That thought, or maybe Pepper gnawing a hole through my bag, was how I finally snapped free of the spell. I didn’t want to get lost in Gray anymore. I wanted something else.
Without looking back, I took a step toward the stairs.
“Stay close,” I warned, taking Pepper out of my bag and setting her down to hop along at my feet.
On the next floor, there was no waterfall curtain to walk through. The waterfall continued in a gushing cylinder that poured from the ceiling and down the shoot, but in this room, the area of elemental magic was fortunately concentrated to the five-foot diameter of the hole.
Easy enough. The hole was avoidable by walking along the drier edges of the chamber.
Then enchantment magic shrank me to the size of one of Pepper’s toenails. I stared out at an unending room. I was smaller than a pin, and Pepper, unaffected, was a dinosaur in comparison. She quaked the stone floor, rocking me unstably as she leapt for the next set of stairs without waiting. In my current state, I wouldn’t catch up to her for hours.
At the top of my lungs, I yelled for her to come back, figuring the fastest way to solve this level was to be carried by her.
I clung to her front leg, clutching bunches of her soft, white fur like reins. The bumps and jolts as she hopped wobbled my skin and rattled my teeth, but I held on tightly, gathering these obstacles would continue as I descended through the temple. One floor for each school of light magic, designed for only Allwitches to conquer.
At the base of the stairs, I dove away from Pepper, worried about what would happen when the enchantment wore off and restored me to my full size. I managed to avoid crushing her but slammed into the wet floor at full speed and slid, watching in wide-eyed terror as momentum propelled me closer and closer to the hole.
No no no no no.
Tears ripped in my leggings. I skinned my hands and knees to slow myself down before I fell through the shoot.
One inch away from it, I came to a halt, then promptly scrambled back, panting.
My ears rang with the water’s howling echo as I ventured across the rest of the room, which I gathered was the Healing chamber. It was only a pain-amplifying spell that made my cuts sting and sensitized my newly formed bruises. I’m not sure if anyone else would call it a reprieve, the sensation of being doused in peroxide, forced to endure someone cruelly poking at all my fragile areas, but it didn’t slow me.
In the chamber of illusion magic, I stopped cold at the sight of Helen, but only for a second. She wasn’t real. I figured that out the second she stopped ignoring me. Not that the apparition of her presence was any easier to bear. Her Illusion had her same proud stance, her back to the water column so its gusty sprays realistically lifted strands of her dark-brown hair.
“The pathetic Ember Rose,” she said, her face tight and formal. “What a pitiful life you’ve lived. How it must have hurt to be so ignored. All your peers slapping each other’s hands at the track, going out of their way to avoid yours. The tables in the cafeteria that were always too full. Silence at your graduation. Watching the tops of fireworks on the Fourth of July, sitting alone in your room. Why is it, do you think, that everyone you grew up with wanted you far, far away from them?”
“Because I’m a half witch,” I yelled, unsure if I had to talk to itin order to make it go away.
“Because they were afraid,” the Illusion stated. “Did youreallythink I was going to let you prance through the Allwitch temple? This place is forAllwitches. Skilled witches. For those worthy of Everden and its magic. For witches like your sister. An Unselected half witch doesn’t belong inside these walls.Especiallynot you, a liability who doesn’t belong in Everden, let alone anywhere.”
These thoughts were familiar. I had them often. They made me want to retreat from the world, when I let myself listen to them.
“Just let me pass,” I said. “The real Helen hid the missing Sevens here, and Pepper and I are kind of in a hurry to find them.”
“You?” she scoffed. “Therabbitwould have a better chance going alone. You thinkyou’llfind the Aspirants? Most days you can’t even bring yourself to leave your room!”
“That isnottrue!” I shouted as I muscled past her form. “I go for runs. I have friends. I go to the library.”
Her words trailed after me, but by concentrating on the roar of the waterfall, and the focus required to keep my balance on the slippery, wet stone, I managed to tune her out until all I heard from her lips were meaningless sounds. There was still pain from the words she’d landed, pain lingering as I curved around the pit of water. Pain sloshing up from my stomach’s black hole. Black ichor grasping to smother the breath from my lungs. But . . .
I guess that’s where the Illusion underestimated me. I was so used to blocking Helen out that I did it unknowingly. So, filing it all away, I went on, forgetting her, forgetting the trick with an Illusion was that there are often multiple.
Pepper hesitated at the next set of stairs, concern etched into her small and delicate features as she sniffed at them.
“What is it?” I asked. It was the first time she wasn’t rushingme to chase her.
Pepper sniffed at the stairs again, her nose wrinkling like she detected a foul odor.
I dipped a toe to test the stability of the top stair. Itlookedsolid. And itfeltsolid. But Aurora Gallatine’s Uninhibitor and Truth Serum cocktail had very much looked and tasted like water, so I suspected it didn’t matter how the stair felt. If Pepper thought there was something wrong with it, I had to trust her.
One of Skye’s felt-tip pens, the dark-blue one she neglected because it wasn’t “majestic,” was in my satchel. I fished it out, dropped it, and watched as it defied the logic of stairs, falling in a straight line instead of tumbling down. It was a drop. Maybe the top step was real, but the rest of them surely weren’t.
I tossed Pepper a baby carrot and listened to her gnawing while I figured out how I was going to get down to the next level without injuring her.
If the stairs were like all the others, it would be about twelve feet to the bottom, and twelve feet was about seven feet more than I was comfortable jumping. But if I hung from the ledge and dangled my legs down, then there would only be about six and a half feet of distance between me and the ground, and that was — as Skye would say —a littlebetter.
