“Avery, swim!”
Avery stopped thrashing as he turned and gave her a wide-eyed, open-mouthed look. “It’s mud!”
“I noticed!”
“I can’t swim in mud!”
“Why not? Try!” The cliff was getting closer. Zib couldn’t decide whether telling him would be a good thing—a motivation—or a bad thing, since no one really likes to hear that they’re about to be swept over a cliff and maybe drowned in mud.
Avery, to his credit, tried. He kicked his legs and flailed his arms, and all he managed to do was go under the mud, disappearing for one heart-stopping moment before he bobbed back to the surface, choking and coughing, with blue and purple streaks on his face. “I can’t!” he wailed.
Zib ran alongside the river of mud—when had it become wide enough for her to think of it as a river? This wasn’t improbable, this was impossible, and her heart rebelled from it even as her mind began looking for ways to make it go away—and considered her options as quickly as she could. If she dove in, they could both be swept over the cliff. She didn’t know Avery very well. Maybe she could find the Impossible City without him. The mud looked soft; he would probably be fine.
But then she would always, forever, be the kind of person who didn’t dive in when she saw that a friend who had made a little, simple mistake was being swept away by consequences he could never have predicted. She would walk in the shadow of that decision for the rest of her life. She would see that person in the mirror.
Zib took a deep breath, kicked off her shoes, which had never fit that well in the first place, and threw herself into the river of mud.
Avery had been right about one thing: it was difficult to swim in the mud. Zib, who had spent substantially more time in mudholes and ditches than he had, thought there was something strange about that; normally, moving through mud was a little difficult but not altogether impossible. This mud was almost like thin taffy. It grabbed at her arms and legs, pulling them down, keeping her from getting any sort of traction. She fought against it all the same, and reached Avery, grabbing hold of his wrist, barely a second before the river of mud carried them both over the cliff.
The mud roared as it slid around them. The mud thundered. Zib, who had never considered the voice of the earth, screamed. Mud flowed into her mouth. She screamed harder. Avery clung to her, his own mouth stubbornly shut, his face jammed against her shoulder, like denial could somehow change the situation unfolding around them. There had been no time to see how far the fall would be, no way to brace for it or to cushion the landing to come. There was only dropping through the air, surrounded by a sticky rainbow of taffy slime, out of control.
For the first time, Zib realized that “adventure” was not always another way of saying “an exciting new experience” but could also be a way of saying “bad things happening very quickly, with no way to make them stop.” She held tight to Avery, who had already known that sometimes adventures could be cruel, who had already known enough to be afraid.
Neither of them could see the cliff they fell past, but if they had, they would have understood the mud a little better, for the stone was banded in pink and blue and purple, stripes of one color sitting atop the next, like something from a storybook. But storybooks didn’t usually try to kill the people who read them, and as Avery and Zib plummeted through the air, they were both quite sure that they were going to die.
At the bottom of the cliff, the mud had formed a sticky, stripy pool, like the runoff from a candy machine. Avery and Zib tumbled down in a cascade of falling mud; they struck the surface together and sank like small, terrified stones into the terrible depths. Without Avery to press the mud from the grass above, the river stopped flowing, and the last of the mud fell after them with a sucking, slurping sound.
Everything was still. Everything was cold, and possible, and finished. Yes. There was a finality to the scene, as if the world had grown weary of two children on an unintentional adventure and simply declared their journeys to be over and finished, and not of any importance to anyone else in the world. Their parents would weep and wonder. Their classmates would stare at empty chairs and make up stories about what had happened to them, where they could possibly have gone. The police would search, and find nothing, for there would be nothing to find.
Too many adventures end with this sort of finality, which is terrible and true and all too probable. But Avery and Zib had been following the improbable road, had stepped upon it the instant they stepped away from the comforting fiction of a straight line and glittering bricks winding through the landscape. So it was that they had barely vanished beneath the surface of the mud when an entire murder of crows swooped down from the cliffside above them, landing on the bank and falling into the shape of a girl.
Crows do not, as a rule, become little girls casually, and perhaps that was why this girl, who was midway between Avery and Zib in size, was still so clearly a crow. She had simply found a means of being a little girl at the same time. She wore a short dress of black feathers, glossy and sleek and growing out of her skin,
