Pip glanced at Otto and bit her lip. He met her eyes, and just like Jenny and Ben had, they seemed to be holding a whole conversation. Pip widened her eyes meaningfully. Otto tilted his head toward Eleanor. Pip scowled. They had been best friends since they were babies, and they were always doing this.

“What is it?” Eleanor asked, sighing.

“It’s about the Stories,” Otto said. He wetted his lips nervously. “Eleanor, I think the other Stories might be . . . noticing us.”

“What do you mean?” Eleanor asked, her voice hoarse. She hadn’t told him about his eyes—about how they’d been flashing gray since they’d escaped from Mrs. Prosper. Ever since Otto had performed a ritual given to them by the hedgewitch—exactly the sort of thing the Stories might be drawn to.

He took a deep breath. “Eleanor, we haven’t told you because we didn’t want to freak you out until we were sure. But I saw something after we got back from the Wickerwood, and I keep seeing it. Pip has, too.”

“Your eyes,” Eleanor whispered. “They’re turning gray.”

They stared at her. “What?” Otto said.

“That’s not what you were going to say?” she asked him, panicky.

“No, I . . .” He swallowed. “My eyes are turning gray?” His voice was tight and fearful.

Pip stared at him. “Oh no,” she said, looking stricken. “I didn’t see.”

Eleanor nodded, tears pricking her eyes. She shouldn’t have kept it a secret. She just wanted it not to be true. “But if that’s not what you were going to tell me—” she started.

Pip swallowed. “We weren’t going to tell you that Otto’s eyes were turning gray.”

Eleanor felt something squeeze behind her ribs, like a knot pulling tight.

“We were going to tell you that yours are.”

Four

The next morning, Eleanor wedged herself into the back seat of the bus and wrapped her arms around her backpack. At the next stop, Otto plopped down next to her, looking frazzled, with his dress shirt untucked from his slacks and his tie loose around his neck.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she answered. They looked at each other glumly. The bus trundled along—then slowed and stopped, pausing at a stop sign.

“Why are we stopping?” Otto asked.

“There shouldn’t be a stop sign here, should there?” Eleanor replied, peering out the window. Were they going a different way?

This was the right street, with the U-pick strawberry farm on the left and the pasture of fat, lazy goats on the right. The road intersecting it, though, had never been there before.

It looked in every way like a normal road. The asphalt was the same gray as the street they were on, and it neatly divided the strawberry fields as if it had always been that way. The only thing wrong about it was that it existed at all.