Half World (8 page)

“Do you think you're the only one who has a task to undertake in Half World?” Jade Rat asked evenly.

“So you're using me,” Melanie said woodenly.

Jade Rat just stared at the girl without blinking. Melanie saw that the rat was cupping one paw with the other.

“We must go down this mountain,” Jade Rat said once more and turned to a small path that led to stairs cut into stone. The rat did not clamber up Melanie's arm to perch on her shoulder. The animal moved with a skipping hop, holding her front paw against her chest.

Melanie, following after, did not offer to carry her.

THE STAIRS HEWN
into the mountainside were not treacherous, but each step was high, and after half an hour Melanie's thighs screamed in pain, ankles wobbling with exhaustion. And the heat from the colorless sun kept the stone steps unbearably hot. Melanie imagined that her aching feet were sizzling slabs of steak. Sweat streamed down her flushed face and stung her eyes despite the bite of cold air. They had stopped, after several hours, to rest and eat, but the break seemed only to add to their exhaustion. There was no end in sight and the afternoon glared mercilessly, the wind stinging, as they continued down the series of stone switchbacks.

Melanie had stopped talking to the rat. And the rat struggled silently. She had to scrabble from one step to the other, for they were almost twice her height, and her sides heaved with her jagged breath.

Melanie had looked back when she passed the rat. The rodent was practically dragging her injured paw, unable to keep it raised.

There's no blood, anyway, she told herself angrily. I've carried her the whole time until now! And my feet are sore, too. The exercise is probably good for her. Besides, she's made of stone. Stone can't feel pain. . . .

The excuses Melanie made for herself infuriated her.

She did not have it inside her to forgive the rat.

She glared at her surroundings. Half World. It looked like a clip from an old black-and-white movie. And what was “half” about it? It looked pretty much like her own world. Not that she'd ever gone hiking before, but this mountain could be anywhere on her earth.

They slowly descended from the mountaintop along switchback paths hewn into solid rock and sometimes stairs. The mountain terrain was dry, but sheltered pockets of rock held enough moisture and soil to support scrubby bushes and tiny colorless flowers. They were so very high that they could not see what vista lay below them. The light gray skies grew darker beneath them. Sometimes Melanie wondered if the mountain was also an island, surrounded by a slate-gray sea. Other times she was almost certain that a blanket layer of clouds was spread horizontally across the entire sky. There were no markers to gauge distance. And as they continued down, down, exhausted and wretched, she stopped caring.

It was if they were spiraling down the tallest mountain of all time.

As they slowly descended, the small pockets of plant life began to change. Sparse, twiggy ground cover grew into leafier shrubs, the flowers larger, a sweet scent in the air—but colors remained nonexistent, and Melanie had never known she valued them so much until they were gone.

And it was getting hotter. The hours of mountain switchbacks had them sweating and panting. Melanie thought bitterly about a school classmate, Lali Vukov. Field hockey captain and leader of the cross-country running team, Lali Vukov would have probably jogged down the mountain, Melanie thought. Probably whistling as she went.

Her mother's overcoat was ridiculous in the rising temperature, but she didn't want to have to carry it. She might need it later. Who knew how cold it became at night?

“Sweating like a pig!” Melanie muttered beneath her breath. She was hobbling down the stairs now, her knees wobbly, her thighs aching. “Bloody feet!” she cursed, limping, and stubbed her toenail on an outcrop of stone.

“I didn't ask you to bite off your pinkie!” Melanie shouted up the stairs. “Okay? I didn't ask you to do it!”

She sank down on a step, dropped her face into her grubby hands, and started bawling.

She had had enough. She didn't know how she would find her stupid and pathetic mother. Weak her entire life, only ever half there, and now stupid enough to be caught by a raving lunatic. Nightmare things happening. Ms. Wei probably sent to jail. And only an unreliable rat as a companion. How could she possibly save her mum? How could her mother have left her to cope with everything by herself? Her tears stung her burnt cheeks as she sobbed and sobbed.

When she was finally finished she wearily raised her head and dragged her coat sleeve over her face, sniffing loudly. Her eyelids were swollen and her skin felt tight.

She felt lighter.

The most oppressive weight of doubt and fear had somehow waned.

She turned her head slowly and saw Jade Rat sitting quietly beside her, her tail wrapped around her paws. The rat was staring straight ahead, whiskers bobbing in the cool mountain wind. Her usually bright and beadlike eyes were dull and dry.

She looked smaller. Less robust.

Melanie's heart shifted.

“Drink some water,” Jade Rat said in a quiet voice.

Melanie nodded. She took off her pack and retrieved a water bottle. When she finished she poured some into her palm and held it out for her companion. The rat licked the water with her tiny soft tongue. It tickled.

“I would have thought your tongue would be rough. Like a cat's,” Melanie said.

“The universe preserve us!” The rat sneezed with outrage.

Melanie smiled for a few seconds. She stared at her ragged sneakers.

She wanted to apologize for the terrible things she had said. The things she had said out of terror and exhaustion . . . but Jade Rat had left her to fall to her death. There was no logical reason Jade Rat should have stayed. Melanie knew that with her mind. But her heart could not forgive so easily.

Melanie said nothing.

The rodent set her tiny paw on Melanie's leg. “Perhaps it is time to try the raccoon's gift.”

It took several seconds for Melanie to understand what she meant. Who knows, Melanie thought wearily. She could ask if she'd find her mum. The odds were in her favor to receive a “yes, definitely,” and it would make her feel slightly better. . . . She returned the half-empty water bottle and retrieved the child's toy.

The black surface of the Magic 8 Ball felt slightly rough, as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper. Melanie frowned. As she moved it from one hand to the other she could feel the sloshing weight of the fluid inside.

Jade Rat sat neatly on her hindquarters, her small front paws clasped in front of her chest.

Melanie raised the 8 Ball to her ear and gave it a gentle shake. “Will we make it home all right?” she whispered. She turned the orb around, flat side up, to reveal the window. The
slosh, slosh
of liquid stilled, and a small triangle slowly bobbed upward.

An icy breeze skittered down the collar of Melanie's jacket, and the hairs on her arms stood erect. She almost dropped the ball. Of all the answers she had seen in the toy, this triangle had never come up before. And her classmate's 8 Ball had only the set number of statements. Never a question. Melanie nervously cleared her throat. She wanted to leave the unsettling toy behind, there, on the stair.

“What did it say?” Jade Rat inquired.

Melanie reluctantly replaced the toy in the backpack. She did not respond for several seconds. “It must be broken. Or someone's kidding around.” She forced herself to laugh.

The rat remained silent.

“The stupid ball said something about whether I can do what I need to do even if I don't know! Okay? And it's right! I don't know what I'm doing!” Melanie was standing, hands squeezed into tight fists, breathing hard and fast. It would be the easiest thing to do, to kick the rat off the mountain step, sending it flying out like a football before dropping for a long, long time. . . .

Jade Rat dropped onto all fours, drawing her red string tail around her feet. She looked very small. “I grow weary,” she whispered hoarsely. “I will aid you as I am able.” She seemed to shimmer. An audible click, and she was a pendant once more.

Melanie gazed upon the jade amulet. The Magic 8 Ball had asked her if she could do the job without knowing what the job was. How was she to know when the action she took was the deciding one? The one choice that would decide everything? She couldn't know, and every time she had to make a decision it would drive her mad!

Melanie grabbed two fistfuls of hair and squeezed hard. The pain was momentarily distracting. She unclenched her fingers and let her hands drop.

No—no, she did not want to become one of the kids who had to yank out hair, cut themselves in order to feel okay.

Think, Melanie told herself. But don't think too much, she admonished. Helplessly, she began to laugh. She took a long, shuddering breath, then let it all go. The most obvious thing she had to do was go down.

One step at a time.

She reached for the jade amulet. Ms. Wei had given it to her. For all that she was uncertain about Jade Rat's intentions, she trusted the old woman, and she would be disrespectful and wrong to leave the gift behind.

Melanie tucked the jade pendant into her mother's deep pocket, reshouldered her pack, and started descending the stairs once more.

She did not know how many hours she had been walking before she reached a layer of clouds. Suddenly she was knee-high in the gray damp of it. Dense, flat, it did not puff and roil like clouds in the skies at home. It was like a vast quilt spreading to the horizon.

Melanie could not see through the completely opaque layer. For all that she knew demons and winged monkeys crouched by her feet, chuckling, waiting for the best moment to trip her. Bite her. Gnaw her to the bone.

Yelping, Melanie scuttled up several steps so her entire body was above the unsettling divide.

What was below?

The image of one of her mother's Bosch paintings rose unbidden to her mind. It was a copy from one of the panels from
The Garden of Earthly Delights
. Hell . . .

With creatures and naked people being tortured, pigs wearing nuns' habits. Sawed-off ears and women skewered with harp strings. Why had her mum hung it up on the wall?

Melanie shook her head.

It must be so dark, beneath the layer of clouds. . . .

How much could a person endure?

Melanie took a shuddering breath and held it. She stepped down. Down, one step after the other, she descended through the obscuring grayness. For several seconds she could see nothing, and panic trembled inside her throat, threatened to burst out from her lungs. She did not want to breathe in the sickly clouds.

But she could not see.

She ran down several steps, then broke completely through.

For a moment she almost fell over backward because the stairs were wrong, she was going down, but when she looked at her feet the steps appeared to be going upward. She sat down, hard, her heartbeat pounding inside her eardrums, and desperately closed her eyes. It's only vertigo, she told herself. That's all. Because stairs that go down can't go up. It's impossible.

Except . . . except the Escher calendar prints beside the Bosch ones on the wall in their living room they had stairs going up and down, around and about, all in different directions.

“Oh, Mum,” Melanie whispered.

Melanie kept her eyes closed, but she began scooting downward on her bottom. Like a little child she lowered her feet, then her bum, one step after the other. She continued this for a long time until the rough stone step was no longer. It felt smooth, flat, like tile instead of something hewn from a cliff.