Don’t Follow, Kitty

"You tell yourself you're keeping them safe. But every time you step through, you're really just hoping they don't follow—because if they do, you'll have to admit you wanted them to."

I stood where she'd left me, looking at the door she'd pulled shut, and let the house go quiet around me. It was a particular kind of quiet, the kind that comes down after you've got exactly what you came for. Every nudge had gone in clean—every pause, every half-answer, every bit of injured pride played out on cue—and she'd walked off believing the whole of it had been her own idea. Textbook, Jeremiah would have called it. I should have been pleased with myself. What I was, was hollow, right through.

I stood a moment longer and made myself breathe, trying to settle the thing in my chest that came of not telling her—the news I'd been carrying about like a coal in my pocket. It had been right there behind my teeth the whole time I held her: that there was another world; that I had a boy and a girl grown up in it; that the man she was off to help was the very one out of the Prophecy I'd been teaching those two since before they could talk. All of it, and the timing for it could not have been worse. If Luke really had started hauling people across with nothing ready to catch them, then Gladys being in it was the one thing that might do some good. He needed help, and fast, before his fumbling turned into the kind of mess even a Guardian who knew his trade couldn't put right.

And there'd be a death. There always was, early on. I'd learned that on my own ground—learned it the hardest way there is, with Grace, in the same hour the twins drew their first breath, and with the dozen others we'd laid under slates before Belkeep was anything you could call a settlement. Luke was working blind, pulling people through with no shelter and no stores and nobody who'd know what to do when it all went wrong. That list Gladys had shown me wasn't a plan. It was a man panicking with a pen. And panic is the thing that does the killing.

Something warm pressed against my shin, and a meow went up loud enough to fill the whole empty kitchen. Snowflake. She looked up at me out of those amber eyes with the plain, uncomplicated want of a cat that has decided you are, for the moment, the most important thing in her world and also possibly a source of food. It was a mercy, that look. It asked nothing of me that a scratch behind the ears wouldn't answer.

"You're right," I told her, though she'd said nothing and I was really only talking to myself. It helped, all the same, saying it to something that wouldn't argue back. There was a sliver of hope buried in the whole rotten business, if I turned it to the light. If Gladys went and saw for herself what unready Guardian work looked like—the scramble, the making-do, the disaster held off by its fingernails—then maybe, when the day came that I finally told her the truth of me, she'd understand why I'd kept it so long. Maybe she'd forgive the years of saying nothing at all.

Snowflake answered with another meow, and I found myself smiling at her in spite of everything. "Fair point," I said. "Luke's told her nothing about any of it—not Clivilius, not Guardians, not one word. He'd not be daft enough to take her across before he had." I turned it over as I said it, and the saying of it steadied the logic. If Luke had a scrap of sense he'd keep Gladys on the Earth side and use her to fetch and carry, not haul her into the cold to be one more soul he couldn't keep breathing. That bought me time. Days, maybe a week, before Jeremiah's ultimatum meant anything at all.

Her next meow had more push behind it, so I bent and gathered her up. She weighed next to nothing, all fluff and little bones, and she set to purring against my chest with a trust that turned the guilt in me over like a spade in wet ground. Gladys loved these two fiercely—people had let her down and cleared off, one after another, and somewhere along the way she'd settled it in her own mind that animals didn't. And here I was, working out how to pull her into a world where her cats could only ever be on the wrong side of a wall from her.

"That's true too," I said to her, as though she'd weighed in. Because there was the other side of it, wasn't there—if Luke told her first, if she heard about Clivilius from his mouth and not mine, she'd never trust a word out of me again. The manipulation was needful. I kept telling myself that, hoping it might start to feel less like a thing I ought to be ashamed of. It didn't.

She gave one more meow, comfort and complaint in the one sound.

"Sorry, kitty," I said at last, and set her down soft on the lino. Belkeep was waiting, and the people in it, and none of that stopped for a cat and a man having a heart-to-heart in somebody else's kitchen.

There wasn't a clear stretch of wall to be had, so I raised the Portal Key at the fridge instead. The device sat warm in my palm the way it always had, familiar as my own hand after all this time—since the night Jeremiah first pressed it on me and I hadn't the first idea what it was. A small bright bead of light left it and struck the steel of the fridge door, and where it struck, the world came apart into colour. It never came the same way twice. This time it went in cascades—blues folding down into greens, gold breaking through the middle of it, a whole shifting run of colour pouring over the metal while the air behind it opened onto somewhere else. No sound to any of it. There never was. Just that silent, impossible spill of light, beautiful and terrible in the one breath, the thing my whole grown life had been built around.

"Stay," I told Snowflake, firm but soft, and pointed a finger at her as though that had ever stopped anything. Daft, really—a cat reads your meaning long before it minds your hand. But I'd been giving that command the better part of my life, to children and to animals both, trying to keep the curious ones from wandering after me into a place that would kill them without once noticing it had.

She dropped onto her haunches and watched me, the colours sliding across her eyes, curious as anything. "Good girl," I told her, and meant it, and was afraid of it in the same breath. I knew what that light did to animals—the same pull it worked on people, only worse, because a cat hasn't got the sense to fear a thing it ought to run from. It only wants to see.

Snowflake's tail started going, a slow wag of excitement or plain confusion, and that was when Chloe came out of nowhere—a streak of trouble making straight for the light. "Chloe! Stop!" It came out of me as a growl, and I threw myself in front of the fridge, arms wide, putting my body between her and the thing. All I needed was to send one of Gladys's "children" into Clivilius by accident—for her to come home from Luke's errand to a cat gone, and me hunting for the words to tell her I'd posted her pet off to a frozen dead end where it wouldn't last the night. The thought turned me cold.

Chloe pulled up short of my Blundies. I kept my arms spread, a fence no cat was getting round, and stepped backwards into the colour, my heart going hard against my ribs at the thought of something small slipping through with me. The crossing was the same lurch it always was—that half-second where you're in both places at once and your body can't make sense of either, the warm air of Tasmania at my face and the deep cold of Clivilius at my back, the two of them meeting through me.

My foot came down on the cold stone of the Portal Cave, and I shut the Portal the way you shut it from this side—not with a hand but with a thought, a decision made and the thing minding it. The colours drew back into themselves and were gone, the wall of the world knitting shut without a whisper, and I stood there breathing hard and going over the floor with my eyes for any small shape that had no business being there. No Snowflake. No Chloe. Nothing had come through on my heels. The relief went out of me all at once. "Shit," I breathed. "That was too close. Gladys would never forgive me."

But something had come through, even so. My eye snagged on it a stride off—a small dark thing on the stone, dead still, a shape too neat to be natural. I crouched and picked it up, and the sight of it stopped me where I knelt. A magnet. Little, worked with some care into the outline of an island—that long, torn shape I'd have known anywhere. Tasmania. The place I'd just stepped out of, sitting in the flat of my palm. Gladys kept a bare fridge, near enough spotless; this had been the one thing stuck to the door, and I'd opened the Portal square against it. The cats had stayed put. Her little magnet hadn't. I turned the island over in my fingers, a scrap of her world and of mine both, come across with nobody meaning it—and I closed my hand around it and kept it.

And there it was—the thought, quiet, the way the worst of them always come. If a magnet could cross with nobody meaning it to, so could a cat. And Gladys wouldn't leave her cats—couldn't. If one of them were to find its way over... if she followed to fetch it back... if the pieces only fell a certain way. If the things she loved best were already on this side, she'd have no reason left to stand on the other. I'd half turned it over before I caught what I was turning, my fist still shut tight around her little island, and the shape of it told me exactly how far gone I was—how far I might go, dressed up as keeping her safe, to have her here.

I hit myself. Open hand, hard across the face, harder than I needed to, so my cheek lit up and my eyes watered and the cave swam for a second. "Don't be a fool," I said out loud, and the words fell dead in that place—the Portal Cave never gives you an echo, only swallows whatever you put into it. The sting was good. It was a line drawn, a mark of where the ground turned from doing what had to be done into being something I'd not be able to live behind the eyes of. Grace had known that line. She'd walked it beside me the few years I had her. But Grace was gone, and the choices had only got harder since, and there was no one left to walk it with.

I stood in the cold of it and felt the whole weight settle back onto me—not just the people I was trying to keep alive, but the man I was trying to stay while I did it. The cave ran off into dark, the track to Belkeep no more than a paler smudge in what little light came down through the cracks overhead. Out there my two were holding together troubles I ought to have been home for. Back on Earth, Gladys was walking straight into the middle of a disaster I hadn't so much as told her existed—his disaster, of all people, the one I'd hung a lifetime of belief on.

I'd been telling myself for weeks that keeping her clear of Belkeep was for her sake, that this world would only ever do her harm. Standing there in the cold with the truth of it, I couldn't hold the lie up any longer. It had been for me. For the tidy split I'd made of my life—Earth on the one side and Belkeep on the other, the two never touching—so I could go on being two men and never have to stand still long enough to answer for the gap between them.

The cold was into me properly now, up through the stone and in at every gap. The navy shorts had been a mad thing to have on in that raw Claremont morning; here they were as good as nothing at all, and Belkeep would take that out of a man's hide in short order. I needed to move—get to the hearths, get into gear that made some sense, put my face to whatever had piled up while I'd been away playing the fond boyfriend. Instead I stood a moment longer, caught between the worlds in more than the plain footing of it, hunting up the nerve to do the right thing while some quieter part of me laid out, one by one, all the reasons the easier road would suit everybody better.

Snowflake's face came back to me—those amber eyes, taking me as I was and wanting nothing better of me. Animals hold on to a thing people are forever mislaying: that being there counts for more than getting it right, that staying put beats being clever, that when it's all coming apart the wisest thing on offer is sometimes only to sit close to somebody and wait for the weather to pass.

Maybe there was more sense in that than I'd ever been still enough to see.

The settlement was waiting. My children were waiting. And a long way off, on the other side of everything, Gladys was walking further into Luke Smith's ruin without the first idea what she was stepping into—because I'd set her going, with my careful nudges and my kind voice and my whole performance of having nothing at all to hide. Her little island was still warming in my fist. I did not put it down.