“We’ll let fate figure that out,” Geth said.
Amelia took Winter’s hand and scooted to the edge of the shelf. She sat down, wiggling her rear in the soil and tying up her skirt between her legs. Grateful she was wearing jeans, Winter sat next to Amelia, and Geth hopped up onto Winter and made his way to the front pocket of her shirt. It was a position he was very familiar with.
“So we just slide?” Winter asked, holding the glowing amber stick out in front of them and staring off into the darkness.
“The wall looks sloped,” Geth said.
“The wall looks sloped,” Amelia growled. “That’s easy for you to say—it’s not your rear you’re riding on.”
A mournful cry sounded from behind them, dull, but audible.
“The gunt is coming!” Geth said loudly.
Amelia pushed off the shelf and began sliding down the narrow ledge. Winter followed her lead. The ledge, made of clay, was wet from the many streams of water running up the sides, and Amelia and Winter quickly began to pick up speed on the slick surface. Long, fingerlike strands of dirt reached out from the wall of the chasm, attempting to slow them down as they raced. Amelia and Winter were moving too fast for the dirt to have much effect. It was a wild, uncontrollable ride that ended when Amelia’s dress snagged on a protruding root, pulling her to a sudden stop. Winter slammed into Amelia’s broad back.
The dull sound of gunt was no longer dull, but thundering and crashing. Winter looked up behind them and could see thousands of white, froggish blobs showering down. The mushy white blobs meshed together and swelled, beginning to fill the chasm.
“Let’s go!” Geth hollered. “It’s coming.”
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Amelia shouted, tugging to free herself from the root.
She pulled at her dress, but it wouldn’t give.
The gunt showered closer.
Amelia bent forward and with her old teeth tore at the cloth and bit herself free. Then she grasped Winter’s ankles and pulled her with her as they began to slide again.
The gunt was upon them, racing after them so swiftly it created a tremendous wind, which whipped at Winter’s hair.
“Go!” Geth yelled.
They weren’t fast enough. A huge, sticky frog glob flew into Winter and pushed her from the ledge. Winter would have fallen all the way to the bottom, but the gunt caught her by the ankles, and she hung there upside down on the wall like a fly in a sticky trap. A two-foot-thick waterflight was running up the side of the chasm, making the area where Winter hung a muddy mess. Amelia reached out to try to free Winter.
That was a mistake. As soon as Amelia touched Winter’s ankles, her hands were instantly caught in the white, sticky gunt. She had no choice but to hang onto Winter as millions of gunt balls continued to fill the entire rip in the soil. Gunt was also rising from the floor of the chasm and getting closer.
“This is not good!” Winter screamed, still dangling upside down against the wall, water and mud washing over her and Amelia.
Straining to keep from falling out of Winter’s upside-down pocket, Geth gazed out at the cascading wall of gunt. “I hope Leven’s okay,” he said.
“What?” Amelia panicked, glaring at the toothpick as if he were crazy. “We’ve got to do something! I didn’t wait all these years to be buried by a pile of gunt.”
“It’s in the hands of fate,” Geth said nonchalantly.
Amelia was dumbfounded. She too was a believer in the power of fate, but she knew something was not right with Geth. He was not the person he had been when he was first captured. Then he had been the lead token of the Council of Wonder, motivated by his hatred for anything that sought to destroy Foo. Now here he was rolling over, instead of actively willing fate to work for him.
But none of that mattered at the moment.
The gunt was at hand.
Packed together, like thick globs of egg white, billions of frog-shaped blobs of gunt advanced, pressed together, creating a river of sticky ooze that poured down the walls of the rip, rapidly expanding to fill the void.
Winter watched as a wall of gunt taller than any building or mountain she had ever seen inched steadily toward them.
She looked up at the thick stream of water flowing up the wall. She glanced at Amelia, who was still stuck to her ankles.
Then Winter closed her eyes and triggered her gift.
Chapter Three
Thorn in Their Side
Tatum Manufacturing was a big, diversified company. Its managers had their figurative hands and literal money in hundreds of products and ideas. Chances were that in a week’s time most people in North America had either sat on, eaten off, or passed by some product that Tatum had helped manufacture.
Geth, of course, was the result of their wood division. It was Tatum that had taken the chunk of him that had contained his heart and turned him into the toothpick he was now.
Geth was appropriately grateful.
The shape he had been shaved down into had made him easy for Leven and Winter to transport, and it had kept him small and out of the direct sight of Sabine.
Yes, Tatum had helped fate well. If questioned, Geth would have nothing but positive things to say about the company that had carved up his heart and spit him out looking like the sliver he was now. But Geth might have felt differently if he had known what else Tatum had done. You see, when the large chunk of tree that contained Geth’s heart had been tossed into the blades and cut down in size, fate had kindly preserved enough of the great king’s heart intact to keep him alive and enable him to guide Leven to Foo. But the monstrous blades of Tatum’s wood division were not quite as skilled and precise as, say, the hands of a well-trained surgeon. In fact, they were less precise than the fins of a poorly trained circus seal. What those imprecise blades had done was put the majority of Geth into one toothpick. But those machines had also trimmed a tiny part of Geth and put it into a separate toothpick. That toothpick had been packaged and shipped from Burnt Culvert, Oklahoma, to North Carolina, while the toothpick known as Geth had stayed in Oklahoma.
And whereas Geth was a traditional-looking toothpick, the small piece of heart shaved from him ended up in a less conservative, specialty toothpick. That specialty toothpick was then packed into a box labeled “Ezra and Son’s Extra Fancy Party Toothpicks.” The marketing line on the label read: “Perfect for picking at even the most prestigious parties.” The toothpicks in those packages were extra long, with fringed plastic purple tops.
Well, no sooner had that package of Ezra and Son’s Extra Fancy Party Toothpicks been trucked across the country and delivered to a large grocery store in North Carolina than Charlie Pork had purchased the pack of toothpicks and carried them to the small sandwich shop he and his uncle Telly ran just off Interstate 40.
It was in that box of toothpicks that this small portion of Geth now lay. Of course, it was no longer Geth. Like a kidney that you might give to a friend in need, this vital part of Geth had been removed and now belonged to a toothpick all its own. And whereas the Geth we all know was a noble being whose every desire was for Foo and fate, this toothpick was different. This toothpick had received the dark part of Geth, and it harbored nothing but anger and hatred.
And confusion.
It was as confused and dark as any toothpick had ever been. Of course, it wasn’t hard to be king of that heap, seeing that there are so few toothpicks who feel anything at all. But as it lay there in that box, the world dark, with thoughts of anger racing through its wooden head, it grew more and more hateful and anxious.
Thanks to a ding, or an imperfection, in the side of its top, the toothpick could hear. His hearing was a bit muffled due to his purple plastic top, but on more than one occasion he heard the name Ezra.
“Throw me that box of Ezra’s,” Charlie Pork yelled.
“This box of Ezra’s?” the help yelled back.
“Them Ezra’s.”
The dark, angry, and confused toothpick had a name.
br /> Ezra was taken out of the box along with a number of lifeless toothpicks and laid in a small tray near the soda fountain. He couldn’t see this, but deduced it when he heard Charlie Pork say, “Put them toothpicks in that small tray next to the soda fountain.”
Every once in a w