A wrinkle appeared between Boone’s eyebrows. She could see the conflict on his face, could see how badly he wanted to do the right thing. But he still had no idea what the right thing was, and she had grown tired of waiting for him to figure it out. She couldn’t risk him stopping her.
“Morgan,” he began before she smashed him over the head with the hefty flashlight.
Boone crumpled to the floor, and Ellory ran for the next set of stairs.
The next floor was more of the same—locked doors that were once classrooms, dust and blackened grout along the walls—and the floor after that. It wasn’t until she found the stairs that led to the rooftop that Ellory slowed down. There were no footsteps behind her, and there were no more obstacles ahead of her. It felt like a trap, but it was one she had to walk into.
She thought again of Rapunzel from the Grimms’ fairy tale, her hair shorn, her prince blinded, her body banished to thewilderness—all because a sorceress had wanted to keep the princess for her own. There had been a happy ending to that fairy tale, but Rapunzel been blond-haired like Gaia. Ellory wasn’t sure that girls who looked like her, with thick-textured black hair, got that golden ending.
Ellory took a deep breath and pushed on.
As soon as she took the first step, she nearly toppled down the stairs when nausea punched her in the stomach. Her legs felt as weak as a newborn’s. She leaned against the wall to keep herself standing, swallowing again and again to keep bile from rising. Sweat coated her skin, and her breath came in sharp pants. Deep aches bloomed across her skin. She looked down to see bruises circling her ankles and inching up under her jeans. Purple-brown marks sprouted across her arms.
Her legs gave out. She gripped the railing as she slid downward until she was sitting in the center of the staircase, breathing like she’d run a marathon.
What’s happening to me?
The top of the stairs seemed oceans away, but she was seized by the urge to crawl back the way she’d come. Boone might have been unconscious, or he might have been bleeding and pissed, but he wouldn’t hurt her. She knew that now. Not as long as hurting her would hurt Hudson.
Ellory almost turned, but the thought of Hudson cleared her head. Another protective spell, she realized, one trying to keep her from wading deeper into the lodge. She climbed to the next step, dizzy.
By the time she made it to the top, black spots danced in her vision. Her lips were dry, but her fingers were too weak to get the water bottle from her backpack. If she didn’t keep moving forward, if she paused for even a second, she knew she would pass out.
Feet turned into inches, which turned into centimeters. Her shaking hand found the doorknob and turned.
Her breath caught.
The rooftop was lit by bluish glows that came from several globes filling the otherwise-empty space. A cloud-covered sky bore down on them, flashes of stars barely visible between the battlements. Lightning sparked across the surface of the orbs, obscuring the shadowed figure at each center. But the one directly in front of her was close enough for Ellory to see that it was not her kidnapped friends that floated in the middle of this living magic.
It was her own sleeping body.
38
Ellory’s legs still couldn’t support her weight, so she could do nothing but crawl forward in a trance. That was her curly hair in its usual high bun, that was her deep brown skin tinted blue by the magic, those were her full lips, her broad nose, her curves wrapped in her favorite green hoodie and blue jeans. She was fast asleep, though occasionally her eyelids would twitch as though she were about to awaken. Every time that happened, another spark of lightning flashed across the globe she was trapped in, and the twitch dissipated into restful sleep.
From her spot on the floor, she could make out the figures in the nearby globes, just as she’d seen them at Colt’s house. Tai slumbered in one, her beautiful face tipped to the side, her lips parted. Cody was in another, curled into the fetal position with their legs pulled up to their chest. Sofia Aston. David Chang Vargas. Ximena Moreno. Imani Khalif. The bright cages continued on beyond what Ellory’s strained eyes could see, holding an untold number of her classmates captive in this underground prison.
But not Hudson. Where were they keeping Hudson?
Ellory turned back to her own body, trembling with dread. She had been here before,seen this before, and she had been terrified then, too. This fear was too ingrained to be new, and she couldn’t think, couldn’tbreathe; her heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest—
She dragged herself closer,
close enough to reach
out
and
touch.
The room went black.
***
“Wake up.”
Ellory gasped into something like consciousness, but she could tell from her translucent limbs and her crepuscular surroundings that she wasn’t awake. Before this year—before magic—she had always thought of her dreams as gossamer threads of imagination that disappeared in the dawn, nothing to worry about or retain. In the short time since she’d accepted that everything she thought she knew was a dream, she was getting better at grounding herself within them, at separating the real from the fake.
