“Where am I?” He was disoriented.

“My room.” I sat up and leaned against the wall.

“How did I get here?”

“Don’t ask.” I wasn’t about to try to explain that the Lilum had somehow transported us here.

I was more worried about what it meant.

It wasn’t John Breed.

And there was someone I had to talk to.

12.21

Plain English

I knocked on the door and stood waiting in a pale yellow circle of porch light. I stared at the door, shifting my weight uncomfortably, my hands jammed in my pockets. Wishing I wasn’t there. Wishing my heart would stop pounding.

She was going to think I was crazy.

Why wouldn’t she? I was beginning to think so myself.

I saw the bathrobe first, then the fuzzy slippers and the glass eye.

“Ethan? What are you doing out there? Are you with Mitchell?” Mrs. English peeked outside, patting her plastic curlers as if there was a way to make them look more attractive.

“No, ma’am.”

She looked disappointed and switched to her classroom voice. “Do you have any idea how late it is?”

It was nine.

“Can I come in for a minute? I really need to talk to you.”

Well, not you. Not you exactly.

“Now?”

“It’ll only take a minute. It’s about The Crucible.”

Just not the one you taught us about.

That finally got her, like I knew it would.

I followed her into the parlor for the second time, but she didn’t remember. The collection of ceramic figurines on the mantel over the fireplace was lined up perfectly again, as if nothing had ever happened there. The only giveaway was the spidery plant. It was gone. I guess some things were too broken to fix.

“Please have a seat, Ethan.”

I automatically sat in the flowered chair, and then stood right up, because there was nowhere else to sit in the tiny room. No son of Gatlin would sit while a lady stood. “I’m fine standing. You go ahead, ma’am.”

Mrs. English adjusted her glasses as she sat down. “Well, I have to say, this is a first.”

Anytime now. Wade on in.

“Ethan? Did you want to tell me something in particular about The Crucible?”

I cleared my throat. “This might sound sort of weird, but I need to talk to you.”

“I’m listening.”

Don’t think about it. Say the words. She’ll hear you somehow.

“Yeah, well. That’s sort of the thing. I don’t need to talk to you. I need to talk to—you know. Only you don’t know. The other you.”

“Pardon me?”

“The Lilum. Ma’am.”

“First of all, it’s pronounced Lilian, but I hardly think it’s appropriate for you to call me by my first name.” She faltered. “It must be confusing, my friendship with your father—”

I didn’t have time for this. “The Demon Queen? Is she there?”

“I beg your pardon!”

Don’t stop.

“The Wheel of Fate? The Endless River? Can you hear me?”

Mrs. English stood up. Her face was red, and she was the angriest I’d ever seen her. “Are you on drugs? Is this some kind of a prank?”

I looked around the room, desperate. My eye stopped on the figurines on the mantel, and I walked over to them. The moon was a stone, pale and round, a full circle with a crescent shape carved on top of it. “We need to talk about the moon.”

“I’m calling your father.”

Keep trying.

“The Eighteenth Moon. Does that mean anything to you?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her reach for the phone.

I reached for the moon.

The room filled with light. Mrs. English froze in her chair, holding the phone, the room fading around her—

I was at the Temporis Porta, but the doors were wide open. There was a tunnel on the other side, the walls crudely covered in mortar. I stepped through the doors.

The tunnel was small, the ceiling so low I had to crouch down as I walked. There were marks on the wall, thin lines that looked as if someone was using them to count. I followed the tunnel a half a mile or so, when I saw the rotted wooden stairs.

Eight steps.

There was a wooden hatch at the top, with an iron ring hanging down toward the stairs. I climbed them carefully, hoping they held my weight. When I reached the top, I had to slam my shoulder against the wooden hatch to get it open.

Sunlight flooded into the tunnel as I pulled myself out.

I was in the middle of a field, a path just beyond where I was standing. Not a path so much as two snaking, parallel lines where the tall, waving grass was worn down to dirt. The fields on either side looked gold, like corn and sunshine—not brown, like lubbers and drought. The sky was blue, what I had come to think of as Gatlin blue. Thin and cloudless.

Hello? Are you there?

She wasn’t here, and I couldn’t believe where I was.

I would’ve recognized it anywhere; I had seen enough pictures of this place—my great-great-great-great-granddaddy Ellis Wate’s plantation. He was the one who had fought and died on the other side of Route 9 during the Civil War. Right here.

I could see my house—and his—Wate’s Landing in the distance. It was hard to tell if it looked the same, except for the haint blue shutters staring back at me. I looked down at the hatch, hidden by the dirt and grass, and understood instantly. It was the tunnel that led to the pantry, in the cellar at my house. I had come out on the other side—the safe side, where slaves using the Underground Railroad could lose themselves in the thick fields.