My left foot slipped from the rock and I experienced the vertigo of a plummet. It was a familiar feeling followed by automatic bracing for pain. But it didn’t happen—a strong hand caught me by the lower back and held on just long enough for me to wedge my foot back in place and find new grips on the cable. I looked over to find that it was Tub who had saved me while holding aloft his entire weight with just one hand.

“Not this time,” he panted. “This time we make it.”

It was all I needed to hear. I put my chin to my chest and ascended: two feet, three feet, four feet. Tub’s foot hit an unfortunate crag and he began to spin, but I kicked off from the wall and was able to steady his rope with my left hand. There was no time for thanks. Our sneakered toes found notches. Our muscles held true. Most important, our willpower didn’t flag. For a time, the clamor around us wasn’t screaming kids or dying trolls or even the laughing of gym class rivals, but instead the cheers of believers who rooted for us to make it all the way to the top, which we did.

We gasped into the dirt until our eyes found each other and our faces split into miserable, hysterical grins. It was the frenzied calls of the kids that compelled us to push our bodies to sitting positions. Gunmar the Black was fifty feet away, towering above us on his bone throne, his red skin crawling across his body as if it had its own intelligence.

Tub and I crawled on hands and knees toward the kids. Claire’s dirty, exhausted face was the first I saw, and I pressed a finger to my mouth to keep her from crying out my name. She bit her lip and nodded. As soon as Tub and I crested a small rising, it became clear why we could see only her head.

Each kid had been buried in the dirt up to her or his neck. It was bad enough that they’d been paralyzed this way rather than kept inside of a cage, but the real hell of their situation became clearer as I got closer. Their mouths were crusted with unidentifiable slop, evidence that Gunmar had been fattening them with tasty stuffing before making sausage of them in the Machine. These children and teens hadn’t been buried, they’d been planted so that the rich dirt and underworld clay could properly season their bodies for the troll palate.