"Secure."
He steps backward off the ledge. The rope goes taut. His boots dig into the granite, and despite my previous confidence in his knot-tying skills, I glance at the rope to make sure it’s not fraying or coming undone. He walks easily down the rock face, boots skidding only slightly on lichen, until the slope levels out and his feet hit the soft creek bank.
The shimmerloam is unmistakable. A two-inch layer of iridescent substrate that shimmers between gold and silver depending on the angle, sandwiched between the dark clay and the topsoil like geological frosting. He drops to his knees and pulls the trowel from his belt.
"Cut around the edges first,” I call down. “Twelve-inch squares. Don't breach the lower clay or you'll?—"
A crack. Not from the loam.
The quartz outcrop to his left splits. A fissure races up the stone face, spitting shards, and something pushes through from behind it. A root. Thick as my thigh. Black and pulsing with veins of deep purple light. It uncoils from the rock like a waking serpent and slams into the creek bed, sending up a geyser of silver water.
Another root. Then another. They punch through the ravine wall in sequence, each one larger, faster, angrier.
"FLYNN!"
The rope stretches taut again. Flynn is climbing, and the roots are between him and the wall. One of them curls around the fallen oak and squeezes. The trunk explodes into splinters.
The roots turn toward him. All of them. At once.
The closest root lunges. He stops to slash with the trowel, and the blade bites into bark that splits open like a wound, leaking thick sap the color of a bruise. The root recoils. Two more whip toward his legs.
"CUT THE LINE!"
"ABSOLUTELY NOT."
Flynn climbs again. The harness looks like it’s about to burst off of him, and his boots leave the creek bank just as a root slams into the spot where his knees were. Shimmerloam sprays into the air like golden confetti. He’s stowed the trowel and is safely protecting the shimmerloam inside his shirt.
He kicks off the wall and scrambles, boots finding purchase on a jutting ledge, then another. The roots thrash below, blind and furious, ripping the creek bank apart in their search for whatever woke them. Flynn climbs hand over hand below me, each heave lifting him up two feet, three feet, and the raw power of it vibrates up the line.
The roots can't climb. They strain upward, stretching, purple veins pulsing brighter, then snap back to the ravine floor with wet, defeated thuds. By the time he clears the midpoint of thewall, they're retreating into the shattered quartz, dragging creek stones and mud behind them.
Flynn grabs scrubby brush at the lip of the ledge and hauls himself over the edge like a sack of potting mix. He lands on his back in the lichen, gasping, the two shimmerloam sheets still pressed to him.
"Got it."
He's breathing hard. His headlamp has gone sideways, casting light across the canopy at a useless angle. Sweat cuts channels through the grime on his face.
"You were supposed to cut the line if the anchor point failed."
"The anchor point held."
"If it hadn't?—"
"It held." I take the loam sheets from his hands, inspect them, and slide them into a padded case from his pack with the reverence of a museum curator handling ancient scrolls. "Twelve-inch squares. Clean edges. Good work."
We climb. The trail back up is steeper than the descent, the predawn darkness thickening under the canopy rather than lifting. The bioluminescent lichen has dimmed, and the humming stones along the creek have gone silent. Something about the ravine has shifted since the roots woke. The air pressure has dropped. My ears pop twice in thirty seconds.
Flynn leads. I follow his boot prints exactly, stepping where he steps, which works until it doesn't.
The section of trail that gave way isn't notable. It looks like every other stretch of packed earth and root lattice we've crossed. Flynn's weight passes over it fine. But his boots are wide, his stride is long, and he distributes his mass across the whole foot. I land on my heel, shifting my center of gravity backward for half a second, and the ground dissolves.
Not crumbles. Dissolves. The soil turns liquid under my boot, and the entire trail margin sheers off the hillside in a curtain ofmud and loose stone. My feet go out from under me. The trowel flies from my hand. I'm sliding, clawing at roots that rip free, and the ravine opens below me like a mouth.
His hand closes around my wrist.
The jolt nearly dislocates my shoulder. My body swings out over nothing, feet dangling, mud cascading past me into the dark below. His grip is absolute. Not tight. Not straining. Absolute. Like the concept of letting go doesn't exist in whatever operating system runs behind those amber eyes.
He pulls.
