David sit down, chattering to him about something that might have sounded interesting if David could have really listened. He just nodded and started eating the food that someone put in front of him. What was going to happen now? Was there some kind of foster home system in Tilcaty? He'd read a lot about foster care back home, and it had scared and depressed him. But things were different here, maybe he wouldn't get lost in the system. Maybe he would even get to stay with Senna and Derek.

He smiled. That would be interesting. He'd get to be a big brother to the baby, and maybe he could convince Ehhulad to stay. They could dig a pond for her if there wasn't a body of water close enough to the house.

The eggs caught in his throat and he almost choked. He couldn't just say, okay, that's fine, and pretend that letting go of his old life was okay! Even though the vertical city had turned into paper, the people hadn't, he'd seen Paige and Jacob when he'd started to fall. They'd been alive and moving, not paper at all. "I want to go home." There had to be someone to blame, some evil witch—someone painfully obvious, like the Auntie or Miss Cowslip—who'd sent him away. Maybe he was a hero and he was the only one who could save his home. How could he save his home if he was pretending to be someone else in Tilcaty?

Ehhulad's cold hand closed over his and he snapped his head up. "Calm yourself."

She was right, he needed to stop getting upset. All that did was make him tired. But what were they going to do? Tell him more things he didn't want to know and then just shrug and say they were sorry and couldn't do anything? Forget that, those weren't puzzle pieces that helped him, they were just… nothing that fit into his personal analogies. Nothing helpful.

"What's wrong with the pup?" Derek raised an eyebrow at Senna, who sighed and bit her lip.

"Leave him, Derek," she said quietly. "You remember when we met, you were fairly upset yourself then…" She went on eating, not as if nothing was wrong, but as if she wanted everything to be alright.

A knock at the door shattered the tension and nearly gave David a heart attack. His body went rigid and he started breathing funny, but he managed to calm himself down while Derek got up to answer the door. Ehhulad smiled anxiously at him, and pushed another mug of tea in his direction, while Senna did her best to convince him that he would be fine.

Then Derek came back in the room, followed by a tall wide woman wearing—a wide-brimmed hat made to keep off the sun.

David nearly fell backwards in his chair. She'd followed him. He didn't know how and he doubted Senna could explain it, but Miss Cowslip had gotten to Tilcaty. His first instinct was to jump to his feet and run as fast as he could, but the only way out of the kitchen was the doorway that Miss Cowslip was blocking. He buried his face in his mug and pretended to suddenly become very hungry. Maybe food would give his brain the boost it would need to get him out of this safely.

Even though her clothes were appropriate to the world they were in now, it was impossible not to know that it was the same Miss Cowslip who made Jacob's braces vibrate and scared Paige. She sat down in a chair that Derek pulled out for her, and then greetings were passed around.

Before anyone could introduce David, he looked up and swallowed down his fear. "Hello," he said, proud and very glad that his voice sounded normal.

"Good morning," Miss Cowslip oozed in that honey voice she had used at the playground. It felt like years had passed since then. "I didn't think I'd see you again, Clarence."

…Clarence. He almost blinked at her in utter confusion, but then a series of images flashed through his mind. Soccer ball. Painting. Goldfish. Clarence. When he'd met her, she'd asked for his name and he'd given her the name of his pet. He didn't know why that made him feel better, but it did. He actually managed a smile. "Neither did I. Sorry, I forgot your name. What was it, again?"

He knew that everyone was staring at him and wondering about the Clarence thing, but he was certain that they would play along for his sake. Senna was smart enough to pick up on it on some intuitive level, Ehhulad probably was too—and Derek might not have been, but he obviously picked up and followed cues from his wife, which was a way of being smart.

Miss Cowslip didn't seem to realize anything was going on. "I'm surprised, I thought you would remember me for my daughter if for no other reason. I am Eugenia Cowslip."

The name was almost exactly the same, even with the added and very stupid-sounding first name, but that thing about a daughter didn't seem right at all. David wasn't sure if he should try to go after it, but then Ehhulad did it for him. "You have a daughter, Miss Cowslip?"

"Of course," her smiled was like honey, too, and David disliked it even more. "She's waiting outside with the carriage. Shall I send for her?" She didn't wait for an answer, she just started to rise to her feet.

Derek stopped her with a gentlemanly cough and offered to get her daughter, then left without waiting for an answer. While he was gone, silence might have settled over the table, but Senna was too clever to let that happen. She put on a sunny smile. "I feel the baby will come soon," she said, and David could have sworn that she was the best actress he'd ever seen. He couldn't even tell that she was worried about anything. "I'm so glad you're here."

"But of course, dearest," Miss Cowslip said, clutching her mug with fat sausage fingers. "There's no help for miles, I wouldn't leave you to birth your first child alone."

And there it was. Her leverage. That was why Senna hadn't seen David's discomfort and sent Miss Cowslip packing immediately—this lady was the midwife that Derek had mentioned before. David gripped his fork so that he could feel it making imprints in his palm. At least she didn't know his real name, that was still safe. But she knew his face, and she knew where he was staying. His knees shook.

The only one not following along with the cheerful conversation was Ehhulad. She was tracing an invisible pattern on the tablecloth, occasionally looking at David. Then, while Miss Cowslip was flattering Senna's cooking, Ehhulad blurted out, "Where is your husband?"

The whole room went quiet, and even the colors seemed to dull. Miss Cowslip's facial muscles twitched, but she didn't fall into a negative expression. It just made her smile look creepy. "Why do you ask, little spider?"

Before Ehhulad could explain herself, or even wheedle an answer from Miss Cowslip without giving up any of her own information, the door opened and Derek came back into the house. Right behind him was—

This time David really did knock his chair back, but he wasn't in it. Paige was standing there, next to Derek, wearing a tunic and short pants, and looking like she belonged in them.

A loud series of excited barking grabbed his attention and he nearly shrieked. All of this and now the little black dog was back! He was going to pass out soon, he knew it. The dog stopped barking for a second to pant, then went back to it. It scurried towards him, barking and panting and just getting far too close. "Senna…!" he tried, but then he gave up and just walked past Derek and Paige, out to the safety of outside.

He hadn't realized that he'd started running until he came to a stop near the bank of a shallow stream, leaning on his knees and breathing hard. The house was still in view, but it was far away, mocking him. He'd left Paige in there. Last time he'd had no one but Jacob to help him, but this time he'd had Senna and Derek, and Ehhulad—they were plenty of help against any scary thing.

Even a dog. He plunked himself down onto the slightly damp ground and gazed disgustedly at his reflection in the water, half-expecting Ehhulad to pop up and call him a 'pretty little bleeder' again. Why had she done that? Things had already been too much for him to handle, and then she'd gone and turned into that black terrier. She had to have done it on purpose, he didn't think she could change accidentally.

"I'm very sorry, but I had to."

"Why?" He didn't bother to look up, she probably knew he wouldn't.

"Because you aren't ready to face her yet."

The water seemed to get more… excited, with Ehhulad nearby. It lapped at the air in a way that made him want to take off his shoes and dip his toes in. He untied his shoelaces and pulled his shoes off, but he left his socks on and kept them out of the water. "I was facing her."

Ehhulad sat beside him and slipped her legs into the water, almost all the way up to her knees. "With great caution, Clarence." She kicked up a few waves, then looked back at him. "Why did she call you that?"

He picked at his dirty socks, pulling at the fabric and then just letting it go. "When I met her in the—where I came from… she asked me what my name was. I didn't trust her, so I told her my name was Clarence." Then, because he couldn't help it, he chuckled. "It's my goldfish's name."

They both laughed for a while. It wasn't really that funny, but he was glad, they both needed to laugh. He knew that he did. Then she looked back at the house. "If you go back now, she'll have sent her 'daughter' away."

His insides boiled. "Paige is not her daughter." It was his fault. If he'd just stayed in the elevator, then Paige would still be safe with him and Jacob. …Jacob. What had happened to him? He didn't like Paige much, that was true, but he would never leave anyone to just be taken by someone creepy like Miss Cowslip. "She's the one you said put a mark on me, isn't she?"

Ehhulad nodded. "A powerful one, she is. Not a hedgewitch, the others would know her as one of theirs, and trust me, she is not." She shivered, then took her legs out of the stream. "Whatever she wants you and your friend for, it can't be good." Sighing loudly, she stood up and shook the water off of herself. "I am sorry for frightening you again, though. Do you forgive me?"

"…I guess so." After all, she had done it to help him, and if he got mad at her now, he'd risk losing an friend that he was apparently going to need. From the start, Ehhulad had known more than him, just like Senna and even Derek. Knowing things was an important part of everything, and David had decided that it was time he started learning them. "What do you think I should do?"

She looked surprised by his question, but then she smiled, wide and open. "You are asking me?"

"Yes."

"Then I advise you to hurry back with me and convince Senna to let us help birth her baby. She is a frightened mother-to-be, and her husband is no better, but if we offer our assistance, she might send the cow away."

David laughed, too hard, it hurt his chest, but he couldn't help it. "The cow. I like that."

"Thank you, I was rather proud of it. Are you coming with me."

"Do you even need to ask?"

When they reached the house, the carriage was gone. David hoped that meant that both Miss Cowslip and Paige were gone, but he doubted it. Ehhulad was right, Paige was gone when they walked back into the house. She'd only been there so that Miss Cowslip could taunt him with the fact that she had won.

For now. He was going to get Paige back, and he was going to find out what the evil sunhat lady did to Jacob. "Senna?" he called out, keeping the anger and fear out of his voice. Even if Miss Cowslip had gone, he didn't want to scare his new friends.

"In here, you two."

They followed Senna's voice into the back of the house, a bedroom. It was a bit like the living room, there was some sewing and a rocking chair in the corner, and lots of books. Even a stuffed bear on a toy chest. David would have smiled if Miss Cowslip hadn't been standing in the room with Derek and Senna.

She was holding a tiny scarf and chattering away, but she stopped to turn a greasy smile his way. "Why, Clarence, we were worried about you."

I just bet you were. It took a great deal of effort not to grunt and make a rude face, but he managed. They had to get rid of her somehow, but how? He doubted she would leave for any reason now that she knew he was here, and she had her claws in Senna… A desperate and probably ridiculously poor idea poked his brain, and he decided to give it a chance. "I ran into a messenger for you."

Miss Cowslip's eyes widened and her jaw went slack for a fraction of a second. "A messenger? What was the message?"

Ehhulad stepped in and rescued him from having to make up something believable on his own. "You are needed in the next town. Their hedgewizard took ill and they are afraid there is something wrong with the water." She grasped David's arm and trembled, her hair tickling his neck. Derek gave them both a questioning look, but then he focused all of his attention on Senna as she sat on the bed and gave in to a cuddly mood.

While David tried not to do something that would mess things up, Miss Cowslip was standing there and chewing on her bottom lip. "That does sound serious indeed… But surely there is someone closer to them, someone more qualified than I?"

"Oh no," David piped up, "there isn't anybody. They were afraid you wouldn't go, but—" He couldn't think of any compliments and he didn't want to, but he didn't think that anything even resembling an insult would help here.

Once again, Ehhulad knew what to do and did it. "They are in need, Madam, how can you stand and question while they suffer?"

That did the trick at last. Miss Cowslip nodded curtly and set the scarf down on the bed. "Madam Grupenski, I must take my leave of you." And then she whisked herself out, before anyone could even offer to walk her to the door.

Derek kissed Senna's head and chuckled. "I'm not sure what's going on, but the three of you have some explaining to do." He looked up at Ehhulad. "You're quite the actor, Miss Spider."

She bowed. "And you are a wonderful audience, cook. Perhaps we shall all form a dinner theater troupe one day, and feast on success."

"Alright, stop the silliness, both of you." Senna didn't get up from her snuggling position, but she did fix David and Ehhulad both with somber looks. "What was that all about?"

"You said you didn't know who Miss Cowslip is!!" David thought about everything they'd talked about before breakfast.

Senna shook her head, then rested it on Derek's shoulder. "No, I said I wish I knew what she is. And that she would probably like to take credit for your being here."

She was twisting the words so that she was right, could she do that? That had to be against somebody's rules, his, if no one else's. "But still…" he muttered, completely aware of how incredibly lame that sounded. "You could have told me."

"Yes, I should have." When she looked back up at him, there were tears in his eyes. "I'm so sorry, I have no excuse."

Derek set her head back on his shoulder and stroked her hair, shushing and making other soothing noises. He sent David a quick look full of worry, confusion, and something else. "Never mind that, she's gone now. What was wrong with her? It was just the midwife. Certainly, she gives me the willies, and she isn't the type of woman you'd ask round for tea regularly, but…" He sighed. "Would someone please just tell me what's going on?"

While the others tried to explain everything to Derek, David went into the living room to play with the yarn again. Maybe by rolling the yarn back into a ball, he could roll his thoughts back together. They were too frayed to do anything without him.

Paige was here, in Tilcaty. Maybe Jacob was, too. Or even Loren, or his parents, or the auntie. Anyone. At this point, David was sorry that he had ever wished for someone he knew to be here with him. He should have been content to be alive and not smooshed somewhere at the bottom.

But who was to say that this wasn't the bottom? A part of it, anyway. Senna knew what cars were, and what she'd said about her science didn't sound too far from some of the science he knew from borrowing Loren's high school textbooks. It would explain how Miss Cowslip and Paige could be there when he had only gotten there by getting attacked by a particle rip. Or whatever the bee had been.

He picked up one of the knitting needles and made some slipknots to loop around it. This was getting to be too much like a game, or a daydream. Except that if it were one of those, he'd be better prepared. But some games started you out unprepared… Then they sent you on a journey so you'd prepare yourself. He thought of Derek's banged-up shield and grinned to himself. Maybe he could take it to the blacksmith. Derek had no business going on any adventure, not with the baby so close.

Feeling a little more infused with purpose—even though he knew he wasn't—David jumped to his feet… and tripped on the yarn that had somehow wrapped itself around his ankles. "Heh. Let go." He kicked himself free, then got up more carefully, and walked back into the kitchen.

Ehhulad was nowhere to be seen, but Senna and Derek were still sitting at the table, looking worried. "Are you feeling better now, David?" Senna asked, an anxious smile on her face. She looked pale.

He nodded absentmindedly, then pulled up a chair to sit across from them. "The shield that Derek was taking to a blacksmith… Was that just so you could have some extra money?" Part of him hoped that they would spill the beans about some sort of special magic/technology that was involved somehow, but that was his imagination running off and trying to have its way with things. "And what about that animal in the forest, the one Derek said was poisoned?" He felt rushed, as if he needed to know all of the answers now, and he couldn't wait any longer. Paige needed his help, and if Tilcaty was as much like a fairy tale game as he was starting to think it was, then he needed what every swords and sorcery video game hero needed: experience.

Taking the shield and finding out what had caused the poison may have seemed completely unrelated, but it was the perfect mixture of where he'd been and where he hadn't. If he could figure out how this world worked—to some extent—then Miss Cowslip wouldn't have that advantage over him anymore. And maybe then Ehhulad wouldn't stop him from 'facing' her again… He tapped his feet on the floor and waited for an answer to one or both of his questions.

It wasn't long in coming. Derek set his hand over Senna's on the table and tried to smile. "Money has gotten a bit… hard to come by in the past few months," he said, looking troubled. "But we couldn't ask you to take the shield."

"That's okay, I'm asking you if I can take it." David grinned, he was going to win if there was an argument. "I need an adventure." He also needed to get away from a place that Miss Cowslip knew she could find him at.

"Now hold on, David, you can't just—"

"Adventure?" Senna sat up straighter in her chair and sent a murderous frown at her husband. "Did he get that word from you, dearest?" Her hand tightened around his, and he winced.

"Well… Maybe, but it's not… That is, I don't think he's just running of for the sake of some silly adventure." He wasn't really sweating, but he was glancing around nervously. Looking for an escape, probably, David's dad got that look on his face when he was on the wrong side of a fight.

Uh-oh. Derek was in trouble. David dropped his smile and cheerfulness to wave his hands around and try to set things straight. "No, it's not his fault! I just thought that since I made you come back here, you should stay with Senna and the baby. I can take the shield for you."

Senna's glare melted into a look of surprised and slightly guilty happiness. "David, that's a sweet idea, but you're so young, and you don't know your way around." She shook her head and pushed away Derek's idly poking finger. "Stop that."

He chuckled and kept poking her head and twirling her short black hair around his finger. "Come now, he can take Ehhulad with him. I'll find someone else to help with the baby, you know I can." He made a face. "I never liked that cow-woman much anyway."

"Derek!" Senna gasped and slapped his shoulder playfully. "Do no speak ill of someone like that. She wouldn't hesitate to turn you into a honeyed tangerine if she caught you." Then she stopped. "Not that she… could turn you into anything but a thoroughly unhappy person…" She let out a sigh and turned her attention back to David. "It would be a great help if you let me keep Ehhulad here while you go, but I do know someone who will be able to take you all the way to Torrance and back. A couple of someones."

His grin came back, this was really starting to sound like a game. And the more it sounded like a game, the more he could pretend that it wasn't dangerous. "And I have to pick whose gonna go with me?"

"Yes." It didn't look like she understood why he was so excited, but she was probably used to Derek getting excited over things she didn't understand. "You seem to get along very well with Ehhulad, so another creature who knows the forests might be a good guide, but there is a boy about your age in the village who knows the way as well. He also knows a bit about medicine." She raised an eyebrow at Derek, then looked back at David. "I'm not sure what my husband led you to believe, but travel between towns is still dangerous here."

The mental image of the boar corpse flitted through his mind and he had to repress a shudder that had nothing to do with excitement. He still hadn't figured out what was scariest about it, the poison or the fact that there were animals that big running around as if it was completely normal. He nodded slowly. "I understand." But who should go with him? He would have liked Ehhulad to go, but she was the best person to stay and help with the baby, after all, she'd been the one who'd known how to get rid of Miss Cowslip. David wouldn't feel alright if he didn't leave Senna and Derek with Ehhulad. But it was a tough decision.

He tried to put himself back into the game perspective. A journey with a guy his age would be fun if Tilcaty were more like home, but it wasn't, and he would probably just get frustrated with trying not to seem out-of-place—which he was anyway. Ehhulad hadn't really had a problem with his being from another world, so maybe another forest creature would at least share her attitude. Even if that creature wasn't as good and fast a friend. "What kind of creature are you thinking of?" he asked.

Senna smiled, maybe that was the companion she'd hoped he'd choose. Another indication that it was the right decision. Senna was smart, and she knew a lot. "He's not a water spider, but perhaps something a bit more advantageous." She stood up and walked across the kitchen to open a window. "You might be interested to know that he can fly."

Derek seemed to know who or what she was talking about, and he didn't look happy about it. "No, Senna, that boy is a nuisance!"

"That boy is an unfortunate who deserves a chance on occasion!"

Apparently David had stumbled across an old argument. He wondered if he should have just risked frustration and accepted the village person guide. "Um… You guys?"

No one paid any attention to his pathetic attempt. Senna reached into a flower pot and took out a metal something, while Derek continued to whine about what she was doing. "The last time you gave him a task—a simple task that anyone could have done, mind you—he had the entire city in an uproar. We still haven't calmed down some of those old ladies."

"None of them died, Derek, stop being such a nervous old hen." Senna pointed the metal thing out the window and waved it around a bit before dropping it back into the flower pot. "Ticarus is a perfectly nice boy, and those old ladies needed a bit of excitement, if you ask me."

Derek humphed and brushed past her to shut the window and bolt it. "Fine. Damage done. You've had your way, so don't come crying to me when that boy gets David into trouble."

"Hush. He can take care of himself." She smiled at David. "Your guide's name is Ticarus Backlash. Don't stare at his wings, and don't tease him. His temper is a bit on the short side." Derek was about to add his own remark to that, but Senna silenced him with a look. "Ticarus is outside waiting for you."

David hugged her, then Derek, and made them promise to tell Ehhulad goodbye for him. The shield was leaning against the wall next to the door. It was so heavy he nearly dropped it. For a small moment full of despair, he tried to figure out what he was going to do with it, but then Derek came and brought the shoulder strap and belt that he'd been wearing.

While he tied the shield to David's back, he muttered under his breath, "Don't take any lip from that winged idiot, he's no older nor wiser than you. And you are in charge. He's just the one that knows the way. If you don't want to do something he tells you to, then don't do it."

These disparate views of his guide were starting to make David more than a little nervous. Normally he would have immediately accepted Senna's side of things, but Derek did sound like he knew what he was talking about. "Is he mean?"

Derek laughed. "Oh no, not mean, just a right selfish little whelp. He'll do anything for a giggle, even if it'll get someone hurt." His green eyes clouded over. "Even if that someone is himself." He blinked the clouds away and patted David's shoulder. "Now go on, the sooner you go off with that rapscallion, the sooner you can come back and tell Senna that I'm right about him being an unrepentant scamp."

With that kind of introduction, David was surprised when he finally stepped out of the door and saw this Ticarus for himself. The parts of him that were recognizably human were a little on the scrawny side, but he obviously got enough to eat at regular mealtimes. His hands were mostly like David's but the fingers were long and spindly like Ehhulad's.

If Senna had not told David not to stare, then most of his initial impression of Ticarus would have been taken up by the wings. But he only glanced at them long enough to see that they were growing out of shoulders somehow, and they were a soft gray color. Ticarus scratched his head, then smoothed back his hair. It was brown, but it looked like it was starting to turn the same color as his feathers in places. "Hi," he said, waving shyly. "Senna called me here… What did she want?"

David thought of the metal thing that Senna had taken out of the flower pot, and wondered if it was part of the magic/technology that she was allowed to have. He decided not to worry about it. "I need to take this shield to Torrance. Senna said that you would show me the way."

"Sure." Ticarus pointed. "That way." Then he flexed his wings and started to rise up in the air. "If that's all, then tell her that next time I won't come. Silly to go all that way just to—"

"Stop!" Either he took things too literally, or Ticarus was already starting to prove Derek right. "I meant that you have to go with me…"

"Then you should have said so, fluffhead." Ticarus settled back onto the grass and folded his arms over his chest. "You're not too bright, are you?"

Maybe David should have gone with the village guide after all. He swallowed a groan and just said, "My name is David. How long will it take to get to Torrance?"

"On foot? Couple of days. If you'd let me fly you, though, it'd probably be… well, less than that." Ticarus blushed and dug a taloned heel into the ground. "I'm not that good with figures 'n formulas."

"That's okay." David wasn't sure how to act around this person, a winged boy with two clashing reputations. But even though he was fairly certain that this errand was going to take long enough that he wouldn't be back in time to see the baby's birth, he wanted to return as soon as he could. If he stood there trying to be polite, it would take them forever just to leave.

Ticarus didn't seem to care. He thumbed his nose—presumably at David, there wasn't anyone else around—and cracked a toothy grin. "How long has it been since I was here last? Must have been forever, you're all growed up!"

"Huh?"

"Did your mom tell you about me? My name is Ticarus Earned Himself A Good Backlash, but people usually just call me Ticarus. When they talk to me without bein' insulting." He scratched his head and fluttered his wings, sending little flecks of dust and dandruff floating to the ground. "Bet your dad was happy you turned out to be a boy instead. They all thought you'd be a girl."

Irritation made David's fingers curl. He couldn't tell if Ticarus had honestly mixed him up with Senna's baby, or if the giant bird boy was just trying to be a pain in the neck. Whatever he was doing, the more he talked, the more distracted his expression became. He also rose slowly into the air until he was hovering a good handful of inches off the grass.

Finally David decided to just explain himself outright. "Look, Ticarus, I'm not from around here. I'm just running an errand for Senna," it was probably best not to mention Derek's name, "and I need you to come and make sure I don't get lost."

"Or eaten." Ticarus stuck his finger in his ear and made a face. It looked worse than if he'd picked his nose. "I'm better at keeping people from getting eaten."

David wasn't sure how he was supposed to take that, or even if he believed it. But he was very tired of standing in front of the Grupenski's house, so he forced a smile. "Let's just get going, and you can tell me on the way."

"Will you really listen to me?" Ticarus flapped up a small gust of dirt, then jumped back to the ground and started half-hopping, half-walking alongside David. "You'll have to pay attention to me. Bad things happen when people ignore me. And when I get bored."

Whatever that meant, it probably wasn't a threat. There was no malice in his voice, he was probably just chattering idly again. "What kinds of things?"

"You wanna see?"

"No."

There didn't seem to be anybody walking around, not nearby anyway. David wondered if it was because they were afraid Ticarus would get bored. But Senna wouldn't have called a dangerous person to be anyone's guide, so David wasn't too worried. In fact, he was having fun just watching his guide flit around, sometimes picking up speed to kick a pebble, or slowing down so he wouldn't bump into something. Ticarus whistled to himself for a while, then said, "You're really slow. Can I just carry you?"

"Wouldn't I be heavy?"

"Probably, you look kind of chunky. Maybe that's why you're so slow."

David glared at him, then started running. Slow, huh? I'll show you 'slow.' His feet pounded the grass at a loud steady rhythm, but Ticarus kept up as if it were nothing at all. He even yawned. David ran faster, only sparing enough breath to ask which way to turn when they passed the last building Ticarus pointed him left, but said nothing. They went on that way for a while, until David's sides were hurting too much for him to even slow to a walk.

He skidded to a halt, then hobbled forward enough to escape his own cloud of dust. It didn't help that Ticarus's wing-flapping was making the cloud bigger, whether he meant to or not. "Torrance is still far away, even if you run. You sure I can't just fly you? You'd like flying, it's fun." He settled onto the ground and held his wings still. "Unless being up high makes you nervous."

"It doesn't." That was the understatement of the year. But David didn't have the breath to elaborate. Maybe it would be better if he just asked for a ride, if only for a little while. But Ticarus didn't seem terribly reliable. What if he got bored and decided that it would be interesting to just let go of David and see what happened? David knew what would happen, and he didn't want to think about it. Falling had always been a mortal fear of his, especially after he and his family had moved to the vertical city. His fall into Tilcaty had not helped.

Surprisingly, when he was ready to start walking again, Ticarus walked as well. It wasn't the ridiculous whimsical tromping that David had seen before, but a sort of ungainly limp. His taloned feet were too big and awkward for walking to even be comfortable. Ticarus didn't even seen to notice it. "Just as well, I guess. That shield would probably hit me a lot while I carried you, and girls only like to say that they think scars are manly. All the ones I've met think they're ugly and disgusting. But they probably just mean mine." He grinned. "Wanna see?"

David shrugged, making the shield clank against him. "Sure." He stopped walking and turned around.

"Hooray." Ticarus spun himself around so quickly he nearly tripped on his own feet, then stretched his wings out to a truly impressive span. "See back there, by my shoulder blades. Ugly ol' things aren't they?"

The skin at the base of his wings was a massive collection of scar tissue, and it looked like someone had tried to cut some of it off recently. David felt his stomach turn. "What happened?" He'd thought that Ticarus was an out-of-place creature, like Ehhulad. But if his wings weren't natural—which the scar tissue was suggesting—then why were they there?

"That's a long story. Let's keep going, chubby, and I'll tell you some of it."

David didn't like the way this path to a nickname was going, but he didn't say anything about it. If he had, it probably would have just encouraged Ticarus to come up with the worst fat nickname that would pop into his head. "So go on then."

Still walking in that awkward limp of his, Ticarus made a sharpish turn to the right and looked up at the sky. "I'm one of a kind, but not really."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean—" Ticarus gave the air an angry flap and left the ground for a moment, "that I'm not the only person to be mixed up like this. Don't look so shocked, I know you were wondering."

It was true, so David held his tongue.

"There was a dog man a while back, he was before me. Before they really figured out what they were doing." The anger faded and Ticarus looked anxiously around him, slowing down so much that he nearly tripped. "I'm a miserable failure too, but that guy took it personal. He actually wanted this 'procedure', and he wasn't happy when they told him it hadn't worked right."

A bit irked at this new information, David grappled with the toppling view of Tilcaty that he thought he'd had all leveled out. Now this new element was spinning him around all the way back to square one—no matter how he'd been pretending, he still didn't know what to do with himself in this place. Even worse, this was also a link to the vertical city. The man that had been chasing Paige… "What do you mean, there was a dog man?"

Ticarus perked up. "Oh, so you were listening! Yeah, there was a man who wanted to be a wolf or something. He read too many books, I think." He stuck his finger in his ear again, and wiggled it around. "Reading just gets you into trouble."

David couldn't help laughing. "From what I can tell about you, I'd say that anything would get you into trouble."

"You just might have something with that," Ticarus said thoughtfully, before taking his finger out of his ear and wiping it on his pants. "Last time they tossed me into confinement, I was just standing around mindin' my own business."

"Right after you did what?"

"…stole some chickens."

"Why would you steal chickens?"

Ticarus chuckled, shrugging his wings into a strange bounce that lasted a few seconds. "Y'know, I don't actually remember. It was a good four days ago." He hopped along an invisible path for a bit, then zigzagged off supposedly in his own direction. Then, just as suddenly, he stopped. "Things just happen. Things I don't remember."

Looking at him made David uncomfortable. It also made him wonder, a lot of things. His wonder muscles were starting to get too tired to do anything. He followed Ticarus quietly for a while, then spoke up. "Why did you tell me about all of that?"

"Well you're Senna's boy, aren't you? She knows, so it's okay that you know too." Ticarus looked surprised to be asked. "Don't tell anyone else though. Say a word like 'procedure' to anyone but a hedgewitch or -wizard, and you'll find yourself on the wrong end of a bad hunt.

David walked faster, suddenly very eager to have the closest village not nearly as close. "What's a bad hunt?"

"That's when they decide you know too much magic for your own good, and they want to make it so that you don't know any at all." An unlucky bush fell victim to Ticarus's overlarge feet. "I'm lucky they think that I'm supposed to be like this, or they'd have hunted me out years ago."

"How long have you—" But Senna had said specifically not to ask about his wings. Even though he'd already said some things about them, it was probably still a subject to avoid. David tried to think of something else that he could ask. "When I first got here, there was a big dead boar. Derek said it was probably poisoned. We were going to talk to Senna about it, but then…" But then too many other things had happened and no one seemed to remember the poor dead corpse. He couldn't blame them, he wasn't exactly in a hurry to dwell on it.

For the first time, Ticarus lost the half-distracted almost vacant look of a two-year-old who'd missed nap time. "There's nothing to worry about. The details of that kind of thing are way boring. Senna tried to explain it to me once and I think I fell asleep." He smiled, showing off entirely human teeth that needed to be brushed.

It seemed like they'd been walking forever, but David had no way of knowing how long it had really been. On his last birthday, his dad had given him a watch, but that had been almost a whole year ago, and the watch had had plenty of time to get lost. He'd asked for a new one for this upcoming birthday, but that was still a few days away. Unless the time in Tilcaty was so different that he'd missed it. "How much longer before we actually get anywhere?"

Ticarus chuckled as he flew up higher and pulled his knees up to his chest, turning himself into a little ball with wings. He dipped a few times, then stretched out again. "I already told you, it'll take a few days to get to Torrance. With that shield, even if I carried you, it might still take just as long."

A stray gust of wind tugged at him, but he managed to stay relatively on course. David sighed and slumped a bit. "Too bad we couldn't get the wagon. That was a lot faster than walking."

"Also dern dangerous."

He looked over at Ticarus. "How is it dangerous?"

"The horses. They're all ornery at the best of times, but wagon horses are just plain crazy." Even though he was twirling slowly, and generally looking ridiculous, Ticarus managed to continue traveling in something like a straight line. "It can cost a man his life to train one not to kill someone. Why'd you bring it up?"

"Senna came and got us in a wagon…" All of that bunk about horses being crazy just sounded stupid, but David couldn't be 100 percent sure about it either way. "So that would be a no, then."

"A no to what?"

While he'd been thinking about alternate forms of travel, he'd lost sight of his guide. A sudden rush of feeling lost made his legs feel heavy and he had to stop walking. "Ticarus?" He spun around as well as he could without actually moving, then spun back the other way. "Where did you go?" It was the first time since he'd arrived that he'd really been all by himself. Even when he'd run away from his encounter with Miss Cowslip, the house had still been in sight. Now he couldn't even see Senna and Derek's neighbors' houses. "Ticarus?"

The whoosh of a man-made gust of wind brushed his hair out of his face. "I think you've said my name more in one day than most people ever have in a longer than that." For the first time since he'd shown up, Ticarus looked serious. "Listen, you seem to be in an awful hurry…"

David waited for him to finish the sentence, but he didn't. While David was waiting, a thin pair of arms hooked under his arms and then slowly, he felt his feet leave the ground. Only a few seconds after he could really let his toes dangle, he dipped back down and dragged for a couple of feet. That was a bigger reason to giggle than the pure fun of going into the air. But then Ticarus adjusted his grip, let out a small grunt of effort and—

They were flying. It was by no means effortless, on either side, David had to do his part to keep himself from slipping out of Ticarus's grasp. But it was worth it to see the everything under him go past, so quickly that the colors blurred a bit. Either Ticarus was stronger than he looked, or David had overestimated how much he and the shield weighed together. "This is great!"

"Glad you—ernf—think so…!"

It didn't sound like Ticarus was quite up to conversation, so David did it by himself. "My home is even higher than this." Looking down at things from this much more familiar vantage point made him feel friendlier with his surroundings. The itch for adventure that had he'd thought he'd lost was coming back to him. "I wish Paige was here."

He fell back into silence, until he realized that he was somehow making himself heavier. Ticarus jerked them both up, then tightened his grip. "Don't get sad on me," he said, his voice strained, "this is easier when you're happy."

Obligingly, David pushed away thoughts of the vertical city and tried to concentrate on how wonderful it was to be dangling his feet over nothing.

"So…. tell me about… this friend of yours. Is she… pretty?"

David glanced over his shoulder—and then up a bit—and glared at Ticarus. "Don't get any idea. Even if she was here, she's too young to be pretty. The way you mean it."

"Calm down. What are you, her dad?"

Sometimes I have to be. David shifted his weight very carefully. "Something like that, yeah. Actually."

He nearly cried out when he slid out of Ticarus' grip and there was nothing but the chilling sensation of Down enveloping his body. It had come so quickly that David didn't even have time to decide how much he wanted to throw up before it was over.

His arms were sore, all the way from his shoulders to his fingertips. Ticarus was grasping his hands so tightly that is was hard not to whimper. Ticarus's face looked like he'd just spent an hour chewing on a lemon, and his ears were starting to turn red. "Hang on," he squeaked, and then, so gradually that David wasn't sure of it at first, they started heading for the ground.

Even when he could feel the tall prickly grass reaching up his pants legs to poke through his socks, David didn't let go. Ticarus pulled his own hands free and then started stretching his arms and wiggling his wrists around. That all looked like a good idea, but David's knees just weren't up to it. He sat down on the grass where he was decided to name the shield Trouble. "Warn me next time, will you?"

Ticarus stopped stretching long enough to roll his eyes and give David a nasty look. "I already told you I can't keep you up for long. Even without the shield, you're still heavy."

"You should still say something before you just go and drop me," David said, settling into a sulk. His heart was just beginning to calm down, but his legs still felt like soup noodles. If he had any say in the future, than there would be no more falling. Of any kind.