Acacia looked up in wonder. “Then can we block her from coming back somehow?”
Elam pointed the scroll at Sapphira. “You’re the portal maker. What do you think?”
Sapphira tapped a finger on her chin. “I suppose if we could somehow move the portal she uses, she couldn’t get in here. At least then we’d be safe.”
Paili shivered. “Not with Mardon and giants here!”
“She’s right,” Elam said. “We would still have to deal with them.”
“I’d rather face a hundred giants than one Morgan.” With the others following, Sapphira exited the tower’s museum and crept toward the shining blue column, perhaps the only remaining portal Morgan could use to enter the lower realms. “Morgan can find portals when she’s down here, because most of them are lit up, but they’re not visible up above. I can just sort of feel them when I’m up there.”
“Then how does Morgan find them?” Elam asked.
“I think she just remembers where she appears in the land above.” Sapphira gazed at the swirling blue light. “Morgan comes here through this portal, so if I move the spot where it comes out up above, she won’t be able to get here, because she probably doesn’t know about the portal on her island that leads to the top of the museum.” Sapphira touched the edge of the column of light, making it sparkle at the tip of her finger. “But it’s pretty risky, because I’m not sure where this one leads, and I don’t know if I can create a firestorm big enough to move it. I watched the dragons make one, and that was more fire than I’ve ever seen in my life!”
“A firestorm?” Acacia took Sapphira’s hand. “If we’re both oracles of fire, maybe you can teach me how to make fire, and we can try to do it together.”
Sapphira let out a long sigh. “Anything to keep Morgan away from these girls.” She squeezed Acacia’s hand and pulled her toward the column. “Let’s go before I change my mind.”
“We’ll wait here.” Elam picked up another scroll and clacked them together. “I can probably take on Mardon, but the giants are a different story. I learned that from fighting Nabal for my dinner.”
Sapphira and Acacia stepped into the portal together and hugged each other close. Sapphira raised a hand and reached for a fistful of blue light, catching it like a rope and pulling down. In a blinding flash, the museum chamber crumbled away, and, seconds later, a million pieces of multicolored light flew together and bonded seamlessly into a new mosaic, a dim sky framing the dark turrets of Morgan’s castle. An orange hue on one side signaled the breaking of dawn.
Sapphira set a hand on her hip and whispered, “I thought we might come out in the land of the living where the tower fell, but this is pretty close to the portal we used to go home just a little while ago. I guess this one really did move from Shinar, like Morgan guessed.”
“How did the firestorm move the portal here?” Acacia whispered back.
“I don’t know. The dragons moved it to the tower from another place first, but Morgan told me that everything shifted around after that, so I guess it moved again.” Sapphira nodded toward the swamp behind them. “She keeps snakes back there and a big dog inside the castle, so we have to be extra quiet.”
Acacia pointed at a nearby apple tree. “She probably recognizes the portal site by landmarks like this tree, so we have to move it to a place where she would never find it.”
“Right, but if an entire first floor of a tower can sink into a new portal, we’ll probably take some stuff with us, too. We don’t want to do it where she’s likely to miss something that gets swept up in the storm.”
“Good point,” Acacia said. “We can’t leave any evidence.”
“But where could we possibly go?”
Acacia turned toward the swamp. “Are you afraid of snakes?”
“Well, take away the fact that some can squeeze you to death and swallow you whole, and the fact that some can inject venom that will eat your flesh or shrivel you into a prune . . . no, not really.”
“Same here.” Acacia tiptoed into the swamp.
Sapphira tugged on the back of Acacia’s dress. “I was kidding. We can’t go in there.” The sun’s dawning rays illuminated the dark water. A mere two arm lengths away, a long, slender body broke the surface, its scales reflecting the sunlight. It quickly disappeared again, and the water stilled.
Acacia backed up a step. “Do you have a better place? Somewhere Morgan won’t notice?”
“No, but even if we don’t get eaten, do you want to take a bunch of swamp water and deadly snakes down where the other girls are?”
“What are you afraid of? We can make fire, can’t we? We can burn them to a crisp.”
Sapphira pointed at herself. “I can make fire, but I haven’t taught you how yet.”
A dog barked in the distance, then howled loud and long.
“You’d better start teaching me. That dog’s bound to alert someone.”
Sapphira picked up two sticks at the base of the apple tree and handed one to Acacia. “You just kind of think fire onto the wood, but you also have to speak to it to make it happen.” Sapphira stared at her stick and said, “Ignite!” A small flame immediately erupted on the end.
Furrowing her brow, Acacia focused her eyes on her stick and whispered through tight lips, “Ignite!” Nothing happened.
The dog howled again, this time louder.
“Concentrate!” Sapphira urged. “Give it everything you’ve got.”
Acacia gripped the stick so tightly, it trembled in her hands. “Ignite!” Again, nothing happened. She lowered the stick and frowned. “What am I doing wrong?”
Sapphira felt a familiar warmth on her thigh. The Ovulum was signaling for her attention. “You’re supposed to get your power from Elohim, the God of Noah. You haven’t danced with him yet, so I guess he hasn’t given it to you.”
“Danced? You have to dance with someone to get power?”
Sapphira withdrew the Ovulum and showed it to Acacia. It glowed red and warm in her palm. “Well, the first time I did it, the Eye of the Oracle told me to command the fire to appear, but I never really felt the power was my own until I danced with Elohim. He’s the one who speaks through the man in the Ovulum.”
Acacia laid a hand on top of her head. “Okay, you’re making my head hurt. You danced with a god, and there’s a man in that egg?”
“Yes.” She handed the Ovulum to Acacia. “Just look inside and see if you can find ”
The dog howled once more and bounded into sight, a huge, long-legged beast with a multicolored coat that shimmered in the glow of the rising sun. His shining eyes locked onto them, and he loped their way, closing the gap quickly.
Sapphira spun and held out her stick, shouting, “Blaze!” A bright flame shot up, and she waved it at the dog. “Get back!”
The dog halted and growled, baring its long, sharp teeth.
Acacia gazed into the Ovulum. “I see him! He’s my teacher!”
Sapphira thrust the firebrand toward the dog, making it back away a step. She twisted her neck toward Acacia. “Is he saying anything?”
Acacia, now standing in ankle-deep water, cradled the Ovulum in her palm. “Yes! He’s talking to me.” She held her firebrand up and spoke to the glass shell. “Like this?” The Ovulum seemed to nod as it wobbled in her hand. Acacia lifted her head toward the stick and shouted, “Flames, come to my firebrand!” The stick immediately flashed with fire.
Sapphira backed toward the water, still thrusting her firebrand at the dog. With each step she took, the dog took its own step closer, staying low. When her feet touched the cold swamp, she gave the dog a last lunging thrust, then lifted her stick high and spun it in a fast orbit. She yelled, “Give me a firestorm!”
The dog lunged. A twisting wall of flames encircled the two girls, throwing the dog back. A yelp and a splash followed, then silence.
Sapphira peered through slender gaps in the orbiting wall. The dog crouched at the edge of the swamp,
as if waiting for the slightest opportunity to pounce again. She hooked her arm around Acacia’s elbow and edged farther out into the mire. There was no going back now.
The wall of fire dipped into the water and raised thick plumes of steam. The wall fizzled, becoming thin and transparent as it cooled. Three snake bodies humped over the water’s surface about four paces in front of them. The dog crowded the bank and growled, his lip curling away from his teeth. A trio of scaly heads popped up from the swamp, their mouths open and fangs bared.
Sapphira waved her stick faster, nearly knocking it into Acacia’s tiny flame. Sapphira slid her arm around her sister’s waist. “We need more power! Call for a firestorm!”
The chilly water seemed to consume their dwindling wall. The dog waded toward them, closing in. One of the snakes swam through a gap in the flames and slithered around Acacia’s legs. As it traveled up her body, it wound her in tight coils, and when it reached her chest, its head swung around to the front, ready to strike.
Nearly blinded by steamy vapor, Sapphira grabbed the snake’s neck and wrestled it with one arm while trying to keep her firebrand rotating. The struggle jostled Acacia’s arm, knocking the Ovulum into the water.
The other two snakes swam around them in a slow orbit, drawing closer with each revolution. Pushing with all her might, Sapphira wrenched the snake’s neck toward the swamp’s muddy bed. She shoved her toe into the wet sand and nudged the Ovulum onto the top of her foot, raising it to the water’s surface, but with neither hand free, she couldn’t grab it.
Acacia reached for the egg, but the snake’s thick coils kept her from bending. She grunted, her voice breaking. “I . . . can’t . . . reach it!”
The other two snakes turned toward them and broke through the fire. Sapphira screamed at the Ovulum as it rocked precariously on her foot. “Elohim! Help us!”
Chapter 7
The Price of Betrayal
The Ovulum slipped off Sapphira’s foot, and its splash erupted in a gigantic spray that wrapped around the girls in a tight waterspout. As the other two snakes spun away, the swamp dried at the girls’ feet. The Ovulum sat next to Sapphira’s toes, pulsing crimson halos that seemed to spin the water around, making a vacuum that drew everything upward, including the girls’ hair and their drenched clothing.
Sapphira’s arms ached, but she kept her grip on the serpent, still coiled around Acacia as it snapped with its needle-like fangs. Lifting her firebrand higher, Sapphira shouted, “Give me a new firestorm! I need all the power I can get!”
Tongues of fire leaped from her hand, and the stick exploded in a shower of streaming flames. The fire expanded into a new spinning wall that circled around them inside the waterspout. Sapphira’s vision suddenly sharpened. Sadness crept through her mind. There was no doubt; a new portal window was taking shape, but, with her arms throbbing, could she keep the writhing snake at bay?
Air rushed upward, and the sunlight winked out. They zoomed down, the whole world plunging so fast their bodies seemed to lift off the ground and hover in midair. The walls of fire and water blended together into billowing clouds of vapor. Then, in a splash of fire and steam, they crashed into a shallow bed of water that cushioned the blow of the rocky ground below. Sapphira lunged for the snake, but it had slipped from her hand. Now crawling on all fours on wet stone, she groped for its neck. When she finally found it, she jerked it up, but its limp body lay loose within her fingers. The snake’s head had been crushed.
Sapphira glanced around. Elam stood next to her holding a thick scroll. “That snake won’t bother anyone,” he said, smacking the scroll’s heavy dowel against his palm.
The portal’s column of light flickered between blue and orange and finally settled on a muted orange hue. Acacia stirred next to Sapphira, trying to push the serpent’s coils down to her ankles. With her soaked white hair plastered against her pale face, she looked like a frazzled ghost.
At Sapphira’s feet lay the Ovulum, cold and dark, but unharmed. She breathed a long sigh and gazed at Elam, barely able to whisper, “Thank you.” She reached over and helped Acacia unwind the snake’s coils. A dozen more hands joined in, one pair wringing out Sapphira’s dress, another combing through Acacia’s hair.
Acacia pulled her clinging sleeve away from her skin. “We need to get out of these wet things.”
“You know,” Elam said, pointing his thumb at the exit corridor, “with Morgan gone now, I think it’s safe to explore. There are quite a few rooms I was never able to see.”
Sapphira smiled. Elam’s chivalry never seemed to falter. She nodded toward a lantern near the museum door. “Give me light!” she called out. The lantern’s wick ignited. “There. Come back when the fuel’s about half gone and tell us what you find.”
Elam winked at her and draped the dead snake over his shoulder. “Got it.” He strode to the corridor and dropped the serpent’s body at the entrance. “I’ll leave it here. It shouldn’t stink too bad this far away.” He smiled and disappeared under the arch.
Sapphira pointed at a pile of scrolls stacked against the museum’s outer wall. “Could some of you girls bring about ten of those scrolls over here? That’s my throwaway pile, and they’ll be good for building a fire.” She pulled her outer dress over her head and stuffed the Ovulum into its pocket.
Acacia stripped her outer dress off as well. As she rung out the excess water, her eyes followed the three girls who began building a stack of scrolls. “Why would you want to burn scrolls?” she asked.
“If you knew what was in them, you’d want to burn them, too.” Sapphira nudged a scroll with her toe. “One is Nimrod’s account of his temple activities, and another describes how to prepare human sacrifices for the idols in Shinar. The others are just as bad or worse.”
Acacia picked up one of the scrolls and scowled at it. “Ignite!” One end burst into flames, and she threw it back into the pile. The fire quickly spread to the other scrolls.
Sapphira laughed. “I think you’re getting it!”
Acacia pulled off her inner tunic. One of the girls removed her own outer dress and handed it to Acacia, then helped her stretch it over her head.
Acacia smiled. “Thank you, Yara.”
Yara, now wearing only her inner tunic, spread Acacia’s wet clothes over two broken ladder pieces. She grinned bashfully at Sapphira. “Your turn.”
A taller girl, also dressed only in an inner tunic, presented Sapphira with an outer dress. Sapphira peeled off her underclothes and slipped on the dry outer tunic, letting the bottom hem drop to her ankles. “Thank you, uh . . .”
“That’s Awven,” Acacia said.
Sapphira nodded at her and smiled as sweetly as she could. “Thank you so much, Awven.” Awven smiled back and hung Sapphira’s wet clothes next to Acacia’s.
The two oracles of fire faced each other, sitting cross-legged with the crackling scrolls between them. The other girls gathered in a circle around them and sat quietly.
Sapphira rubbed her hands in front of the fire. It flashed orange, matching the portal column’s new color. “Well, I guess moving the portal worked. This place will be a lot more peaceful knowing Morgan won’t be sneaking up on us.”
Acacia laughed softly. “Right. No more plunges into the chasm. That was no fun at all.”
“I can believe that. Your scream haunted my nightmares ever since it happened.” Sapphira nodded toward one of the other girls. “Do you know their stories? I don’t remember seeing any of them before today.”
“You wouldn’t. We were still in our growth chambers when Morgan decided these girls were too smart for her purposes. She threw them into the chasm not long after we were uprooted. Yara overheard Morgan telling Mardon to keep you and me so he could learn why we were so different and to try to” she glanced at Paili “uh . . . alter the next brood, I guess you might say. Then, Morgan caught her listening and threw her into the chasm.”
“So,” Sapphira said, tapping her fingers on
the stone floor, “Yara made it through the whirlpool along with the other eleven who came before us. But I wonder what happened to Taalah and the spawns who came later. And what about the little embryos that Mardon incinerated?”
“Before you came and freed us, the man we listened to told us that some girls burned in the magma, and some burned elsewhere. He said their souls traveled to other destinations, but he wouldn’t tell us where. He pretty much said, in a kind way, of course, that it was none of our business.”
“Your teacher is the person inside the Ovulum? And you listened to him for centuries?”
“It sure looked like him, but we didn’t listen to him all the time. He would tell us stories for a while and then we would sleep. I think we slept for very long periods of time, but I’m not sure. I never dreamed, so it was hard to tell. It never got boring, and we never got hungry or sick.”
Sapphira nodded at Yara. “The only difference between these girls and the ones who didn’t survive the magma is when they were spawned. Why would that be?”
“That couldn’t be the reason,” Acacia said. “Paili survived, and she was spawned after we were.”
Sapphira raised her knees and propped her chin on them. “Well, then Paili is the real key. Why is she different from Taalah and Qadar?”
Paili leaned forward and whispered in Sapphira’s ear. “They ate Morgan’s fruit.”
The words echoed in Sapphira’s mind and dredged a painful trench in her heart. She swallowed through her tightening throat as tears welled in her eyes. The truth behind “They ate Morgan’s fruit” rang like a clear bell.
“Is something wrong?” Acacia asked.