"Said the living lab experiment. Tell me, did he spark your life and then freeze you and keep tweaking?"

"Of course not!" Mr. Forkle turned to Sophie. "Any tweaks I made to your DNA were done before your inception. I implanted your embryo immediately."

"Okay," Sophie said, not sure why he seemed so upset by the idea. Humans froze embryos all the time. And either way, she was still an experiment.

But for the first time, she didn't care.

She stalked closer. "If whatever they did to me makes it so I can stop you, it's worth it."

"You may inconvenience us occasionally," he sneered. "But you will never stop us."

"We'll see about that," Mr. Forkle told him. "She's done an excellent job keeping you distracted. And now I've found the information we came for. Looks like the next stage of your timeline will be in Merrowmarsh."

Gethen's jaw dropped.

"I can divide my consciousness," Mr. Forkle said with a smile. "One part of my mind was being rather obvious while the other slipped past and dug out what I needed. Clever enough for you?"

"It'd be more clever if you had any chance of stopping what's happening."

"There's always a way," Mr. Forkle said, dusting off his hands. "Oh, and we'll also be removing that bludgeblot from your nails so we won't have to worry about your friends tracking you."

Gethen snorted. "There's no way to remove bludgeblot-that's why the ogres use it. Burned like the sun when they painted it on."

"Well then. I guess we'll just have to remove your nails entirely. Our Froster will be by soon to freeze them off. So I'd recommend you go back to that place you've been hiding and hope your pain receptors stop working."

Gethen shouted threats as they left, but the warnings were as empty as his sandy cell.

His final words to Keefe were the only ones with any impact.

"You're choosing the wrong side, boy. You'll regret it when you see your mother's vision realized. But then it'll be too late."

TWENTY-THREE.

YOU GUYS DON'T look so good," Dex said as Sophie and Keefe stumbled back to the girls' main room. "What happened?"

Sophie didn't know where to begin as she collapsed into the nearest chair. Keefe flopped onto the ottoman next to her and stared at the ceiling.

They'd had to use light from Marquiseire to leap home, and the unmapped star's glow felt like getting sliced and diced by a shattered disco ball. But Sophie's unease had much more to do with the fact that Calla and Blur were on their way to Merrowmarsh-another Neutral Territory-to investigate, while Mr. Forkle had left to get Squall so she could freeze off Gethen's fingernails.

The latter task haunted Sophie more than the first, making the black swan pendant around her neck grow a million pounds heavier. She knew they had to stop the Neverseen from finding Gethen, but . . . wasn't what they were doing to him torture?

Della crouched in front of Sophie and turned Sophie's face from side to side, then squeezed Sophie's cheeks, giving her a fish face.

"What are you doing?" Sophie asked-though it came out more like "Wharyoooing?"

"Attempting to fill in for Elwin. He gave me a Sophie Survival Kit, as well as a separate list called Crazy Messes That Sophie Will Find A Way To Get Herself Into."

Sophie sighed as Della fished a huge collection of crumpled papers from her pocket, each covered in Elwin's messy writing.

"Here it is," she said after flipping through several. "Light poisoning. Symptoms include fatigue, severe dehydration, bluish tint to the gums, and glints of sparkle in the irises."

"Poisoning?" Sophie repeated. "And wait-what about my irises?"

"It means your body re-formed with light particles still in it. Not surprising considering you were leaping with the unmapped stars." Della handed Sophie a mirror. "See what I mean?"

"Great. My eyes look like alicorn poop."

Della laughed. "It is a strange effect, I'll admit. Even stranger how it makes Keefe look like a Vacker."

Della was right. The shimmer in Keefe's eyes made them look teal for some reason.

"Always wanted to be part of the family," Keefe mumbled. The sadness in his voice broke Sophie's heart.

"Are you okay?" she whispered.

Keefe shrugged and scooted away from her.

"You'll both feel better once you take Elwin's remedy." Della opened a huge medicine cabinet-which Sophie had thought was just a big shrubbery-and studied the shelves of small glass vials. There were elixirs, balms, and poultices in every color. Della handed them each a tarlike vial and one that looked a lot like snot.

Sophie uncorked the black one and took a whiff. "Ugh, this smells like Iggy burp."

"Here," Della said, giving them each a bottle of Youth. "Wash it down with this. You need it for the dehydration, anyway."

The slightly sweet water helped a little. But Sophie could still taste the burpy medicine even after she'd swallowed. And the snotty elixir tasted like a bug smoothie.

"So are you guys ever going to tell us what happened?" Biana asked. "Because I think Dex is going to explode if you don't."

"Hey, don't put it all on me," Dex argued. "If Biana twists her hands any tighter, she's going to pull off one of her fingers."

Biana blushed. "I guess we're all a little worried."

Sophie turned to Keefe. "Do you want to tell them?"

He shook his head. "You'll do a better job."

Sophie doubted that, but she did her best to sum up everything Gethen had said. Every word seemed to make Keefe slouch smaller.

"You know he was just saying that stuff to get in your head, right?" Fitz asked him.

"Well, mission accomplished." Keefe rubbed his temples so hard, he left red marks on his forehead. "I mean . . . according to him, she was in the Neverseen my entire life. That means every memory I have of her is a lie. Every. Single. One!"

Della wrapped an arm around him. "I know it's hard, Keefe-"

"Do you? Because I can't imagine any of the perfect Vackers being longtime traitors."

The silence felt painful.

"Sorry," Keefe mumbled. "It's not your fault she's evil. And don't try to defend her-there's no debating it anymore. I mean, don't you realize what this means?" His eyes darted to Sophie. "My mom was probably part of everything that went down with Jolie."

The words were a punch to the gut, and Sophie knew Keefe could tell. Jolie's journal had mentioned a woman communicating with her when the Neverseen tried to recruit her. She'd also mentioned a woman being there the night the Neverseen tried to force her to set fire to a human nuclear power plant. Either could've been Lady Gisela-or both.

"Do you have any theories for the 'vision' your mom had for the future?" Sophie asked. "Or what this timeline is with the Neutral Territories?"

"Not yet. But I will figure it out. Do you have any fathomlethes in there?" he asked Della.

"I don't know if that's a good idea," she said.

"Why, what are fathomlethes?" Sophie asked.

"Tiny pearls we sometimes find in rare river oysters," Dex told her. "They give you crazy dreams, but they can also help you access your long-term memories-"

"Which is exactly what I need," Keefe jumped in. "Please?" he asked Della. "He said she's been preparing me. That means there have to be clues I didn't pick up on. Now that I know what to look for, I can find them."

Della sighed and took out a bottle filled with what looked like blue-green caviar. "You can have one," she said, removing it with tiny tongs. "And this is a one-time-only thing."

Keefe popped it into his mouth and swallowed. "How long do I have before it hits me?"

"Probably about fifteen minutes," Dex said.

"I guess that's my cue, then." Keefe waved good night and left for the boys' tree house. "Time to get some answers."

TWENTY-FOUR.

CALLA AND MR. FORKLE still hadn't returned by bedtime, and even the reveriebells couldn't calm Sophie's tangled dreams. Lady Gisela's wounded face kept morphing into Gethen's as he sat chained in his cell. Squall loomed over him, and he screamed in Keefe's mom's voice. Then his fingernails turned to ice and everything splattered red.

She dragged herself out of bed at sunrise, hoping a walk by the river would clear her head. A soft song rustling through the forest caught her attention.

She raced into the trees, chasing the sound to a small clearing where she found Calla singing with her palms pressed against one of the trunks.

"You're back!" she said, startling Calla so much the poor gnome nearly fell over. "Sorry. I'm just glad you're okay. I was worried when you weren't home last night."

"We only returned an hour ago, wanting to make sure we hadn't missed anything."

"And?" Sophie pressed.

Calla slumped against the tree. "And . . . we found nothing. No shielded trees. No whispers of warnings in the roots. The Black Swan is moving one of Gethen's dwarven guards to keep an eye on the area, but it's possible that will only make the Neverseen change their plan."

"Do you have any idea what they're up to?"

"I don't. And that's what terrifies me. In all my four thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine years on this planet-"

"Four thousand," Sophie interrupted. "You're four thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine years old?" She knew the elves had indefinite lifespans, so it wasn't that big of a stretch to know that gnomes did too. But the number was too huge to fit in her brain.

"I believe that's the right age," Calla agreed. "Though there have been stretches where I lost count. But in all that time, I've never felt anything like the worry I felt coming from Brackendale. That's why I took such a risk to bring you and Biana to investigate. Whatever we're facing is unlike anything I've experienced. The melodies reminded me of our ancient warnings."

"Warnings?" Sophie repeated.

"Songs so old we don't even know who first sang them. They warn of a great Withering before an endless Fall. But our history holds no record of any such occurrence."

Sophie wasn't a fan of the word "endless." "But you believe there's a cure?"

Calla pressed her ear against the tree. "I believe nature always finds a way. But it also does so on its own timeline. We must hope that timeline is faster than the Neverseen, or whoever is behind this plague."

Sophie wanted to do more than hope-she wanted to act. There had to be missing something, some deeper meaning behind what Gethen had said, or some detail in the Exillium records they'd overlooked to help them find the Psionipath.

She returned to her tree house prepared to gather her friends and come up with a plan. But they'd already gathered-all except Keefe-and were waiting around the waterfall.

Dex held up a gadget that looked even crazier than his Evader. "I figured out how to break into the Lumenaria database!"

It looked like he'd wired pieces of Imparters together and shaped them into a pyramid, with six long antennas sticking out of the top point. Five were made of different metals-gold, silver, bronze, copper, and iron. And the sixth looked like a twig.

"I know the stick part is weird," Dex said, "but I needed this thing to broadcast in all six technologies. The elves, ogres, trolls, goblins, and dwarves were easy to figure out, but I had no idea what to do for the gnomes. I tried solar-powered stuff, but it still seemed too techie. Then I saw some branches on the ground and thought, why not?"

Only Dex would decide to jab a gadget with a stick.

"You should've heard him squeal when it worked," Fitz said. "I thought a banshee had snuck into the room."

"Ignore my son," Della told Dex. "You deserve to be excited."

"Yeah, I can't believe you figured it out so fast," Biana told him.

Sophie smiled. "Dex is a genius."

Dex's grin turned supernova.

He pressed the base of the gadget, making the pyramid glow green. He had to wave it around a few times, like when humans try to search for a stronger cell phone signal, but eventually a crackly hum filled the room and a fuzzy hologram appeared.

Sophie squinted at the image. "Is that a scroll?"

"A super old one. The database is filled with them. I've just started going through. I was looking for stuff about the Wildwood Colony, but this one caught my eye because of all the smudges." He pointed to black smears covering whole paragraphs. "These runes have been blacked out, which means someone is trying to keep something secret. But they must've run low on ink because at the end it's thin enough for a few words to peek through-and if I'm reading them right, it proves the ogres have something that gives them leverage with the Council."

It took a moment for the gravity of the revelation to hit.