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  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and cleared my mind. I needed to think like Vella. I would find the story of this lake and convince it that it needed a bridge. I reached out to the lava lake.

  I got a flash of Connie—or maybe I should say Constance—Cobblestone, but only for a second. Both of them vanished, to be replaced by an enormous vision of Agatha, wreathed in flame, her eyes glowing with unswerving purpose. She swiveled and drove that lethal stare right into me.

  “Ah!” I yelped, opening my eyes and cutting that connection. Okay, that didn’t help. And I’d probably just sent up a giant flare letting Agatha know where I was.

  But I’d seen something before I’d pulled away. This place, this throne room, was how Connie saw herself. Flicker was an island of safety in the middle of Agatha’s angry lava.

  You want a bridge, I thought to the lake. A bridge to cross the lava.

  The lava lake roiled. It erupted on the far side and bubbled close to me. I stepped back as lava sloshed onto the floor.

  Wow. It so did not want a bridge. It wanted to swell and consume me.

  Rrrrrgh! Working with another person’s story sucked. I mean, I could respect that lava’s got to lava, but how was I supposed to get anything done this way? I raised my pen, wanting to just make it do what I wanted. I could just write: A bridge grew across the lava. And the bridge would happen, but the lava would hate it. And I didn’t want to force anything to be what it hated. So how did I make the bridge without making the bridge?

  Argh! I did not have time for this!

  And then, like a hammer to the head, I knew what my “crazy” was, as Flicker put it. At André’s ruined Silverwefts, I cried because I couldn’t figure out why I was broken, why I kept wrecking everything. At the Reflection Pool, I’d thought it was because deep down, I was the bully. But I wasn’t a bully. I didn’t want to tear people down to build myself up; I didn’t want to hurt people.

  I was impatient.

  I thought back over all of my blunders in the last hour, each one stacked on top of the others because I’d rushed and pushed to get what I needed.

  My actions weren’t unfounded. I had no time at all. Agatha was burning her way to me right now. Jimmy would follow. I hadn’t found André yet. Or the hourglass. Let’s not forget Flicker and even Connie, now sucked in and trapped inside their burn-it-all-up alter-ego. And Jayla was stuck in Veloran because of me. And Theron and Gruffy and Pip. Not to mention there was the brand-new rip I’d made in the sky and . . .

  I let out a breath and stopped my mind from running away.

  I now knew that people were getting squished by my impatience, so I had to make better magic. No cutting corners; I had to stand fast and do it right, even if it meant getting walloped by Agatha. Winning wasn’t really winning if you leveled everyone around you.

  I had to live—or die—by the stories around me.

  Urgh. That was so complicated and sticky I didn’t even want to think about it. The lake didn’t want my story. It wouldn’t bend. So I could break it or . . .

  Or I could bend.

  I glanced over by the monkey bars. There sat my wisdom, smoothing his whiskers and waiting for me to get a clue.

  “André’s out there?” I asked Squeak, pointing at the throne island.

  “Squeak!”

  “I don’t see him.”

  Squeak crossed his arms and cocked his head.

  “Okay fine,” I murmured.

  I started out on the teeny tiny ledge, which was not as easy as it sounds. It was just big enough for half of my feet, and the wall had a very uncool lean toward the lava. I kept my hands flat against it and shuffled along, my heels dangling over red-hot death. Every time I moved, I thought I was going to fall backward and burst into a hiss of human steam.

  I made it to the first doorway and backed into it, breathing hard.

  “Squeak,” said Squeak encouragingly.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Squeak.”

  A thoom sounded not-so-far-away-at-all down the tunnel. Agatha was coming. Tick tock, tick tock.

  “Urg,” I said, getting back out onto the ledge. I made it to Squeak and gratefully grabbed the rungs. Hanging on with both hands, I squinted over my shoulder at the giant lake.

  Well, the good news was that the bars were rough. It would be hard to slip off them. I put my back against the rungs and rubbed my hands together.

  I’m coming, André. Just wait a little longer and I’ll save you . . . Or, rather, drag you into this wonderful mess with me. Which I’m sure you’ll appreciate. So yeah, hang on. I looked at the mile-long stretch of bars. And, you know, I’ll hang on, too. We’ll all just hang on.

  I started climbing the rungs like I was going up a ladder, which started out okay. Soon, though, my back was hanging over the lava. Squeak, in a flash, ran up and sat on my belly.

  I went as far as I could like that. I wanted to keep using my feet all the way, but that wasn’t happening. As soon as I was almost flat, it took more effort to keep my feet on the rungs. I pushed against them and went forward, one rung at a time. My arms started to tremble, and I’d only gone maybe fifteen bars out, with eighty-five left to go.

  Finally, I couldn’t keep my feet on the rungs, and they swung out over the drop. Squeak flashed up onto my shoulder.

  “Squeak,” he said.

  I can do this. I can climb across a hundred rungs.

  I turned myself around to face the island, and I continued, one hand over the other. One more. Five more. Ten more.

  Yeah, sure you can. In what universe?

  Thirty bars out, and my muscles were shaking. I rotated my shoulders and went three more rungs. Sweat rolled down my face, falling down to hiss into steam below.

  I’m gonna die. This was the stupidest idea ever.

  I went forward another three rungs, stopped to breathe. The heat from the lava was dizzying. My feet dangled over the little flames running across the fire lake like soccer players. They appeared, ran, vanished.

  Hey, look! She’s gonna fall. Score!

  Five more rungs.

  Come on, Lorelei. Be like Theron. Buck up and just do it.

  Five more.

  On the next one, my hand slipped slowly off the rung. I swung to the next one. My shoulders ached, and I wasn’t even close to halfway. I was maybe forty bars out. Sixty more to go. My heart started thundering.

  “Squeak, I’m slipping,” I shouted.

  “Squeak,” he said.

  One hand slipped off, and I grabbed the rung with my other sweaty hand. The roughness of the bars wasn’t even helping enough now. All it was doing was tearing up my hands.

  With a grunt, I yanked myself up and caught the next rung and swung, catching the next. I needed to keep moving. If I could just keep moving, I could make it. I reached for the next rung. My arms ached so much I wasn’t sure if I even trusted them not to just let go.

  “I . . . I can’t.”

  “Squeak!”

  You can die here, you know, Jimmy’s words from a year ago echoed in my head. If I died here, I was dead. I couldn’t change that with my pen. I couldn’t change anything—

  Waitaminute!

  I hauled myself up, grunting, my arms trembling. I couldn’t change the lake of lava, but I could change my own story. I’d changed something Flicker wanted back in the Kaleidoscope Forest. And now I wanted more strength. I could change that!

  I forced my arm between the rung and the ceiling, scraping the heck out of my elbow and bending it over the bar. It hurt like someone was shoving a broken brick into the crook of my arm, but it held my entire weight while I used my other hand to reach into my pouch. I pulled out my pen and wrote on the air: Lorelei has the strength of Theron.

  The words glowed, then flashed out in that wonderful ripple. My arms filled with vigor, and the soreness disappeared from my shoulders and my wrists.

  “Now we’re talking!”

  I put the pen away and started across again. I passed t
he halfway point with ease. Fifty bars down. Fifty to go. So this was what it felt like to be Theron. Jeepers. No wonder he was always wanting to climb stuff. How could you just sit still with this much strength in your muscles?

  Hand over hand over hand, I kept going, but the next twenty were harder. Even with Theron’s muscles, I started getting tired again. Ten after that and I started to feel like I had before.

  Fingers slipping . . . Next rung.

  I clung there, working my shoulders, trying to loosen the knots, but that only seemed to make it worse. I still had about twenty bars to go.

  “Come on,” I told my aching muscles. “Twenty more.”

  I began talking to myself to take my mind off how much my arms hurt. “What does Dad say,” I huffed, shaking sweat out of my eyes. One more rung. “About jobs that are too big?” I reached for the next rung, slipped, gasped, then grabbed onto it with a death grip.

  I clung there like it was no big deal. Right? Almost fell to my death. No worries. I could barely feel my hands now.

  Come on. It’s not going to get better. Just keep moving.

  I couldn’t grip the bars for more than a second before they started to let go. My hands slipped with every grab, but I was finally over the island. Now if I fell, I’d just break every bone in my body.

  “Squeak,” said Squeak, patting my head.

  “When a job is too big,” I continued, “Dad says, ‘How do you eat an elephant?’” I moved faster, saying one word for each rung.

  “One.”

  “Bite.”

  “At.”

  “A.”

  “Time!”

  My left hand came off the next bar before I let go of the last one. I screamed, swinging backward and hanging on by only three fingers. Then two. Then one—

  I brought my other hand up, snatching the bar with my right as my left melted off. I started to swing forward.

  But my right couldn’t hold on. I shot off the bar and plummeted toward the lava stone pillar. I twisted to grab it.

  “Squeak!” Squeak leapt off and landed on the seat as I slammed into the side of the throne. My ribs hit hard, and I grappled with the armrest. There was no platform on the top, only the throne topping the tall, craggy pillar. My feet dangled over a hundred-foot drop to the rocky island below.

  Squeak became a blur and flashed over my shoulder. I felt a hundred little pushes underneath my arms, underneath my legs and my feet.

  I hauled on the throne. Nothing. Not enough arm strength to lift a pencil. I swung a leg up and pulled with my heel. “Aaarrrrgh!” I shouted. Barbaric yawps were better for this sort of thing.

  Like a wounded crab, I toppled into the stone chair.

  “That was fun,” I huffed. “Let’s do that again never.”

  For a moment I just lay there, sucking in big gulps of fiery air, trying not to feel the burning pain in my wrists and hands, the fire in my shoulders. Fire fire fire. If I survived this dumb day, I was going to sleep on a block of ice for a week.

  My forearms felt like Ziploc bags packed with jelly. I breathed hard, looking back across the lava lake. Jeepers, Flicker. Pick a more deadly throne room next time, maybe?

  “Squeak,” said Squeak, patting me on the shoulder.

  “Easy for you to say,” I huffed. “Okay, I don’t see André anywhere. If you made me climb all the way out here just to—”

  Squeak scrambled onto the armrest of the throne. At the front where Flicker’s hand would’ve rested, there was a ruby the size of my fist. Squeak ran around it three times.

  I put my hand on it. It was warm. Gee, what a surprise.

  “Okay,” I said. “This opens the prison door or something?”

  “Squeak.”

  “But you can’t open it.”

  “Squeak.”

  “Which means I have to figure out how to open it.” I rolled my eyes.

  He rolled his eyes back.

  “Hey! I feel like an armadillo speed bump. I didn’t see you just climb over a lake made of—”

  He leapt to the bars on the ceiling overhead. As a flash of gray light, he streaked across the rungs all the way to the ledge on the floor on the other side of the lava lake where we’d started, then flashed back up the bars to the center and dropped back onto the top of the back of the throne.

  I stared at him with my mouth open.

  “I’m not talking to you,” I said.

  “Squea—”

  “Ever again.”

  He twitched his whiskers and gave that little chittering sound I knew was laughter.

  Okay. So I had to open the prison. No big deal. There was a trick to this thing. There was a trick to everything like this in the Wishing World, and obviously Squeak couldn’t do it, whatever it was. Because if he could do it, he’d have already done it.

  I let out a long breath and put my hand on the ruby.

  “Show me your secrets,” I murmured. I reached into the story of the ruby. How had it come to be here? What did it do?

  The stone had been created by years of pressure, bits of rock squishing together so hard that they became something different, something hard and clear and red. And then the ground had cracked, and it had been pushed up by other stones. It had been pulled free by little people with little fingers, filed and cut and polished until it was this very proud, faceted shape.

  And then it had been given to the beautiful girl with lava for hair, with enough fire inside her to make a dozen rubies through heat alone. Flicker had taken the ruby to this place, placed it in her throne, and whispered secrets to it. She had made it the guardian of the secrets below the throne, and set it to open only with the speaking of four words.

  I opened my eyes, invigorated by the rush of knowledge, by the trickling stream of joy that flowed through me at knowing another person’s story, even if that other person was a rock.

  “Thank you,” I said. The stone did not respond. Speaking was not its purpose, was not part of its story. Being spoken to was.

  I closed my eyes, slid my hand over the stone and palmed it.

  I said the words that lay at the heart of the stone’s purpose. “The well is clean.” I didn’t know what they meant, but their power flowed through me.

  The throne swiveled to the side. I squeaked as my feet dangled over the drop to the rocky island far below. Where the throne had been was now a deep hole.

  At the bottom, slumped against the wall and not moving, was André.

  Twenty-Four

  Where I’m Caught Red-Handed

  “André!” I shouted. There was no ladder down the hole, and the sides had little smooth bumps on them. I wasn’t sure at all that those would work well as steps for climbing. I should have brought a rope.

  Yes. And I should have brought a helicopter, too.

  My arms felt like bars of lead, but I needed to find a way down and back up. I was frustrated that I couldn’t actually talk to Squeak. It would have been nice if he could have said, “Be sure to bring rope, because André is stuck in a sixty-foot hole.”

  “Just hang on, André. I’m going to get you out of there.” I could turn myself into a rock climber with, like, pick-axe hands or something. I wondered if giving myself another boost of strength would work. I pulled out my pen—

  One of the nubs on the side of the hole became a red hand, rose up, and grabbed my ankle.

  “Hey!”

  Squeak became a flash and gnawed on the hand a dozen times in a second, and it let go. But another one launched up and grabbed my other ankle, then a third one grabbed the one Squeak had just freed. They yanked and I went over the edge with a squeak.

  And a Squeak.

  The hands were like the Shake and Bake in Azure City, except they were lava red, and they pushed us down instead of helping us up. Thankfully, they weren’t hot. Squeak tried to get them to let me go, but even he wasn’t quick enough to bite them all, and there were a hundred of them all around us now, growing out of the walls.

  I struggled, trying to cli
mb, but it was impossible to climb something that kept pushing me down. I grabbed one hand and pulled, but it grabbed me back, then handed my arm down to the next hand, which tugged me farther down.

  The reddish light above became a smaller and smaller circle as I was forced downward. The heat was immense, like we were being shoved into an oven. It was stifling. I could barely breathe.

  The hands brought me to the bottom. André lay crumpled there, drenched in sweat, his black curls plastered against his head. He was thin as a bag of sticks. His white shirt was dingy with dirt and sweat, and his black pants were torn in the knees. He had no shoes. His breathing was low and shallow, but he was breathing. The hands retreated into the wall and vanished.

  “André,” I said. “We’re here. We’re going to get you out.”

  “Squeak,” said Squeak.

  His eyelids fluttered, and I felt a wash of relief. He was alive. He looked up at me and smiled weakly. “Ha . . .” he whispered. “I knew . . . you were coming.” His voice sounded like dry paper.

  “Of course I did, I wouldn’t leave you here—”

  “Because the walls shook,” he said weakly in his Honduran accent. “And then there were cracks.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered, forcing a smile. He was trying to make jokes, but I wanted to cry. He was so shriveled and weak.

  His head lolled back. “I could not beat the hands. I tried, but it is too narrow. I transformed into a Flimflam and unfurled my wings. But no matter how I flew, they could always grab me. I tried . . . to paint them away, but more would grow. It is quite a cunning trap. But no match . . . for you.”

  “Um, yeah. No match for me. Have you out in a second.”

  He laughed, and it sounded like my great-grandfather coughing. “You . . .” he said, “. . . are a bad liar.”

  “Okay, fine. I didn’t figure out the hands.”

  “You will.” He leaned his head against me and closed his eyes, as though he had spent the little strength he had.

  I paused, then I hugged him, closing my eyes. “You bet your foxy ears I will. You just hang on,” I whispered, a catch in my throat. “You’re going to be okay.”

  I let him go and opened my story sight, and the origin of the hands unfolded in front of me.