Ray looked up. Marceline wasn't smiling anymore. She had gone completely still in the air, the way nothing that was breathing ever did.
"What tree house?"
"Just a tree house." He shrugged, which was about all he could do from the waist up. "Ooo's got a lot of trees."
She kept looking at him. Then the smile came back, a little wider than before, with a lot of teeth in it.
"Sure. Lot of trees." She dropped the handle in his lap. "Next payment's whenever. Don't get comfy."
"I never get comfy. I'm on a floor."
She was already going. She went up over the porch roof and across the clearing, past the two smoking halves, and the dark took her before she reached the tree line. Last time she had stayed until the sky went thin at the edges. Tonight it was hours from morning.
Ray sat on the step with the handle in his lap and his wet jeans going cold on him.
There was something about that: a vampire and a house, and somebody getting kicked out of it. He turned it over and over and got nothing else out of it, except a feeling in his stomach he didn't like.
When his legs came back, he went inside. He looked at the bed for a second, then lay down on the floor with his arm under his head. After the way she'd left, he didn't feel like pushing his luck.
...
Jake knocked on the roof a little after sunrise.
"Breakfast! Hey, Ray, why is your yard... Oh my Glob."
Ray came out onto the porch. In daylight it looked worse. The black stripe ran from the step to the stream like somebody had gone over the grass with a blowtorch, and on either side of it lay the stomper, stiff now, with the legs sticking up at angles. It smelled like burnt hair and the bottom of a pond.
Finn was already off Jake's back and running a lap around the left half.
"Dude! DUDE! Is this the stomping thing? You killed the stomping thing?"
"It came last night." Ray rubbed his face. "It was going for the cabin, so I did the move."
"By yourself?"
"There wasn't anybody else."
Jake walked the whole length of the stripe with his nose down. He sniffed at the halves and at the stream, and he sneezed three times in a row.
"Man. All I can smell is cooked monster." He shook his head until his ears flapped. "My nose is done for the day."
Ray held up the handle, with the stub of blade still on it. "Sorry, little bro. That was your emergency sword."
"It was an emergency!" Finn took the handle in both hands like a trophy. "That's what it was for!"
At the Tree Fort, before anybody ate a thing, Finn went and got the charcoal. He drew a fourth line on the doorframe next to the other three and stepped back to look at it.
"That's four."
"Please stop counting."
"Never."
Breakfast was eggs and a stack of pancakes that Jake had made tall on purpose. Finn didn't touch his. He had the look he got before a lot of questions, and Ray knew it by now.
"Okay, so across the sea." Finn leaned over the table. "What do they eat?"
"Uh. Burgers. Pizza." Ray thought about it. "Tacos on Tuesdays."
"Why Tuesdays?"
"It's a rule."
"Do they have heroes?"
"Some." He thought of the red trucks going by the warehouse with the sirens on. "There's guys who ride around in big red wagons and put out fires. Everybody likes them."
"That's so math." Finn put that away somewhere behind his eyes. "And how'd you cross it? The sea. Without getting eaten."
"I was in a boat."
"The one that sank."
"That one. Rest in peace."
"So how'd you get out?"
'Oh, shit.' Ray had not gotten this far in his planning. "I swam."
Finn's face went white around the edges. Ray remembered that much: the kid was scared to death of the ocean. "How far?"
"...Far."
Across the table, Jake's eyebrow went up a little and came back down. He ate a pancake whole and said nothing.
Ray looked at his eggs. Every answer was one more thing to remember, and Finn remembered everything. Tacos on Tuesdays was going to come back to him in six months, and he was going to have to explain why.
He was tired of making up a place. It came to him that he didn't have to, not all of it. He knew somewhere that was real.
"I can't show you across the sea." He pushed his plate away. "But humans used to live here too, a long time ago. I know a place where their stuff is still there. You want to see what humans had?"
Finn was out of his chair before Ray finished the sentence.
...
Jake got them to the hill before lunch, with a torch he had made out of a branch and some of his own shed fur, which smelled terrible and burned great.
Finn had been in plenty of holes. This one was different from the start, because of the stairs.
They went down under a big slab of stone, through a gap Jake had to squish himself to fit through. After that came a slide of loose dirt with roots hanging over it, which Finn went down on his butt and loved, and at the bottom the stairs started. They were made of metal and had teeth on every step, and they went down at a slant into the dark.
"Careful," Ray said. "I fell down these."
"What kind of stairs have teeth?"
"Stairs that moved. You stood on them and they took you up by themselves."
Finn stood on one. Nothing happened. He jumped on it, and nothing happened again, and Ray made a sound through his nose that was almost a laugh.
"They're broken, Finn."
"Oh." He went down the rest of the way anyway, very carefully, in case they started up again.
Down at the bottom it was a long hall, as wide as a road, with glass boxes on both sides. Ray walked in front with the torch and told him what things were, and Finn didn't understand half of it and loved all of it.
There was a big metal box tipped against the wall, with its whole front rusted shut. Ray patted it on the side. "You put money in, and it gave you food."
"Just gave it to you?"
"If you paid."
"Who was inside?"
"Nobody. It did it on its own."
Finn looked at the box with new respect. In the middle of the hall stood a slab of cracked plastic with a map under it, all faded out except one red dot and some words in the corner. Ray read them out: "You are here."
"That's nice of it," Finn said, and he meant it. It seemed like a good thing to have, a sign that told you where you were.
Ray showed him the shop where he had found his first sword. The shelves behind the glass were full of lumps, faded red and blue, sagging over little stands. Finn thought they were some kind of candle.
"They were little people," Ray said. "Toys. Guys from stories." He tapped one of the cases. "I always wanted a shelf like this."
Then he didn't say anything else about it, and they moved on.
Jake came behind them the whole way. He kept to the edges, sniffing the doorways, and didn't make one joke. Finn noticed that, a little.
The hall opened up into a big room with a sign hanging over it that was missing a couple of letters. There were tables bolted to the floor everywhere, and at the far end somebody had dragged more tables and chairs together into a wall.
Ray stopped walking.
Finn went on past him, up to the wall of tables. It was taller than he was, so he climbed up on a chair and looked over it.
He had seen skeletons before. There were skeletons in half the dungeons in Ooo, and some of them got up and swung swords at you.
These ones were small and brown, and they were lying all bunched up together behind the tables, eleven of them, some still inside what used to be jackets. There were blankets that had gone to strings, and a row of plastic jugs along the wall, and a lamp. One of them had a hand on the one next to it.
Finn counted the fingers on the closest hand, the way he'd done with Ray's hand in the woods. There were five.
He looked back. Ray was standing in the middle of the room with the torch, and his face had gone completely still. He wasn't telling Finn what anything was anymore.
Finn figured it was because they looked like the people back home. That would do it. If Finn crossed a whole sea and found a bunch of dead Jakes, he would go quiet too.
Finn climbed down. One table near the wall had been left out of it, with two chairs pulled out facing each other, and there was a tray on it. It had two cups on it, and two forks side by side, and between them a little toy still shut up in a bag.
"What's this one?"
Ray came over slowly. He crouched down so the tray was at his eye level before he answered.
"Lunch. Somebody bought lunch for two people." He touched the corner of the little bag with one finger. "That came with the kid's one. You got a toy with it."
"So one of them was a kid."
"Probably."
Finn looked at the two forks. One of them was smaller.
Now he knew where some of the people like him had gone. They had gone here, behind the tables, and they had stayed.
He didn't touch anything. It didn't seem like his to touch.
Jake came up behind them and put a big paw on Finn's head, and another one on Ray's back.
"Come on, guys." His voice was soft. "Let's go eat lunch somewhere."
...
They went out the back way, over a pile of fallen stone and up into the light. Finn had to squint. Outside the hole, a big metal sign stuck up out of the grass at a slant, with half its words gone.
Ray sat down on a rock and didn't say anything, and Finn let him.
Finn thought about it. Ray knew what the stairs were for. He knew about the food box and the you-are-here sign, and which fork went with which person. Nobody else in the whole world knew that stuff. Jake knew a lot of things, but he didn't know that.
So that was what it was like, having a big brother. It was having somebody who could tell you what the stairs were for.
The people behind the tables hadn't gotten out. But some had. Ray's people had, the ones across the sea with the tacos and the fire wagons, and they were still there right now, eating lunch.
Finn didn't like the sea. It was huge and dark, and you couldn't see what was under you, and things lived down there with a lot of teeth. He had never told anybody how much he didn't like it.
"Which way's the sea?"
Ray looked up, and then he pointed. He took a second longer than he should have, and he pointed kind of generally.
Finn looked that way for a long time, past the sign and the hills, at the flat line where the sky started.
"One day I'm gonna cross it," he said. "I'm gonna go see them."
Ray opened his mouth. Then he shut it again and looked at the ground, and it took him too long to say anything, and when he did, all he said was, "Yeah, little bro. Maybe."