I hurry over. “Bri, Zora, I need you all to find the end of this chain. It goes as far as I can see to the west. But check how far it stretches on either side.”

They nod.

“And look out for any eyes, anyone behind this mess.”

Bri takes a tentative step. Zora stabs the ground with her javelin to rear herself in the air and leaps over several squares at a time. She stabs, leaps again, and lands with the litheness of a panther, so poised.

“Wait up,” Bri says, hopscotching between the live wires of magic tic-tac-toed along the ground. “Zora, wait for me!”

Julius is straddling two feisty streams of magic crackling between his feet. “You did not tell me this was going to involve screwing up my Js. That was not in the travel memo, Rue.”

The soles of my shoes look like chewed bubble gum, and my heel is practically on the pavement. “It’s getting hotter, we have to move. Now!”

Some heads nod, brows cinched, and I can practically hear their thoughts asking, “Which way, Rue?”

Uhm. We can’t go west, we can’t go back, so that leaves north and south. Bri and Zora went south, so that’s the way we’ll go.

I point. “That way!”

The masses move in that direction in a wave, pops crackling at their feet to a chorus of screaming. This is a nightmare. I dig my nail into my palm. Find an opening, Zora, find something. I glance behind me, north, the opposite way I just told everyone to go, and it leads to a tree line. I squint but can’t tell if the chain stops at the edge of the forest or keeps going. Could that have been the better way? Shit, I don’t know!

“Ahhhh!” I spin and find the wheels on the Seer’s cart melting into a puddle of bubbling metal on the street. Oh my god!

I run.

Julius spots her too. “Shit, man!” He hightails it to the Seer like the track star he was in high school, scooping her up from her cart before I even make it to her.

“Run!”

We sprint. My lungs cry for breath and I urge Julius to go faster, praying we reach the end soon. The cries of pain become white noise and I keep my eyes ahead, focused, running as fast as I can. I glance backward and Taavi is stepping over one stream of energy, then the next. She’s far too slow. With the way the ground is heating, she’ll boil before making it to the end.

I fall back to run beside her. “Come on. Left, right, left, right, left, right,” I say. “Get the coordination down. We gotta move quick.”

“Left, right,” she says, her feet hesitating. “Right, no, left.”