Frazier shifted uncomfortably. His news was very strange, and he worried about her reaction. “Well, some of our hunters discovered an interesting . . . thing.” He paused, unsure how to proceed.

“A thing?” Jane repeated. “Your descriptive skills are less than apt, Frazier.”

“Sorry.” He rubbed his hands together. “I guess I’ll just say it how it is.”

“Brilliant idea.”

Frazier tried to laugh, but it came out as a snort. “Way out in the Forest of Plague, near the spot of the old battleground, they found a place where hundreds of trees have been cut down. Each stump is perfectly flat, as if the trees had been cut with a laser or something.”

Jane tilted her head, obviously intrigued. “Interesting. I can’t think of anyone . . .”

When she trailed off, looking at the fire, Frazier continued. “Right, no one in our Reality has that kind of technology. But, um, that’s not the weird part. Not even close.”

That caught Jane’s attention; her eyebrows rose.

“The trees . . .” Frazier said.

“Did someone take them? Did they burn them? That area has enormous trees—some taller than the fortress.”

Frazier shook his head. “I know, which makes the next part really bizarre. I couldn’t tell what had happened until I flew on the back of a fangen and looked down from above.”

“What do you mean?” Jane asked.

“Somehow, whoever cut those trees down . . . arranged them on the ground so they spelled out words.”

“Spelled out words?” Jane repeated. “With trees?”

“Yes. They formed letters out of the tree trunks. Really big trees that made really big words.” He laughed at himself but stopped abruptly.

“What did they say?” Jane asked, not smiling.

Frazier braced himself, knowing he had no choice but to repeat the mysterious message word for word.

“It said, ‘Mistress Jane, you are a coward. Come and find me.’”

Chapter

16

~

Tunnel of Glass

Tick slid his hand along the warm, hard glass of the big tube as he walked beside it in disbelief at the sheer height of the structure. It rose at least twenty feet above him, maybe more, and appeared to be a perfect cylinder. The bottom third was buried underneath the shifting sands of the desert. The glass was clear, but so thick he couldn’t tell what lay inside the big pipe; he could only see distorted images of varying color.

“Okay,” Paul said. “I’ve seen some strange stuff since hanging out with you two, but this might beat all.” He stepped back and spread his arms wide, looking up at the curved glass. “What could this thing possibly be?”

Sofia squatted on the ground, digging through the sand to see if the structure changed at all underneath. “Looks like it just keeps curving in a perfect circle. Maybe if we dug all the way to the bottom we’d figure something out.”

“Do I look like a shovel to you?” Paul asked.