She reached out for the fabric of the labyrinth, ignoring a prickle of remembered pain. The Dragon is letting me use this power because it’s the only way to get past Torment. That means I’m the only one who can help the others. She found the spot where she’d left Isaac, and felt the tiny vibration that marked his presence in the nearby tower. A grip and a twist were all it took to bring here to there.

Torment pounced, his mental grip prying at Alice’s hold, but she was already running up the last few stairs. Instead of emerging onto the roof of the tower, she and Soranna stepped up onto a distant bridge. Alice hurriedly let go of the connection, and she could almost hear Torment’s irritated snarl.

Ahead of them was a doorway into a tower. Some sort of curtain blocked the entrance, a cross-hatched pattern of twisting green shoots like a spray of weeds. Light leaked out through the gaps, startlingly bright against the gloom of the fortress, and Alice guessed this was another place where a book had leaked into its environment. Hopefully it’s not as horrible as the last one.

“Isaac said they were going to hide in there. Are you ready?”

Soranna nodded. Alice stepped forward, one hand raised to push through the weeds. She felt the rich softness of soil and plants under her boots, and caught the nose-tickling scent of grass. Encouraged, she took another step, through the curtain, and promptly fell over.

It was not really her fault. As she passed through the curtain, something very strange happened to down, shifting it ninety degrees. Alice, caught by surprise, lost her footing and ended up face-down in the dirt. Fortunately, instead of a stone floor, there was a bed of soft grass to break her fall, and she had just about recovered enough to stand up when Soranna came through, squeaked in surprise, and collapsed on top of her.

Once the two girls had disentangled themselves and gotten on their feet, Alice got a chance to look around the tower. She had seen some strange things in the depths of Geryon’s library, but she had to admit that this beat most of them in terms of sheer impossible geometry. By now she was used to spaces much larger than the buildings that contained them, so it wasn’t a surprise to find a sun-drenched lawn inside a tower. What was more than a little startling was that the grass was growing—and Alice was standing—on the walls. It felt for all the world as though down was toward what had been sideways the moment before she stepped through the doorway.