“Caves must not be that close, then,” Hester grimaced, before peeking down at the guards. “They’re getting closer, though.”
“Wait a second,” Dot said, focused overhead. “Look.”
Hester peered up at the waters, shimmering with sun.
Except the shimmers were moving. It wasn’t sun. It was . . . fish. Big and small, swimming in an overturned sea.
“How are they managing it?” Anadil wondered.
Dot punched her hand into the fish-filled waters again, keeping it in longer, gauging something . . . Her eyes narrowed. “Only one way to find out,” she said.
With a deep breath, she launched upwards, cannoning into the sea.
“Dot, no!” Hester and Ani screamed, both prepared to catch their falling friend, even if it meant death for them all—
Only Dot didn’t fall.
“Currents!” she pipped, dangling from the water, her head upside down. “They hold you in place, like the air holds birds in the sky. Jump in!”
Anadil didn’t hesitate, flinging herself up and bellyflopping onto Dot. A second later, the pair popped their heads out of the sea like lemurs, but Hester still hadn’t moved from her spot down the meringue. Fudge crumbled under her fingers, her body slipping. Below, she heard men’s shouts . . . the scrape of their boots against chocolate . . .
“You need to jump. Now,” Anadil demanded.
Hester didn’t know how to put feelings into words: her fear of letting go . . . her inability to trust . . . the vulnerability of a leap . . .
But a true friend can sense these things without them spoken.
“Trust me,” said Anadil.
Hester closed her eyes, launched high, and felt Ani’s embrace as they dunked underwater. The sea was warm, its currents viscous, sucking onto her body like the arms of a starfish. Hester opened her eyes to a miles-long drop to the sky below. She panicked, blood surging to her head, her limbs thrashing against the waves, but the warmth held her close and she couldn’t tell if it was Ani or the sea. Her head felt light and empty. Salt water slipped down her throat. Cold arms wrapped her tighter. Hester looked into Anadil’s eyes, the currents locking them together, fish brushing their legs.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Dot chirped, “but what about them?”
Hester glanced at the guards bounding higher. They were within ten yards, teeth bared, Lion badges hooked to their armor, reflecting a witch’s darkening glare . . .
“What goes up must come down,” Hester vowed.
Three friends lit their fingers.
A helix of glow attacked the wall, red, green, and blue, crisscrossing and searing through chocolate. Fudge spewed into guards’ faces, the meringue cracking like glass. But the men kept climbing, the first guard within range of the sea. With a bloody yell, he primed to jump at Anadil. Hester locked eyes with him, redoubling her glow—
The wall combusted under his hands.
Chocolate, cream, and meringue shattered, spraying into the air, as the Borna guards plummeted, screams echoing before they were lost to the sun.
“Let’s go,” Hester ordered, paddling upside down into fog. “Don’t know how long we’ll last with blood filling our heads like this.”
But Dot stayed in place, eyes pinned downwards, throat bobbing, as if their survival had come at a cost she wasn’t ready for.
“Dot?”
She turned to her coven mates, both shadowed in mist.
Anadil’s red eyes pierced through.
“They wouldn’t have mourned for you,” she said.
ANADIL HAD ASKED a pertinent question: If the sea around the caves was said to be poisonous, why were the witches still alive?
Prowling through fog, heads hanging out of the water, they hunted for the caves, alert for poison. But all they found was more inverted sea, the fog breaking to reveal open water again and again, until Hester’s head was so swollen with blood that she began to hallucinate tiny Easter bunnies. Anadil and Dot, too, were swimming slower and slower, their eyes rolling to the backs of their skulls, as if they were lost in their own visions—
“Stop,” Hester said, throwing out her arm.
Ani and Dot collided with her.
Ahead, the upturned sea ended in a waterfall, plunging at impossible speed . . .
. . . into a new sea, down below, the sky restored overhead.
“Who knew I’d be so excited for a sea to be where it should be,” Anadil said.
“Waterfall must be the end of the kingdom,” Dot assessed.
But any comfort the witches had in seeing the Woods right side up beyond the waterfall was offset by the hue of this distant sea, thick and red, the color of rust. And, in the middle of the sea: an island of towering rock. The surface of this rock looked like a clock face, with an opening to a cave at every hour—twelve Caves of Contempo in all.
The cave openings were well-protected. First by a rim of sharp rock spikes around the perimeter of each cave. And second, by a mob of long, spiny-white creatures with black-toothed snouts, floating through the red sea around the island . . .
“Crogs,” said Dot.
“Special taste for girls,” Hester added, remembering the beasts that guarded the old School for Boys.
“Maybe that’s what they mean by ‘poisoned’ sea,” Anadil guessed.
A seagull glided over it, letting its feet touch the water—
The bird vanished in an acid char of smoke.
“No, they mean actually poisoned,” said Dot.
Head hanging, Hester studied the waterfall ahead, a vertical straight shot, blue sea to red, upside down to right side up, a dividing line between a world in chaos and the hope of setting things right.
Now they just had to find a way to cross it.
“That’s a death plunge, first off,” Hester said. “Then poisoned water. Girl-eating crogs. Armored rock. Caves that mess with time.”
“Can your demon fly us one by one?” said Anadil, voice stuffy from all the time inverted. “Like he did at the Four Point?”
“That was a stone’s throw. This is half a mile,” Hester dismissed, her demon quivering, afraid to fly. “We need a cocoon or raft to ride in. Something to survive the fall.”
“Made from what?” Anadil prompted. “What don’t crogs eat?”
“Boys!” Dot piped, her face perilously red. “That’s how Sophie evaded them at school. By turning herself into a boy.”
“Well, we don’t have that option, or is there something about you that we don’t know?” Hester blistered.
“Crogs eat everything, though,” Dot lamented, watching the spiny creatures wrestle over the last of the seagull. “Well, except each other . . .”
Hester wasn’t listening.
She was watching a shadow in the fog behind Anadil, getting bigger . . . bigger . . . Hester’s finger glowed, prepared to attack—
Slowly, she lowered it.
It was a boat.
A small dinghy, hanging out of the upturned water, made from white wood.
No, not wood, Hester realized as it floated closer . . .
“Bones,” she said, gaping at it.
“Crog bones,” said Anadil, mystified.
The boat had no passengers. No captain.
Like a ghost ship, it moved silently, deliberately, until it stopped hard in front of the coven. Hester held her breath, shielding her friends—