But there was none.
“Did we do something wrong?” Anika asked as we searched and searched, spread out farther, then went back again.
“Did we not unplant all the seeds?”
“Did we miss a level completely?”
“Guys, Helen isn’t here.”
My stomach twisted something awful. We looked at Levana, her eyes red still, bloodshot, and she was shaking. We were all shaking.
“She will be all right,” Anika told her. “She’ll find her way.”
Anika didn’t believe her own words for a second—and neither did anybody else.
“She might be down there—she might,” Seth said, and he, too, was trying to get himself in a place where he could focus on unwinning this trial. “We just have to keep moving and we’ll get to her.”
I was the same—which shocked me all over again. It felt like I was changing.
There, while I watched—it felt like I was changing, like the feelings in me were altering, my thoughts brand new, and I had no idea why or how.
Was I losing my mind? Or was it March, somehow?
Maybe the game?
“What elsecanwe do?” Russ shouted. “Where are the talking flowers here—hello? Anybody?Anything?!” And he went to poke some of the flowers that were not very vibrant or bright against the tree. When nobody responded, he began to kick them.
It was more disturbing to watch than I would have thought.
Cook was on him, wrapping his arms around the guy while he kicked and thrashed.
“Stop it, Russ, stop it!”
“Kicking flowers isn’t going to help anyone. The trial hasn’t been fully unwon yet,” March said, more irritated, less composed than I’d ever seen him before. “Let’s spread out. Let’s see what more this place challenges us with.”
“Butwe fell!”Russ hissed. “Maybe they didn’t see us! Maybe we just need to tell them we’re here—because we already fell!”
“Howare you going to do that when this place goes on forever, sandbrain?” Erith snapped.
I went a little farther. This whole place could have been an illusion because she was right—it did look like it went on forever. There were no actual walls—every time I thought I reached the edge of the canopy that had lookedverydifferentfrom outside, it would turn out to be just a curtain of leaves and cords and tree roots, with another maze on its other side. Everything was greener, more alive, and there were birds here on this level now, too. It was brighter,even though not a single sun ray slipped through the large leaves.
Regardless—we were still stuck, and trying not to panic wasn’t working.
What if there was no way out? What if there were more seeds we planted, and what if we never found them—what if?
The other Hands argued, and I moved farther away on instinct—I had enough screaming going on in my head that I was barely able to contain it. There must be something we were missing. I felt it in my bones—there was something else. The trial would have ended if we’d unwon properly just like it had the first two times. The trial would have ended?—
I stopped.
My lungs stopped.
My heart stopped, too, for the longest second when I pulled back another one of those curtains made of leaves and ropes and saw the other side.
A doorway—so dark no light could survive near it. It did not fit with the rest of the Tree of Years, not the way the roots and the vines twisted, not the color of them, not thefeelingof it. They looked lifeless, completely lifeless, like a portal to the Everstill—a dark and twisted Everstill, that is.
And it looked exactlylike the one we found up at the top of the tree when we first entered.Identical.
Something moved behind me, but I was so consumed by the sight of that doorway that I didn’t even move back.
