The gears in my stomach turned. I held onto the seeker with all my strength and nodded.
“I’m right behind you,” March whispered as the others made a little way for me to pass through.
Then we were on our way.
The tunnel stretched aheadof us, dimly lit by the same faded amber glow that seemed to be the Labyrinth’s signature light. The seeker in my hand pointed steadily forward, the needle unwavering, and we followed it, March and I atthe head of the group. He never once left my side, which made this whole thing possible.
Headfirst.
At first, the tunnel was just stone. Rough walls, uneven floor, the occasional pipe running along the ceiling that dripped what Ireallyhoped was just condensation onto our heads. Our footsteps echoed, and nobody said a single word. We walked fast, as if we were trying to convince ourselves that we weren’t afraid, or that we’d get there in just a minute, or that we weren’t trying to hide or rush or anything—but then the tunnel began to change.
The stone walls gave way to metal in sections. There were copper panels, green with age, bolted together with rivets the size of my thumb. The floor smoothed out and the pipes multiplied, branching and converging overhead like the roots of a tree. Amechanicaltree.
Then the ceiling started to shift, too.
Stone becameglass. Not all at once—in patches first, like windows cut into the rock. Thick, cloudy glass, green-tinted, but we could still see shapes above.
Soil. Roots. Theundersideof things.
“What in Time’s Temper isthat?!” Erith whispered from right behind me, and instinctively, we all stopped walking.
Through the glass, we could just see a vast open space. Maybe a room, or a clearing—it was hard to tell. Rising from the other side of the glass were dozens of tall, narrow pillars arranged in circles, some broken, some tilted at odd angles. Between them, strung like spider silk, were hundreds of thin silver threads that caught the faint light and glittered.
“I have no idea,” Levana said in wonder.
“It looks like…a game,” Cook said.
A game.At that word, something in my stomach dropped like I’d missed a step on a staircase.
“What kind of game?” I wondered because all those pillars and those threads…they could be anything.
“No idea,” said a few of them at the same time.
“Let’s keep moving,” said March, taking my hand in his while I held up the seeker in the other.
So, we did. It didn’t matter what that place over the glass was—we were here for Silas.
The seeker pulled us left at the first junction—a fork in the tunnel where the right branch sloped downward into darkness and the left continued on level ground.Thank Time it’s left,I thought but didn’t say. I didn’t want to go even deeper underground than we were.
The ceiling over us was entirely made of glass now. It showed nothing but darkness for a while, with pulsating lights blinking all around us—and then we turned a corner, and there was light. A lot of light coming from above, right through the ceiling.
The room over us was enormous. We couldn’t see too much—the glass was cloudy—but what we could see were trees or thingsshapedlike trees. Massive structures of twisted metal and wood, their trunks spiraling upward, their branches interlocking overhead to form a canopy so dense it blocked whatever light source existed above them.
Between the trunks, I could make out platforms at different heights, connected by bridges and ladders and what looked like nets made of rope.
“Holy Hour, that’s massive,” said Seth. “I’ve never seen a bigger tree in my life.”
“It’s got levels. Look—it’s got levels. Look at all those branches,” said Anika in wonder.
“How far does it go?”
“Howhigh?”
“Do you think we could break this glass ceiling and get up there?”
“I’d very much like that. I can’t breathe properly down here…”
“Too narrow?—”
