Cold woke me.
Not the polite cold of a house with the heating off. A cold with teeth. It was in my fingers and my ears and the hinge of my jaw, and when I breathed in, it went all the way down and sat in my chest like a stone.
I opened my eyes to white.
Snow. I was lying in snow, face up, under a sky the color of a bruise just beginning to heal. Dawn, maybe, or the end of a very long dusk. A few stars still hung on near the horizon.
I lay there and waited for the world to make sense.
It didn't.
Get up, said Mother Stitch.
Her voice was so close. Usually she lives in the kitchen of me, a warm murmur in the background. Now she was right at my ear, and her needles were clicking fast, fast, fast.
Get up, my boy. Get up right now. You'll freeze. Your lips are blue, I can feel them. Up.
I tried. My body took its time agreeing. I rolled onto my side and my hand went through the crust of the snow up to the wrist, and the cold that came off it was so sharp it felt like a burn.
"Okay," I said. My voice cracked. "Okay. I'm up. I'm getting up."
I made it to my knees.
I was in a field — or what might be a field in summer. Now it was a long, flat sheet of white, broken by the black stubs of something that had once grown there. Farther off, a line of dark trees. Pines, I thought, or something like pines. Taller. Too tall.
No houses. No road. No streetlights. No sound at all except my own breathing and the faint hiss of wind over snow.
I was wearing what I'd worn to clear out my father's house. Jeans. A grey hoodie. Sneakers. The cardboard box was gone. My phone was in my back pocket.
I took it out with fingers that didn't want to bend. The screen came on.
No Service.
The clock said 14:52. That was wrong. It had been nearly six in the evening when I climbed the stairs.
Then the numbers on the clock flickered, rolled backward, and the screen went black and didn't come on again.
Two hundred and eleven, Thirteen said.
"What?"
Seconds. Two hundred and eleven seconds since you opened your eyes. I'm counting everything now. There was a gap in the record on the stairs. There will not be another. Two hundred and fourteen. Two hundred and fifteen.
Its voice was wrong too. Too loud. All of them were.
I'd heard them my whole life. But always the way you hear a radio in another room — present, real, but over there. Now it was as if someone had opened every door in the house at once, and every radio was in the room with me.
I made myself stand.
My legs shook. The snow came up past my ankles. My sneakers were soaked through in seconds.
"Where am I," I said, to nobody.
Somewhere new, said Smiler. It sounded thrilled. Somewhere completely, wonderfully new. Isn't it beautiful?
"I'm going to die of hypothermia."
Not if you're clever, Smiler said. And you're very clever. You're me.
I started walking toward the trees, because trees meant shelter and because I had to do something.
Every step was a fight. The snow wasn't deep, but it was the wet, heavy kind that grabs at you. Within a hundred steps, my feet had gone from painful to numb, which I knew from somewhere — a documentary, a book — was worse.
One hundred and four steps, said Thirteen. One hundred and five.
Faster, said Mother Stitch. Faster, my boy, keep the blood moving. I can't keep you warm if you stop.
"You're keeping me warm?"
What do you think I've been doing?
I hadn't noticed. But now that she said it, there was a thread of warmth running through me — thin, like a single strand of wool. Down my spine, along my arms, into my hands. Not enough to feel good. Just enough that my fingers still moved.
I didn't know how that was possible.
I didn't have the energy to wonder.
At the edge of the trees, I stopped.
There was something lying half-buried in the snow. At first I thought it was a log. Then I saw the boot.
A man. Or what had been a man. He lay face-down, one arm stretched toward the trees as if he'd been reaching for them. Snow had drifted over his back. He wore a heavy coat of some dark wool and, at his hip, a sword.
A real sword. Long, plain, in a leather scabbard gone stiff with frost.
I stared at it for a long time.
Oh, he's dead dead, said Smiler, peering. Look at his eyebrows. Frosted. Very distinguished. I'd have gone for a hat, personally.
Take the coat, said Mother Stitch.
"He's dead."
He doesn't need it. You do. A pause. Strangers die every day, my boy. Let him lie there. He'd have taken yours.
Here, Smiler repeated, softly, savoring the word.
I knelt. My hands were clumsy. It took a long time to roll him over, and when I did, I wished I hadn't. Not because his face was horrible — it wasn't, really, just very pale and very still, with frost in his eyebrows — but because of what was on his chest.
Three long tears through the coat, through the leather under it. Claw marks. Something with a reach longer than my arm.
Something killed him, Thirteen said. Something with claws. Something big. Something that might still be here. Two thousand and six seconds. Two thousand and seven.
"Thanks, Thirteen."
I'm only counting.
I took the coat. I'm not proud of it. It was stiff and smelled of smoke and old sweat, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I left the sword. I didn't know how to use a sword, and holding one felt like it would be lying.
Take the sword, said a voice I hadn't heard yet that morning.
Deep. Slow. Huge. Coming up from the floor of me.
Take the sword. For when they come.
"Gnash, no."
They're coming. I can smell them.
"You can't smell anything. You don't have a nose. You're—"
I can smell them, Gnash said, very calmly, and for the first time in my life I felt something I had only ever imagined: a pressure behind my teeth, as if something much bigger than me was pressing its face to the inside of my skin, trying to see out.
I put on the coat and walked into the trees.
Under them, the snow was thinner and the light was dimmer, and everything smelled of resin and cold. The trunks were enormous — wider than I could have put my arms around, and so tall I couldn't see where they ended. Here and there, frozen to the bark, were little bundles of something red. Berries, I hoped.
I walked until my legs wouldn't, and then I sat down against a trunk with the coat pulled tight around me and my knees against my chest.
The sky had gotten darker, not lighter. Not dawn, then. Dusk.
I looked up through a gap in the branches.
There were two moons.
One was ordinary — pale and round and a little lopsided, the way the moon always is. The other was smaller, closer to the horizon, and it was the color of rust. It hung there like a bloodshot eye, not quite looking at me.
I laughed. I don't know why. It came out as a kind of hiccup and then I couldn't stop, and I sat there in a dead man's coat in a forest that didn't exist, laughing at the sky, until I tasted something metallic.
I'd bitten my lip. Blood. Warm for a second, then cold.
When I wiped it with the back of my hand, the snow it dripped onto turned pink.
I scooped some up without thinking and put it in my mouth, to stop the bleeding, to stop the laughing, to do something.
It tasted like iron. All of it, not just the bloody part. The snow in this place tasted like a coin held on the tongue.
The laughing stopped. Not because I stopped it. Because something settled over me, cold and wide and patient, like a coat being laid across my shoulders by someone who doesn't say anything.
Hush. In a forest that didn't exist, under two moons, in a dead man's coat. Still here. Still staying.
I pulled my knees in tighter and let it.
Interesting, said Smiler.
Nine thousand, two hundred and forty, said Thirteen.
And I could feel — I could feel very clearly — how easy it would be to close my eyes.
Don't you dare, said Mother Stitch, and her thread pulled tight.
I didn't close my eyes.
Instead, I did something I had never done in twenty years of living with them.
I looked for them.
Not inside. Outside. I lifted my head and looked into the forest, between the trees, into the blue-black dark. I don't know why. Maybe because they were so loud now that it seemed impossible they were only in my head. Maybe because a world with two moons felt like a world where anything could be real.
I looked.
And this time, something looked back.