Allayria stares at the surface; if she squints she can see the angle Lei is talking about—a slight downward tilt to the right that should be impossible for water to maintain, but sits undisturbed before her. Set against grass and crumpling banks, it's subtle enough to be overlooked but prominent enough to provoke uneasiness.

"What if," Lei continues, a thin line creasing between his brows, "the lake is the mirror? If we look into its reflection, maybe we'll see..."

He strides along the rim of it until he stops, hand outstretched.

"There!"

She glances into it too, following the point of Lei's finger. Reflected, high up in a tree and a long sprint away, is a glinting periwinkle cube dangling from a white rope. There are a couple of others near it too: a black one and a gold one.

"Let's go before someone else comes," she says. "Before anyone tries to run off with ours too."

She feels Lei's glance and hears the frown in his voice when he answers: "Maybe you should stay down here."

"Oh no," says Finn.

"What? I am not," she snaps, firing up.

"You can barely—"

"I walk just fine. You're the one walking around with a brain injury maybe you should—"

A blur of blue streaks past them; Allayria catches the glint of golden hair as Kali leaps up onto the nearest tree and climbs.

"Shit!" Allayria yells and the others start tearing toward the trees as two others sprint past—Caj, the Smith-caller, and Julia, another Halften soldier.

The pain is pulsing now as Allayria half-sprints, half hobbles to the tree line, hoisting herself up at the nearest trunk. At least with this she can predominately use her arms and left leg, and she scrambles up quickly, though not as quick as she would normally.

When she reaches the platform she turns around and hauls Finn up by the scruff of his neck as Lei climbs up on the other side.

The branches are strangely laid out here—it's obvious to anyone who has spent any time in trees, anyone who has spent years trying to find a decent fork of branches to kip in—that they are irregular. Man-made. They lattice out in design, creating an intricate web of paths, all leading toward a distant cluster where, high up, the cubes hang.

A ways-away, the other three are already leaping from branch-to-branch. Kali is shouting orders but only Julia seems to follow them; the Smith Skiller is like lightning dancing through the trees, running ahead, on his own. A crackle of wood splinters through the air every time a foot falls or something pummels out of a nearby trunk. It is the forest in miniature: a minefield of tricks and traps.

"We need to stick together," Lei decides. "I go first. Finn: behind me. Allayria: watch our backs."

He tests a path on their left, easing a foot on it and then moving quickly forward. When he reaches the trunk of the tree he gestures and they follow suit.

The first time they trigger something is two trees away, when Lei sets one foot out, then another, and then the whole branch snaps down. He's saved only by the sudden snatching of Finn's hands and Allayria's grip around the boy's waist.

When they haul him back up they try the next branch to their right. They make it halfway through this one when something cracks. Fearing another break, they sprint forward and the shards of ice hiss past them.

They're more prepared for the next one: Allayria catches the boulder in hand, shoving it back toward the offending trunk as the others scramble off. On a parallel tree branch, Caj suddenly drops, his body hitting the tree limb beneath and slinging below it, hanging on as a spurt of fire gushes past.

He swings himself back up, but instead of running from the false trunk he jumps at it, metal glinting in his hand, and his feet dig into the sides as he brings a fist down, jamming something in the gaping caw. Allayria hears a weird click, like gears grinding, and the opening seems stuck.

Allayria glances back to see where Caj is heading next, but she feels a tug on her shirt and lurches forward just as the branch beneath gives way.

Her teammates clutch at her, but she still sinks down far enough so that her bad knee slams into the trunk and she gives a sharp shout of pain.

They heave her up and her hands clutch at the trunk bark as she pants, half from adrenaline, half from the ringing pain vibrating through her leg.

She feels a hand on her shoulder and suddenly Lei is far closer than she'd like.

"We need to wrap your knee," he says, and he's sliding a knife around his sleeve, cutting it off mid-bicep. "Cut some leather from the pack and we'll brace it."

His brown eyes flicker over to Finn.

"Keep a look out," he tells the boy, and the Beast-caller turns, glancing around with wide eyes.

When Finn's occupied elsewhere Lei's head tilts forward and he murmurs: "Fashion the brace out of metal instead. I'll hide it with the cloth."

They work quickly; Allayria keeps glancing down at the branch beneath them, ears straining for a creak or crack, but Lei seems to know this work well, in only a few minutes they have her joint tightly wound up and, though she can still feel the throbbing between all the compression, when she sets the leg down and tests it the pain is less acute.

"Thanks," she says, surprised.

Finn's head pokes around the trunk and, still looking slightly surprised, he says: "I found a path. Let's go."

They follow, and the boy starts weaving in a zig-zag, flitting from branch-to-branch in a seemingly random fashion.

"Where are the others?" Allayria asks, finding no signs of Kali or her partners.

"They were ambushed by a group of howler monkeys," Finn muses, his thin, small arms hovering out around him as he jumps to an adjacent branch. "I've never seen a monkey before."

"Let's try not to get personally acquainted with them until after the task is over," Allayria suggests, leaping over a little less elegantly, her locked knee swinging out across open air.

They go further on, and then Finn reaches into his pocket, pulls out some acorns, and starts tossing them at the upcoming branches. The tiny weights trigger some traps, and the other two follow as he pelts his way past another half-dozen trees.

They're nearly there when they hear a crash behind them and turn.

Caj is sprinting along a shuddering tree branch, and he flits past them in a mere matter of seconds. They start to scramble forward but Lei holds out a hand. Caj is running along a new type of tree now, something pale and ashen, and Allayria can hear the telltale crack of wood. He dashes forward, two small knives in hand, and makes it to the other trunk as he jumps up, notching a knife into the trunk and holding on as all of the branches around him, on the tree and the surrounding trees, collapse.

Shit, Allayria thinks, quickly scrambling to Skill two similar knives out of rock for Finn.

"We've got to run," Lei says and he's staring at her.

"Five more trees," she says, handing the picks to Finn, and then she returns his look. "I can make it."

It's a fraction of a beat, but then he nods and they run forward.

She has only a second of warning, a second of that groaning crack and the mad push of bones and muscle against caving wood, before it all falls apart. She hits the bark hard enough to drive the stone in and, glancing around she sees Lei and Finn similarly stranded in their trees.

Sliding the vine down in her pack, she swings it first to Lei and he holds on, wrapping it around his free hand, as she grabs on and pushes off the tree,

He does something else as she swings forward, pulling the vine not just with his arm but with his Skill, and the coil between them shortens. When she hits the tree she's only a hands-width away from his feet and she scales up to hang beside him.

"There's an iron rod in the trees," he tells her in way of greeting and she presses a hand against the bark, feeling the metal beneath it as she curses.

"Can we still split it?" Allayria asks. "Pull the tree down one side and notch the rope around it..."

"Create our own swing," Lei finishes. "Try it."

He throws the vine to Finn as she turns forward, finding the nearest tree to them. It's a thick, hulking thing, the branches sheared down, and she holds a hand up, visualizing the stocky stem. She pulls her hand back.

In unison, the grain and bark of the tree groan and then crack, splintering in raw ribbons of soft wood as the right half of the tree collapses into a ninety-degree angle.

The trunk she clings to shivers as somewhere on the other side a small body hits it with a thunk and Lei hands her back the vine.

She lets him go first across it; at this point, he's going to have the best reaction skills if things go awry, and she sends Finn next. She's knotted the rope around her waist when she sees another lash out, latching onto her tree, and Kali jumps, swinging forward and crossing over to the tree next to Lei and Finn.

Gritting her teeth, Allayria follows.

They dodge around each other like cats in an elusive game of mouse after that; Kali adapting Allayria's trick for her own use, Allayria acquiring another reel of vine so Lei can move quickly too. Caj is somewhere in the mix too, using long wires of metal to zip over to trees, and Allayria sees nothing of their Beast-caller. Her own has locked his knobbly knees around her waist, arms looped around her neck, as she tries to keep pace with the Solveig woman.

They're one jump away from the cubes, Allayria trailing only by a beat, when Kali twists in her swing, her free arm jabbing back as, suddenly, a sheet of ice slices through Allayria's vine.

It's that uncomfortable lurch of sudden nothingness where there had once been strength, and Allayria feels Finn's arms constrict around her neck as she jabs the frayed vine out flinging it so it hits an adjacent tree.

Someone is shouting—probably Lei—and she's really falling, a sensation that, at this point she should be used to, but isn't. She thinks Finn must be yelling too but it's all tunneling down into buffeting nothingness and the steady sound of her breathing as her free hand coaxes the vine around the trunk and then knotted around itself too.

The bark beneath it suddenly cracks and bends, holding the hasty loop in place, and Allayria has a brief moment to wonder where exactly Lei is that he could have done that before she and Finn slam into the tree.

At least it was the other side this time, she thinks in consolation as her torso smarts with the impact. Now I'll be an even shade of purple and blue.

"Climb," she rasps at Finn and the small Beast-caller scuttles off her back, the two little rocks she made wedging into the soft bark as he shimmies up.

Kali has made it to the platform, her elegant hand holding another thin stream of ice which she uses to free her cube from the thread holding it up. She grabs it, triumph shining in her green eyes, and then she throws the shard of ice, which slices through another thin braid of rope, and the periwinkle cube plummets down to the obscure forest floor.

It is surprisingly difficult to find a light purple cube on a forest floor.

Maybe it's been squirreled away in some Gods-forsaken tree with a numerical code that requires you to stand on your head and sing a limerick before it opens, she thinks sourly, kicking a tuft of grass in frustration. Her skin crawls with a seething, nettling rage that manifests itself in the satisfying image of planting a fist along the illustrious, aquiline nose of a particular blonde Nature-caller.

While Lei and Allayria scour the ground Finn has perched himself in the center of a small clearing, eyes closed and fingers lightly touching the ground around him. Part of Allayria is too exhausted and weakened to care but another part of her wants to wring his neck too.

"Anything?" Lei asks, though she can tell by his tone he already knows what the answer is.

"No."

"There's a mole in here," Finn suddenly announces, pointing to a hole nearby. "He's trying to get some sleep, but you're being much too loud."

Allayria, who has no interest in the bedtime of a glorified underground rat, doesn't bother to answer this.

"He has something," he announces after a couple of minutes. "He rolled it into his den but he says he doesn't want it anymore. It's taking up too much space."

They stand around the hole for a minute, until the strangest creature Allayria has ever seen emerges. It's a hairy, long-nosed thing, with tiny, squinty eyes and huge, comically flapping paws. It shuffles around, squirming, until Finn picks it up. He then reaches into the hole and pulls out a small cube. A small, periwinkle cube.

"This has honestly been the strangest day of my life," Lei says suddenly and Allayria grins.

A/N: WATTPAD, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME? This and the next chapter were missing for the past two hours and I just posted ten messages to some poor girl's wall in an attempt to post one. (Only one, I swear!)

In more cheerful, less endlessly mortifying news: Paragon hit 40K and Partisan hit 5K!! I'd describe the little happy dance I'm doing in my chair, but honestly it's a bit sad and uncoordinated, so it's best if I don't.