"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."
...
Jake got them back to the Tree Fort a little after noon, and he talked the whole way. It was mostly about sandwiches: which bread held up, which didn't, and a long theory about pickles that Ray lost the thread of halfway across the valley. Ray didn't say much. He had a feeling Jake knew that, and was talking for both of them on purpose.
Lunch was sandwiches, as promised. Finn ate three and seemed like himself again by the end of the second.
He was himself enough to go to the back room and come out dragging a sword almost as tall as he was, with a blue grip.
"Take this one. It's my fifth-favorite."
"No." Ray pointed at the doorframe with his crust. There were four black marks on it, at Finn's eye level. "Look at your door, man. I'm not putting a fifth one on your house."
"But what if there's another emergency?"
"Then I'll run. I'm very good at running."
Finn looked like he wanted to argue. Jake got up instead, went into the kitchen, and came back with a knife. It was a long kitchen knife with a wooden handle, the kind for cutting bread.
"Then take this, at least." He held it out handle first. "It's my second-favorite bread knife. Don't break it."
"I'm going to break it."
"I know. That's why it's not the first."
...
Jake set him down by the stream in the middle of the afternoon, and they both stopped at the edge of the clearing.
The sun had been on the stomper all day. The smell had gone from bad to something with layers in it. Flies were having the best day of their lives.
"Oh, man." Jake pinched his nose shut with two fingers, which made his voice very high. "Okay. My nose is working again. I hate that."
"Can you move it?"
Jake tried. He grew until he was taller than the cabin, took the half with the head by one leg, held his breath and pulled. The half slid about a foot and left a trench behind it. Jake let go and staggered back, gasping.
"Nope. Not today." He shrank down, breathing through his mouth. "Tomorrow. I'm gonna need a way bigger breakfast for that one."
"Thanks, man." Ray climbed the porch, stepping over the missing step without looking. "Pick me up at home in the morning, then."
Jake gave him a funny look. Ray didn't know what it was about, and Jake didn't say. He just said "Sure," and waved, and went off down the stream with his nose pinched.
The knife was a problem too. It went into the old scabbard easily and kept going, all the way to the bottom, handle and all. Ray fished it out and jammed a fistful of dry grass in first, and after that the handle stuck out about where a sword's would. It looked stupid. He hung it on his belt anyway.
...
The noise woke him a little after midnight.
It was a wet, tearing sound, and under it, lots of small voices. They giggled. It was a high, jittery noise with no fun in it, the kind a group of somethings makes when it's found dinner.
Ray got up off the floor and looked out the window.
There were a dozen of them, maybe more, all over the stomper. They were about knee-high, all ribs and back legs, with long faces and more teeth than the faces needed. They were the color of wet ash. They were eating, and fighting over the eating, and giggling the whole time.
'Okay. They're eating the dead thing. The dead thing is outside. I'm inside.' He stood very still. 'Everybody's happy.'
It lasted about ten minutes. Then one of them lifted its long face out of the stomper and sniffed the air in his direction.
It came to the porch. He heard the claws on the boards, and then on the door, scratching high up where the M was. Another one joined it. Then something hit the door hard enough to jump the bar in its brackets.
Ray put his hand on the knife and didn't draw it. The lightning was the last thing he had, and if he used it now, he'd be lying on the floor with no legs while the rest came in to look at him.
The window went dark.
One of them was coming through it. It was a small window, and the thing had to squeeze, and it squeezed loudly, all scrabbling feet and giggling. Its head came in first, then its shoulders, and then it dropped onto the table and knocked the plate off.
Ray drew the knife.
He did it the way Finn had made him do it a hundred times with a wooden sword: knees bent, the blade up between them, feet under him. The thing jumped off the table at his face. He stepped the way Finn had shown him, so it went past him instead of into him. It hit the wall. Before it could turn around, he cut.
It wasn't clean. It took two more tries, and it screamed the whole time, and so did he.
"Die! Fucking die! Oh my God!"
Then it was lying on the floor, and he was standing over it with the bread knife, breathing like he'd run a mile, with his hands shaking so hard the blade rattled.
Something else was already scrabbling at the window. The door jumped in its brackets again. Out in the yard, the giggling had turned into one sound, all of them together.
It came up out of him before he knew it was there.
"Get out of my house!"
He heard himself say it. It rang around the one room for a second.
Then he made himself look instead of panic. Through the crack by the door hinge, he could see them coming up from the stomper to the porch. They weren't spread out. They came one behind another, along the path the first one had trampled through the grass, straight from the carcass to his door.
A straight line. He had one move, and it only went in a straight line.
He put the knife back in the scabbard, on top of the grass, and went to the door.
He lifted the bar and pulled it open in one move. They were right there: two on the porch, more on the steps, and the rest in the yard behind them, in a rough line all the way to the stomper. A lot of long faces turned toward him at once.
He didn't say anything cool. He set his front foot, put his eyes on the middle of the line and shut his mouth, and he pulled the breath all the way down.
The heat came slower than it did with a sword, like it wasn't sure about this.
"Thunder Breathing, First Form. Thunderclap and Flash."
It was a short crack, flatter than the others, and it didn't take him far. He went across the porch and down past the missing step and halfway across the yard. Then his legs quit and he rolled in the grass and stopped, on his back, with the stars going around.
The giggling stopped. Somewhere off in the trees, a lot of feet were running away very fast.
Ray lay there. There was a knife handle in his fist with nothing on it, and a scattering of bright bits in the grass that had been Jake's second-favorite bread knife. His hair was up, and the sparks were ticking along his bracelets. When he turned his head, he found he had stopped about a foot short of the stomper.
For a knife, that was pretty good aim.
...
It was an hour before his legs came back, and then he went to count the damage.
The door had long scratches down the middle of it, and one of them went right across the M. The window frame was splintered where the thing had squeezed through, and the plate was in three pieces on the floor.
'She's gonna love that.' He ran his thumb along the new groove, the way he had on his first evening here. 'Maybe she won't notice. She notices everything.'
The one he had killed was still in there too, and he dragged it out by the tail and threw it as far as he could into the dark, which wasn't far.
The mug was fine. It was still on the shelf, where he'd washed it and put it back. He stood there holding it, feeling stupidly relieved about a mug.
Then he went and sat on the porch, one step up from the missing one, and thought about what he'd yelled.
'Get out of my house.'
He had lived in the studio above the laundromat for four months. He had called it home, sometimes, because that was the word, the same way he'd call the night bus his bus. He'd never hung anything on the walls. When he got pulled out of it by some cosmic weirdo, the thing he'd missed most was the chips in his locker.
On his second morning in Ooo, he had sat in the grass by a highway sign with a fake sword across his knees and called this whole dead world home. He had meant it in the worst way he could mean anything.
Now he had yelled it at a bunch of giggling rats, about a one-room cabin with a missing step and a vampire landlady who charged rent in songs. And he had meant that one too.
'Home, apparently.' He turned the empty handle over in his hands. 'Jake's gonna be so mad about his bread knife.'
'Home. Same day I pointed a kid at an empty sea and said maybe.' He didn't know what to do with that one, so he didn't do anything with it.
He went back in, dropped the bar, and lay down on the floor. It was the rule when she was here. She wasn't here. It was starting to feel like the rule anyway.
...
Across the valley, Marceline had spent the whole day in her cave not thinking about it.
She had lain on the couch, and then under the couch, and then hung from the ceiling, and none of it had helped. It kept coming back to her in his dumb, easy voice.
'A tree house, by the pond.'
There was one tree by the pond big enough to hold a house. She knew, because she'd lived in it. She had left it a long time ago, and she had never, not once, given it to anybody.
'Lot of trees, my ass.'
A little after midnight, she gave up and went. She took the bass because she always took the bass, and she went low over the hills with the wind in her hair and the moon off to one side.
The pond came up silver in the dark. On the far bank stood the tree, bigger than she remembered, with the same crooked branches going every which way.
One of its windows had a light on.
Marceline stopped in the air above the water. Somebody had moved into her tree.