We were all falling to our knees, digging into the roots, breaking pieces of wood. My skin bled but I didn’t feel the pain. I didn’t feel anything but panic, until we finally pulled a big piece of wood that seemed to be a layer of the floor itself. It took three of us—I had no idea which Hands—but we pulled, and underneath them, we saw seeds.
A handful of seeds that someone grabbed in their fists—Levana. She stood up screaming, and threw them to the other side, and then the floor underneath us groaned like abeast. Seth grabbed another handful, threw it to the other side.
The groaning intensified.
The timewraiths were almost on us when the smooth branches began to move.
“Move back, get back, move!”someone shouted, but we already were doing just that, all our eyes on the slide as it tried to untwist itself but couldn’t—and then it broke.
Screams as the branches snapped, some farther up, some lower—and then the wraiths began to scream, too. A screeching sound that made my ears bleed, like nails against metal, but much,muchworse.
They wereright there,possibly about five feet away, but the pieces of the broken branches crashed through the forest floor when they fell. They broke the floor completely, taking the wraiths with, their arms swinging, their awful fingers trying to hold onto thin air as they fell deeper and deeper below.
It all happened fast and slow, felt all too real, too raw, and like an impossible dream at the same time.
For the longest moment, none of us dared to go closer to the hole in the floor. I looked around and nothing had changed—the same branches and leaves, flowers and mushrooms—it was all the same down here as it had been up there. A forest within a forest, indeed.
We no longer heard the pieces falling nor the wraiths screeching the way they had. More light slipped through the canopy surrounding us here, so we saw clearly how far the other level had been—at least fifty feet.
“They’re gone, too,” Mimi whispered, looking down at the floor, to where Levana and Seth had thrown the seeds. She was right—all that was left of them were small piles of white powder scattered all over.
“Over, over, over,” Helen whispered as she slowly went closer to the hole to see better.
My stomach twisted like a broken machine.
“Helen,” someone said—could have been Mimi. “Helen, get back.”
But the Heart was whispering,over, over, over,and she inched a little closer to the edge, careful, her step light.
“Helen?” Levana said, the name a question on her tongue.
“It’s over,” Helen said. “It’s o?—”
A groan. A hiss. A hand with four freakishly long fingers wrapped around her ankle. Pulled.
We all ran forward, even though we knew it was too late. Others called her name, and maybe I did, too—there’s a wraith, there’s a wraith, there’s a wraith wrapped around your ankle!
What a silly thought. Must have been the shock.
But Helen was gone.
She didn’t scream—she only fell.
“Stop, stop—you’ll all fall, STOP!”someone shouted, thank Time, and I thought to listen. I thought to stop before it was too late for me, too, and the momentum propelled me forward, brought me to my knees. The hole was just two feet away from me, the edge of it like another mouth of a monster, too.
No Helen. No timewraiths anywhere that we could see—but the rings on the trunks and the branches were glowing silver. A full glow—like they’d suddenly come alive just now.
It was over—nowfor real. It was over, for us, and for Helen, too. She would never survive the fall. She would never survive a wraith wrapped around her ankle.
It was over, and somehow, I was still alive.
41
Itshould have beenover.
We trapped some of the timewraiths, and more fell, disappeared, and we unplanted the seeds. The rings on the wood were all glowing, most fully. However we’d killed that glow in the forward Turning Trials, it was now restored.
We were on the ground and there should have been an exit here—there should have.
