Sasha swept Pirate up on her shoulder and stepped into the tunnel. She kept her brother tucked behind her, with hands on his wrists and her eyes on the walls. They moved, those walls. She was certain of it. Black squiggles against more black, so she shouldn’t have been able to see anything strange, but the hairs on her arms stood as tall as trees, and she kept looking left and right as though following something.
It was cold in the tunnel. And damp. The eggy smell of the valley got stuck in there, transforming into something moldy and ancient. Every time Sasha took a breath in, it felt like the tunnel took a breath as well. And when she let her breath out, her clothes brushed against her body in the slight breeze. Something itched the back of Sasha’s neck. She reached her hand around to scratch it, and discovered that her neck was fuzzy and velvety and that her fingers sank into depths of softness.
She bit back a scream and pushed Toddy ahead of her. “Run,” she said.
The sounds of their movements echoed in the tunnel, caught by the shadows and tossed toward them again with a new lushness until their ears felt full of cotton. Every step Sasha took brought on a new impulse to break out into sobs, but she would not give in. For, as terrifying as moving through the shadows was, it was even more frightening to think about stopping to cry. Letting those nefarious shadows gather around her and stroke her hair and skin, enter her being through her nose and mouth. Take her over.
So she and Toddy ran until they were out of breath, and then they ran some more. The trundleberries, so sweet and delicious before, now sloshed around in their stomachs with a bitterness that made Sasha ill. She was never going to get through the tunnel. She was never going to find the Magician. And she certainly was never going to defeat the Smoke. How absurd to think a child was capable of anything like that!
“Agh!” Toddy tripped over an uneven stone and rolled to the ground. Sasha tumbled over him, twisting and turning like she was barreling down a hill. Her elbow slammed into the ground painfully, and dirt collected in her hair.
This was the end, she thought. But she kept her body rolling, like the Cirque Magnifique contortionists who gathered themselves tightly and spun themselves around the big tent like pill bugs, their sequins flashing in the lights until the audience was too dazzled to understand what was real and what was fantasy.
Sasha’s dizziness was so great that the shadows’ dark colors spun into streaks of white. But she knew Toddy was beside her, so she kept going. Until, finally, the tunnel spit them out.
Sasha flung her limbs over the soft dirt outside the tunnel exit. The sun shone again, warming their skin and burning off any remnants of the shadows’ downy clutches. Her stomach settled and her brain stopped spinning. She turned to her brother.
“Are you all right?”
Toddy’s giggle was more relief than amusement, but all the same he said, “That was fun!”
Sasha got up and brushed her hands together. “Not the kind of fun I want to try again. But if we can get through the tunnel, we can survive the Grandelion. It can’t be worse than—”
“Sasha!” Toddy’s big eyes stared at a spot over his sister’s shoulder. He scooted back a few inches and pointed.
Dread crawled up Sasha’s spine like hundreds of beetles. She had a feeling she knew what was behind her, but as she slowly turned, she realized nothing could have prepared her for the greatness that was the Grandelion.