She risked dialing Connor’s cell phone, from an ancient payphone she spotted a mile from the maze, sitting in front of a shuttered hair salon, which was now scrawled over with graffiti. The receiver was sticky in her hand, but she still squeezed tightly, as if she could somehow reach Connor by touch. The phone rang and rang and then clicked over to voicemail. The second time she called, a woman—Connor’s stepmother, Dea assumed—picked up after the third ring.
“Hello?” she said breathlessly. Then: “Who is this? Who is this?” Her voice was shrill and it made Dea’s head hurt. She hung up.
She called Gollum’s house several times, hoping to reach Gollum directly, but someone else always got to the phone first, usually Richie or Mack, and, once, Gollum’s father. She always hung up. Maybe she was being paranoid, but she wasn’t sure who she could trust, and she didn’t want to get Gollum in trouble. She was sure that if the cops knew Gollum had been in touch with Dea, they wouldn’t leave her alone. One time, both Gollum and Richie picked up simultaneously, and before Dea could second-guess herself, she blurted out “corn maze” before hanging up. Immediately, she felt like an idiot. She hadn’t even given Gollum time to recognize her voice. But when she dialed back, it was Gollum’s dad who answered.
She wished she’d thought to take Kate Patinsky’s number.
She was bored, which she hadn’t expected. She hadn’t realized it would be possible to be so constantly anxious and simultaneously so flat-out bored that she almost wished the thing she was afraid of would happen, just so that something would. She thought this must be what it felt like to go to war, to spend hours playing cards and choking on the thick dust of a foreign desert, almost wishing that a bomb would explode.
She hiked to the nearest gas station twice, not because she was low on supplies, but because it broke up the hours and gave her something to do. But the second time, she caught the guy behind the register giving her funny looks, and figured she could go back only once, maybe twice more before he started asking questions. Then she would have to move on. She’d pack up and head south.
But not yet. Just in case.
Her schedule was slowly flipping. It was better to walk the roads at night, hit a diner when she needed to get warm, slip between the faceless shifting crowds of truckers doing their cross-country hauls, and gray-faced strippers, makeup harsh under the lights, eating pancakes at three a.m. She slept most of the day, swimming through the hours, trying not to think too hard.
On her third day in the maze, Dea woke to the sound of voices. She rocketed up in her sleeping bag, fumbling for her knife, which was stupid, because she would never be able to stab anyone and she knew it. She unzipped the tent flap and eased out into the open, careful not to make any noise, blinking in the bright light. It was clear and cold, not a cloud in the sky, shadows drawn starkly, like cardboard cutouts plastered to the ground.
She heard a child squeal and a mother speak sharply. She relaxed, but just a little. She’d thought the cops had tracked her down again, but it was just a family, exploring the maze despite the cold. Still, if they found her, they’d be sure to call someone—the police, most likely—and report the girl living alone at the center of Ohio’s Largest Corn Maze.
She stood up and began hastily dismantling her tent before realizing it was no use. The voices were already so close, she could make out individual words: the low, sarcastic drawl of a teenage girl, complaining that it was too cold and she was hungry; the shrieks of a younger child; the father and mother arguing about whether to go right or left. She stood, rigid and terrified, waiting to be discovered. But then the voices receded, and Dea knew the family had given up and had decided to backtrack. She stayed where she was, hardly breathing, until the roar of their car engine had faded. Then, struck by an idea, she stood and moved into the deep shadow of the maze, hugging her jacket tighter.
She was in luck: the little kid had dropped a glove, a red fleece mitten so small Dea could fit only three fingers inside of it, and still faintly warm from the child’s grip. She tucked the mitten inside her jacket pocket, stupidly happy. She would walk today, as soon as possible. Her body was craving it, a compulsion she didn’t want to think about too closely. She needed to keep her strength up.
She retreated into her tent, pulling the sleeping bag all the way over her head so that it blocked the light filtering through the nylon walls. She felt the mitten, beating through the fabric of her jacket like a second heart. She knew it would be many hours before the little girl’s bedtime, but she had nothing else to do. She waited, her mind revolving slowly around the idea of the mitten, and the idea of the girl who’d possessed it, waiting for a break or a change. She drifted in and out of sleep. The sun passed overhead.
And eventually, she felt a change, the dark tangle of another mind rushing toward her, like the ground coming closer in a dream about falling. She leapt with her mind; she reached out to push; and after a brief wrangle, a sense of entanglement, she was in.
She hadn’t walked a kid’s dream in a while—not since she was a kid. Kids’ dreams were erratic, often fractured, and moved too quickly to be satisfying. She was relieved that this dream was simple and relatively orderly.
Dea was standing behind a large hedge. This was the child’s defense, her attempt to prevent a stranger’s intrusion. Beyond the hedge, Dea saw a group of kids tearing around a pool deck. Dark shapes were moving fleet-fast through the water—more kids, Dea assumed, until one of the shapes surfaced and she saw glistening dark skin and a set of teeth. Some kind of sea creature, then.
She felt a light touch on her elbow. She spun around, startled, and swallowed a scream.
It was the boy. The boy with honeyed eyes and a tangle of long brown hair, the one who had given her the water in Connor’s dream.
In Connor’s dream.
“Why are you following me?” Dea took an instinctive step backward, colliding with the hedge. The leaves slithered away, like a nest of snakes disturbed by a stone. “And how?”
“Calm down, okay?” the boy said, holding up both hands as if to reassure her he wasn’t holding a weapon. He sighed. “Look, I’m trying to help.”
“You can help me by leaving me alone,” Dea said.
The boy raised an eyebrow. “You want to find your mother, don’t you?”
Dea went cold. “What do you know about my mother?” Then: “Before, you told me I couldn’t find her.”
“I told you that you wouldn’t find her, unless the king wanted you to.” The boy paused, watching Dea searchingly. “She must have been taken through the mirrors. It’s the fastest way into the city from your world. If you want to find her, you’ll have to go in after her.”
Dea felt pressure behind her eyes and realized she was about to cry. She didn’t know what was real anymore—she didn’t know what to believe.
“It’s just a dream,” she remembered her mother had whispered, the first time Dea had walked a nightmare and seen a tidal wave of mud and human bones barreling blackly toward her. “Just a dream.” Now she found herself saying the same words again, out loud, as if they contained a protective spell that could help her.
“Just a dream?” the boy repeated. He looked faintly annoyed. “I’m as real as you are. We all are.”
“We?” Above her, Dea saw three birds, bellies flashing red against the blue sky. Harbingers. She should leave—she’d taken what she needed, sucked in as much strength as she could. But she couldn’t move. She was transfixed by the boy’s eyes, like two hard candies, and by the black brushstrokes of his eyelashes. By his skin, deeply tanned, and the faint white scar above his left eyebrow. Real. The word kept drilling in her head like an alarm.