We hadn’t found Hazel Five yet. If I fled, I wouldn’t be able to face Neven. She’d finally arrived, flying straight at the other Hazels. With her help, we could take the trolls for sure.
“I can’t leave yet,” I said. “My sisters can’t either. Go! Before the trolls reach!”
“But—” the girl started.
“Go!”
“I’m not risking my daughter to convince you,” her dad said. “Last chance.”
I shook my head.
For a moment, he looked torn. Then he dropped into the driver’s seat. “Good luck. Come find us.”
“Library!” the girl called. “We’ll be in—”
They tore off. The trolls on the road had been inches from reaching the SUV. They gave chase for a couple of feet, then stopped. As one, they whirled on me.
I stepped back automatically. Gravel shifted under my feet. I chanced a look over my shoulder to make sure there weren’t any more coming—Shit. At my four and eight o’clock, two small groups approached. It was like they’d organized this.
I slashed at the nearest troll. Something smacked into my back, dragging down my coat. Fighting three or four trolls was a whole different story than one at a time.
Neven’s shadow soared over the road. She was carrying the others. I bolted toward her, the troll still on my coat. I already felt its claws on my back. No, off, off—
Effortlessly, Neven’s tail whacked the troll away. Her tail wrapped around me, plucking me off the ground and placing me on her back.
“Time to go,” her voice rumbled.
Neven had put me at the back of the group instead of by her neck. I was getting a grip on her scales when her words registered.
She wasn’t helping us fight. She was evacuating us.
“No!” I called. Neven was flying fast. The town blurred below. I swore I glimpsed blond hair in the window of the house we’d come here to find. “No,” I said, the wind thinning my voice. “I wanted to . . .”
There was no point in finishing my sentence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Neven paced back and forth.
“That,” she growled low in her throat, “was unwise. Picking fights with trolls without any preparation? What were you thinking?”
She’d set us down behind a low hill that separated us from the main road, maybe two hundred yards from the roadblock we’d encountered.
“I’m sorry,” Four said, “we hadn’t realized—”
“We didn’t pick a fight,” Rainbow said. “We didn’t know the street was brimming with trolls. And we couldn’t help the alarm.”
“Alarm?” Neven said.
“Yeah. A car alarm went off. Everything was fine before then.”
She was still pacing. “You weren’t prepared.”
“We had weapons,” I said. “I thought we did OK?” Immediately, I wanted to take back the words. Of course we hadn’t done OK. We’d even gotten the weapons wrong.
Just tell me what to do, I’ll fix it, I’ll do better.
I swallowed the words. The last thing I should do was be just as needy and unsure as before.
“You could have died.” Neven fixed a hard look on me.
My gut churned.
She stopped pacing and faced us. “Sit,” she barked. Within seconds we sat in a half circle around her. I plucked at the grass next to me, pluck pluck pluck, and I recognized the nervous, useless gesture but couldn’t stop.
“The Powers That Be are why the rift spun out of control,” Neven said.
I snapped to attention. So did the others.
Neven scanned the fields beyond us for movement. “As I’ve explained: Rifts are interdimensional portals. They’re gaps in a world’s reality, zipped open by the Powers, allowing them to influence that world. The rifts are normally so small as to be invisible. Hazel, as with every Chosen One, the rift is linked to you. Rifts shadow the Chosen One, allowing the Powers to tweak the world around their hero to aid their training and development. When a Chosen One reaches a certain age or state, the rift widens to allow for more significant changes. In your case, the trigger was turning sixteen. Then, once a Chosen One completes their mission to save the world through an act of heroism, the rift closes.”
Red leaned forward. “This rift did more than just widen slightly.”
“And it was huge from the start,” I added. “Not small or invisible at all.”
“The Powers That Be are . . .” Neven tilted her head. The sun glared on her scales. “The Powers can reach through the walls between worlds to tamper with your dimension. When they tamper too much, the walls become unstable. And when the walls are unstable and the Powers play around with that world anyway, what’s supposed to be a tiny gap can instead rip wide open.”
I rubbed my legs to keep warm. As the adrenaline wore off, the cold seeped in.
I didn’t know why Neven was finally offering explanations, but the more I knew about the rift and the Powers, the better.
One phrase she’d used stood out. “Play around?” I echoed.
“I’m not done.” Neven fixed her eyes on me. “Once you were born and your rift tore open far beyond expectations, the Power in charge of this situation tried to close it. It failed. If a rift this size followed you the way rifts are programmed to, however, it would’ve swallowed buildings in your wake. The Power managed to pin the rift in place, but its programming didn’t change. When you strayed too far, the rift would squirm to reach you, with all the unfortunate side effects that entailed. At least the chaos was restricted to a single place.”
“Why couldn’t the Power simply close it?” I asked.
“Rifts aren’t programmed to close on demand. Instead, they react to specific triggers—such as your birthday. When the rift expanded that night, the Power could no longer contain it. It snapped loose from the farm, from you. Sixteen years of pent-up energy sent it bouncing around.”
“You keep saying programmed. What does that mean?” Four asked. “Is this like The Matrix?”
“Come again?”
“It’s an old movie.” Four’s voice went thin, worried. “Is our whole world just code the Powers whipped up? Are we living in a simulation?”
“The Powers had nothing
