Not a single thing seems out of place, or foreboding. Not at first.
Some of the platforms are narrow, not much wider than our feet. Others are so large we could stretch out and take naps. We don’t. Yet another platform we encounter is covered in inches-deep sap, which saturates our shoes and clings to the cottony bridge: thick tufts rip out every time our shoes make contact. We tear so many layers from the bridge that Hope’s foot plunges straight through—it nearly gives me a heart attack, even though I’m not the one halfway on her way to falling. Lonan’s heel pierces another hole as we move to pull Hope back up. He barely avoids falling all the way through.
After that, we go barefoot.
We run, on and on, because nothing screams we’re there, and because nothing screams that we aren’t. Hope falls behind, especially as the humidity thickens. Lonan forces his pace to match hers.
The humidity should have been our first clue, as breathing turned into a process more akin to drinking a lukewarm soup that fights on its way down. But we dismiss the thick air as an unfortunate side effect of this unfamiliar ecosystem. At least, none of us acknowledges it out loud.
The bone shards do not go unnoticed.
It’s a collective experience: Phoenix falls first, with an odd flinch as his bare foot recoils from the bridge. He falls with grace, contorting so he lands squarely on the bridge instead of falling over its edge. Cass is right behind, and the rest go down like birds with clipped wings.
I see every second of it, and yet I can’t avoid it.
The cloud-soft bridge is suddenly a breeding ground for razor-sharp teeth, shards of bone woven into the cocoon fibers. It’s white on white, except for where blood spills from our feet, our ankles, anywhere else we make contact.
Laughter.
Laughter, from Phoenix, from Cass—uncontrollable and giddy, like kids who’ve never had a sled or snow on Christmas, but suddenly have both. Like patients at a mental institution whose invisible friend has thrown all the pills away and unlocked every exit.
I’m about to ask—
Bats.
A thousand, thousand, thousand bats are flying at me, around me, hairy and black, and the smell, the smell is like death and dying and failure and loneliness all woven into their tiny skeletal frames. I still feel the bone shards, the way they slice me and sting me and spill me open, but instead of lying on the net I am at the mouth of a cave with people I don’t recognize. I am tall, I am cold. My hands are not my own.
Behind the bats: a blade.
And even though it is not my heart the dagger slices into but someone else’s, the too-cool metal tears into me. Skin versus stab; I feel every frozen-hot second. I feel the soul slip out as the body slumps.
I blink, and finally I see the bridge again, not a bat in sight, my heart and soul intact despite whatever it was I just experienced.
Which was what, exactly?
The others are in various stages of delirium, anguish, absence. Some flail, some sink deep into the white woven fibers. Finnley is too close to the edge—one sharp shift could end her. Only Lonan and Hope managed to stop themselves in time to avoid it.
Lonan reaches out his strong, lean arms and helps me back to the platform. “Here,” he says. “Who’s carrying your shoes? Maybe the sap has dried by now.”
“Phoenix—has them—in his pack.” I can’t get a deep breath in this soupy air.
Also, I just experienced death. Someone else’s death. I think.
Hope’s eyes go wide, and I turn to look. The bridge is stained red where Finnley’s cheek rests on it, and she’s shifted so far to the edge now that her entire right arm dangles. She waves in the breeze like a vine.
I shout at Alexa, try to get her attention—she’s closest to Finnley—but she’s as gone as the rest of them.
Do not go this way, the knots told us.
It would be nice if there were symbols for follow-up messages, like, because your blood might drip from the bridge like rain. Or because free-falling to the ground will be the last thing you ever feel.
Or because you might not die, but you’ll taste death. And what’s the difference, really?
Hope’s fingers curl around my elbow. Her nails dig so deeply I can practically feel the dirt beneath them embedding in my skin.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “We’ll get her through this.” Finnley is a threat, but it’s not like she asked to be. I should have spoken up when I heard the first twig snap that night.
I pry myself away from Hope. This is going to hurt, is all I can think.
I should probably be thinking about other things. But Finnley is about to fall, so I run.
Delicate, careful: I am neither. Nor am I brave, because fear taints bravery and I am most definitely fueled by fear. The bridge is at once the sharpest and the softest, innocence-stained, and it takes so much control to keep it from defeating me. Every step, every shard, brings a flash of pain, lasting only as long as I am in contact. Black, charred flesh—teal-blue breathlessness—red-hot, poison-boiled veins—a tight noose of yellow snakeskin.
It is a rainbow of death.
The net is laced with more and more shards, the farther out I go. I grit my teeth against the pain, try to push through, but it’s hard to separate truth from vision. I burn, and drown, and suffocate, and lastly—
I fall.
FIFTY
THE RAINBOW FADES as soon as I’m over the edge. No more borrowed pain—I have my own now. The bridge is as wild as a dragon flying out of ashes toward heaven, and then there’s me, clinging to its tail. Finnley has not fallen over yet, and it is only, miraculously, because I’m now pulling the bridge down in the opposite direction.
Pain, fear, and impossible choices—these are all I have left.
Choose, Eden: death by plummeting to the jungle floor, or death by strained shoulder sockets, ripped clean apart by my dangling weight.
Choose, Eden: clamber up to safety—become Finnley’s sure death rather than her savior, because she will surely fall when balance is restored—or spend sixty more seconds of life feeling noble.
Choose, Eden: choose, choose.
Humanity is not wired to choose death.
Not our own deaths, anyway.
So I choose life. And the irony is, it doesn’t feel any different.
FIFTY-ONE
LONAN AND HOPE are wearing shoes.
Hope is screaming. “Help,” she says. Over and over, “Lonan—help me! Finn’s going to fall!”
But Lonan helps me.
FIFTY-TWO
WE ARE BLOOD and tears, but there is no time to drown in them.
Lonan digs in Phoenix’s pack, retrieves my shoes. The cotton and sap have hardened into a stiff plaster, not nearly as sticky as before. The soles of my feet are mangled and swollen, but I force them inside, where bits of sand lodge themselves inside the wounds. It stings, grates. And yet it is better than the alternative.
We work together, Lonan and I, to pull Phoenix up from the net and back into consciousness. Hope is blank, empty, as she wipes blood from Alexa’s feet and slips them into shoes. She does the same for Cass.