“It’s not your job to protectme,Heartling. We’re all equals here.” He opened his mouth to speak, but I said, “And don’t you dare sayI never said it was.” Because that’s what he was going to say, I just knew it.
His widening grin said so—but now I was smiling, too. “Not my job, true. Just my honor.”
Well, fuck. What could I possibly say to that?
“Enough.”
Silas’s voice rang in my ears, and he sounded unlike his usual self. We had no choice but to look up, especially when everybody else suddenly stopped talking, too.
“They don’t want us to leave one of us behind,” Silas said, and his eyes fell on Cook, then me. “What was it that we learned inBalanceabout loose ends?”
Easy. “Time hates loose ends.” We’d been learning that since elementary school.
“Ridder’s formula,” Cook said from where he sat near Mimi across from us. His eyes were wide open, his cheeks slightly flushed, like the thoughts in his headwere racing. “A…a form of breaking loops is not allowing them to come full-circle.”
That’s when it hit me, too, all at once.
“Because a looponlyexists when it can come full circle.”Of course.There were all kinds of loops magic could make, but some of them only needed tonot closeto stop existing. You didn’t necessarily have to break them—simply never allow them to loop.
“I don’t think this loop rewinds time, though,” Silas said. “I think it rewinds inventory.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Levana asked.
“It means people. Objects,” Silas explained, and it made so much sense now I felt silly for not seeing it sooner. “It means all we have to do to not allow this time to loop to close is to leave something behind.” Silas slowly stood up and looked at March. “And we already have.”
“The axes.” The axes that they’d left with the wraith, to pin him to the wood.
“The loop can’t close if we leave something behind,” Iwhispered to myself, just to taste the words on my tongue, to make sure they sounded as right as they felt. They did.
“If you’re wrong, I’m going to punch both your faces, Spades.” Helen jumped to her feet. “Let’s try to get out of here already.” And she started to run.
There was still a part of me that considered it wasn’t true. There was still a part of me that wondered if maybe we had to domoreto not allow the loop to close, maybe leave behind something else. Our shoes or our uniforms or even cut our hair—anything at all.
But the axes qualified. They were objects that had belonged to us, too.
We ran together, and this time we all felt the shift in the air. We all felt our magic buzzing in our chests again. It had worked.
And when we found ourselves back to the beginning of it all, the mushroom didn’t come to life to say its line—Still stuck? How original.The flowers remained just flowers, too. No warning, and no screaming—just the hole on the ground where the slide tree had brought us up from the level below.
“It works,” Seth whispered, green smoke over the palm of his hand as he raised it up. “The loop is broken. We’re no longer stuck.”
Levana said, “Your seeds. C’mon, everyone, bring me those seeds again. I’m ready to get out of here.”
It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.
We weren’t stuck anymore, and our magic was back, and we were free to climb to the next level. We werefree.
Four of the Hands who still had their seeds, including March, were already by Levana. She’d kneeled right at the edge of the slide, because Mimi insisted that it would require less magic to extend these existing branches all the way to the next level, than to create new ones from scratch.
They dumped all their seeds, and I was waiting to do the same, too, if needed.
The five of them were enough again, though. And the effect was immediate. As soon as the seeds hit the edge of the smooth wood, the ground groaned and shook and threw us all off our feet just like before.
This time, we knew to brace ourselves as the branches grew and twisted up toward the sky lightning fast, so none of us lost balance or fell. We only prayed that the next level of this game would be the end of it.
21
The flowers came back to scream at us—get back, get back, don’t go up there!They told us,You will die if you do!
