“Thank you,” she said primly. “That was unbecoming of me.”
Elswyth reached to the table next to her, where Persephone’s baby lay wrapped in blankets. The infant was beginning to sob, barely audible over the sound of Silas and Gall.
She handed Mrs. Rose the child. “I need you to take him andrun,” Elswyth said. Mrs. Rose took the infant and smiled, cooing. Then she looked confused.
“Where did you get a baby?”
“Run!” Elswyth said. She pushed Mrs. Rose off the table and down the tunnel that led toward the exit. Her pink dress disappeared into the shadows. Then Elswyth turned around and ran back into the room.
Silas turned to her. “What are you doing? Elswyth, run! I’ll hold him!”
“I can’t! Not without Persephone!”
Silas sliced another vine and then two more. Sweat glistened on his brow, and his shoulders slumped. The flame from the broken lantern was dwindling, and Gall stepped closer, vines testing the ground, searching.
Silas turned to her, exhausted. “Elswyth, please, ru—”
A vine the size of a man’s arm struck out at Silas. It impaled his stomach, protruding, blood-soaked, from his back.
Elswyth screamed, reaching out as the vine lifted Silas into the air. He slid farther down, inch by inch onto the vine, as blood dribbled from his mouth.
He raised his pistol again, shakily, and fired. The bullet missed Gall, instead shattering one of his tentacles. Silas tried to shoot again, but the gun fell from his hand.
Gall flung Silas across the room, discarded. He slid to a stop on the floor by Aranyani’s pool.
Elswyth ran to him, but Gall stepped between them, his tentacle vines blocking her path. He lowered himself down like a spider, examining her, and she was face-to-face with his lifeless eyes.
“Don’t fret, Elswyth. His life was unimportant. He was merely a tool. You, on the other hand… your life would be a great loss.”
Elswyth scrambled backward. She grabbed a piece of broken wood from the flames. Its tip burned like a torch. She thrust it at Gall, and he retreated into the shadows.
“A little fire will not kill me, Elswyth. I am life itself. I am the wet and rot of the ancient wood. I am the strength of green and growing things.”
Elswyth looked around her, desperate for anything she could use. And then she saw it. Sitting there, near the flames from Silas’s lantern, was her living engine. A glass orb of compressed, flammable gas.
She backed up, diving for it, and then held her torch to the surface of the sphere.
“Come any closer and I’ll do it,” Elswyth said.
Gall paused. He was silent for a moment.“The explosion would kill us all, Elswyth. Your sister is made of wood now, too,”he said. A vine gestured toward Persephone, where she lay motionless in her tree.“Would you end her life as well?”
“What life, Gall? You’ve taken that from her,” Elswyth said.
“I could save her. I could make her new again. After all the time you’ve spent searching for her—could you live, knowing it wasyouwho killed her? You, who thinks all life is sacred?”
Elswyth looked at her sister, frozen in wood. Her face was still slack, her eyes now totally gray. It seemed that she’d lost her will to live as soon as she’d relinquished her son. A single tear fell from Persephone’s eye. But was it a small smile that Elswyth saw on her lips?
Elswyth set her jaw. “Everything dies. It’s our time, Gall.”
She dropped the torch and pushed the living engine off its stand. It rolled into the flames, glass cracking.
Gall screamed. He dove for the engine, vines wrapping around it, trying to push it from the fire.
Elswyth turned and ran. She got three steps away before the explosion hit her in the back.
When Elswyth came to, her body screamed with pain. Cold stone pressed against her skin; when she opened her eyes, she saw she’d been thrown against the far wall of the chamber. Bones lay scattered around her, and her body ached from a thousand cuts and bruises. Blood dribbled from her mouth onto the floor.
The room came into focus. Gall—what had once been Gall—was at the center, burning. His vines whipped around the room, covered in flame. They flailed wildly, destroying the laboratory and the catacomb walls. Gall’s corpse, at the center of it all, was a ball of flame, barely recognizable as a man. An inhuman screeching echoed through the chamber, joined by the hissing and cracking of wood.
