Avery looked at Zib. Zib looked at Avery. Avery looked at the sky, which was wide and blue and somehow subtly wrong, like the shapes of the clouds weren’t what they ought to be, like the birds that soared on distant winds would, if they came closer, be revealed as dragons, or winged horses, or winged people. Zib looked at the forest, which was welcoming and foreboding at the same time, filled with ferns that were the wrong colors and trees that had the wrong leaves. Both of them looked at the road.
“We just … walk?” asked Avery. “That’s all?”
“You walk improbably,” said Quartz. “And here is where I give you a word of caution, although I’m sure you don’t need it, clever children that you are. You began this story together, whether you intended to or not. You’ll end it the same way, or you won’t end it at all.”
“What does that mean?” asked Zib.
“It means we both go home or neither of us does,” said Avery.
Quartz tapped the side of his nose with one striated finger. “Clever boy, yes, indeed! All or nothing, that’s the way in the Impossible City. All or nothing.”
Avery and Zib exchanged another look.
They wouldn’t be able to explain why later, if anyone asked them at all, but they started walking at the same time, and when they reached the road, they kept on walking, with Quartz walking alongside them, still disconcertingly made of crystal.
They had been walking for some time—long enough for Zib to have climbed and fallen out of three different trees growing alongside the road—when Quartz waved them to a halt. The crystal man’s formerly jocular face was set into a scowl.
“What,” he asked, “do you think you’re doing?”
“We’re walking to the Impossible City so the Queen of Wands will give us an ending and send us home,” said Avery, and frowned, because that sentence should have made no sense at all.
“No, you’re not,” said Quartz. “To get to the Impossible City, you need to walk the improbable road.”
“But we are!” protested Zib.
“You’re not,” said Quartz. “Everything you’ve done has been completely plain and probable. If you want to walk the improbable road, you need to find it.”
Avery and Zib exchanged a look. This was going to be more difficult than they had expected.
“How can you be improbable on purpose?” asked Avery.
“I don’t know,” said Quartz.
Zib frowned. Zib sat down in the middle of the road and began picking at her hair, dislodging leaves and twigs and a small, startled lizard that had been there since she’d fallen out of the first tree.
“Get up,” said Avery. “We have to keep walking.”
“No,” said Zib. “I don’t think we do.”
“What do you mean?”
Zib got back to her feet. “I think it’s probable that if you follow a road, you’ll wind up going where the road goes. So that means that if you don’t follow the road, it’s improbable that you’ll wind up going where the road goes. So that means that if we want to follow the improbable road, we can’t follow it at all. Come on, Avery!”
She grabbed the boy’s hand and broke into a run, dragging him off the road and into the meadow on the other side. A wall of thorns burst from the ground behind them, cutting them off from Quartz and from the road.
Quartz smiled.
“Well,” he said. “That took them long enough.” Whistling, he began strolling onward, toward the distant, unseen spires of the Impossible City.
FOURTHE CROW GIRL
Avery was not very fond of running. They did running three times a week at school, and he was always one of the very slowest, circling the track behind the rest of his class, lungs burning and legs aching and shoes pinching his feet. All those things happened now, as he ran with Zib. His breath whistled in his throat, which seemed to have gotten somehow smaller, forgetting what it was supposed to do. His legs were too long and too short at the same time, and his shoes hurt his feet, making him utterly aware of every single toe.
And he was laughing.
It seemed strange that he should laugh while he was being dragged across a meadow by a girl he’d only barely met and who wasn’t at all the sort of friend he was invited to bring home for lemonade and cookies. His mother would have sniffed at Zib’s hair, and his father would have scowled at Zib’s clothes, but here they were together, having an adventure, and he knew, deep down, that as long as she held on to his hand, he would be just fine.
He was still marveling over this impossible truth when his foot hit a stone and he went sprawling, his hand yanked from Zib’s by gravity. The grass, which had seemed dry when they were running across it, had pulled the trick beloved of grasses everywhere and hidden its wetness away down among its roots: as soon as Avery fell, he began to slide, slowly at first, then with growing speed, as his weight pressed the wetness out of the grass and into the soil beneath him.
The mud was candy-striped, pink and blue and purple, streaked with veins of golden glitter. Avery was too busy shrieking to appreciate it.
“Avery!”
Zib had been happy running through the meadow with her strange new friend beside her. Unlike Avery, she had always seen the value in being able to run faster than anyone expected, and she had been so delighted with her own cleverness that it had never occurred to her that he might feel differently. Now, watching him wheeze and yell as a sudden cascade of colorful mud carried him away, she wondered whether it might not have been a good idea to go a little slower.
There was a plopping, cascading
