"What do we do?" Bran whispered. He glanced at me, and I could tell that, even though he was too kind to say it, he was wondering how we were going to get out of here with me like this.

"Leave without me," I said.

Lark shook her head at me. "No. There are other ways. We can go into the tunnels."

"So that we can get lost and be hunted down by the Magician?" Bran said. "No thank you."

"Do you have a better idea?" Lark hissed.

Almost instinctively, all of us turned to Reed.

"What about you?" said Bran, a pleading note in his voice. "You've got to have an idea. Don't you? You always know what to do."

"We run," said Reed. "We go into the tunnels."

"But how are we going to get out again? How are we going to avoid the Magician if we don't know where we're going? How are-"

"I don't know!" Reed snapped. Quietly this time, he repeated, "I don't know. I thought it would be easier than this. I thought we'd be able to make the Magician see reason. At the very least, I thought we'd be powerful enough together to defeat him. But now..." He shook his head, as though shaking away the thoughts. "We need time. We're all stressed, now, freaked out by how much everything has gone wrong. Nothing's going to be accomplished when we're like this. We have to get out of here and regroup. For now, we head into the tunnels and avoid being captured by the Magician."

"Are you ready, Fyra?" Lark asked.

I shook my head, knowing that if we went too soon, I'd risk starting the attack all over again. I'd be a liability. "I just need another minute."

There was silence. The sound of my slow, steady breathing seemed to fill the air around us, until it seemed like the darkness itself was making the noise.

"I know you're there," said the Magician's voice. It echoed through the tunnels, coming from all around us, though the acoustics of it told that it came from much farther away. I jumped. "I know you're hiding somewhere around here. Let's play a game, shall we? If you make it out of these tunnels, you live to fight another day. I won't attack you, or shoot parting shots at your back as you flee. You'll have another chance. If you don't make it out, you have a choice—join me in my mission to destroy my old village, or be cursed. I'd choose the former. I know you, your fears, and everything about you. I've been watching you from the beginning. The curse I choose will be the perfect one to break you."

I shivered, resting my hand against the cold stone beneath my feet. Something about the texture or the temperature seemed to clarify things. My breathing finally steadied.

"I'm ready to go," I whispered.

"Good," said Reed. He stood, and the rest of us followed suit. "Stay close."

We wove through the tunnels, with Reed seeming to take turns at random, occasionally pausing to listen for any sign of the Magician nearing us.

"Can you sense him at all?" I asked Bran.

He shook his head, face pale and worried in the darkness. "I can't. There's too much magic everywhere; it's blocking my powers, making it impossible to differentiate between one thing and another."

Reed stopped suddenly and whirled back toward us. "Less talking, more walking."

He moved to continue forward again, but with a cry of warning, Lark grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back. They fell to the ground.

"What was that?" Reed whispered furiously.

"Pit," gasped Lark.

Reed helped her up and scrambled to his feet. Indeed, there was a pit directly in front of them, nearly invisible against the darkness of the tunnel walls. Even when he held his lamp directly above it, it seemed like nothing more than a slight shifting in the reflectiveness of the floor—certainly not an actual hole.

Reed gave Lark a shaky smile. "Thank you."

Lark acknowledged the words with a nod and began to move back the way we'd come. Reed and Bran and I hurried to catch up to her.

The Magician's voice echoed through the tunnel around us, slightly bored-sounding. "I hope you're finding my labyrinth of tunnels easy to navigate. But you probably aren't. You could simply surrender to me, you know."

Was it just my imagination, or were the words slightly louder this time? Was he catching up to us?

"Faster," said Reed.

We ran through the halls, occasionally slipping on the slick stone as we rounded corners. Lark suddenly gasped.

"What?" said Bran. "What is it?"

"Light."

Reed stopped, and we nearly trampled him. He covered the torch with his hand. Sure enough, there was light coming from the tunnel ahead of us—sunlight, fresh and yellow and a thousand times different from the cold, warmth-less light that had emanated from the floor in the Magician's throne room. I could tell the air was fresher, too.

I felt a wave of relief and exhaustion go through me, and I stepped forward, only to have Bran pull me back.

"It's a trap," he said.

Reed looked at Bran, eyes darting about his face as though he'd be able to read Bran's mind by the expression in his eyes. "How do you know?"

"The Magician's out there," said Bran. "I can feel it. He'll catch us before we make it out, and he'll still have won the game. We'll be doomed."

"Can we beat him?" asked Lark.

"We can try," I said.

Reed shook his head. "No. We can't. He's too powerful, and we've been shaken too badly. Kids like us will never win against a time-weathered Magician like him under these circumstances."

"Then what?" I asked. "We give up? We stay in here until he comes in and catches us?"

Reed's face twisted, and he turned away suddenly. The small glimpse I had seen of his face told me he was thinking about something, deeply conflicted within himself about whether or not it was truly a good idea. And my experience with him told me what it was. Reed, the leader of us all, the one who always had a plan, the one who had a deep feeling of duty toward us. Reed, the one who now felt that he had let us down. Reed, who had one final idea.

"No," I said. "You can't. We aren't leaving you."

Bran's eyes darted between Reed's back and my face. "What? Who said anything about leaving people? We're a team."

A slight gasp escaped Lark's lips. She placed a hand on Reed's shoulder, forcing him to turn his face to us. His lower lip was shaking uncontrollably, but his face was brave.

"You can't," she said. "We won't let you."

"It's you or me." He looked at his hands, which were also shaking, then thrust them into his pockets. "The three of you, versus a single life. And he'll just curse me, not kill me. That's a price I'm willing to pay."

"Yeah, well maybe we're not," said Bran.

"You'll come back for me. You'll find a way. I know you will."

"You're our planner, Reed." Against my will, my voice cracked. "We can't do anything without you. You're the one who brought us together. Without you, we'd still be quibbling somewhere in the forest outside our village—or we'd all be dead."

"I'm the planner?" said Reed. He smiled shakily. "I like that."

"We need you," Lark said. "We need you to plan."

He nodded. "Fine. Then here's one final plan. I go out there, and I distract the Magician while you all run for the trees. I can give you something that'll make you invisible—or at least very hard to see."

"Come with us," I said. "The invisibility will work for all of us."

"Not if he finds us. Not if he knows we're there, and curses all of us, one by one. This way some of us are certain to escape." Reed took his pen and began drawing on his forearm. "Once you get out, as long as he keeps to his word, you'll be able to run into the forest. Go as far as you can before sundown, then send one of the stone creatures to Sharla. Say you need the Calamity to come pick you up. They may not be willing to help you defeat the Magician, but they can't turn away a Blessed in need. While you're there, make a plan. A good one."

He turned to me. "Fyra, no matter what, you have to keep morale up. I know you. You're the only one of us who, no matter what, held on to hope. You saved Lark and me from the ghosts. You were the first one to try to save Bran from the magic storm. You never realized it, but from the start, you were the one to hold us together—you were the one who brought us here in the first place. I know you can do it."

Hand over his forearm, he closed his eyes, drawing the sketch out of his skin bit by bit. When it was done, he handed a rope to us. "Sling this around your shoulders and tie a knot in it. He won't be able to see you."

"And what'll you be doing?"

"Fighting him." He began to scribble something else. "I want you three to be safe, no matter what. Don't take any risks. If it's too dangerous to come back to try and rescue me, and you don't think you'll be able to do it, don't try at all. I'd rather live the rest of my life cursed than watch the same happen to my friends."

The Magician's chuckle floated around the corner of the tunnel. "Do I hear whispering children? Should I investigate?"

Reed met each of our eyes, one by one. "Tie the rope securely. If it comes loose, you'll lose your invisibility. Understand?"

Lark nodded.

"Good," said Reed. With a nod of farewell, he stepped around the corner of the tunnel.

If you hope the rope will stay tied tightly, please vote! If you hope it will come untied, you're probably a pretty terrible person! (Not really, though. XD)