THE old Ford truck bounced on the bumps in the dirt road. The rifles clanged on the floor. Georgie put his feet down to steady them without being asked.

Rose sighed. Here, in the Edge, she could protect them well enough. But they were about to pass from the Edge into another world, and their magic would die in the crossing. The two hunting rifles on the floor would be their only defense. Rose felt a pang of guilt. If it wasn’t for her, they wouldn’t need the rifles. God, she didn’t want to be jumped again. Not with her brothers in the car.

They lived between worlds: on one side lay the Weird and the other the Broken. Two dimensions, existing side by side, like mirror images of each other. In the place where the dimensions “touched,” they intersected slightly, forming a narrow ribbon of land that belonged to both of them—the Edge. In the Weird, magic pooled deeply; in the Edge it was a shallow trickle. But in the Broken, no magic shielded them at all.

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.