Remember, no dying before you dip your toes in the ocean. That was the deal.
A minute passed in silence.
She had a decision to make: go back up the stairs and look for another way to climb down, or keep moving forward.
Her curious side won, and she moved down to the next step. Her footfall was soft enough that she couldn’t even hear it. In another lifetime, Magnolia had been a thief, with a reputation for sneaking in and out of places. It was time to put those skills to work.
Pausing every few steps to listen, she made her way down the flight of stairs without attracting any attention. The next landing opened onto another story. Debris littered the dark tile floor. A metal chair arm protruded from a pile of concrete rubble. An upside-down table, its legs bent in opposite directions, lay in the dust a few feet away.
Magnolia remembered the Pepsi machine she had discovered in Hades, on X’s final dive. The freezing temperatures there had preserved the ancient artifact, but Charleston’s climate was much warmer and wetter. Nothing of value seemed to have survived the years.
She continued down the cracked and twisted steps, holding her knife as if she were about to spar with the darkness. Her breath fogged the inside of her visor with every step. The pane was so blurry, she almost didn’t see the strange ivy clinging to the wall.
She took another wary step and raised the knife, staring at the first living thing she had seen on the surface in months. The vines grew thicker on the next landing and snaked around the corner.
The sinewy vegetation covered the wall like gigantic cobwebs, each strand ending in barbs as thick as her hand. Magnolia knew better than to touch one of them. Half the shit down here was poisonous, and the other half was carnivorous. She proceeded cautiously down the steps, listening for movement and hugging the rail to keep her distance from the vines.
Halfway down the next flight, the entire stairwell lit up with a pinkish glow. Magnolia flinched and then froze as the barbed heads of stems snapped free of the walls. The labyrinth of vines pulsated and came to life, dozens of them, each twisting and undulating independently of the others.
More pink lights flashed across her path.
This wasn’t exactly the sort of pastel she was hoping to find.
Two years ago and a thousand miles to the west, she had come across groves of glowing, tentacled plants like these. Matt Shaw, a diver on Team Angel, had wandered too close. It cost him a leg. Magnolia had helped hold him down while Andrew sawed through flesh and bone to stop the spread of the venom. Matt had survived, earning himself a cushy job in the water reclamation plant, where he sat and stared at monitors most of the day.
After the accident, Magnolia had visited him. Privately, she had felt that a desk job was the last place she wanted to end up. But right now she would gladly trade with him.
She hugged the opposite side of the stairway as the flora continued to move. The ends waved about as if searching for her. The monstrous vines stretched across the next landing, too, and into the open room beyond. She peered inside, where the pulsating stems all connected to a central trunk growing in the center of the space.
It looked almost like an old-world tree, but twisted and wrong.
Magnolia spotted the cracked hole in the center of the room. The tree thing had grown right up through the floor. But could it really be that big? The tower had to be thirty stories high, and she was still a long way up.
She pressed her back against the wall and steadied her breathing. Never in her forty-seven dives had she seen anything like this.
Keep moving, Mags! You want to see the ocean or not?
Fear crawled through her. She forced herself to take another step. Then a second and a third. With each step, the glowing foliage grew thicker. As she worked her way deeper into the guts of the tower, the vines grew harder to avoid. She plastered herself against the far wall, sidling carefully.
Above the next landing, she could just make out the stenciled characters that read floor 6.
She still had a way to go.
Holding the knife in front of her, Magnolia moved around the next corner. The pinkish lights were blinking frantically now. It was almost as if… but no, that was crazy. The vines couldn’t be talking to each other. It was just a plant—a very weird, very big plant.
Her next step made a squishing sound. It was enough to make her cringe, but as she backed up, she saw that she hadn’t stepped on one of the vines. The sound came again as she stood still, holding in a breath and tingling with adrenaline.
A noise like a dog chewing on a bone echoed off the walls. The web of vines glowed an angry red, filling the staircase with a ghastly light.
Frozen in place, she breathed silently and did her best not to move. The crunching turned to cracking and then a guttural choking.
She took a cautious step backward at the same moment a shadow flickered across the wall below. The sound of creaking ligaments and bones filled the stairwell. It reminded her of the Sirens, but the thing that emerged was nothing like one of the creatures from Hades. This time, it wasn’t an apparition. The thing stretched furry skeletal arms lined with thorns, and raised something over its bulbous head.
Magnolia stumbled backward, falling on her butt. She scooted out of view as the creature skittered up the stairs.
A huge eyeball on a stem poked around the corner. The leathery eyelid snapped over the black pupil several times like a camera shutter before the stem retreated.
Raising the knife in one shaky hand, Magnolia pushed herself up with the other. As soon as she was on her feet, she backed up the steps. The sound prompted a screech, and the furry creature connected to the eyeball bounded around the corner on two peg legs and a third limb connected to its bony chest. The webbed feet and hand slapped the concrete.
Magnolia backed up several more steps, and the creature halted. A vine, dripping pinkish goo, hung from the long, curved beak on its feathery face. Swinging the stem from side to side, it rolled back its head and slurped down the snack.
She finally understood. The vines weren’t reacting to her. They were reacting to the beast that was feeding on them.
“Stay back,” she said, angling the blade toward the monster. It tilted its eyeball at her as if trying to understand.
“Don’t come any closer.”
It was the tone, not the words, that mattered. She had often employed the same tone when one of the junior Hell Divers tried to get a little too familiar with her on the night before a dive.
She took another step backward. The creature blinked again, its eyelid snapping open and shut like a hatch. She poked at the air again with her knife. If forced to, she would kill it. The beast was only half her size, but the sharp hooked beak and long talons gave her pause. A single strike from any one of them could tear her suit wide open—and maybe her flesh, too.
A cackle escaped from the open beak. She lunged with the knife to scare it off, but that only seemed to make the creature even more curious.
Magnolia staggered back up another step, brandishing the knife. The foliage continued to glow, filling the passage with pulsing light. The subscreen on her HUD showed that her power was already down to 45 percent.
She was wasting time.
In a swift motion, she swiped at the beast. The blow didn’t connect, but the creature flinched and the eyeball reared back. She took off running, back up the stairs. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but she could hear the creature chasing her. Another eerie cackle followed her. It sounded as if the creature was trying to speak and throw up at the same time.
She loped up the stairs, her injured ankle hurting but not slowing her down. At the next landing, she went left into the main room. The vines there flared red as she stomped all over them in her haste.