And she moved her hand in time to see it.
Professor Cobble plummeting through the door she had made in the floor.
Down, down, down he went and not just through to the classroom below. She had made sure it went farther, far beyond, allthe way to the place where real Areifen roamed. In fact, she could see said place now, when she managed to steady herself enough to look over the rim. There was that gleam of grayish blue, a hint of dunes. And Professor Cobble falling into it all.
She heard him scream as he went through the upside-down sky.
As he hit a staircase some ways up and went silent.
After which, she didn’t quite know what to do with herself. She had been holding her breath; now everything in her body wanted to breathe. She had to stand there for a second, shuddering and gasping, hardly able to believe what she had just managed.I tricked the man who murdered me, with magic I barely thought I could do, she tried to tell herself, as she started toward the door.
Though that wasn’t her concern now.
Bram was. Bram, who still wasn’t around.He killed him, she thought wildly and couldn’t stop herself screaming his name. No thought of anyone hearing, no idea if that was the right thing to do. She just did it—and then again, as she stumbled around the door and out of the office.
But this time, he answered back.
“Oh, you’re alive, you’re alive,” she heard him say, just before she saw his trembling hand reach the jagged mess of plaster he’d been thrown through. He got hold and hauled himself up—with difficulty, it seemed to her. But once he fully appeared, framed by that hole, she could see why.
His other arm was not attached to his body right.
And his head looked very odd. It tilted at a strange angle, and—
“Oh my god, your neck is broken. Your neck is broken. He’s broken your neck,” she babbled, mind already riffling through for a spell to heal something like that.Hands clasped, she thought.Hands clasped and then turn them inside out somehow, sort of.
But he got there first.
“It’s fine, love; it’s all right, look,” he said, one hand already on the grisly lump she could see on one side. The other hand on the side that looked fine. And before she could beg him not to, he just pushed with both.
It made a sound like detaching a wing from the body of a bird.
Bile rose in her throat to hear it. The world seemed to sway a bit.
Though it at least meant he managed to come to her. She sagged against the office doorway, as he scrambled his way out. One hand reaching out for her—and god, she reached back. She went to slip her hand into his, at last, at last.
Their fingertips even brushed.
She honestly didn’t know how she ended up on her back.
All she knew was how it felt: like slipping on something, without moving at all. Followed by the horrible sense of having the breath punched out of her. She tried to breathe again and couldn’t quite do it. Her body had that winded wedge jammed into it, just below the ribs.
And just as she got it out and gobbled down some air, something yanked on her leg, hard. She found herself hauled across the floor to the door she had created, fast enough that she couldn’t grab a thing. She scrabbled over floorboards, and the rim of that hole in the middle of them, and for the hand Bram tried to grab her with.
But she went down anyway. She plummeted, like Alice in the old story.
Skirt billowing up, hair a tunnel around her face.
Bram screaming, screaming, screaming after her.
Because of course he couldn’t follow her through. He could only watch through that barrier between him and his once wasworld, as she plunged through the upside-down sky. Clouds that weren’t clouds suddenly parting, the air beneath awaiting her.You’re going to end up slamming into a staircase, too, she told herself frantically. And for a second, she sought to solve this by scrabbling to grab fistfuls of that silver sandlike stuff.
It was only thinking of Cobble that saved her.
She got a flash of him falling, and the reason he had done so hit her.
He doesn’t care to really understand how this place works, she thought.He only thinks from his stolid, superior, old posh perspective. And just like that, she flipped. She found her feet on the clouds, and the clouds became the ground.
Because of course there was no up and down here.
