Chapter Thirty-Two #2
I clung to her front leg, clutching bunches of her soft, white fur like reins.
The bumps and jolts as she hopped wobbled my skin and rattled my teeth, but I held on tightly, gathering these obstacles would continue as I descended through the temple.
One floor for each school of light magic, designed for only Allwitches to conquer.
At the base of the stairs, I dove away from Pepper, worried about what would happen when the enchantment wore off and restored me to my full size.
I managed to avoid crushing her but slammed into the wet floor at full speed and slid, watching in wide-eyed terror as momentum propelled me closer and closer to the hole.
No no no no no.
Tears ripped in my leggings. I skinned my hands and knees to slow myself down before I fell through the shoot.
One inch away from it, I came to a halt, then promptly scrambled back, panting.
My ears rang with the water’s howling echo as I ventured across the rest of the room, which I gathered was the Healing chamber.
It was only a pain-amplifying spell that made my cuts sting and sensitized my newly formed bruises.
I’m not sure if anyone else would call it a reprieve, the sensation of being doused in peroxide, forced to endure someone cruelly poking at all my fragile areas, but it didn’t slow me.
In the chamber of illusion magic, I stopped cold at the sight of Helen, but only for a second.
She wasn’t real. I figured that out the second she stopped ignoring me.
Not that the apparition of her presence was any easier to bear.
Her Illusion had her same proud stance, her back to the water column so its gusty sprays realistically lifted strands of her dark-brown hair.
“The pathetic Ember Rose,” she said, her face tight and formal.
“What a pitiful life you’ve lived. How it must have hurt to be so ignored.
All your peers slapping each other’s hands at the track, going out of their way to avoid yours.
The tables in the cafeteria that were always too full.
Silence at your graduation. Watching the tops of fireworks on the Fourth of July, sitting alone in your room.
Why is it, do you think, that everyone you grew up with wanted you far, far away from them? ”
“Because I’m a half witch,” I yelled, unsure if I had to talk to it in order to make it go away.
“Because they were afraid,” the Illusion stated.
“Did you really think I was going to let you prance through the Allwitch temple? This place is for Allwitches. Skilled witches. For those worthy of Everden and its magic. For witches like your sister. An Unselected half witch doesn’t belong inside these walls.
Especially not you, a liability who doesn’t belong in Everden, let alone anywhere. ”
These thoughts were familiar. I had them often. They made me want to retreat from the world, when I let myself listen to them.
“Just let me pass,” I said. “The real Helen hid the missing Sevens here, and Pepper and I are kind of in a hurry to find them.”
“You?” she scoffed. “The rabbit would have a better chance going alone. You think you’ll find the Aspirants? Most days you can’t even bring yourself to leave your room!”
“That is not true!” I shouted as I muscled past her form. “I go for runs. I have friends. I go to the library.”
Her words trailed after me, but by concentrating on the roar of the waterfall, and the focus required to keep my balance on the slippery, wet stone, I managed to tune her out until all I heard from her lips were meaningless sounds.
There was still pain from the words she’d landed, pain lingering as I curved around the pit of water.
Pain sloshing up from my stomach’s black hole.
Black ichor grasping to smother the breath from my lungs. But . . .
I guess that’s where the Illusion underestimated me. I was so used to blocking Helen out that I did it unknowingly. So, filing it all away, I went on, forgetting her, forgetting the trick with an Illusion was that there are often multiple.
Pepper hesitated at the next set of stairs, concern etched into her small and delicate features as she sniffed at them.
“What is it?” I asked. It was the first time she wasn’t rushing me to chase her.
Pepper sniffed at the stairs again, her nose wrinkling like she detected a foul odor.
I dipped a toe to test the stability of the top stair.
It looked solid. And it felt solid. But Aurora Gallatine’s Uninhibitor and Truth Serum cocktail had very much looked and tasted like water, so I suspected it didn’t matter how the stair felt.
If Pepper thought there was something wrong with it, I had to trust her.
One of Skye’s felt-tip pens, the dark-blue one she neglected because it wasn’t “majestic,” was in my satchel.
I fished it out, dropped it, and watched as it defied the logic of stairs, falling in a straight line instead of tumbling down.
It was a drop. Maybe the top step was real, but the rest of them surely weren’t.
I tossed Pepper a baby carrot and listened to her gnawing while I figured out how I was going to get down to the next level without injuring her.
If the stairs were like all the others, it would be about twelve feet to the bottom, and twelve feet was about seven feet more than I was comfortable jumping.
But if I hung from the ledge and dangled my legs down, then there would only be about six and a half feet of distance between me and the ground, and that was — as Skye would say — a little better.
I opened my bag for Pepper to get in, then maneuvered myself to finger grip the edge of the last solid stair. I hung for all of thirty seconds before my arms wobbled. Before I could talk myself out of letting go, my fingers slipped, and I free-fell.
Several things happened at once. I hit the ground in a crouch. I heard a loud pop. My ankle throbbed. My satchel swung up and smacked me in the chin. Pepper, still in it, let out a loud squeak of consternation. But we were fine . . . We were fine.
My stomach swooped unpleasantly as my body got used to the injuries. My right ankle had taken the brunt of the hit, and it was swelling, probably sprained, but I could put a little pressure on it and keep going, even if I had to hobble.
The mental magic chamber only made my head ring, another pain I was accustomed to, thanks to the phantom flu, Farrah, and Helen. All I had to do was squint my eyes and plow forward. Before I knew it, the pain was gone, and Pepper was leading the way to the quantum chamber.
There was a profound, preternatural stillness to that chamber, where the shoot of falling water was frozen in time like an aquamarine glacier. Would it feel like shards of ice if I put my hand through the shoot? Or would it feel like the water upstairs? Wet and cold?
I forgot about my sprained ankle as the frozen column of water pulsed like a portal. Yet its power was even greater, ten times that of a portstop’s. It radiated like the entrance to another world.
Blood rushing to my ears, I stuck my hand out, wondering if it was the gate to where I came from, to home, to the human realm. Mesmerized, I stared at the faint blue glow the portal cast upon my hand as my fingers inched toward it.
At the last second, I snatched back my hand. The compulsion to find out where the portal led was strong, but I resisted it. Leland needed me in Everden, and because there was only one level left to know for sure if he wasn’t in here, I followed Pepper down the last set of stairs.
There was no obstacle in the final chamber, no scent of magic as far as I could tell.
It was only an empty, stone room, a left turn, and a large, adjoining chamber about the size of the Creation Academy’s cafeteria.
A vast open space, with all the water from the six levels above releasing in the corner, where the waterfall ended in a deep, black well.
I held on to the stone wall for balance, taking some of the weight off my right foot as I slowly made my way toward the well.
Peering into the basin of water, I didn’t see much. The water was too dark and murky to make out even my reflection.
Pepper sniffed curiously at it from where she sat on the stone ledge.
She was mesmerized, as mesmerized by the black water as I’d been in the quantum chamber.
But the thin ledge, narrower than the width of her small feet, was slippery with wet droplets and humid mist. It occurred to me that with one wrong move, Pepper might slip.
I was about to lift her and place her back in my satchel when someone entered.
“Step back from the well!” yelled a voice. Strong and male.
Startling Pepper.
I didn’t believe the splash even as I watched it happen, the well’s black depths rippling around where she’d fallen in. Bending, I reached a hand in the water and frantically searched. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I pitched over the ledge to search deeper, making waves in the black water as I combed it with my fingers and panic blared through my ears.
“Pepper?” I yelled.
“Take her away,” said a sharp-edged female tongue.
And at the sound of that voice, so callously directing what they wanted done with me, all the strength was stripped from my body.
This time, I couldn’t overcome it the way I had when I stood before her office. All this work, all this effort I’d put into confronting her, and all she had to say about it was Take her away. Get her out. How was I supposed to fight someone who wouldn’t even face me? I couldn’t.
The Echelon Dashell Eldridge lunged for me while Helen reached for the necklace inside her blouse.
She pulled it out by its chain, and I swallowed, recognizing the Ring of Greatest Fear’s sapphire pendant.
Helen’s fingers roamed to the pendant and began making the clockwise rotations required to induce delusions.
It was exactly as the Illusion had said. What was I doing here? I was a liability, destructive. I made everything worse for everyone.
Everyone who was taken was taken because of me.
Leland was missing.
And now, because I’d put her in danger, Pepper was gone.