I looked over at Victoria, pounding her own nails into his feet. I saw David and Quon and Malaiki and Salama doing the same.

I felt the skin of my stomach bulge and saw a pulsating lump move up into my chest and out to my ribs, racing within me, as if I were hollow. Now the fuzzy gerbil appeared on my chest, comforting me. I petted it, then immediately resumed pounding.

I hammered nails feverishly, harder and harder. No matter how many nails I took out of my pocket, it was still full.

Then I thought about the Woodsman, about how much this must be hurting him. The individual nails might have felt like a pinprick, but the cumulative effect of all those people pounding all those nails must have been agonizing.

I began to weep and threw down my hammer and tried to pull away. But I could only get so far—I realized now that I was tied to the others with the sticky strands of a great web, strong and binding, that I couldn’t break loose from. I picked my hammer back up and did what everyone else was doing.

“It’s he who makes us suffer,” someone said, pointing upward, then pounding another nail into his foot.

“Take that,” I bellowed, and pounded nails into his heel.

“Nice work, Nick,” Quon said.

“You too,” I replied, seeing the blood trickle down from the nail he’d just pounded.

“Look out,” someone yelled. People scattered, some of them pointing upward. A water droplet as big as a person splashed onto the ground, moisture flying everywhere. It felt warm on my face and had a salty taste.

“Back to work,” someone shouted, and we moved in again close to his feet, grabbing our nails and positioning our hammers, as if going back to an assembly line after lunch hour.

For another stinging moment I grasped the horror of what I was doing. I cried. After wiping my eyes, I grew angry at how I’d suffered, how my dad wasn’t there for me and how my family had abandoned me. I picked the hammer back up, pulled the replenished stock of nails out of my pocket, and started pounding again.

A thunderous noise came from above the head of the Woodsman. I looked up in the sky and saw a vast army of bright warriors, beating down upon a transparent ceiling. Swords unsheathed, they jammed themselves against a closed portal in the ceiling. Though far below them, I heard their muffled pleas as they called to the Woodsman.

“Let us tend your wounds, World-Maker.”

“Let us stomp your enemies and raise your royal standards in their blood!”

“Let us invade Skiathuros, fight the holy war now, and bury forever the twisted ones!”