by S T G Hill
Despite her exhaustion, Ellie managed to think: good. Those two had left them to those ape-monsters.
Then she couldn't stay awake any longer. She was too tired even to dream.
It felt like only moments later when Thorn shook her awake. “Up!”
This weird groaning sound underscored his voice.
"Just a few more minutes!" Ellie groaned. Her whole body still ached. She rolled over to face away from him.
"Ellie!" Casey said. She ignored him, too.
Then Thorn upended her bed with a quick bit of channeling, spilling her over onto the floor.
"Hey! What did you do that for?" she looked up at him from her heap.
They didn't need to reply, because she saw the reason straight away.
The far wall, the one that they'd come into this room through when they found their way through the maze, was moving.
"We have to go!" Thorn said, coming around the mess he'd made and hauling her up by the wrist.
"Go where?" Ellie said, the cold twist of panic in her mind clearing some of the cobwebs of sleep from her thoughts.
She saw that, too: where the warning message was once on the wall a doorway now stood, flanked by two large, snake-headed pillars. Real vines crawled all over the pillars.
It was the first non-monstrous life Ellie could remember seeing in this place.
There wasn't any time to think about what that could mean.
The wall advanced faster, that low grinding turning into a roar.
"Come on!" Thorn said, still holding her hand.
Casey grabbed his other one and they ran forward.
"The food!" Ellie said as they rushed past the long buffet table.
Despite the situation, her stomach growled, then panged deeply when she caught the scent of the fresh bread.
"No time!" Thorn said, pulling them past it.
She reached out, barely able to against Thorn’s grip, and managed to snag a single crusty roll.
The wall raced towards them, the roar now a howl.
They jumped through the doorway into darkness...
...And landed on grass.
Thick curls of mist rolled lazily across the ground.
Ellie pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and looked behind her.
The door was gone. So was the room, the walls, everything. An endless dreary forest replaced all that.
Low hanging clouds left the whole world gray and drab. A wet, compost-like smell clung to everything.
Hot, sticky air lay over everything like a sodden blanket.
Somewhere nearby, running water burbled.
"Everyone okay?" Thorn said.
"Yeah, I think," Casey said. He'd already stood up. Black mud stained his palms and the knees of his sweats.
"I don't think I'm ever going to be okay again," Ellie said, also pushing to her feet. She wiped as much of the mud on her hands off as she could on the rough bark of a nearby tree.
Luckily, the single crusty roll had avoided the mud.
The trees didn't look like any that she knew.
Some strange bird called out in the distance.
"Are we in a jungle?" Ellie said. Her stomach growled a different question.
She pulled the roll in half and ate one piece right away. It tasted good. She wished she had something to wash it down with.
"Should've eaten before you went to sleep," Thorn said, coming up beside her.
"No way," Ellie said with a roll of her eyes, "How long was I out for, anyway?"
Thorn shrugged, "It was hard to tell time without any natural light. Couple hours, maybe?"
"That's it?" Ellie said, turning to him.
She got a good look at him. Sunken, bloodshot eyes. Pale, clammy skin. "Please tell me that you slept."
You shouldn't even be here, she wanted to add, but didn't.
He shrugged again. She hated how he did that as his answer for everything. "No. I figured one of us needed to stay awake to keep watch. At least I ate."
She tossed the final half of the roll into her mouth and chewed slowly before swallowing. It barely dulled the knife edge of her hunger.
Two hours wasn't nearly enough to face whatever horror Belt had in store for them here. She didn't feel recharged at all.
"You should've slept," Ellie looked at his sunken eyes and the dark semi-circles beneath them.
"I'm fine," he shot back, a little too quickly.
As though to demonstrate it, he turned and started marching deeper into the jungle. "There's some sort of path here. It's faint but I can see it. It has to be the way."
Casey followed him right away, running to catch up on his shorter legs. "Where do you think it goes?"
"Dunno..." Thorn peered ahead.
Ellie didn't hear the rest.
Something rustled in the high branches of one of the nearby trees. She squinted upwards, trying to see into the gloom.
The shadows shifted up there. Shifted in a way that suggested something large.
She wondered if she had enough energy in her to conjure up a ball of light like Thorn had used earlier.
But then a pair of glowing eyes appeared, and they looked right at her.
Her breath caught.
"Ellie? We need to keep moving," Thorn called back.
"Right, yeah," Ellie’s eyes didn’t stray from that little rustle of movement.
She walked back a few steps away from the tree before turning and running to join the other two.
"We're not alone here," she told them when they noticed her alarm.
Casey glanced about into the trees all around them, the blood draining from his face.
"I didn't expect anything else," Thorn said. Though he, too, cast wary eyes about. "This path has to be here for a reason. Let's keep following it."
Chapter 31
The path was narrow, often just wide enough for the three of them to walk single-file without the broad leaves of the trees on either side brushing against their shoulders.
"This place smells!" Casey wrinkled his nose.
That didn't get much better, either.
The air just seemed to hang around them, dank and full of some sort of rotten life.
And the more they walked, the more Ellie felt certain they were being followed.
It didn't just come from her limited understanding of her prognostication.
She heard things.
Things like branches high above them bending and creaking beneath some large weight.
Ellie took up the rear of their single-file line. When the leaves rustled behind her, she stopped and looked.
Twice she caught sight of some branches shifting, but never what moved them in the first place.
Strange birds and other things just out of their vision let out equally weird calls and shrieks.
"The sounds bothering you?" Thorn said when he noticed.
In spite of his exhaustion, he somehow still had enough left in him to get under her skin.
"I'm a city girl," Ellie said, checking over her shoulder when something went chirrup nearby, "The only nature sounds I'm used to are pigeons and seagulls. Dogs barking, cats yowling, that sort of thing."
That made her think of Chauncy, the tomcat she'd left behind. She knew that Mr. Fichtner wouldn't have fed him at all. Was he all right? She hoped so.
"Yeah well it's not the animals I'm worried about," Thorn cast wary eyes into the brush.
"Then what is it?" she asked.
Thorn swept the area around them with his eyes. Then he lifted one hand and swept out again. "I don't know if Matilda and Miles are out there, too. I can't feel them. But that doesn't mean anything; clearly the only magic we can work down here is whatever Belt allows and nothing else."
"Like how we can't conjure any food," Casey said.
"Exactly," Thorn replied, "Now let's get moving again. It didn't take that long when we started to find the maze and those focus pearls. We should find whatever the next trial is soon."
Ellie gla
nced over her shoulders even more often, wondering if the sounds she heard were Miles and Matilda stalking them.
But that didn't make much sense to her. Neither of them struck her as the sort to go flying through the tree branches like Tarzan.
Actually just the thought of them, especially of Matilda, made another sensation other than hunger take up space in her stomach. Boiling anger.
She wanted to call out, to tell them to show themselves so that she could show them what she thought of them leaving the others behind in the maze.
Thorn fell back when the path widened enough to allow it.
"We're being followed," Ellie said, that terrible sensation of being watched prickling beneath her skin.
Casey's head moved around as though on a swivel while he tried to see everything at once.
"I know," Thorn said, jaw working.
He looked exhausted. The awful sweat that the sticky air here caused made his skin look even clammier, and he squinted against even the wan excuse for daylight that filtered down to them here.
"So what do we do about it?" Ellie said.
Thorn gave another trademark shrug. "Nothing for now. Look, those white-haired ape... things didn't attack us until we started trying to solve the maze with the pearls, right?"
"Yeah," Ellie said.
"Well, I think it stands to reason that whatever's out there now will also stay out of sight until whatever it is we're supposed to figure out next."
Ellie immediately saw several problems with that, even running on only a couple hours of sleep and a single bread roll. "They could attack beforehand. Or what if it's not monsters, what if it's Miles and Matilda?"
"If it's them, maybe we can help each other out again. We're all in this together, remember. And if it's not them and they attack beforehand... Is your Omenborn battery charged up yet?"
"I don't know," Ellie’s bones still ached, "Probably not enough."
She didn't mention that hot burst of anger in her chest at the suggestion of letting the other two back into the group, even though she could see where he came from.
There was something else she'd been thinking about. "Do you think that if we get hurt here it's real?"
"Feels real," Thorn said, wincing.
Probably thinking about the apes. she knew.
"And if we die?" Ellie said, thinking of Jackie and the awful sounds she made when those things ganged up on her, "Do we die for real?"
Thorn swallowed hard. She and Casey both looked at him. "No, I don't think so. There's no way Cassiodorian and the others would've allowed it."
Cassiodorian’s not the one in charge, Ellie thought.
He didn't sound certain about that, but Casey looks sick at the thought of it. And Ellie didn't want to push it much, either. So she didn't.
They walked on.
Ellie swatted at a mosquito with a body as fat as her thumbnail. Clouds of the things buzzed about the place and she wondered if the test was to still have some blood left in her body by the time they reached the end of the path.
"Guys, I think the trees are thinning!" Casey pointed ahead to the brightening light.
Thorn perked up and looked around. He'd been doing the zombie shuffle for a while, half-closed eyes pointed straight down.
She'd suggested they stop for a bit to let them all rest up, but he'd insisted that he didn't need to.
It made Ellie wish that she knew that anti-grogginess spell that Arabella had used on her. But she also suspected that it wouldn't work in this place anyway.
"It is!" Ellie said, noticing it too.
More weak light came in through the canopy, and the vine-choked stands of trees around them widened so that she could see deeper than a few feet to either side of them.
And the more they walked, the thinner the jungle became.
"I see it!" Casey said, jabbing a finger ahead, "I see the end!"
"Casey wait!" Thorn said, reaching out to grab him.
His grasp fell short and Casey dashed ahead. A similar surge of excitement urged Ellie to do the same, but she didn't.
That prickling feeling of something's wrong played up and down her spine.
"Casey!" she called out.
One second Casey's head bobbed up and down as he ran.
The next moment he disappeared. Ellie's heart dropped.
Then Casey screamed and her stomach turned into a tight, cold ball.
"Casey!" Ellie and Thorn yelled as one.
They rushed forward.
In the time it took them to reach him, Casey had already sunk up to his armpits.
The only thing that kept his head above the thick black tar was a vine he'd managed to grasp in the moments before he stepped into the pit.
He looked at them with wide and terrified eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry," he said.
"Don't worry," Thorn said, "I'm getting you out of there."
He held out his hands, his lips mouthing some focusing words of power. Ellie felt the magic gather, but it didn't go anywhere.
"Help me!" Thorn snapped at her.
Ellie tried. She held out her hands and formed the image in her mind. The image of a magical lasso wrapping around Casey's waist and drawing him up for the black gunk.
Again the magic gathered, but wouldn't do anything. Like a cat that would glance back when you called its name but then sit down instead of coming to you.
"It's not working!" Ellie said. "Help me with this!"
She ran over to the nearest tree. The one that Casey had managed to grab the vine from.
She snatched at that vine, its length already taut. It thrummed lightly in her grasp, like a guitar string.
It's going to snap, she thought. She pushed that thought away and then pulled on the vine.
Thorn added his strength, gripping the vine just in front of where she did.
Casey started to pull free.
"I'm coming loose!" he said. The tar left his chest and shoulders black and sticky.
Then his mouth opened and he shrieked.
He sank back down, deeper than before. The tar swallowed him up to his chin.
"Something's got me!" he said, eyes squeezing shut while he thrashed.
Ellie and Thorn felt it too. It dragged them both forward, their shoes digging furrows in the soft dirt.
Ellie screamed, not in fear but in rage.
I'm not letting this happen!
"Pull harder!" she squeezed her hands tighter around the vine and yanked.
They both pulled as hard as they could. Hard enough that every muscle, already tight, burned.
Once more, Casey slid upwards through the tar. Its blackness coated him from the neck down.
"He's coming free!" Thorn said.
And he was. If only for just a moment.
Then Casey screamed again. "It's still got me!"
He couldn't say anymore, because the thing in the tar pit dragged him down below the surface so that only his hands, in a death grip around the vine, remained above the surface.
The pull of the thing dragged Thorn and Ellie to the very edge of the pit. One of Thorn's feet slipped into the tar until it lapped around his ankle.
"No!" Ellie’s chest went tight with panic, "Pull harder!"
Thorn didn't answer. He just gritted his teeth and yanked. Ellie did the same.
Casey's head, covered with the tar, broke the surface. He opened his mouth and sputtered a bunch of the black stuff out of his mouth before swallowing a breath.
Before he could do any more, the thing below the surface dragged him down again.
This time Thorn slipped in with both feet and stood in the tar nearly to his knees.
Ellie, right behind him, winced when she felt the stuff soak into her shoes.
This isn't happening. I'm not letting this happen, Ellie thought.
She let go of the vine.
Thorn noticed her weight come off it. "What are you doing? Ellie! Magic's not working!"
Then the pull on the vine got stronger. Thorn went
into the muck up to his waist. Behind them, the thick tree branch that supported the vine groaned.
Ellie saw it, then. Saw what the Trial offered: another way to get a few competitors out of the game.
She could leave them, walk around the tar pit, and go on alone.
I'll never do that.
She gritted her teeth, lips pulling back in a snarl. She thrust her hands out, palms towards the tar.
As she watched, a bubble formed on the surface where Casey's head had been.
It was his last breath, she knew.
Up. Come on. Up. UP! she thought, willing the magic from her body.
"Come on! Come on!" she screamed. Her arms shook. Desperation and anger and stark terror mingled in her chest.
She strained as hard as she could, trying to force her power free. The pressure of the magic built in the air like a heavy blanket of static.
But it didn't go anywhere, just lingered.
The vine started coming off the branch. Thorn slipped deeper into the tar, up to his chest now.
He couldn't even get out if he wanted to at this point, she knew.
Her whole body shook. She forced the power within her out. Made it.
It came reluctantly. But it came.
The whole jungle seemed to shake.
Ellie screamed, not just in rage but in pain. It hurt to break through whatever Belt did to keep certain spells from working here.
But she broke through.
The tar seethed, the black liquid lapping at the edges of the pit.
"Ellie! I see him! Don't stop!" Thorn said.
Casey's head broke through the surface. Ellie's scream turned triumphant until she saw the boy's head loll forward.
She saw how he didn't spit the tar out to take another breath.
She forced more of the power from herself. How, she didn't know. She didn't care.
The spell pulled Casey out of the sticky tar. Head, then shoulders, then hips and legs.
She and Thorn saw it, then. They saw the large-clawed reptilian hands that clung to Casey's ankles.
They refused to let go, at first.
But then Ellie lashed out with the only thing that came to her mind: a forked tongue of lightning like Thorn used against the apes.
It struck the scales of those hands.
Somewhere below the surface, something screamed. The tar pit bubbled with it. Then the hands let go.
