"This stuff has saved our lives a dozen times," she said. "It's strong, it's durable, and the Fae avoid it like the plague."

"How did this thing get here?" said Satterly, baffled.

"I'm getting to that," said Linda.

They continued up the hill. Farther along, a yellow tow truck was wrapped around the trunk of a stout pine, its exposed edges mottled with old rust.

"We never found out what that guy's name was," said Linda, pointing at the truck. "No wallet." She shrugged. "When we buried him, we called him Joe, because that's what it said on the side of the truck, but he didn't look like a Joe to me."

Satterly said nothing, only goggled at the truck as he walked past it.

"This is my car," she said, pointing. A Volvo station wagon rested on its end in a ravine, its taillights pointing skyward. From where Satterly stood, he could reach out and touch the rear bumper.

"You're from Georgia," he said stupidly, pointing to the license plate. Then he noticed the registration tag on the plate. It had expired in June of 1994.

"How long have you been here?" he said, turning toward her.

"Fifteen years," she muttered. "We've been here fifteen years."

As they neared the top of the hill, Satterly began to notice a light emanating from there, steady and blue. It cast long shadows through the tree trunks. Glancing to the left, Satterly noticed that the ravine that held Linda's Volvo continued up the hillside, carving an ever-narrower depression into the earth. Curiously, as the ravine neared the top of the hill, it grew more rounded, more regular, smaller, until Satterly would have sworn it was a drainage ditch, something man-made. The source of the light was at the top of the ravine.

It was a blue sphere of light embedded in the ground, the size of a softball. It glowed with its own radiance, its makeup uncertain. Satterly took a step back and tried to comprehend what he was seeing.

The ravine narrowed even further, becoming shallower as it ascended the slope, finally diminishing in size to a perfectly rounded trench the size and shape of the blue patch of light. The glowing circle was nestled at the top of the depression, as though someone had been rolling it through the mud, leaving the ravine in its wake.

"There it is," said Linda simply. Satterly reached forward to touch the circle and she grabbed his hand. "Careful of the boundary," she said. "It's sharp; it'll take off your finger if you're not careful."

"What the hell is this thing?" said Satterly, kneeling and peering into the circle. He looked back at the ravine. "Did this little thing dig out that huge hole?"

She nodded. "It used to be much bigger," she said.

"What is it?"

"That, Mr. Satterly, is the blue sky of the planet Earth," said Linda. She knelt next to him, laying the pistol across her knees. "Or at least what you can see of it from here."

convertible.

"Why couldn't you just walk back through?" said Satterly, gazing into the blue orb. "When it was bigger, I mean."

"I'll show you," she said. She picked up a stick from the ground, illuminated by the sphere's light. She poked the end of the stick into the light and they watched as it was torn to splinters by an unseen force.

"According to Hereg," she said, "the same force that's causing it to contract is distorting the membrane between the worlds. His spell is going to enlarge and smooth out the boundary." She dropped the stick and wiped her hands on her pant legs. "That's what he says, anyway. Who knows how much of it is true?"

"He's been in that cage a long time, I gather."

"Yes, we caught him trying to steal food from us about eighteen months ago. We'd built the cage to hold some of our more precious belongings, but with the storms and the cold weather, we had to move them. Again, locking him up like that wasn't my choice, but without him, we'd probably be dead by now."

"I gather that you and Jim Broward don't always see eye to eye," said Satterly, turning away from the light.

"You gather correctly," she said. "I don't think he's a bad man, we're just ... very different. He's got his people, his son Chris, who was guarding you just now, and Meyer and jenny, they're a younger couple. My son and I, we tend to see things differently from them."

"Sounds like it's been a long fifteen years," said Satterly.

"You can't even begin to imagine. There have been bad times. My husband was ... he died in an argument with Jim about five years ago. Some times the Fae come; there's a city about a day's ride from here, you know. A place called Sylvan, in Seelie territory."

"Yes," said Satterly. "That's where we're headed."

"And the girls, the children." She bit her lip. "I worry about the children, the ones that were born here. All the time."

"Why do the girls all have bandages on their ears?" Satterly asked.

"I don't want to talk about that," said Linda.

"Tell me how you got here," said Satterly.

"It's a long story," she said. "Ancient history now."

"Up to you."

She leaned back on the ground, her hands stretched out behind her. "It was June," she said. "My husband and I were driving our son Jamie to camp in Tallulah Falls, Georgia. We'd just moved to Atlanta from Rochester, New York. We thought maybe Jamie would meet some other kids, you know. Do some archery, whatever kids do at those places. He was thirteen, it was an awkward age for him." She stopped and peered at Satterly in the darkness. "Why are you smiling?"

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's just that I haven't seen another human being or spoken English in so long, it actually seems more strange than my life does now. It's just bizarre, that's all."

"Anyway," she continued. "We got lost heading out to the camp. My husband was driving. We were following the signs out to Lake Rabun, just like the directions said, then we hit a fork that wasn't on the map. We went the wrong way, we doubled back, got lost. Next thing I knew we were on this little dirt road and I was afraid the Volvo was going to bottom out any second.

"I don't know what happened next. One second, we were on a tiny dirt road near Tallulah Falls, Georgia. The next second, there was no road. It just disappeared. Like that." She snapped her fingers. "The trees changed, the goddamn mountains changed. All around us. All at once. David lost control of the wheel and we pitched into that big ditch.

"In those days, the hole was huge. Big enough for Paul to drive a semi through, at least. He was the first one through, or at least the first one who stuck around. He'd been here almost a year when we showed up. He was on his way to a construction site, just minding his own business, then boom! He crashed his truck, landed in some godforsaken alternate dimension or whatever the hell this place is, and he was alone. For a year. I don't know how he survived, I honestly don't.

"When we got here, Paul kept trying to convince us that we somehow weren't in Georgia anymore. I mean, as far as we knew, we'd just taken a really wrong turn. We couldn't figure out why this truck driver had been living in a lean-to for a year when he could have just walked down to the interstate and hitched a ride. I was never a Girl Scout, but even I know that if you walk in one direction long enough, you're gonna hit road sooner or later."

"But there was no road," said Satterly.

"No, there was no road. Just the path you were coming along when they ... you know."

"Yeah." Satterly scratched his nose. "They call them shifting places," he said. "They spring up spontaneously; they do all kinds of weird things."

Linda stood suddenly, wiping the dirt from her back. "None of that matters anymore," she said. "Let's get back."

Satterly walked in front of her back the way they'd come. Neither of them spoke. When they passed the huge fire in the center of the encampment on their way to the cage, all the humans sitting there watched them pass. The girls, their eyes glinting in the firelight, looked on somberly as they walked by.

"Think about it," said Linda. "If you want to come with us, we could use the help."

Satterly sat in the cage, leaning against the bars. They were cold to the touch. In the center, his friends huddled together, sleeping fitfully. Were they his friends? Satterly closed his eyes and thought about home.

The next morning dawned bright and crisp. A breeze blew in from the north, raising the temperature to something approximating comfort. Satterly awoke to the sounds of breakfast being cooked around the fire. He knelt by Mauritane and gently shook him awake. Mauritane's eyes were bloodshot, underlined with dark circles. Wordlessly, the two of them roused Raieve, Silverdun, and Gray Mave. Mave's wound had come open again during the night, and Mauritane tore off another length of his cloak to use as a bandage. Mave refused to stand and would not eat when food was finally brought to them. Satterly helped replace Mave's bandages. He was beginning to understand how Mave was able to do what he'd done to them, and the thought chilled him to his bones.

Jim Broward came and rattled the cage. "Well, Satterly, are you with us?"

Satterly stood, his stomach clenching in his chest. He walked to the bars and nodded. "I'm with you," he said.

Broward nodded and opened the door of the cage.

From outside, the cave was invisible. Over time, the humans had encouraged trees and shrubs to grow over the opening, giving no indication that the opening existed. Its mouth was low, no more than six feet high, overhung with damp rock and fuzzy moss. Inside, though, the space was enormous; their torches glinted off far walls and slowly filled the cavernous room with light. There were two dark shapes huddled in the back of the space, black oblongs that were oddly familiar to Satterly as they entered the cave.

Meyer Schrabe was about Satterly's age, somewhere in his thirties; he had long, curly hair and a prominent nose that looked either broken or permanently swollen. According to Linda, he was on Jim Broward's side of things, though to Satterly he seemed like a perfectly decent person, all things considered. The two girls, Polly and jasmine, were his. They tagged along beside the men while their mother, jenny, lagged, talking with Linda and Linda's daughter Rachel.

There were torches evenly spaced along the wall, set into sconces fashioned from the omnipresent rebar. Meyer left Satterly with the girls to go light them.

"That's our daddy," said Polly, the older of the two. She watched her father, a sweet loving look on her face.

"We love our daddy," said jasmine. "We'll miss him."

Satterly kneeled next to jasmine. "Why will you miss him?" he said, humoring her. "Aren't you going with us?"

"No," said jasmine. "We're not going anywhere."

"Says who?" Satterly frowned.

Polly looked at Jasmine. "Quiet, stupid," she said. "He doesn't know things."

"Voila!" shouted Meyer. He stood by one of the oblongs in the cave's rear. He reached for the edge of a tarpaulin and pulled, revealing a sight that nearly brought tears to Satterly's eyes.

It was a red convertible, big, wide. Human. A 1971 Pontiac LeMans.

"This is the greatest automobile ever made," said Meyer, brushing over the paint with his fingertips. "A wolf in sheep's clothing. A '71 LeMans Sport, with an extremely rare 355 horsepower, 455 cubic inch V8. Aluminum intake manifold. Four-barreled carb. Four on the floor, with a power top, Rally wheels, and an AM motherfucking eight-track stereo in the dash."

"Just ignore him," said Linda, coming up behind them. "Once he starts talking about that thing there's no stopping him."

Meyer rolled his eyes. "It's only the greatest car ever made," he said.

Satterly was shocked. "But it looks so good. There's no way this car's been here for fifteen years."

"Time goes slower in the cave; it's great for the cars, but every minute we spend back here is more like twenty outside. So get back there and start pushing."

"A shifting place," said Satterly. "Okay, but why are we doing this exactly?"

A few feet away, Jim Broward took the other tarp off of his own vehicle, a mideighties Chevy pickup that was badly dented on the passenger side.

"Linda take you out to see the Hole?" asked Meyer, pushing the Pontiac from the driver's side, holding the wheel through the window.

Satterly grunted a yes.

"Well, it's been climbing that hill for years now. Problem is that it's now about fifty feet off the ground in our world." He leaned into his work. "We have to bring it down to earth."

Satterly wiped his forehead. "Mind telling me why we can't just drive out of here?"

"Batteries won't hold a charge in this place," said Meyer. "We have to roll them down the hill."

Broward stood by his truck, scowling. "Hey, you two. Stop screwing around and push."

It was backbreaking work pushing the two automobiles up the sloped floor of the cavern and into the sunlight. Satterly looked out across the hilltop and could see what looked like spires protruding from the mist in the distance. Past the hilltop the ground grew level; only baked earth and lonely trees separated them from the veiled city.

"What's that?" he said, pointing.

"Fae city," said Meyer. "Sylvan. We don't go there."

In the other direction lay the blue sphere, or the Hole, as the humans called it. By day it wasn't particularly remarkable, just a swatch of color in the dirt. From the mouth of the cave, the ground sloped downward to where the Hole lay in its ditch.

"When we're ready, we'll start the cars rolling, pop the clutches, and put the cars in place running," said Meyer.

Paul, the former truck driver, reached into the back of Broward's pickup and pulled out a length of chain that rattled metallically against the truck bed. At its end was a menacing steel hook.

"Is it strong enough?" said Broward.

"How the hell should I know?" said Paul, tugging on the chain.

Broward nodded. "Let's go get Hereg."

Satterly felt a tug on his shirtsleeve. It was Rachel, Linda's daughter, her hair done up in pigtails.

"Mister," she said, her face grim. "Once they all leave, can we go with you to Sylvan?"

Satterly frowned. "No, honey, we're all going home together." She made him uncomfortable; it was a discomfort he'd experienced before but couldn't place.

Rachel shook her head. "I am home," she said. She reached for the bandages around her ears and tugged. They came off, revealing ragged wounds dried to the color of rust, sliced across the tops of her ears. Despite having been cut, however, Satterly could see the beginnings of two perfect points sprouting from the raw flesh. The points were perfectly formed, perfectly Fae.

"See," said Rachel. "I am home." She pointed at Satterly. "You don't know it yet, but so are you."

homecoming.

Satterl stood in front of the cage, feeling like a traitor.

"Mauritane, can I talk to you?"

Mauritane seemed to take a moment to recognize him. The influence of the steel bars was worsening. "What?" he said, keeping his distance from Satterly and the bars.