“We can’t go quite yet.” I pointed to the broken automaton, trying to focus. “If it’s my turn to face the next one, I want to know exactly what makes these things tick.”

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

I STOOD OVER THE AUTOMATON, an untrained coroner about to perform the world’s oddest autopsy. The trouble was, even “dead,” the automaton was all but invulnerable. Hubert might have been able to impale this thing, but so far I had failed to pry even a single metal block from its wooden body. Smudge watched warily from my shoulder. He had calmed enough to join me, but shifted to and fro, ready to flee at the slightest provocation.

As eager as I was to uncover the automaton’s secrets, I couldn’t stop thinking about Lena.

It had been one kiss, and a relatively brief one at that. We had fought an automaton and survived. Who wouldn’t get swept up in the relief and excitement after living through that? Whatever she might feel for me, it didn’t change the fact that she was in love with Nidhi Shah.

But what happened to that love the longer she was separated from Shah? The more time she spent with me . . .?

I turned away from that train of thought. Lena wasn’t a thing to be stolen. She had made her choice. She didn’t need me, not with Shah alive and human.

Despite the past week, I knew so little about her power. The way she entered her tree reminded me of my own magic, of reaching into the pages of a story. The tree was her portal to magic. But how could Lena pass into and out of that magic at will? Did the tree absorb and hold her physical body? There was no way that tree had been large enough to contain both Lena and the automaton, suggesting their bodies somehow transformed, becoming a part of the tree.

“What happened when you pulled the automaton in with you?” I asked. “How did you fight it? How do you know it won’t escape?”

“It’s hard to describe,” she said. “It fought against me, and against the tree itself. As its strength waned, it tried to steal mine.” She touched the ground, as if reaching for the roots below to touch those memories. “That’s why it lost. It didn’t understand the tree’s magic.”

“I don’t understand either.”

“I didn’t fight it, Isaac.” She gestured toward the trees. “Do they fight the wind? Do they fight the snow and ice in winter? They endure. They live. They grow. Fire a bullet into the trunk, and it will heal, growing to encompass that bullet within itself. Chop off a branch, and the bark will seal the wound.”

“Unless you chop the whole thing down,” I said.