CALLA AND MR. FORKLE still hadn’t returned by bedtime, and even the reveriebells couldn’t calm Sophie’s tangled dreams. Lady Gisela’s wounded face kept morphing into Gethen’s as he sat chained in his cell. Squall loomed over him, and he screamed in Keefe’s mom’s voice. Then his fingernails turned to ice and everything splattered red.
She dragged herself out of bed at sunrise, hoping a walk by the river would clear her head. A soft song rustling through the forest caught her attention.
She raced into the trees, chasing the sound to a small clearing where she found Calla singing with her palms pressed against one of the trunks.
“You’re back!” she said, startling Calla so much the poor gnome nearly fell over. “Sorry. I’m just glad you’re okay. I was worried when you weren’t home last night.”
“We only returned an hour ago, wanting to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.”
“And?” Sophie pressed.
Calla slumped against the tree. “And . . . we found nothing. No shielded trees. No whispers of warnings in the roots. The Black Swan is moving one of Gethen’s dwarven guards to keep an eye on the area, but it’s possible that will only make the Neverseen change their plan.”
“Do you have any idea what they’re up to?”
“I don’t. And that’s what terrifies me. In all my four thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine years on this planet—”
“Four thousand,” Sophie interrupted. “You’re four thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine years old?” She knew the elves had indefinite lifespans, so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to know that gnomes did too. But the number was too huge to fit in her brain.
“I believe that’s the right age,” Calla agreed. “Though there have been stretches where I lost count. But in all that time, I’ve never felt anything like the worry I felt coming from Brackendale. That’s why I took such a risk to bring you and Biana to investigate. Whatever we’re facing is unlike anything I’ve experienced. The melodies reminded me of our ancient warnings.”
“Warnings?” Sophie repeated.
“Songs so old we don’t even know who first sang them. They warn of a great Withering before an endless Fall. But our history holds no record of any such occurrence.”
Sophie wasn’t a fan of the word “endless.” “But you believe there’s a cure?”
Calla pressed her ear against the tree. “I believe nature always finds a way. But it also does so on its own timeline. We must hope that timeline is faster than the Neverseen, or whoever is behind this plague.”
Sophie wanted to do more than hope—she wanted to act. There had to be missing something, some deeper meaning behind what Gethen had said, or some detail in the Exillium records they’d overlooked to help them find the Psionipath.
She returned to her tree house prepared to gather her friends and come up with a plan. But they’d already gathered—all except Keefe—and were waiting around the waterfall.
Dex held up a gadget that looked even crazier than his Evader. “I figured out how to break into the Lumenaria database!”
It looked like he’d wired pieces of Imparters together and shaped them into a pyramid, with six long antennas sticking out of the top point. Five were made of different metals—gold, silver, bronze, copper, and iron. And the sixth looked like a twig.
“I know the stick part is weird,” Dex said, “but I needed this thing to broadcast in all six technologies. The elves, ogres, trolls, goblins, and dwarves were easy to figure out, but I had no idea what to do for the gnomes. I tried solar-powered stuff, but it still seemed too techie. Then I saw some branches on the ground and thought, why not?”
Only Dex would decide to jab a gadget with a stick.
“You should’ve heard him squeal when it worked,” Fitz said. “I thought a banshee had snuck into the room.”
“Ignore my son,” Della told Dex. “You deserve to be excited.”
“Yeah, I can’t believe you figured it out so fast,” Biana told him.
Sophie smiled. “Dex is a genius.”
Dex’s grin turned supernova.
He pressed the base of the gadget, making the pyramid glow green. He had to wave it around a few times, like when humans try to search for a stronger cell phone signal, but eventually a crackly hum filled the room and a fuzzy hologram appeared.
Sophie squinted at the image. “Is that a scroll?”
“A super old one. The database is filled with them. I’ve just started going through. I was looking for stuff about the Wildwood Colony, but this one caught my eye because of all the smudges.” He pointed to black smears covering whole paragraphs. “These runes have been blacked out, which means someone is trying to keep something secret. But they must’ve run low on ink because at the end it’s thin enough for a few words to peek through—and if I’m reading them right, it proves the ogres have something that gives them leverage with the Council.”
It took a moment for the gravity of the revelation to hit.
“So . . . you’re saying the ogres have a way to control the Councillors?” Sophie asked.