I’d thought the scene with Chris had been high impact. This—a whirl of intensity, Jessica reaching out with a bleeding arm, grabbing a thin wrist, slamming it down into rocky ground until the attacker dropped the blade. Frantic, even though it meant losing traction, Jessica reached out and swiped the knife, sending it flying ten or fifteen feet.

The hands that grabbed her arms were small. Fingernails dug into forearm, and came away with fine white lines caught beneath small fingernails that had been painted pink.

Jessica knelt on the offending hand, pinning it down, and strangled—

Strangled Bonesaw.

The pressure in my chest felt like it squashed my heart flat. No beat, only hurt.

Yeah.

I turned away from the scene. I chased Tattletale, following her route.

The white light beneath my feet was solid now, ten units of time out of ten. A hundred out of a hundred. Zero out of zero.

I reached the cliff’s edge. Rain, Kenzie, Love Lost and Colt were at crystals, fiddling. Trying to decipher the system.

I doubted they’d be making any bridges appear, but it was good they were doing that. The other kids were staying safe, Chicken Little holding Darlene’s hand, talking constantly, like he couldn’t stop.

The others were huddled. Hiding. The spike-headed woman was approaching, navigating cracks that forked off from the rest.

I looked down, and saw a darkness with no bottom. A bottomless canyon. The other side of the chasm was fifty feet down and twenty feet away.

“How long do you think you’d fall before something terrible happened to you?” I asked.

“A good while,” Tattletale said. She looked up at me. “I’m just guessing. My word isn’t gospel.”

“It’s never gospel,” Chicken Little piped up.

I nodded.

“How long do you think we have?” I asked.

“Minutes,” Tattletale said.

“So you figure… maybe a two minute fall?” I guessed. I sounded like a far away person.

“It could be ten seconds and it could be ten thousand years,” Tattletale said.

“That’s even better,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Sveta asked.

“She’s acting unhinged because she got to see some family stuff she probably shouldn’t have,” Tattletale said.

“What stuff?” Sveta asked. She touched my arm. I looked at her, and saw her looking down at the bolt of lightning that was firing off to one side. “Hey.”

“Mom stuff. A lot of Amy stuff. I knew I shouldn’t have looked,” I said.

Bonesaw never came back. Jessica quit being a therapist.

“I told her she shouldn’t have looked,” Tattletale said.

“Talk us through this?” Sveta said. “Why even talk about falling?”

“Because… we need to get down there,” I said. “If we go by the median, five thousand years is a pretty good bet, isn’t it?”

I pulled away from her hand, walking away from the chasm.

“For what?”

“You’re insane,” Byron said. “You can’t—”