Anger, Merry, Andrew, Love, Envy, and Sorrow.
The group forms a crescent, a firing squad of arrows targeting Malice, ready to blow him off his haunches. The iron, neon, frost, glass, and ice projectiles aren’t bluffing. Though they can’t kill, a combined effort will launch him through the building’s skeleton, potentially severing load-bearing walls and demolishing the library.
How did her friends know to come here? Does it matter?
Wonder holds up her hands. “Dearests, wait—”
She chokes as a forearm cranks around her jugular, whipping her against a solid body. Malice moves like a snake, pointing one of Wonder’s quartz arrows at her temple.
The visual produces a seizure, a unanimous premonition from her peers as they clutch their archery. Wielded by bows, the arrows don’t pierce.
Brandished by hand, they do. It’s still not powerful enough to kill, but enough to hurt.
At his leisure, Malice can turn Wonder into a pincushion, lacerating her with plenty of tactically placed cuts to make a difference. Her inhalations escalate. She remembers this, the torment of being held down, of being sliced and diced.
Her scars remember this, especially when Malice glides the arrowhead down, down, down to her starburst scars. One flick, and he’ll reopen them.
Malice sighs. “Lower them, mates.”
“Are you shitting me?” Andrew snaps.
“And by the way, hand over my bow.”
“An even exchange,” Love says. “Your bow for Wonder.”
“And your intestines,” Sorrow adds.
“I vote for the testes,” Envy says while aiming. “But nobody ever listens to me.”
“Let her go, evildoer,” Merry shouts.
“I will. Just not here,” Malice assures. “Now hand me my fucking bow!”
Of course. Malice has delayed for this reason; it had nothing to do with bidding the library farewell. He wants his archery back, to a kamikaze degree.
“Drop it!” Anger growls.
“Dearest,” Wonder gasps. “It’s all right. Give it to him.”
Anger’s on the verge of charging like a rhino. Therefore, she holds each of her classmate’s gazes, pleading. Trust me. I have a plan.
Indecision precedes a snarl of rage. To everyone’s shock, Anger vanishes and then reappears moments later, bulldozing into the rotunda with a hickory longbow and a quiver holding arrows capped in turkey fletching.
Once the quartz tip leaves Wonder’s scalp, Anger tosses Malice the weapons, which he manages to catch with his free hand.
The thing is, they had believed Wonder.
But then, her friends register the lie. Plan? She has no plan yet.
“I hate you,” she whispers to Malice.
To which, he chuckles. “If you’ll excuse us, mates. My perky, perennial partner and I have homework to do.”
“No!” Love and Merry squawk while leaping forward, forcing Andrew and Anger to disarm and ensnare them.
Wonder penetrates them with a warning look, especially Anger and Love, who have the power to cross worlds without Asterra Flora. Don’t you dare follow us.
The request sinks in, pulling her friends’ expressions into grimaces.
To shift realms, they need a portal, a shaft of celestial light. Malice jolts Wonder into a beam of starlight crashing through the windows. They have to travel individually, so their arms lift at the same time, extending toward the ray. That’s when the glittering fluid of seed and blossom begins to dance across their palms.
Her friends stand by, helpless as she vanishes into another world.
5
There’s a flash of light, a spiraling vortex so prismatic that she clenches her eyes shut from the assault. This is new, the sensation of falling and soaring at the same time, as if she’s caught between the above world and the underworld, both ends of the cylinder tugging on her. She’s a shooting star, moving and not moving at all, plunging and rising.
The whirlwind sucks out the noise. A beautiful silence trails in its wake, so that her inhalations and exhalations flutter like wings. It’s akin to meditation, when all consciousness drifts away.
And then she hits the ground.
A flat surface wallops her, from knees to breastbone to nose. She crashes flat onto her face, smacking into soil hard enough for her molars to clatter like castanets.
Needless to say, she has never arrived like this. She’s sprawled, her limbs akimbo, her body plastered to the earth. The trip must have aggravated the harness, distributing the archery around her. She deduces as much when her heels trace the quiver, knocking about a few stray arrows.
Her nostrils burrow into the undergrowth, which scrapes her chin and forearms. Dirt and grass clog her mouth, the textures gauzy rather than coarse, with the faint trace of moonlit incense. It’s a fragrance purer and riper than from where she’s just come. It’s the aroma of starlight: of sharp silver and fresh white.
Wonder flops onto her back, splayed and coughing at the sky pitted with celestial bodies that tinkle. It’s a million whistles, a million chimes, a million cymbals shrunken to pinpricks of sound that skip across the canopy. The stars wink, hovering nearer than they ever will over the mortal realm.
Because this isn’t the mortal realm.
An adolescent dragonfly—the length of her foot—settles onto her stomach, its platinum, propeller wings fanning in place. The creature dashes off, zipping into the abyss before Wonder can pet it. They’re feistier and more evasive when they’re young. A long time ago, on the cusp of thirty, she’d made it her mission to trail a dragonfly for an entire day, just to see how it spent its time.
Hyacinths sprout around her, creating a jeweled tapestry. Wonder lurches upright, swatting the hip-length curls from her face as she soaks in the vista. It’s akin to an island dangling amidst the galaxy, with moons and planets bobbing in the distance, so small that she can pinch them between her fingers.
Below that, bluffs slope. Farther afield, on the opposite side of the range, one will discover mineral caves and still waters, a placid gloss of dark pools beneath homes on stilts, where her kin live.
But here at the summit, she’s overwhelmed. Nestled someplace in the glen stands a structure, a shrine of books. Secluded in a forest thicket exists her happy place.
Her eyes sting, which is silly. If she’d been apart from it for a few hundred years, nostalgia would be justified. But although it’s only been a blink of time since her previous visit, she hadn’t expected to see the structure for a much longer time.
Actually, she’d been prepared to never see it again, should her class lose this battle.
Wonder collects her archery and then wobbles to stand while hitching the weapons to her back. She knows the muscles of this ridge, the joints of its shoulders; she used to meditate in this very spot. Also, she’d had target practice with her peers on this hilltop. But…
She rotates, her gaze darting across the expanse.
Malice is nowhere in sight.
They’d left in such a hurry, without bothering to agree on a location. The first place she’d thought of had been obvious, though she hadn’t arrived as close to the Archives as she should have. She’d been too frazzled to focus.
And who knows what destination Malice had been thinking of? He might be across the range, somewhere along the shoreline. For kicks, he may have landed in Joy’s bed, prompting the goddess into a screeching fit. Or by accident, he may have landed in the middle of an archery range, or worse, in the belly of the Fate Court’s throne enclave.