“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Alice said, blinking her eyes and coming back into the real world. “What if I get it wrong?”

“There is a risk,” Ending said. “But this is the only path we have left. The only way for you to get your revenge.”

Anger flared, and Alice gritted her teeth. She opened her inner eye again and got started.

It wasn’t easy. Even the trap spell, the smaller part of The Infinite Prison, was too massive for her to get ahold of at once. She had to grab the biggest chunk of the spell that she could manage to keep in her grip at once, gently detach it from the rest, and move it from one place to another. Once it was settled, she went back for the next piece, re-creating the connections between them as best she could where they seemed to fit. It was like moving a jigsaw puzzle, lifting up chunks of pieces and fitting them back into place. Only they were more fragile than that—a jigsaw puzzle made of cobwebs, maybe.

It took a good deal longer than she’d expected, and she had to rest between one chunk and the next, when her mental grip started to weaken. During one of these pauses, she told Ending what had happened when she’d tried to use the wards, and how she’d had to repair them afterward.

“A feedback loop,” Ending said, sounding a bit smug. “Yes, that makes sense. It’s one reason I wanted to test the spell. But it was fortunate for you that it burned out when it did.”

“Why?” Alice said. “The bluechill got loose and nearly killed us.”

“If the spell had held, it would have continued to drain your energy at an accelerating rate. That would have killed you just as quickly.”

“Oh.” Alice remembered the sensation, like the blood was being piped out of her body and replaced with something thick and cold. She shivered. “Will we get a chance to test this one, do you think?”

“Unfortunately not,” Ending said. “There is no way to test it without becoming trapped in it yourself. But on the other hand, a spell draws its power from the one who Reads it, which in this case will be Geryon. If something goes wrong, he will bear the consequences.”

“I don’t want to kill him,” Alice said. “I told you that.”

“We won’t,” the labyrinthine said. “I would worry more about yourself. If the spell doesn’t hold, or Geryon catches you trying to make the switch, he will not hesitate to kill you.”

Alice paused.

“You’ve done a great deal for me,” she said. “And I don’t want to seem ungrateful. But I have to know. Why?”

“Why?” Ending said.