On the Edge, page 2
It was her flash that had started all of their trouble.
No, Rose reflected, they’d had plenty of trouble before her. Draytons were always unlucky. Too smart and too twisted for their own good. Grandpa was a pirate and a rover. Dad was a gold digger. Grandma was stubborn like a goat and always thought she knew better than anyone else. Mom was a tramp. But all those problems didn’t affect anyone but the individual Draytons. When Rose flashed white at the Graduation Fair, she focused the attention of countless Edge families squarely on their little clan. Even now, even with the rifles on the floor, she didn’t regret it. She felt guilty about it, she wished things hadn’t gone the way they did, but given a chance, she would do it again.
Ahead the road curved. Rose took the turn a bit too fast. The truck’s springs creaked.
A man stood in the road, like a gray smudge against the encroaching twilight.
She slammed on the brakes. The Ford skidded in a screech on the hard, dry dirt of the road. She caught a glimpse of long pale hair and piercing green eyes staring straight at her.
The truck hurtled at him. She couldn’t stop it.
The man leapt straight up. Feet in dark gray boots landed on the hood of the truck with a thud and vanished. The man vaulted over the roof to the side and disappeared into the trees.
The truck slid to a stop. Rose gulped the air. Her heart fluttered in her chest. Her fingertips tingled, and she tasted bitterness on her tongue.
She stabbed the seat belt release button, threw the door open, and jumped out onto the road. “Are you hurt?”
The Wood lay quiet.
“Hello?”
No answer. The man was gone.
“Rose, who was that?” Georgie’s eyes were the size of small saucers.
“I don’t know.” Relief flooded her. She hadn’t hit him. She got scared out of her wits, but she hadn’t hit him. Everybody was fine. Nobody was hurt. Everybody was fine . . .
“Did you see the swords?” Jack asked.
“What swords?” All she’d seen were the blond hair, green eyes, and some kind of cloak. She couldn’t even recall his face—just a pale smudge.
“He had a sword,” Georgie said. “On his back.”
“Two swords,” Jack corrected. “One on the back and one on his belt.”
Some of the older locals liked to play with swords, but none of them had long blond hair. And none of them had eyes like that. Most people facing a truck head-on would be scared. He stared her down as if she had insulted him by nearly running him over. Like he was some sort of king of the road.
Strangers were never good in the Edge. It wasn’t wise to linger.
Jack sniffed the air, wrinkling his nose the way he did when he looked for a scent trail. “Let’s find him.”
“Let’s not.”
“Rose . . .”
“You’re on thin ice already.” She climbed into the truck and shut the door. “We’re not chasing after some knucklehead who thinks he’s too important to walk on the shoulder.” She snorted, trying to get her heart rate under control.
Georgie opened his mouth.
“Not another word.”
A couple of minutes later, they reached the boundary, the point where the Edge ended and the Broken began. Rose always recognized the precise moment when she passed into the Broken. First, anxiety stabbed right through her chest, followed by an instant of intense vertigo, and then pain. It was as if the shiver of magic, the warm spark that existed somewhere inside her, died during the crossing. The pain lasted only a blink, but she always dreaded it. It left her feeling incomplete. Broken. That’s how the name for the magic-less dimension had come about.
There was an identical boundary on the opposite end of the Edge, the one that guarded the passage to the Weird. She never tried to cross it. She wasn’t sure her magic would be strong enough for her to survive.
They entered the Broken without any trouble. The Wood ended with the Edge. Mundane Georgia oaks and pines replaced the ancient dark trees. The dirt became pavement.
The narrow two-lane road brought them past the twin gas stations to the parkway. Rose checked the parkway for oncoming traffic, took a right, and headed toward the town of Pine Barren.
Above them an airplane thundered, fixing to land at the Savannah airport only a couple of miles away. The woods gave way to half-finished shopping plazas and construction equipment, scattered among heaps of red Georgia mud. Ponds and streams interrupted the landscape—with the coast only forty minutes away, every hole in the ground sooner or later filled up with water. They passed hotels, Comfort Inn, Knights Inn, Marriott, Embassy Suites, stopped at a light, crossed the overpass, and finally turned into a busy Wal-Mart parking lot.
Rose parked on the side and held the door open, letting the boys out. Jack’s eyes had lost their amber sheen. Now they were plain dark hazel. She locked the truck, checked the door just in case—locked up tight—and headed to the brightly lit doors.
“Now remember,” she said as they joined the herd of evening shoppers. “Shoes and that’s it. I mean it.”
TWO
NOBODY said anything until a pair of small black and blue shoes perched on Jack’s feet. They weren’t Skechers, but they looked similar enough. To get the real thing, she’d have to go to the mall in Savannah, and she had to save every drop of gas or she couldn’t get to work. Rose crouched and mashed the top of the shoe with her finger, looking for Jack’s toes. Ample room. He grew like a weed, and she always tried to buy shoes a little bigger than he needed. “Do they feel too big?”
Jack shook his head.
“Do you like them?”
Jack nodded.
“Okay,” she said, glancing at the price tag. Twenty-seven ninety-nine. She would’ve bought them even if it said fifty.
The boys watched her very quietly, standing in the aisle like a pair of frightened rabbit kittens. Rose sighed. “Would you like to look at toys?”
“Look” being the operative word. The boys stared at the action figures, transfixed by armor and muscles of colored plastic. Rose lingered by the end shelf. The stranger on the road kept popping back into her head. He wasn’t local; she was sure of it.
The Edge was narrow here, only about twelve miles across. They didn’t even have a real town, just a handful of houses randomly sprinkled on the outskirts of the Wood and grandly termed East Laporte. She knew all the local Edgers by sight, and she’d never come across anyone like the king of the road before. Those eyes weren’t something she would forget.
If he wasn’t from East Laporte, then he was probably from the Weird. People from the Broken favored guns, not swords.
Rose bit her lip. The Edgers like her passed freely between the worlds, but crossing from the Broken or the Weird into the Edge was a different matter for those not born to it.
First, most people from the Weird and the Broken couldn’t see past their respective boundary. If someone from the Broken tried to follow her into the Edge, she would vanish from their sight when she crossed. One moment she’d be there, and then she’d be gone, and they would keep right on driving in their own world. Because they couldn’t sense the boundary, for them the Edge simply wasn’t there. It didn’t exist, like a room behind a door that forever remained closed. On the other side, most people of the Weird couldn’t sense their boundary either and missed it as well, going about their regular lives, never knowing about the odd place next door that led to an even odder world.
Of course, there were always exceptions to the rule. Some people in the Broken were born with a magic talent. It lay dormant until one day they stumbled onto an unfamiliar road and decided to take it to see where it led. Some people in the Weird managed to discover the other dimension as well. And that brought the second problem: crossing the boundaries hurt.
There was nothing to be done about that. People like her lived in the Edge, because it was the only place they could retain their magic, and they worked and studied in the Broken, because that’s where they made their living. But while they experienced aches and discomfort and a brief stab of pain during the crossing, a person native to the Broken or the Edge would endure agony.
Still, a few determined enough did make it through. Caravans from the Weird stopped by East Laporte every three months or so. Like most Edgers, she sank every spare dollar into buying junk from the Broken. Pepsi. Panty hose. Fancy pens. When the caravans arrived, she would carry her loot out and sell it to the caravan master at a markup or trade for the goods from the Weird, mostly odd jewelry and exotic trinkets, and then unload those goods at a couple of dealers in the Broken. A little extra money.
The caravans didn’t stay long. The worlds were greedy. Too much time in the Broken, and you’d lose your magic. Too much time in the Weird, and the magic would infect you and the Broken wouldn’t let you back in. The Edgers had some immunity—they could last in either world longer than other people, but even they eventually succumbed. Peter Padrake, one of the most famous people from the Weird to have crossed into the Broken, had lost his magic years ago. He couldn’t even enter the Edge anymore.
What would cause a man from the Weird to risk pain and the loss of his magic by traveling to the Edge? He didn’t come with any caravan—those weren’t due for another couple of weeks. It had to be some sort of emergency. Perhaps he was here for her.
That thought made her stop. No, she decided. She’d been left alone for the last three years. Most likely he hadn’t come from the Weird at all. The Edge was narrow but very long, as long as the worlds themselves. It ran into the ocean in the East, but in the West it stretched for thousands of miles. True, the Wood usually kept the visitors out, but they did get travelers once in a while. They said that in the West, the Edge widened. Rumor had it that a chunk of a large Western city sat right in the Edge. Perhaps he’d come from there. Yes, that must be it.
Who cared where he’d come from anyway?
Rose sighed and picked up a big jug of bubble fluid, equipped with four wands. Georgie liked bubbles. He could keep them very still in the air for almost twenty seconds. She had already plunked down the money for the shoes. In for a penny, in for a pound. After all, Georgie hadn’t done anything wrong, and Jack kind of got rewarded for ripping his new shoes. Might as well get the bubbles. It was good practice for Georgie. It would help him learn to flash . . .
It dawned on her that Jack got new shoes and Georgie would only get some lousy bubbles. It wasn’t fair. No matter what she did, she just couldn’t win. Gahh, what would be the right thing to do? To buy the bubbles or to buy nothing but the shoes? She wished she had a manual or something, some kind of instruction sheet that would clearly spell out what a responsible parent did in this sort of situation. Her imagination painted Georgie twenty years later, sitting in leg irons before some Broken psychiatrist. “Well, you see, it all started with bubbles . . .”
In the aisle, Georgie said something, and a deeper male voice answered. An alarm went off in her head. Rose leaned over, peeking around the bubble display. A man stood next to the boys, talking. She put down the bubbles and marched over to the newcomer.
He stood with his back to her. It was a broad, muscled back, covered with a faded green T-shirt that was tight across the shoulders and loose around his waist. The T-shirt had seen better days. His jeans fared no better: old, worn-out, gray from permanent dirt embedded in the weave. His hair was dark and worn on the longer side, not quite reaching his shoulders.
He wasn’t a local Edger, and Jack would’ve smelled him if he was fresh from the Edge or the Weird. Magic didn’t work past the boundary, but Jack’s sense of smell was still keener than normal, and people with magic in their blood gave off a specific scent. She never smelled it herself, but Jack maintained they smelled like pies, whatever that meant. And he was under strict orders to tell her immediately if they encountered an unfamiliar pie-smelling person in the Broken.
As she neared them, she heard the man’s voice. “. . . yeah, but his arms don’t move. He’s stuck like that. You can’t make him fight.”
He didn’t sound like a child molester, but child molesters never sounded like child molesters. They sounded like your law-abiding, churchgoing, nice next-door neighbor. And they were very good with children.
Georgie saw her. “Rose, he likes the guys, too.”
“I see,” she said. If they were back in the Edge, and if she had the knowledge to convert her power into an environmental effect, her voice would have frozen everything in a twenty-yard radius. “And does he usually hang out in the toy aisle talking to little boys?”
The man turned. He looked to be in his late twenties. He had a handsome face with a square jaw and sculptured cheekbones. No baby fat remained on his face. His cheeks were hollowed, his nose narrow and well cut. She scrutinized his deep-set hazel eyes. The eyes reassured her: they were honest and direct. Not a child molester, she decided. Probably just a nice guy talking to the kids in the toy aisle.
He reached up and pulled a pirate figure from the top shelf. “Now this one moves. You can pose him.” He handed the toy to Georgie, and the boys bent over it. “Sorry,” he told her. “Didn’t mean to alarm you there.”
“I wasn’t alarmed.” She toned down the menace a little.
“My mistake.” He turned back to the toys.
She stood next to him, feeling slightly awkward. “Buying for yourself or your son?” she asked, to say something.
“Myself.”
“Ah. Are you a collector? One of those Never-Remove-from-the-Box types?” Oh, that’s good, she thought. Instead of ending this conversation on a somewhat comfortable note, ask the stranger more questions and insult him while you’re at it.
He glanced at her. “No. I take them out and I play with them. I stage huge wars. I also divide them by weight class.” There was a slight note of challenge in his voice.
“Do you have many guys?” Georgie asked.
“Four boxes.”
Rub it in, Rose thought with sudden venom, and immediately checked herself. He had no way of knowing that she couldn’t afford to buy them toys. He was simply answering the question. She needed to end this conversation, buy the damn shoes, and go home.
“I keep waiting for them to make a good Conan figure, but they never do,” the man said. “I stopped holding my breath. Was hoping for Green Arrow today, but nobody carries him.”
“Which one?”
He gave her a suspicious look. “Hard Traveling Heroes.”
Rose nodded. Having two little brothers made her into an action figure expert. “By DC Direct? Parallel Universe down the street has him, but it will cost you thirty bucks.” She felt like slapping herself. It had just popped right out.
His eyes widened. “Can you tell me where it is?”
“We’ll show you,” Georgie volunteered.
She glared at him.
“We can show him the comics, right, Rose?” Jack’s eyes were huge. “Please.”
Rose had to concentrate to keep from gritting her teeth.
“That’s okay,” the man said. “I’ll find it. Thanks for letting me know it’s there.”
He looked at her like she was some sort of maniac. “No, we’ll show you,” Rose found herself saying. “It’s just down the street, but it’s hard to explain how to get to it. Come on, boys.”
Five minutes later, the four of them were walking down along the Wal-Mart sidewalk.
“Thanks again,” the man said. “I’m William.”
“Rose,” she said and left it at that.
The boys seemed smitten with William. Jack in particular seemed fixated. It made sense—he was too young even to remember Dad, and none of their male relatives were ever around long enough to make an impression. A lonely kid abandoned by his father, who had run off after some phantom treasure, Jack was desperate for some male attention.
“I have new shoes,” Jack said.
William stopped and looked at his shoes. “Cool boots.”
Jack smiled. It was a tiny hesitant smile. He didn’t smile very often. If Rose could’ve gotten ahold of Dad at this moment, she would’ve laid him out on the asphalt with one punch.
Georgie took a deep breath, plainly not wanting to be outdone in the coolness department. She could almost feel the wheels turning in his blond head. She should’ve bought him those damn bubbles so he could’ve at least said he had something new, too.
Georgie blinked a couple of times and finally burst out with the only bit of news he could scrounge. “I got grounded for snitching.”
“Really?” William said.
Rose tensed. If he mentioned leech birds, she’d have to come up with some sort of explanation. But Georgie only nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“That probably wasn’t good.”
“No.”
William glanced at her. “Does your sister ground you often?”
“No. She mostly does this.” Georgie rolled his eyes in perfect imitation of her and muttered, “Why me?”
William looked at her.
“What made you think I’m their sister?”
He shrugged. “You look too young. Besides, not many kids would call their mother ‘Rose.’ ”
They reached the end of the sidewalk. She took the boys by the hand, and together they crossed the street and headed across the grass to a small plaza. “So you’re not from around here?”
“No. Moved here a couple of weeks ago from Florida,” William said. “Jobs are a bit better here.”
“What do you do?”
“I lay floors.”
Rose nodded. The area was booming. Every time she drove by, construction crews had cleared more of the forest to make room for new subdivisions and shopping centers. A floor installer could make some serious money here. No wonder he could afford four boxes of toys.
