It was the white tulip that answered. “Because we’re notevil,that’s why. If you were smart, you’d run. Go back where you came from, right now.”
My smile dropped a little bit, and the others stopped laughing. I exchanged a look with Silas, who was leaning in to see them better right next to me.
“This isn’t worth dying for, I tell you. It isn’t,” said the daffodil.
“Why, though? What’s up here? We don’t see anything,” I said, looking around again, just to make sure that nothing had changed since we’d climbed.
“What’s up here?” the pink tulip screeched. “WHAT’S UP HERE?!”
It wasshaking.
“How dare you—how dare you evenmentionit to him?!” the white tulip.
“Don’t you know what we’ve had to go through—don’t you know?!” the daffodil.
“BAD HAND! BAD HAND!”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to—”upset you,I was going to say, but the others started screaming.
Holy Hour, the flowers were indeedscreaming.
We all moved back a step or two, and Anika and Levana tried to calm them down, but it didn’t work.
A tick later, right before our eyes, the flowersclosed.
They stopped screaming, and they simply closed their petals, and stopped moving altogether.
A breath escaped my parted lips.
“Still stuck? Howoriginal.”
We jumped, and a few of us screamed—could’ve been me as well.
This time, it wasn’t a flower that had spoken, but a mushroom.
An honest-to-Time mushroom, tall as my forearm, with eyes and a mouth on the thick brown stem, the head of it hanging on top like a hat.
The mushroom then rolled its eyes—I saw it. We all saw that it rolled its eyes and moved to the sides like it was trying to shake its head—then froze. The eyes and the mouth disappeared.
He was just a mushroom again.
“Did that just…happen?” Cook whispered from behind me.
The rest of us looked at one another. Swallowed. Nodded.
That definitely happened.
“Let’s just keep moving,” March said and took my hand in his.
I really wished he didn’t have to let go anytime soon.
We kept our eyes wide open and our ears strained at all times. We kept checking our Life Clocks, too, to make sure that time wasn’t moving slower—or faster, for that matter—but no. The seconds ticked by exactly as they should. Time in this level of the Tree of Years, it seemed, didn’t change speed.
And the scenery didn’t change either.
“How much longer?” Erith asked for the third time in the past five minutes, but I couldn’t blame her, could I? I wasasking the same question in my head over and over again, too—how much longer did we have to go to find something in this place? Anything at all, just…something.
“That’s it, I’m done,” said Levana all of a sudden, and stopped walking. Fell on the floor on her knees. “There is no point in trying to get anywhere—we need to goup.”She pulled the seeds from the pocket of her suit and arranged them in a small space between two thicker roots. “What we need is another one of those bridges that brought us up here.” She looked at us. Put her hands on her hips. “Well? C’mon—bring your seeds whoever has any left!”
