“It’s not it,” I said, hoping to drown it. “Magic is not the way we complete this level.”
“Thenhow?” asked one Hand or the other.
“How are we to know what needs doing?”
“That good-for-nothing speaker!”
“Our so-calledwardendidn’t give us any clue, either.”
“We’re stuck?—”
“We’ll be wandering this place forever?—”
“We’ll be stuck in atree?—”
“Nothing’s ever going to change?—”
They went on and on, speaking one over the other, and I argued, too, my nerves getting the best of me. It seemed to be easier to think out loud sometimes, even if I couldn’t hear what I was saying through the noise.
Until…
“Still stuck? Howoriginal.”
The rest of us all clamped our mouths shut at the same time.
A mushroom with a mouth, and eyes that rolled like a person’s.
A mushroom with a mouth that said the exact same thing as before. In the same way.
Something cold spread under my skin, and it was so fast, so all-consuming, even the thoughts in my head froze out of my reach. All—except one that burned like flames.
“A loop,” I whispered when those flames illuminated me well enough. “We’re stuck in a time-loop.”
Of course.
It made sense the way everything was the same everywhere we looked. It made sense that that mushroom would be in the same place, and that the tulips and the daffodil were there, too.
They had eyes and mouths again, and they told us all about how our lives were too precious to be lost here, that this wasn’t worth dying for.
But the most important proof of all was…
“It’s here,” Seth and Mimi said at the same time, pointing down at the hole on the floor just a few feet away. The hole where those smooth twisted branches had broken through to form a bridge for us. The same place we’d come through what felt like hours ago—and we’d only walked straight ahead, yet we’d ended up right back where we started.
“Easy then,” said Helen, pointing at me and Silas and Cook. “You’re Spades. You can break loops.”
Three problems with that.
One—we could break magical loops that were made by mistake, or that were a result of too much residual Sparetime concentrated in one area or one person for too long. The kind that caused glitches in time. Two—we needed at least a decade of active magic use to even begin to understand time-loops.
And three…
“Magic doesn’t work here, Helen,” Cook reminded her, and his voice broke. “We’re stuck for real now.”
Nobody had a single thing to say to that.
20
We argued. We sat. We complained. We laughed.
