slamming every time one of them came reaching for me.
There’d been hundreds on the road, but more were stepping from behind trees, as if they were sprouting out of the ground, and they all had my face. Me a few years ago; me taller than I am now; crawling baby versions of me; toddlers with little grabbing fingers. Me with greying hair; me as an old man, hardly able to walk.
I started panicking that I was going to find myself as a corpse, its dead hand reaching for me. I ran. Trying not to get caught by one of them, trying not to trip on tree roots or crash into low branches.
“Do you know where you’re going?” I gasped at Isis.
“That way!” And we broke from the trees into a wide grassy field, with the sky bright above us and the hills curving. My feet thudded into the rough grass, and it was easier and quicker now, the ground sloping away.
I looked behind and I thought, We’re going to make it – we’re leaving them.
Then I turned my head back. In front of us were hundreds of people scattered across the field. A blink and it was thousands. A me for every day I’ve been alive, for every day I’m going to be. All with their hands outstretched and eyes as black as space. Calling, shouting, crying, their words blending like storm waves crashing on a beach.
Huuuuurrrrttttinnngpleeeeeeezzemeeeeestopppp.
I stumbled. Couldn’t swallow, couldn’t catch my drumming heart, couldn’t think. I looked back, and now there were as many mirror-mes behind us.
There wasn’t a space between them, nowhere to escape through.
“Do you see?” I whispered to Isis.
“Yes,” she said, at last.
“What do we do? How do we stop them?” I thought she’d know, but she didn’t even answer. They closed in, shrinking the circle of grass between them and us, and I realised she wasn’t looking at them, she was staring at the ground. She put her hands in front of her eyes, waving her fingers.
“What are you doing?”
“I…” She flickered her fingers in front of her face. “No!” She stumbled back a step.
“What? What is it?”
Now there was no space left. I was trapped in a wide open field, the crowds closing in. Everywhere I looked, my face. Whichever way I looked, I saw me looking back. So many versions of me, but all with those torn-out, black-hole eyes. And still I thought Isis must be doing something, saving us, like when she broke open the Devourer. Then she spoke again.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered. “It hurts.”
A horrible shaky feeling started in my legs and went up through my stomach, into my heart.
“Isis?”
She looked at me, but she’d gone. Her eyes were black stars, just like them.
“Isis!”
A hand, my hand, reached out to grab me. There was no space left. There were fingers on my cheeks, my nose, in my hair, pulling at my arms, my clothes. I punched and twisted and kicked, but even as I tried to beat them back, the creatures only gripped tighter. I couldn’t get away, I couldn’t fight them off. I couldn’t see anything but reaching hands.
They pulled me under.
Chapter Twenty-six
Isis
Colours were travelling through the ground. Except they weren’t colours, they were something else.
Nerves in the land, Merlin had said.
Next to her, Gray was gasping for breath, his face a mask of terror. They were in the middle of an empty field, but he was twisting and turning, staring wildly around.
“Do you see them?” he asked, his voice cracking and high.
“Yes,” she whispered. Shades of red and orange, green and blue, purple, pink and yellow. Zigging and zagging through the ground towards her, bringing a sigh of words:
I won the race thought it would be bigger I’m on top long walk beautiful place hold in my stomach curse her cows make my baby well let him love me warmer weather.
On and on, the words she’d heard through the standing stone, prayers and pleas made to a piece of rock in the woods.
“What do we do? How do we stop them?” shouted Gray.
She tried to focus on his question, but the colours were hypnotic, like oily rainbows on water. She put her fingers in front of her eyes, trying to shield the sight, cutting the colours into a cross-hatched pattern.
“What are you doing?”
“I…” She didn’t know, but that wordless part of her mind did. She wiggled her fingers, finding a point, a speed of movement matching the flicker of the colours in the ground. They flashed upwards,