The Mirrored Shard by Caitlin Kittredge

retreated, discomfited by the birds, who’d been everywhere since I’d emerged from Thorn. Dean had always said they were the watchers, the eyes of the old gods and the magic that veined the world. Even my father’s airship was named after a raven, the most famous raven of all, Munin. My father had told me the story of Odin, a god who sacrificed his eye for wisdom, and who possessed two birds, Hunin and Munin—Thought and Memory—that flew into the world each day and brought knowledge back to Odin in Asgard, where he sat on his throne.
    It wasn’t so different, I supposed, from Thorn and Iron, two places connected by the dotted lines of the universe, but at the same time wholly apart. One magic, one iron, one replete with the fantastic and one rooted firmly in the earth whereon it sat. There could be crossover, but there could never be harmony.
    I turned my back on the crows, focusing on the Deadlands. My Weird let me cross those lines, fold that page so that I could brush one world against the next, travel from one to the next.
    My mother had lured me into the Thorn Land by telling me she knew the way to the Deadlands, but now I was sure it was simple as crossing over to a place I’d never been before. I’d managed to build a Gate to Crow’s dreamworld, and it stood to reason that if I could access that place, I could access the Deadlands.
    I didn’t need Nerissa, I thought, bitterness welling inmy stomach. She’d strung me along for months while my father and my friends wasted away here, in an Iron Land thrown into chaos.
    Putting aside my anger at my mother and her manipulation, I focused on building the Gate, as I had with the place of dreams. Then, I’d had a focus, something to channel my Weird. This time I was flying blind.
    I wasn’t the first person to be able to do this—my much more famous predecessor, Nikola Tesla, had had the gift as well, had conceived of worlds beyond imagination, and was eventually responsible for breaking the bonds between them, creating the world as we knew it.
    I didn’t have anything so spectacular in mind. I just needed to make a path, a bridge I could skip across before it collapsed.
    Using my Weird felt a bit like standing on railroad tracks as a train approached—a rumble you could sense in your core, a disturbance that fed through every bit of you. My head started to pound, as it usually did, and a trickle of blood worked its way from my nose.
    Forming a Gate, the sort of thing that Tesla constructed out of technology and the Fae constructed with their uncanny powers, took a lot of effort. It usually left me spent and drained, racked by headaches for at least a day, but I couldn’t afford that now.
    I had to find Dean, and I let that desire pull me toward the gray spots between the bright beacons of Thorn and Iron and all the places in between that I could travel.
    I could practically feel him, his warm chest against my cheek, smell his smell, hear his laugh. I was so close thatthe tears leaking from my eyes had nothing to do with the pain I experienced as the Gate opened in front of me.
    Then, as quickly as I’d felt my Weird begin to respond to my desires, everything went wrong.
    A scream ripped through the empty spaces that I saw when I opened myself to my Weird, and I felt a tug against the center of myself as if a jitney had slammed into me. Light exploded in front of my eyes and panic rose in my throat, along with a scream of my own. This had never happened before, and I didn’t know what I could do except be buffeted by a wave of resistance as I glimpsed a sliver of a gray sky and a black, twisted tree in a field of brown grass. Then I saw nothing, simply black velvet cut through by pinpricks of light.
    Stars. I saw stars. I realized that I was in the vastness between worlds, and they weren’t stars but spots in the fabric of space and time, worlds and destinations that I could visit if my Weird could only reach them.
    The cool grasp of the Deadlands, like