by Megan Crewe
At the sound of a ragged breath, my gaze jerked down—to the only other figure outside the trap.
Finn hunched over several feet farther down the path, his face sallow and his shoulders rigid. He’d cut some khaki fabric from the leg of his pants and was pulling the cloth tight around his hand. A reddish splotch was already seeping through the fabric, and the front of his shirt was drenched with blood.
Horror choked me. I ran to him, my feet stumbling over each other. His head jerked up after my first few steps, his eyes hazed with pain, and I could tell he hadn’t even heard the thud of my escape. My own eyes filled with a rush of heat that wasn’t just tears but anger.
What had they done to him? What had the Confed done to my brilliant boy with the smile?
“I’m all right,” he rasped, and lurched to his feet.
I blinked hard. Of course he’d say that even if there was more blood on his clothes than still in his body. “No, you’re not. You—”
Finn cut me off with a wave toward the monstrous tree, keeping his other hand cradled against his abdomen. “We have to get everyone else out. I don’t know how much time they have.”
He was right. He looked like death itself, but he was alive and out and standing by his own power. As soon as we’d freed the others, I’d do what I could to heal him, whether he liked it or not.
Amid the tendrils, I hadn’t heard anyone but myself. Now, I could make out faint noises of discomfort: an indrawn breath, a grunt, a whimper.
“Desmond?” I shouted. “Judith?”
No one answered my call. Maybe sound only traveled out but not in. Letting us hear their struggles but denying them the hope they might have gotten knowing we were working to save them. The examiners were cabrones, all right.
A muttered curse filtered from one of the cocoons of vines that dangled near us. The strands shifted as if in response. We dashed beneath it.
A small gap showed between the tendrils at the lowest point of the cocoon, a few feet above my head.
“Pree!” Finn yelled.
I raised my hands toward the opening, but it was far beyond my grasp.
“Las nubes se levantan,” I murmured at the ground to boost me upward—and before the lyric had even finished leaving my lips, a couple vines from the massive trunk beside me lashed out. One clung to my calf, but I heaved myself backward just fast enough to break its grip. Finn dodged to the side.
“They didn’t like it when I tried casting either,” he said.
The stray strands whipped back and forth and then, when they caught on nothing, retracted into the giant mass.
Finn stepped forward again. “Here,” he said. “Use me.”
He knelt down, bracing himself against the ground with his good hand, and motioned for me to clamber onto his back. Blood dripped from his rough bandage.
My resolve wavered. “Are you sure—”
“I can handle it,” he said, repeating the gesture. “We need to get them out now.”
I hadn’t climbed on anyone’s back since Dad had given me piggyback rides as a little kid. I set my feet as gently as possible just below Finn’s shoulders and tried to ignore his wince as he took my weight. The faster I did this, the faster I could get off him.
“Prisha?” I said, trying to peer through the gap in the vines. The space inside the cocoon was too dark for me to make her out, but I could hear her breath coming in short bursts.
Cautiously, I eased my hand through the opening without touching the surface and gave a little wave.
“Hey,” Prisha said softly. The bunch around her contracted an inch, but then her fingers squeezed mine. “I don’t know how to get through. Every time I move...”
“It’ll give you room if you push,” I said. “You just have to be fast. Are you completely free?”
“Yes,” she said. “It—it’s pretty tight in here, though. I don’t think I can do ‘fast.’”
I lifted my other hand. “I’ll help. It’s only going to get tighter. Ready?”
She clasped my hands in answer. Together, we shoved at the opening. It gave, and I hauled on her arms as hard as I could.
Prisha tumbled out, toppling me with her. We fell to the ground beside Finn. My elbow jarred, but I pushed myself up right away. I didn’t want to think about what additional damage I might be doing to those numbed muscles in my back.
Finn caught Prisha staring at his hand as he straightened up, and his expression went strangely flat. “It’s fine!” he said. “We still have two more people to help.”
Someone was crying openly now, a thready sobbing I knew was Judith. “We’re coming!” I said, pacing under the remaining cocoons. There were far more of them than could hold the rest of our group. “We just have to find you.”
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t hear us. God, with a broken arm, she’d have no chance of working herself free. None of us could have managed that.
Prisha pointed to a spot at our right, where Desmond’s arm had protruded from a clump of vines just a few feet off the ground. He was already squirming out. The three of us ran to him, and he tumbled into our arms with a groan that his gritted teeth couldn’t contain. The skin of his arms and face were mottled with dark abrasions. The clenching opening caught around his left ankle.
Desmond kicked at the tendril and yelped when it dug in even tighter. His foot was trapped just below the knob of his anklebone. The strands twisted tighter, and his ankle made a horrible cracking sound.
Finn yanked the other boy’s shoulders, and Desmond fell the rest of the way out. We lowered him so he could sit on the ground with his legs sprawled. His foot jutted at an angle so unnatural it sent a shudder down my spine.
“Sorry,” Finn said raggedly as Desmond hunched over, both of them shaking. “Another second and it would’ve crushed your foot too.”
Desmond only nodded, his lips clamped shut.
“Don’t cast!” I warned him, even though he looked as if he was in too much pain to consider trying.
A shriek split the air. “No!” Judith cried out. “No, please, stop it. No!” Her voice broke into sobs.
I leapt up from where I’d knelt next to Desmond. Where was she? Higher, to the left? I sidestepped, trying to tune out the sharp yet heavy thud of my pulse. “Judith!” I called, even though I knew she wouldn’t hear me.
“Help me!” she gasped out. “Please, I give up. Burn me out! I don’t care. Just make it stop.”
Her last word was cut off by a crack like the sound Desmond’s broken ankle had made, and then a desperate moan carried down.
“Stay still!” I yelled, my throat raw. “Stay quiet! We’re trying to get to you!”
There. That clump near the top of the mass... too high to reach even if I stood on someone’s shoulders.
Judith shrieked again. I rushed to the corded trunk of the “tree.” My fingers found purchase on the ridges of vine, but only for a few fleeting seconds before the tendrils split off and swiped out at me. One spiraled around my elbow, and another smacked my waist. A ream of them unfurled as Finn and Prisha wrenched me away.
The vines kept sweeping forward this time. Prisha and I heaved Desmond up and braced his arms against us. Then we ran down the path with Finn. Over the hiss of the lashing tendrils and the thump of our frantic feet, I could still hear Judith. She wasn’t speaking in words anymore, only incoherent sounds of pain.
“We have to help her,” I said. I’d promised. I couldn’t fail again. I couldn’t let the examiners win.
But when I let go of Desmond to turn back, the whole mass of tendrils was shifting, surging along the hedge after us. A bunch of tendrils whipped at us so close that the tip of one scraped my cheek.
We staggered backward, Finn grasping my shoulder. Prisha kept her arm around Desmond’s back, holding him off his broken ankle.
“Didn’t you hear her?” I hollered at the sky—at the examiners, wherever they were. “She wants out! She quit! You can’t just—”
Another jab from the vi
nes caught me in the chest. I reeled backward, colliding with Finn. He pulled me to him, wrapping his arm around my waist.
Judith’s next shriek turned into a gurgle.
My muscles tensed with the urge to race back to her, and Finn’s hold tightened. His face bent close to mine, his heart thumping in his chest against my back.
“We have to help her,” I said. My voice sounded very small. What was the point of all the studying I’d done, all the skill I had, if I couldn’t manage this one thing?
“I know,” Finn said with a hitch of breath. “I trust you. Tell me there’s still a chance, tell me you see a way, and I’ll be right there with you.”
He would be. I believed him then with total certainty. He saw just how warped and wrong his Confed must be to have brought us here with their ruthless, brutal magic. Maybe we’d grown up at opposite ends of the city, on opposite sides of that invisible divide between old magic and new, but in that moment we were feeling the exact same horror, and he would go every bit as far as I would to overcome it.
Except as I stared at the writhing vines with fresh tears in my eyes, I also knew I didn’t really believe we had a hope in hell of saving Judith now. I wasn’t even sure there was anything left of her to save.
I sagged against him, and the wave of vines swelled as if to crash over us.
“Finn!” Prisha cried.
He grabbed my hand, but he didn’t have to pull me. With my conscience tearing at my heels, I ran.
Chapter Twenty-One
Finn
If I’d ever thought the examiners lacked a sense of humor, that impression was corrected when we barreled around the first corner away from the lashing vines and the girl we’d abandoned to them—and discovered the end of the maze had been waiting for us fewer than thirty feet away. The hedges fell back to reveal a wide-open stretch of ground free of any visible threat.
We’d been a mere minute from safety—a mere minute from Judith walking out alive.
It was a sick, sadistic joke. I pictured Examiner Lancaster watching us on a distant screen, sweeping back her silver hair as she smirked to herself, and wanted to both punch someone and to keel over helplessly at the same time.
I did neither. Sharp shards of agony stabbed up my arm from my mutilated hand, and a duller ache in my side turned into a jab if I inhaled too deeply, but even through the haze of pain, I knew that whatever safety we’d attained was only relative. The Exam wasn’t over yet.
The space we’d emerged into was a huge circle maybe a mile across, bordered by a dark hedge all the way around. The ground had shifted from the previous gray to a yellow-brown hue, with a gritty texture under my shoes that fit its sandy color. The faux sky above us emitted a coordinating pallid yellow light. Small dunes rose and fell in ripples to our left. A dozen or so narrow spires of an ivory rock-like material were scattered across the rest of the clearing. Smooth platforms of the same color jutted from their tops and sides like embedded discs.
The tallest of those spires stood in the middle of the clearing, with a single huge platform at its peak that gave it the look of a gigantic gaunt mushroom. Its stalk rose at least thirty feet from the ground. A fountain cascaded from the side into a glinting pool at its foot.
A pang ran down my throat. How many hours had passed since I’d last tasted water?
Desmond sank to the ground. He set his hands on his broken ankle with a wince.
“Is there anything I can do?” Rocío asked. The longing for him to say yes, to give her the chance to fix something, radiated from every tensed inch of her body. Judith’s shrieks echoed in my head.
“Do you have professional medical training?” Desmond inquired. At the droop of her head, he added more gently, “I think I’d better just freeze it. I can manage that. Hopefully they’ll have some magimedics waiting for us when we’re finally through.” He spoke without betraying any concern that he wouldn’t be among those who made it, but his gaze was more vague than usual. How much pain was he suffering from?
He leaned over to cast his ’chantment, and I looked down at my most visible injury. Thank the Fates I’d chosen pants with a natural fabric that the dissolving rod could cut through. The strip of cloth I’d wrapped around my hand had slowed the gush of blood until I’d managed to stammer out a ’chantment to close the pulsing artery.
I hadn’t found the wherewithal to deal with the smaller vessels, though. The bandage was tacky with blood only half-dried. Gods only knew whether my work on the artery would hold, considering the state I’d been in.
The thought of attempting to seal it more thoroughly brought back my headache with a vicious thump. Maybe keeling over wasn’t such a horrible idea. The ground was looking more and more welcoming.
“Finn,” Prisha said.
The worry in her voice woke me up. I was swaying.
Rocío reached me first and grasped my forearm. She examined my hand, her fingers tightening.
“Your thumb,” she said. “The trap did this to you?”
I managed a shaky laugh. “I did it to me to get out of the trap. It seemed my best option at the time.” I nodded to her right hand, to the fused stump where her little finger had been. “Now we match. In an opposite sort of way.”
She shook her head at my joke. Her thumb tested the edge of the makeshift bandage, and my body stiffened at the thought of her glimpsing the mess underneath.
“I don’t think we should take the cloth off,” I said. “I tried to seal the worst of it, but… I had a bit of trouble concentrating. It might not hold. And I’ve lost a little more blood than I’d prefer already.”
The back of Rocío’s shirt and the tied strip of sheet around her chest were streaked with that blood from when I’d pulled her away from the vines—from the front of my shirt, which was sticking to my chest in a gruesome fashion. A metallic butcher-shop scent tinged the air. I swallowed hard.
“I can ’chant the cloth,” Rocío said. “That’ll be easier than trying to tackle the wound directly anyway. Maybe I can fuse the fabric with the skin and harden it so it blocks off the blood flow completely...”
Her brow furrowed. The distress in her face receded, focus taking its place. She rolled out a few singsong lines.
The rag tingled against my hand. A searing pain shot through my wrist, and I flinched. A cool balm washed over me an instant later, reminding me of the ’chantment she’d applied to my headache two days ago.
She let go. My hand still throbbed, but the sensation was distant and contained now.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Prisha asked.
My head and my chest still hurt, but not so much I couldn’t function. “Nothing major,” I said, and, to Rocío, “Thank you.”
Prisha pursed her lips as if she didn’t believe me, but she was scarcely in a position to accuse me of lying.
I pointed to the fountain with my good hand. “I could really use a drink.”
“Count me in,” Desmond said. He levered himself to his feet.
Rocío offered him her shoulder for support, and he hobbled alongside the rest of us toward the central spire.
“We’re not the only ones here,” Prisha observed.
I followed her gaze. A couple figures were stalking over the low dunes. A moment later, I spotted a girl limping from one of the smaller spires to a black structure beside it. The structure was little more than a few walls leaning together, and so low she had to crouch to enter.
“I wonder how many others made it this far,” Rocío said quietly.
As we approached the central spire, shadowy dimples came into view down its stalk. Handholds? But my attention was more drawn to the low jet of water that streamed into the pool, which was wide enough that I could have lain down in it if a swim had appealed. Two taps near shoulder height protruded from the stalk a short distance from the pool.
The moment we reached the spire, I walked up to the nearest one and waved my hand beneath it. Water spurted out, splattering the already damp ground and trickling
into a channel that led to the pool.
I gulped from my cupped hand until the parched sensation in my mouth eased, and then stepped aside to give Prisha a turn.
She took a drink, wiped her mouth with her sleeve, and peered upward. “What do you imagine is in those bags?”
A ring of sacks dangled along the edge of the platform thirty feet above us. They looked lumpy, as if stuffed full. The platform was too wide for anyone to reach them from the side of the stalk, but there were square openings at the tops of the columns of handholds.
“We should at least check. Carefully.” Rocío prodded one of the notches in the side of the spire, judged it secure, and started clambering up.
Desmond, who had no chance of climbing with that ankle, hunkered down beside the pool. I considered making the attempt, but the continuing ache of my ribs kept me in place.
“Just wait here,” Prisha said to me briskly. “You’re not going to be any use to us if you fall and crack your head open.”
It was the right thing for her to say, such a Prisha thing to say, but I still couldn’t look her in the face without unease twisting inside me.
“Be careful,” I said. “And if there’s anything good up there, save some for the rest of us.”
She scrambled up the spire after Rocío. I sat down near Desmond and scanned the desertlike landscape.
“‘In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie,’” Desmond intoned gloomily. “I wouldn’t mind having a ’chanted ring right now, cursed or not.”
Rocío and then Prisha disappeared through the platform’s trapdoors. One of the sacks above us lurched out of view as the girls heaved it up over the edge. A pleased exclamation followed.
“Watch out below!” Prisha hollered, and tossed a sack down toward us. I leapt up as it landed at my right, scattering some of its contents on impact: granola bars, pears, and a wrapped sandwich.
A different sort of pang wrenched through my abdomen. I snatched up the food and hauled the bag over to Desmond.
