It was such a familiar sound that he thought for a moment he was back in the gutter of New London, huddling in rubbish for warmth. Then he realized that he was curled around something knobby and hard—a tree root. He worried for a moment that he was in the Forest, that the dryads had somehow enspelled him and brought him here. He searched his memory and remembered Lucy Virulen’s hand slipping from his as he fell through howling darkness toward a door of light. We are where I said we’d be. The Grue. There was a tiny part of him, like a black box shut deep in his mind, that the Grue couldn’t always control. That little part was disappointed. He had hoped if they achieved their aim and opened the door he would be free of the Grue, the magic, everything. He had hoped that he could start anew. He shut away those feelings before the Grue could mock him for them, and breathed deeply. Old London. The smells were different than home—loam rather than sewage, wet leaves rather than the burning bone of the Refineries.
