Page 4 of In an Absent Dream

RULES ARE RULES, NO EXCEPTIONS, NO APPEAL

KATHERINE STEPPEDthrough the impossible door into the tree and found herself in a long, curving hallway that looked as if it had been carved from a single piece of wood. There were no corners where the walls met the floor or ceiling: instead, a soft curve helped each blend into the next, smoothly wiping away all distinctions. Everything was golden and pale, polished to a gleaming sheen and striated with the wavy lines she had seen in other pieces of cut wood.

A long rug patterned in a beautiful blend of grapevines and blackberry creepers stretched from where she stood into the unseen distance, keeping her feet from slipping on the slick floor. It was softly worn, as if many feet had walked on it before she came.

Her eyes widened. This was someone’shouse. It had to be. Hallways and rugs weren’t the sort of things one found inside trees; they belonged in houses, where they were loved and cleaned and cared for by the people who owned them. Which meant she wastrespassing. And trespassing wasagainst the rules.

Katherine understood rules. Understood them down to the marrow of her bones. Rules were the reason the world could work at all. Following the rules didn’t make you a good person, just like breaking them didn’t make you a bad one, but it could make you an invisible person, and invisible people got to do as they liked. She never,neverbroke the rules if there was any way to avoid it, and when she did break them—say, by trespassing in a stranger’s house just because that stranger happened to live inside a tree—she stopped as quickly as she could.

She whirled and reached for the doorknob, intending to let herself out before anyone had time to realize she was there . . . only the door was gone, replaced by more hallway, stretching out for what felt like forever. Katherine froze.

Trees didn’t suddenly appear where they hadn’t been before. People didn’t make their houses entirely out of a single piece of wood. Doors didn’t disappear as soon as they were used. The number of things that didn’t happen but were happening anyway seemed to be piling up, and up, and up, until it felt like they should be scraping against the sky.

For maybe the first time since her sixth birthday, when she had decided she didn’t need anyone who didn’t need her, Katherine was unsure.

This did not make the door reappear.

“Oh,” she said softly. The hallway swallowed the sound, making it something small and meek and forgettable. She didn’t like that, and so she said again, “Oh,” louder this time, trying to sound surprised, like she had no idea how she had come to be in this place where she wasn’t supposed to be, where she couldn’tpossiblybe, since there wasn’t any door.

No one came to ask her why she was in their hallway, or show her the way out. Katherine frowned. This was going to take a little more effort than simple surprise.

The door wasn’t there: more hallway was. Walking that way should have been impossible, meaning it was against the rules in some intangible, difficult-to-articulate way. Katherine turned again, until she was facing the way she had been originally. Despite having no visible lights at all, the hall was quite well lit, as bright as her bedroom when she plugged her nightlight in. She could almost have read a book without—

Her hand clenched. Her book was gone. She dimly remembered dropping it when confronted with the impossible tree. She didn’t remember picking it up again. Her frown became a scowl. Books were precious things, meant to be treated well, both because they deserved it and because if she didn’t treat them well, her parents might stop buying them for her. Leaving them lying in the dirt while she ran off to impossible places certainly didn’t count as treating themwell.

Nothing to be done about it now, except for getting out of here as soon as she could. She took a step forward before glancing back over her shoulder. The door did not take her movement as a reason to reappear. Sighing, Katherine looked resolutely down the hall and started walking.

Like the tree trunk, the hall was not perfectly straight: it bent and twisted, slowly, by degrees, until she could have been walking in a circle without properly realizing it. The light grew brighter as she walked, going from nightlight to hallway light to proper overhead light. This, she could read by.

No sooner had the thought formed than the first of the frames appeared on the wall. It contained a cross-stitch, neatly done, with an embroidered marigold in one corner. Katherine stopped.

“‘Rule one,’” she read. “‘Ask for nothing.’ How funny that is! Although maybe that means I’m not allowed to ask for the way out? I’ve never heard of a rule like that before.”

She resumed walking, and shortly came upon a second frame. Again, she stopped.

“‘Rule two,’” she read. “‘Names have power.’ What does that evenmean?”

The walls did not reply. Katherine walked on, faster now, hurrying to find the next sign.

Rule three was “always give fair value.” Rule four was “take what is offered and be grateful.” And rule five, most puzzling of all, was, “remember the curfew.”

“None of this makes anysense,” she complained, and heard a soft click, as of a door latch coming open. She turned. There, on the hallway wall, which she was sure had been smooth and featureless only a moment before, was a door. It was standing ajar, tempting her to come and see what might be waiting on the other side. She bit her lip, lightly, staring at it.

If the door was open, surely that was an invitation to go through it, wasn’t it? And she was already trespassing. It wasn’t like going through an open, unlocked door would mean she was trespassingmore.

Carefully, Katherine approached the door. It didn’t disappear, which had never been a concern before, but was now an all-consuming one. She nudged it with her toe. It swung a little farther open, and something new appeared: a beam of light too buttery and bright to be artificial. Sunlight. She had found the exit. She wasn’t going to get in trouble after all. Beaming, Katherine shoved the door open and stepped through, emerging, not into the fields along the path or even into the well-maintained yard of some stranger’s house, but into a dream. She stopped, trying to stare in every direction at once, until it felt like her eyes were going to cross in her head with the effort of taking it all in.

If a carnival and a farmer’s market and a craft fair all decided to happen at the same time, in the same field, the result might have been something like what was in front of her. Everywhere she looked there were tents, and painted wagons, and little stalls with fabric walls and decorated awnings. Pens filled with animals—goats and chickens and pigs—stood side by side with rickety cases packed tight with leather-bound books whose spines glittered with gold leaf and what she thought might be real rubies. Figures moved by with sacks slung over their shoulders and yokes across their necks, the ends weighted down with buckets filled with mushrooms, or potatoes, or water that rippled from the motion of impossible fish.

Figures, not people: she wasn’t sure the word “people” was big enough to encompass everything she was seeing. Some of them were no bigger than her hand, soaring along on green moth’s wings, their hair like candle flames that flickered in the sunlight. Others were so big she could have mistaken them for boulders, with skin as gray as granite and hands almost as large as her body. It was like there was some sort of spectrum, and she was right smack in the middle, neither big nor small, neither fair nor foul.

A few of the figures moving by without giving her so much as a glance looked like they might have been human, and somehow they were the worst of all, because if they were human, this was really happening, and if this was really happening, then the rules she had known for her whole life were wrong. None of these things were covered. If nothing here was real, she was safe, but if any of it really existed . . .

“First time, huh?”

Katherine whirled and found herself eye to eye with a girl of her own height, with pale, dirty skin and small brown feathers tied in her long brown hair. The feathers only held Katherine’s attention for a moment before it switched, inevitably, to the girl’seyes. They had no whites. The girl’s pupils were too big, surrounded by a dark orange iris that extended from corner to corner, lid to lid. Katherine did what was, under the circumstances, the only reasonable thing to do. She screamed.

A few of the passing strangers looked over with vague interest, taking in the pair of them without slowing their strides. The girl with the feathers in her hair rolled her impossible eyes, which somehow made them seem even larger, and more orange.

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