By the time the voice started to count down from ten, I could see the open plaza that buffered the maple field from the towering sequoia. I spotted a potential sanctuary: a shadowed recess beneath the spiraling staircase, where the steps might shelter me from the fertilizer. With every bit of juice left in my veins, I rocketed forward and dove into that cubby, right as hundreds of sprinklers all hissed on in unison.
A fine green mist shrouded the western quadrant of the field. Some of the green water splattered the pavement in front of me. I covered my mouth with my sleeve and tucked my knapsack protectively behind my back.
Then I held my breath and watched the field in anticipation.
Dec still wasn’t sold. “Even if you make like the Flash and beat the sprinklers, who’s to say the greenhouse won’t be swarming with guards?”
“Then I guess I’ll have to empty the hive.” And I had just the insane trick in mind to do it. “That chemical you threw into the river—Hydrobane, was it?—how much of that do you have?”
When it dawned on him what I was asking, Dec made the shape of the crucifix over his heart and muttered a prayer in Gaelic. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Sabra. You want to go running through sprinklers carrying a substance that explodes on contact with water?”
“Yep.”
After some coaxing, Dec reluctantly led me out to the shipping container. He opened a cooler, revealing four lumps of the silvery Hydrobane laid in a row, each the size and shape of a brick and wrapped in plastic. If Dec’s demonstration had used only a marble’s worth, I could only imagine how much devastation an entire loaf could dole out.
“Each is coated in a resin made out of mineral oil. Even the humidity in the air can be enough to set off a reaction, so the coating keeps the moisture out. But once the resin washes off …”
“Then I guess I better make sure tonight’s forecast doesn’t call for rain,” I said.
Dec shut the lid of the cooler. “The hell do you need these for anyway?”
“Nox likes order. I’m going to introduce a little chaos.”
Seconds later, an explosion rocked the compound. A blossom of fire rose up out of the green mist. The blast was so powerful that it ripped apart the tree trunks surrounding it, sending chunks of scorched, still-glowing bark to rain down over the orchard. The fertilizer being dispersed into the air must have been combustible, because right before my eyes, the flames spread through the network of tree canopies. In time, the sprinklers all turned into makeshift flamethrowers.
Shouts echoed from the field. Footsteps clattered down the stairs right over my head as Nox’s security team fanned out across the compound, skirting around the edge of the war zone of toxins and fire. One of them screamed into his walkie-talkie as he ran. “Turn the sprinkler systems to water only!” he barked. “Do it now!”
I waited an extra minute until the last of them had exited the tower. Then I emerged from my hiding space and began the winding ascent around the outside of the sequoia. As I climbed, I was treated with a bird’s-eye view of the compound. The devastating blast had left a crater fit for a meteorite. Even with the fertilizer shut off, the flames continued to spread in a ring that grew wider by the minute.
As I neared the greenhouse at the top, I pulled the gun from my waistband. For the last flight of steps, I edged cautiously around the trunk, keeping my back pressed to the bark. Then I stepped up onto the main platform.
The greenhouse was surrounded on all sides by a wraparound balcony, and the windows offered a 360-degree aerial perspective of the compound. Under less deadly circumstances, I might have taken the time to enjoy the panoramic view of Jay Peak and the highlands to the north.
The interior of the greenhouse contained rows of strange, exotic plants growing in boxes—an orchid with golden petals; cacti with dagger-sharp spines; a crimson briar patch with thorns that appeared to ooze blood. And in the middle of this freakish garden, a far stranger scene was unfolding.
Only two occupants remained in the greenhouse. Atlas had been bound by his hands and legs to a wheelchair. His head lolled from side to side, his vacant gaze passing right over me.
The other man had his back turned. He was freakishly tall even with the pronounced hunch in his back, and deathly thin as well, a gaunt wendigo of a man. He was tending to a pink-spotted vine with a pair of pruning shears, chattering insanely to himself. When I caught his face in profile, I knew exactly who he was.
The resemblance between Wilbur Nox and his younger brother was uncanny. Wilbur had the same cobalt eyes, the same harsh cheekbones. But whatever insanity possessed the elder Nox had left him emaciated, with the heavy eye bags of a chronic insomniac.
As I edged across the room, I noticed a tray full of syringes in front of Atlas. Their transparent tubes contained liquids of all colors and consistencies. They were crudely labeled with the penmanship of a madman: Shivers. Fever. Sleep. Revive. Agony.
Even more terrifying, three of the vials—Truth, Nightmare, and Pain—had nearly been used up. The Nox brothers had been using Wilbur’s potions on Atlas to try to torture the riddle out of him.
My hand paused over the syringe labeled Agony. I was tempted to give Wilbur a taste of his own medicine, but getting Atlas out of here quietly was more important than vengeance. The last thing I needed was this psycho screaming in pain.
I picked up the Sleep syringe and padded quietly up behind Wilbur. The closer I got, the more I could make out his quiet ramblings. “That’s right, my darling Cucurbita tormentus. You will be the one to make the little birdy squawk, where Ferocactus verum failed. Torment is the road to truth, I always say …”
I wrapped my hand over Wilbur’s mouth and rammed the needle into his back. He thrashed and gave a muffled scream into my hand, but I proved stronger than him. I expelled the contents of the syringe, and his frantic screeching and panicked movements calmed to nothing. His body crumpled. He was snoring by the time he hit the tile floor.
With the mad scientist incapacitated, I knelt by Atlas’s wheelchair. His lips were so chapped from dehydration that they were bleeding. In his drug-induced haze, it was going to be difficult to get him off the compound, which wasn’t exactly wheelchair accessible.
I lightly tapped him on the side of the face a few times. “Stay with me, Atlas. Do you know where you are?”
He burbled something incoherent, then whispered one name: “Selene …”
Whatever freakish nightmare the drugs had conjured in his mind, it involved his dead sister.
Desperate, I grabbed the Revive syringe off the tray. While I didn’t want to subject him to more of Wilbur’s potions, I needed to wake him up so he could defend himself. I jammed the needle into his thigh and slowly depressed the plunger.
Atlas’s eyes snapped open and he looked wildly around the room. I withdrew the needle and cupped his face. Where my thumb touched his neck, his pulse palpitated. “You’re safe now,” I said. “I’m getting you out of here.”
I madly scanned the room for something to cut his restraints, until I saw the tiny pruning shears that Wilbur had been using. While I sawed through the ropes on one of his wrists, Atlas started to focus. “Sabra, I figured out where the final riddle is,” he whispered with excitement. His voice was raspy and dry. “At least the general area, but it’s a start.”
“That’s great,” I reassured him. “You can tell me all about it once we get you the hell out of this tree.” The shears finally snapped the first restraint.
With his newly freed hand, Atlas grabbed my wrist. “No, now. In case I don’t make it out.” I started to tell him that wasn’t going to happen, but he plowed on. “Elderfield Hollow. It’s a defunct agricultural college on an island just off the coast of Maine. The school has been closed for nearly half a century, but I’m positive the trail leads there.”
I beamed at him, only admiration and awe in my heart. “Twenty-four hours of torture, drugs, and hallucinations, and you still managed to break the code?” My eyes filled with tears thin
king about all that this boy, who was practically a stranger, had been through to save my sister—and to save me, too. “Clichés be damned, but I don’t know what I would have done without you over the last week.”
Atlas started to smile back at me, but his grin liquefied. His gaze had focused over my shoulder. The hairs on the nape of my neck bristled.
I spun around to find Horace Nox standing at the top of the stairs with a gun leveled at my head. “Didn’t you see the sign?” he asked. “No girls allowed in the treehouse.”
My hand flew to the butt of the revolver tucked into my jeans, but Nox wagged a warning finger at me. “I don’t think so. Take it out real slowly, lay it on the ground, and kick it toward me.”
As I set my gun down, I contemplated trying to get a shot off, but I wasn’t exactly a sharpshooter. Nox looked ready to pull the trigger if I so much as flinched. I felt all hope fade away as it skittered across the floor and stopped next to his shiny black shoes. I shrugged the knapsack off my back and tossed it to the floor as well.
With his gun still trained on me, Nox crossed the room to where his brother lay and felt his neck for a pulse. On cue, Wilbur let loose a phlegmy snore. “He seems charming,” I said. “I can see where he gets his good looks and model physique.”
Nox straightened up. “They should really change the Tides family name to ‘Weeds.’ But in a lot of ways, you’ve made this easier for me by coming here. In fact, you didn’t even have to go the trouble of torching my field. I would have happily waved you right through the front gates. Because while this asshole”—He waved the gun at Atlas—“has done a bang-up job resisting torture, now I get to use you as leverage against him and him as leverage against you. A symbiosis of pain.”
“What if you and I find the final riddle together?” I hated pleading with the man responsible for my brother’s murder, but I was low on options. “If you let Atlas go, I swear I’ll—”
Nox pulled the trigger and fired a shot so close to my head that my eardrum sang after the bullet whistled past. A window shattered behind me.
“No more ultimatums,” he said. “This is how it’s going to work: You’re going to walk over to that tray full of delightful potions. You’re going to pick up the syringe labeled Agony. And you’re going to inject it into your heart. If you don’t, I’m going to start putting bullets in your boyfriend, nonlethal shots first, into the most painful joints in his body. I’ll start with his ankles and work my way up to the kneecaps, then his pelvis. Maybe even his manhood, since I’m in such a generous mood.”
“I get the picture,” I snapped.
“As for you, Mr. Atlas, I have a distinct feeling that while you proved adept at withstanding a lot of pain, you won’t have the stomach to watch it inflicted on your girlfriend. And if you thought Wilbur’s Pain potion was bad, he tells me that Agony is that multiplied by a hundred. We couldn’t even use it on you because the pain from it is so unbearable that it can actually stop a person’s heart. Her agony won’t end until you tell me the answer to the last riddle.”
Atlas was using his free hand to tug at his remaining restraints. “I don’t know the answer, asshole,” he said. “It’s kind of tough to focus when instead of getting me the research materials I asked for, you give me torture and sleep deprivation.”
Nox checked his watch. “You’re full of shit and you’re both wasting my time.”
Through the loudspeaker in the corner of the greenhouse, the monotone female voice returned. “Sixty seconds until fertilization commences in North Quadrant.”
I glanced down at my knapsack. In dropping it, one of the remaining bricks of Hydrobane had partially slipped out. I could see it glinting silver under the top flap.
An idea congealed in my mind, but first I needed to figure out which direction was north. The plume of fire was rising to the west, which meant that if I turned ninety degrees clockwise …
“Come on!” Nox ordered. “Pick up the syringe. Unless you want me to start playing Operation with your boyfriend.” He took aim with the pistol at Atlas’s lower extremities.
I held up my hands. “Okay, okay. I’m going.” As I walked toward the tray with the needles, I stealthily snagged the brick of Hydrobane with my toe. With each shuffling step, I pushed it forward, never looking down so Nox wouldn’t suspect. When I stepped behind a garden box, which briefly obscured my feet from him, I gave the brick a hard nudge. The “Thirty seconds” announcement covered the whisper of the brick gliding over the tiles. Like a hockey puck, it slid across the glossy greenhouse floor, heading toward the north-facing balcony. It tumbled off the edge toward the field below.
At the tray of syringes, I picked up the vial of Agony. A few beads of the golden poison spilled out of the needlepoint. “Sabra, don’t,” Atlas begged me. His faced had caved in with helpless torment. We both knew that as soon as he cracked and gave up the location of the final journal page, we were dead.
I pointed the needle toward my heart. “Before I do this, answer me just one question, Horace.” Without giving him the opportunity to refuse, I asked anyway. “Why the Nightingale? You could have named your bar anything you wanted. But you chose to name it after a symbol of female revenge.”
“Symbol of female revenge?” Nox snorted. “I’ve read every single myth and legend about resurrection and rebirth in existence, and let me tell you, the nightingale is the most brilliant practical joke in all of mythology. Women exacting vengeance, then getting transformed into nightingales, to forever sing some beautiful fucking song—female empowerment bullshit, blah, blah, blah. But here’s the punchline that you clearly missed: The Greeks had it all wrong, because in nature, it’s only the male nightingale that sings.” Over the loudspeaker, the announcer began the ten-second countdown. “Don’t you see, you moron? The female nightingale has no voice.” Nox clapped the butt of his gun on the edge of a garden box to underscore each of his final words. “The female. Nightingale. Doesn’t. Sing.”
I stared defiantly into Nox’s eyes. “This one does.”
In the northern quadrant below, the sprinklers hissed on, rinsing the resin off the brick of Hydrobane.
The explosion bucked the greenhouse hard, sending Nox and me to the ground. Under the force of the blast, the north-facing windows all shattered.
Something I hadn’t expected happened next: The enormous tree began to list to one side. The blast must have been destructive enough to gouge a chunk out of the base. The floor beneath us tilted ten degrees, twenty degrees, then thirty. I grabbed hold of one of the garden boxes as the incline grew more pronounced. My knapsack, which contained the rest of the Hydrobane, landed next to me, and I prayed that there was nothing wet uphill. Meanwhile, Atlas’s wheelchair started to roll forward. He latched onto the nearest flower box and braced himself.
The Nox brothers weren’t so fortunate. Wilbur’s unconscious body tumbled across the floor and right off the edge of the platform. Nox slipped helplessly over the tile, too, and for a second it looked like he might share his brother’s grisly fate. At the last minute, as he approached the edge, he wrapped a hand around the railing and dangled there.
The tree’s decline came to a jerking halt as what remained below of the damaged trunk held fast. My revolver, which had been lodged against one of the garden boxes uphill, skittered loose and raced past me before I could make a grab for it—
And landed right in the outstretched hand of Horace Nox. With his legs dangling over the void and his other hand still gripping the railing, he steadied his elbow on the tile and swiveled the gun in my direction, grinning with dark resolve.
I let go of my perch. My body slid fast over the tile floor on a collision course for Nox. Right as he zeroed in on me, I drilled my boot into his other hand, crushing his finger bones between my heel and the railing.
Nox screamed, and with his fingers too mangled to hold on, he fell. While I hugged the railing for dear life, I watched Horace Nox plummet into the canopy of burning trees eighty feet below. The inferno sw
allowed him whole. “How’s that for agony?” I whispered.
Atlas cleared his throat. Upslope, he was dangling by one hand from a garden box, his forearm muscle bulging out of his skin under the weight of the wheelchair. “Glad we dropped a house on the wicked witch and all,” he said in a strained voice, “but would you mind terribly cutting me out of this chair?”
I scaled back up the slope and pulled Atlas up to a safer perch, where I finished sawing through his restraints with a piece of broken glass. He was in rough shape—his body was stiff from being confined to the chair for the last twenty-four hours and he broke into a heavy sweat as the drugs made another cycle through his bloodstream. I wrapped his arm over my shoulder for support, scooped up my knapsack, and together we clambered over to the top of the staircase.
It was slow work climbing down. With the tree tilted nearly forty-five degrees, one unbalanced step could pitch us over the edge of the rickety bannister. As we journeyed downward, we were treated to an outstanding view of the fire that was spreading through the maples.
Our descent came to a halt at the site of the second explosion, where the staircase ended in a scorched, jagged lip. The Hydrobane blast had decimated the bottom of the tree, leaving a chasm where the last flight of stairs used to be. Twenty feet below, the blackened crater still burned in patches.
The titanic tree groaned ominously. “I’d ask if you were okay to jump,” I said, “but I don’t think we have a choice.”
Atlas smiled weakly. “Cannonball,” he whispered, and we took a big step off the edge of the staircase.
A quick fall later, we hit the top lip of the crater. I braced myself for the impact and transferred my momentum into a roll down the shallow slope. I heard Atlas cry out as his ankle twisted beneath him. Before we’d even stopped tumbling, the mangled tree trunk looming over us gave another colossal groan. I picked Atlas up off the bed of charcoal and helped him limp across the crater. As we hobbled up the slope, the enormous tree cracked in half. I could feel the shadow of it coming down to hammer us into the earth.