While they peruse, I watch the glass beneath our feet warily and the clouds writhing below that. It feels like the clear panes should drop away at any moment, but they stay strong. Maybe it is just a floor—just an Old Vetrisian marvel made for show. Maybe I’m being paranoid. But the way Lucien keeps looking over his shoulder, to the walls, of all things, makes me uneasy.

I put a hand on his arm and lean in. “What’s wrong?”

His throat bobs. “It’s in the walls.”

“What is?” He doesn’t say anything. “Lucien—”

“Something hungry,” he finishes, fingertips dawning midnight.

“Valkerax?”

“No.” He goes still, voice lowering to a bare whisper. “Something older.”

us, the hunger cackles. But that’s impossible. The hunger is for Heartless only. Why would it be outside, made flesh, made real, where others can hear it? Unless…

On the opposite side of the glass floor, deep in a wall, something moves.

The granite swells.

“We have to go,” I chirp to Fione, trying not to betray my nerves. “Posthaste.”

“I still don’t know which one to take.” She frowns. “I can barely translate the titles.”

“Then take them all.”

“Not advisable.” Fione frowns and points up to the bookshelf, where runes are carved into the stone. “That means ‘large warning,’ and that means ‘one item,’ and I don’t have to know the rest to understand the gist.”

“This one.” Malachite points with his free hand to a green-bound book with faded silver inking. “Take this one.”

Fione raises a brow. “How would you—”

“I know that symbol. It’s the same in beneather runes. ‘Tree.’ And ‘destroy.’”

“‘Destroy,’ or ‘create’?” Her rosebud lips frown deeper. “You have to be precise—they have nearly the same shape order, but different occulants over the verb—”

I look at Lucien, but he hasn’t moved—his whole body still as a deer, his onyx eyes wide and searching the walls frantically, as if seeing something I can’t. And then he looks up.

And so do I.

Above us, the granite wall swells, cracking with hairline fractures.

“We don’t have time,” I blurt. “Just take the gamble and the godsdamn book.”

Fione breathes in and darts her hand out, pulling the green book from the shelf. Like snapping out of a trance, Lucien grabs my hand and darts for the staircase, strides so long and fast I can barely keep up.

The sound comes first—screeching. Not valkerax screeching, not anything alive or organic. Not anything with a tongue, or teeth, or a voice box. It’s a sound made without flesh, the screech of something dragging slowly, achingly across glass. The walls all around us swell, dozens of bulging rounds of stone pushing at the seams, straining.

The explosions come second.

Glass.

Raw glass bursting from the walls, cloudy and thick and moving like fast river water. Like vines alive.

Like roots.