Rose eyed the Wood hugging the road, its massive trees crowding the narrow ribbon of packed dirt. She drove this way every day to her job in the Broken, but today the shadows between the gnarled trunks filled her with anxiety.
"Let's play the 'You Can't' game," she said to stave off the rising dread. "Georgie, you go first."
"He went first the last time!" Jack's eyes shone with amber.
"Nyaha!"
"Yaha!"
"Georgie goes first," she repeated.
"Past the boundary, you can't raise dead things," Georgie said.
"Past the boundary, you can't grow fur and claws," Jack said.
They always played the game when driving through to the Broken. It was a good reminder to the boys of what they could and could not do, and it worked much better than any lecture. Very few people in the Broken knew of the Edge or the Weird, and it was safer for everyone involved to keep it that way. Experience had taught her that trying to explain the existence of magic to a person in the Broken would do no good. It wouldn't get you committed into a mental institution, but it did land you into the kooky idiot category and made people give you a wide berth during lunch hour.
For most people of the Broken, there was no Broken, no Edge, and no Weird. They lived in the United States of America, on the continent of North America, on the planet Earth - and that was that. For their part, most people in the Weird couldn't see the boundary either. It took a special kind of person to find it, and the kids needed to remember that.
Georgie touched her hand. It was her turn. "Past the boundary, you can't hide behind a ward stone." She glanced at them, but they kept going, oblivious to her fears.
The road lay deserted. Few Edgers drove up this way this time of the evening. Rose accelerated, eager to get the trip over with and be back to the safety of the house.
"Past the boundary, you can't find lost things," Georgie said.
"Past the boundary, you can't see in the dark." Jack grinned.
"Past the boundary, you can't flash," Rose said.
The flash was her greatest weapon. Most Edgers had their own specific talents: some prophesied, some cured tooth-aches, some raised the dead like Georgie. Some cursed like Rose and her grandmother. But flashing could be learned by anyone with a drop of magic. It wasn't a matter of talent but of practice. You took ahold of the magic inside you and channeled it from your body in a controlled burst that looked like a whip or a ribbon of lightning. If you had magic and patience, you could learn to flash, and the lighter the color of your flash, the hotter and more potent it was. A powerful bright flash was a terrible weapon. It could slice through a body like a hot knife through butter. Most Edgers never could get their flash bright enough to kill or injure anything with it. They were mongrels, living in a place of diluted magic, and most flashed red and dark orange. Some lucky few managed green or blue.
It was her flash that had started all of their trouble.
No, Rose reflected, they'd had plenty of trouble before her. Draytons were always unlucky. Too smart and too twisted for their own good. Grandpa was a pirate and a rover. Dad was a gold digger. Grandma was stubborn like a goat and always thought she knew better than anyone else. Mom was a tramp. But all those problems didn't affect anyone but the individual Draytons. When Rose flashed white at the Graduation Fair, she focused the attention of countless Edge families squarely on their little clan. Even now, even with the rifles on the floor, she didn't regret it. She felt guilty about it, she wished things hadn't gone the way they did, but given a chance, she would do it again.
Ahead the road curved. Rose took the turn a bit too fast. The truck's springs creaked.
A man stood in the road, like a gray smudge against the encroaching twilight.
She slammed on the brakes. The Ford skidded in a screech on the hard, dry dirt of the road. She caught a glimpse of long pale hair and piercing green eyes staring straight at her.
The truck hurtled at him. She couldn't stop it.
The man leapt straight up. Feet in dark gray boots landed on the hood of the truck with a thud and vanished. The man vaulted over the roof to the side and disappeared into the trees.
The truck slid to a stop. Rose gulped the air. Her heart fluttered in her chest. Her fingertips tingled, and she tasted bitterness on her tongue.
She stabbed the seat belt release button, threw the door open, and jumped out onto the road. "Are you hurt?"
The Wood lay quiet.
"Hello?"
No answer. The man was gone.
"Rose, who was that?" Georgie's eyes were the size of small saucers.
"I don't know." Relief flooded her. She hadn't hit him. She got scared out of her wits, but she hadn't hit him. Everybody was fine. Nobody was hurt. Everybody was fine . . .
"Did you see the swords?" Jack asked.
"What swords?" All she'd seen were the blond hair, green eyes, and some kind of cloak. She couldn't even recall his face - just a pale smudge.
"He had a sword," Georgie said. "On his back."
"Two swords," Jack corrected. "One on the back and one on his belt."
Some of the older locals liked to play with swords, but none of them had long blond hair. And none of them had eyes like that. Most people facing a truck head-on would be scared. He stared her down as if she had insulted him by nearly running him over. Like he was some sort of king of the road.
Strangers were never good in the Edge. It wasn't wise to linger.
Jack sniffed the air, wrinkling his nose the way he did when he looked for a scent trail. "Let's find him."
"Let's not."
"Rose . . ."
"You're on thin ice already." She climbed into the truck and shut the door. "We're not chasing after some knucklehead who thinks he's too important to walk on the shoulder." She snorted, trying to get her heart rate under control.
Georgie opened his mouth.
"Not another word."
A couple of minutes later, they reached the boundary, the point where the Edge ended and the Broken began. Rose always recognized the precise moment when she passed into the Broken. First, anxiety stabbed right through her chest, followed by an instant of intense vertigo, and then pain. It was as if the shiver of magic, the warm spark that existed somewhere inside her, died during the crossing. The pain lasted only a blink, but she always dreaded it. It left her feeling incomplete. Broken. That's how the name for the magic-less dimension had come about.
There was an identical boundary on the opposite end of the Edge, the one that guarded the passage to the Weird. She never tried to cross it. She wasn't sure her magic would be strong enough for her to survive.