Chapter 21 #2
One wrapped around Silas’s ankles, too, hauling him up beside them, suspending him in the air upside down.
Screams, but they weren’t his screams. No—Silas only went still, legs bound, arms falling down his sides, his face perfectly neutral, his eyes closed.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. This whole place was so, so wrong…
“Get them, get them, keep moving!” someone shouted, and the Hands already had the ones who’d been food for wraiths up on their feet.
Seth, Helen, Erith, pale as sheets but with eyes wide open, holding onto the Hands near them, limping farther and farther back.
“Ora—come on, we need those seeds!”
Yes, we needed the seeds to get to the next level of this wretched game.
But I needed the seeds, too, to get to Silas.
March and Reggie were trying. They were jumping up and down, barely able to graze Silas’s fingertips with theirs. The tree was holding him up high, and he wasn’t moving at all. Not a single inch.
Was he…
No-no-no—don’t think that word!
“Go, run—we’ll get him,” Reggie shouted at us. “Sy, hold on! Hold on, we’re gonna get you down!”
Except Silas wasn’t going to hold onto anything—the tree had him, just like it had the wraiths. They were paralyzed, too, their arms over their heads, those fingers, long and black, just dangling there for us to see.
Time’s Teeth, I wanted to burn every inch of them. I wanted to burn this whole tree to the ground, too, and the people who’d put us here.
This was not a game—this was a fucking death trap.
A hand on my arm. Russ grabbed me, tried to pull me to move around the boys trying to reach Silas—March was trying to climb the tree now—and to that hole made of stone blocks on the main trunk. The others were already halfway there, carrying the ones who’d been attacked.
There was no need to think or to decide anything because it was never even a question. I jerked my arm off of Russ’s grip and I did run—right there by Reggie’s feet as he jumped again and again.
“Move!” I shouted, and fell to my knees, slammed my hand against the floor.
My hand that was full of seeds.
“No!” someone screamed, but I was too busy calling for magic—any kind of magic, something that would help those seeds grow. All the magic I could let out. They could have all of it, every second I owned.
Purple smoke below the palm of my hand. Someone shouted and someone called, someone screamed for Silas again.
My hand was pushed back by a branch that suddenly burst out of the floor.
I fell back on my ass, too panicked to even feel anything, or think straight, but I could still see.
I saw the branch—not thick, but not too thin either—as it shot up higher and higher, all the way to where Silas hung on that tree.
I saw Reggie jumping on it, planning to climb, but it was slippery, too, this branch. Just like the others we’d made to get up here, it was very slippery.
Reggie fell on his ass with a loud thud, and the timewraiths began to move their fingers—those fingers—and March jumped onto the branch next, only he had his brand new axes in his hands that he’d had to magic again, to climb up to this level.
He slammed them against the smooth surface of the wood, and by the time I thought to stand up again, he’d already made it all the way to Silas.
March had wrapped a leg around the branch, and was using his axe to cut off the tip of the wood holding Silas up, and the wraiths moved-moved-moved, stretched out their hands, tried to reach the tree.
Silver sap still leaked out of those tears.
“Catch!” March shouted, and then Silas was falling.
It all happened at such a strange pace, I couldn’t tell if it was too fast or too slow. All I knew was that Reggie was there and he caught Silas in his arms, and then March was somehow in front of me, just like that, eyes wide, panicked, lips moving.
“RUN!”
I ran.
My body moved, my legs carried me, and the others were jumping up and down as they waved at us, while Erith and Mimi were on their knees right under that hole on the trunk. Green and white magic had spread all about them.
The seeds. We only had a handful left.
But a handful was enough.
This time vines spread up the surface of the main trunk from underneath Mimi’s and Erith’s hands. The color of their magic had disappeared, and the vines were as thick as my forearms, a whole network of them climbing up against the bark, all the way to that hole, possibly some twenty feet up.
The screeching sounds behind us made us all jump—the wraiths were definitely awake and thrashing, pushing themselves to the sides, trying to free themselves.
Meanwhile Silas’s eyes had already opened, and Russ and Seth were helping him onto Reggie’s back. “Just hold onto me, and I’ll do the rest,” the Club said.
Alive. I counted eleven heads—we were all alive.
“Go, go, go!” Levana called, and Erith and Mimi were the first ones to start climbing up the vines. None of us even breathed, hopeful and terrified at the same time to see if they would crumble under the weight of the girls.
They held.