Trial by Fire

Half blind and numb with shock, Lily stumbled past the guards, through the gate, and down the steep hill of the Citadel toward the strange city. She heard people calling out to her, telling her to stop, pleading with her to come back to the safety of the keep, but she was too overwhelmed to respond. All she wanted to do was get away—to get as far away from this waking nightmare as possible.

As she walked, she told herself that what she was experiencing had to be some kind of hallucination. Something had happened to her when she’d had that seizure, she decided. Maybe she’d never even woken up this morning.

The more Lily thought about it, the more convinced she was that none of this was really happening. Tristan hadn’t cheated on her. They’d never had a fight or ended their friendship. She’d never gone down to the water or agreed to come to this strange place. None of this was real.

Lily paced down a cobbled street and headed into the heart of the strange city. She wasn’t really paying attention to which way she went; she was just following a vague sense inside her that told her when to turn or continue straight ahead. She talked to herself sternly the whole way, convinced that this was all some fever dream she couldn’t wake up from, probably because the doctors had drugged her.

“That’s it,” Lily said loudly, making several pedestrians stop and stare. She lowered her voice but continued to mumble to herself, trying to keep panic at bay. “When I heard that voice inside my head, the one that said it would be frightening, it was just the doctor warning me before she gave me a shot. She was telling me that the drugs were going to do this to me. That’s all.”

No matter how real it felt, she knew that she would wake up eventually and the meandering streets that she now wandered through, with their tall, latticed towers of vegetation, and their tinkling sounds of running water, would all disappear.

Lily’s wild eyes bounced from one strange sight to another. Colonial style carriage houses and brick townhouses, right out of her version of Salem, were interspersed with modern wood-beam and glass buildings that had a tent-like feel. A few steps down, she saw spiral-shaped domes that had gardens growing on side tiers, interspersed with glass windows. They looked like hives that housed plants instead of honey in their combs. Lily glanced into the glass windows of these hive houses and saw only more greenery inside. They were multifaceted greenhouses that were growing things both inside and out.

Rotating around, she realized that there was one on every block, and where there wasn’t, there was one of the tall, latticed green towers that went up to find the sun rather than wait for it to hit the ground. Lily wandered closer to one of the towers, trying to look inside the soaring double helix of greenery.

Something growled. Lily looked down slowly. At her feet, chained to the base of the tower, were three monstrous dogs. Or were they bears? One of them hissed, showing fangs like a tiger’s.

Lily screamed and threw her body back, away from the unnatural creatures, and didn’t stop until she slammed into something hard. She spun around frantically and saw that she had backed up against a large glass window. It was the front of a café.