“Allow me,” he says, elbowing a scrawny guard in a black jumpsuit out of his way. “I’ll make a bridge.” His hands latch onto the bottom of the nearest tree trunk, and turn the bark beneath it to ash. He works his way around the fat trunk in circles, whittling away the layers in a matter of seconds. Ash flutters up and floats before settling on the surface of the puddles.
“He’s chopping down the tree!” Kaleida shrieks and wraps her arms around Milo. “We have nowhere to go.”
She’s right. I trapped us.
The final piece holding the trunk to the stump wisps away in gray flakes, leaving the massive tree to fall on top of us and create a direct path to our tiny island. The man steps back to admire his work then waves for the others holding it up to let go.
The molten metal is sure death, the tree sure pain, and I can’t quite decide which is more appealing. I don’t have time for fear to flip my insides upside down. I feel the destruction of the trunk as if it were my own, my stomach decimated through to my core. I scream as it falls in slow motion toward us, its size appearing to grow with every nearing inch. I throw my hands up. The surrounding trees thrust their branches out. Twigs twist and curl, interlocking with each other and catching the trunk before it reaches us.
My jaw hangs open. But not for long. The man is already halfway through another trunk, another devastating attack on my stomach. I feel the tree’s pain. It comes crashing toward us, and I catch it again in a hammock of stretched branches above. He goes for another.
Eight trunks later, the sky barely shows through the weave of branches above, the cone-shaped cocoon of tree trunks I built around us. I let out a long breath, pretending I can’t hear the shouts on the other side, that I can’t smell the death. Eli stands behind me and envelops me in his arms, his skin against mine as comforting and familiar as slipping on a fresh, cold T-shirt in the morning. No need for words.
“How are you doing this?” Kaleida’s dark eyes blaze with fear.
Milo rubs his hands together so hard I’m sure they’ll be raw to the bone before long. “Does it matter? You’re alive because of her.”
I lean against Eli’s chest and try to count the number of people I killed so I could live. So I could stand here like this again. In his arms.
But the moment is far from calm. I shake so hard my teeth must chip. Eli holds me even tighter. I’m used to it now, his strength. He tries to hold back, to keep it in check, but if he succeeded, I’d miss the way it hurts when his arms are around me. How I’m sore for a bit after, as if his touch lingered. I’d miss how safe I feel.
“Help!” Atom screams from over our heads. He clings to a wobbly branch of one of the fallen trees. Three Vaile scurry up the inclined trunk toward him, only visible from below when they toss their arms outward for balance.
“Where are Sypher and Maverick J.?” I ask, searching the treetops. “He should be with them.”
“There!” Kaleida points to two figures crawling across the canopy of branches above us. Vaile climb every trunk now, closing in on them.
“I’m not a Hollow,” I yell, loud enough to stop most of them in their tracks. “I don’t want your magic. I’m only trying to fix things!”
The Vaile erupt in chatter, their heads turning in question toward one another. They weren’t trained to talk, only to kill.
But I continue anyway. They need to know the truth. “The Centress sent me to Caldera as a baby. And thousands of others.”
“Lies!” A woman yells, reaching the top of the trunk that Atom grasps. Even through the weave of branches, I can see her cruel face. Blonde wisps of hair hang over her temples, once tucked into the wild bun atop her head. Her snarl is a hideous mix of threat and loathing. A dozen others reach the top of the ring of trunks at the same time, their faces appearing in a circle above us. Sypher and Maverick J. are barely visible, but the loud whacks of fists colliding with anything andeverything and the screams of Vaile falling from the trunks tell me they’re managing well enough.
I try to persuade the branches above to knock the blonde woman down as she swings an arm toward Atom. He scrambles backward to avoid her grasp—right into the arms of another. A man in a gray jumpsuit snatches him up by the collar of his shirt and hangs him through an opening in the criss-cross pattern of branches. Atom kicks his legs and locks his elbows at his sides in an attempt to prevent his shirt from pulling over his head. He’s quiet in a heart-splitting way. I trace the path down from his pale bare feet to the sea of metal below. A death drop.
I press my back closer to Eli, begging the trees to help and searching for one pair of kind eyes in the cluster of Vaile above us, one person I can convince to listen, one person who cares. Finding none, I try to sway them all, my cries breathless and frantic. “Put him down! He’s one of your own. None of this is a lie. All the Centresses have deceived you for centuries. Hollows aren’t even dangerous, and now they’re dying!”
The uproar that follows is deafening, only growing louder as my words are passed through the crowd like poisonous gas.
“They don’t believe me!” I cry. But it’s like screaming during a dream—useless and suffocating. And it doesn’t wake me up.
“Drop him!” a Vaile yells from above.
The ominous words suck me into my own mind, deep enough to smother me in a vision.
I’m alone in the woods. Liquid black metal creeps up my legs, over my hips. But it’s as cold as Eli. As reassuring. As lethal. It engulfs my arms, slinks up my chest. I’m caught in a trance, not even fighting as the metallic shine masks my face, pushing past my lips, crawling up my nose. I expect my lungs to be taken over, but it’s my heart that fills with cold blackness, that raps its last struggling beat.
I return with a harsh gasp, my senses gone haywire. I squint at the glinting metal, at the tiny crannies on the branches. Eli’s hold on me is consuming, every point of contact like a thousand touches in one. He shakes as though he felt that final beat too.
But the scream is what scars my senses.
“Mommy!”
Atom falls at a body-numbing speed.
Wherever this kid came from, it’s not here. No child separated from their mother at one-year-old and raised to kill would scream for her in a moment like this. Or call her mommy. He’s far from home. And family. And about to melt.
