“We’d slip and fall three feet up.”
“We’re moving at a normal pace now, though…right?” Reggie said, scratching the back of his head as he looked around.
“We are,” I said without hesitation—my movements matched the rhythm of my heart perfectly.
“I think we completed this level when we made this,” said Seth and slapped his hand against the wood a couple of times. “Now,howare we going to climb it?”
“Magic.” We turned to Silas, who was pacing around in a circle with his eyes down and his hand around his chin. He looked older like that. Almost like a different person.
“We have our Life Clocks. If they allow us to use Sparetime, we can magic the soles of our shoes, and make rope at the very least.”
“Will that be enough? It’s pretty steep,” said Russ, and he was right. The branches went almost straight up.
“Only one way to find out.”
March dropped to his knees, took his Life Clock out and put his hand over my boot.
“What are you doing?”
“Whathesaid,” March said, nodding his head to the side.
I looked at the others—all of them were kneeling, too, working on their own boots. “I can do it myself,” I muttered, feeling awkward to have him kneeling there in front of me.
“I never said you couldn’t,” said March without even looking up at me. Red spilled out of the palm of his hand and on my right boot.
A heartbeat later, I felt them changing around my feet, felt the soles getting thicker, raising me up another inch. The hands on March’s Life Clock moved—four minutes. It had cost him four minutes of Sparetime to alter my boots, which was entirely too high a price to pay, if you asked me.
March didn’t, though. He just looked up at me and grinned, his eyes sparkling.
My heart squeezed.
Dangerous,Silas had said, but even he hadn’t known justhowdangerous March was becoming for me, and I didn’t know it, either, then. Not fully.
“Guys, itworks,” said Erith a tick later. “My magic’s never quite worked before, but it worked on the first try.” She showed us the thick brown sole of her boot, almost identicalto mine. That’s when it hit me—March had used his magicso easily.They all had.
“It did exactly what I wanted it to do!” Erith cried, ecstatic.
“Mine, too,” said Helen. “Look at his! I never used to be able to make much of anything before.”
That made me insanely curious.
Wouldmymagic work the same way, too? Because it didn’t back home, not quite. I’d tried. We were all encouraged to try in school after we turned fifteen—only the most basic things. I tried at home with my parents, too, and it never quite felt right. It never moved the way it was supposed to, the way the adults said it should. It was always…hesitant.
Eventually I’d stopped trying. Not that I was a big fan of making things out of thin air. Well, not thin air, but Sparetime. Minutes that we could have used for something else, somethingbigger.
Regardless—now I was curious to know if it worked for me, too.
Then Silas said, “C’mon, let’s get up there, see what else they have in store for us.”
And so, we did. At first, we didn’t magic any other tool, only the boots. We didn’t think we needed to. We started climbing, trying to find edges on the smooth surfaces to hold on to, and the soles did help a great deal. My boots wouldn’t slip a single inch. March had done a really great job.
But when we were about ten feet off the floor, they were no longer enough. There were only so many places where we could hold onto those branches, and my hands were so, so tired, my fingertips bleeding.
“Hey guys, watch this!”
Green magic, dark and thick, like something betweensmoke and liquid, spread from under Reggie’s palm where he was climbing just a couple feet over my head.
The next second, he was holding this device that looked like an axe, but the head of it was pointy, sharp, thick. A climbing axe.
