The White Oak (16 page)

“Well, it’s not like you’re helping me now,” I say. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m captured.”

“I know,” Minotaur says sullenly. “That’s my failing. But listen to me while you can. They are going to put you in a cell and give you food, but you must not eat or drink any of the . . . ”

Minotaur’s voice trails off when he realizes that I’m not paying attention. One of the bronze figures in the panel above the thieves is calling down to me. He looks just like my father, but he is on fire, as are all the figures in his section of the door.

“He’s one of the wrathful,” Minotaur says. “Don’t touch him.”

I roll my eyes at that—
of course
I won’t touch him. The bronze man lies on his stomach on the floor of his panel and leans out as far as he can without falling. His fire burns so hot that his bronze body is molten and glows like a red star. I can feel the heat radiating off his tiny arm as it reaches out to me. When he talks, he hisses like a sputtering ember, “Cora, you are cruel to your father. Don’t leave me to burn as you left me in the river.”

I feel a hot anger rising up in me, matching my father’s heat.

“You’re the cruel one,” I say sharply. “You pulled me into your grave, and you killed Lucas!”

The red man laughs when I say that. “So you think I killed the computer geek.” He shakes his head and tsk-tsks. “Cora, your brother knew the ground was unstable, and he dug the grave anyway. Did you ever think,” the red man hisses, “that maybe Lucas wanted to die? Just like his mother and his grandfather?” My eyes widen as I realize what he’s saying—that he
did
kill Mother and Grandfather.

I wish I could get away from him, but I’m stuck in the Ker and can’t help listening. When he insults me, it’s not that bad, but I won’t hear his attacks on Lucas. He enjoys seeing me get angry, so I try to keep my cool. The only way to beat him is to turn his poison on him.

I try to suppress the anger and infuse my voice with pity. My father hates to be pitied. “It’s sad, really, how pathetic your eternal existence turned out to be. You were larger than life, everyone was scared of you, but now you’re just a puny decoration on a
door
.”

I see him turn a shade redder, but then he cools back down to a glowing orange and laughs. “This is not my eternal place,” he says, “but someday you’ll wish it were. I’m just here to check on my daughter and help her along. I have a much more important place—one more terrifying than you can imagine. If you stay alive long enough to see it, it will be the last thing you see.”

As I search for a response to my father’s boast, a command issues from the speakers: “Shut down the scanner and let her in. Make sure she proceeds to checkpoint seven.” The Keres move toward the door, and as we pass underneath my father, he spits at me, shooting a tiny stream of molten metal at my face. It would have burned me if the Ker’s swirling wind hadn’t caught it, swept it around me, and blown it back at him. It splatters against the door, burning a small depression into it.

“Don’t forget what I told you. Don’t—” Minotaur begins to say, but he can’t finish. We’ve crossed over the threshold and into the building. His signal is blocked.

The walls of the rotunda are the same black stone as the outside of the building, but the floor and ceiling are white. It’s brighter in here and I have to squint my eyes—they’ve become so accustomed to the twilight. The alabaster floor shines like milk. My eyes follow the walls up to the high domed ceiling—a white circle framed by the black walls. I want to stop and examine the place, but the Keres rush across the rotunda and into a narrow hallway with black marble floors and white plaster walls. We walk down the clean white hallway until it comes to a dead end where a stainless-steel table is manned by three armed guards. The guard accompanying us steps forward to address them.

“We have orders to take the accused to checkpoint seven,” he says.

It takes me a moment to realize he is talking about me.
The accused
, I think. What does he mean by that?

“Stand by for clearance,” one of the guards behind the table says. He types something into his handheld device and peers at its tiny screen. Then he addresses the Ker who is holding me. “I need to scan her to confirm,” he says. Then he looks at me. “Give me your hand,” he says.

I try to oblige, but I’m not able to move. Then I feel the Ker open. It’s as though she’s unzipping part of my straitjacket and pushing my hand out. The guard grabs it, turns it over, and scans my palm. As soon as he lets go, the Ker pulls my hand back in and closes up around me.

“It’s a positive match,” the guard says. “You can proceed.”

Proceed where? I think, but the entourage is moving forward. The wall in front of us has somehow disappeared, revealing a longer hallway with another stainless-steel table at the end of it. When we reach the second checkpoint, we replay the scene at the first. The guard scans my hand and another wall opens to let us through.

I’m not a routine prisoner. I can tell by the way the checkpoint guards react when our spokesperson tells them we are going to the seventh checkpoint. Their eyes get wide, or they look away to hide their emotions.

At the seventh checkpoint there’s only one guard and no steel table. The Ker approaches him, pulling my hand out and presenting it to him for scanning.

“The scan key won’t work for this door,” the guard says. “She has to open it herself.”

The Keres drift about for a few moments, confused about what to do.

“Find the door and place her hand directly on it,” he instructs.

The Keres inspect the walls, putting their smoky faces up against them to look as closely as they can. The walls are perfectly flat and white. I don’t see how they can find the right spot, but just as I think that, one of them makes a motion to indicate to the others that she’s found it. The Ker holding me glides over, forces my arm out, and presses my hand flat against the wall in the place the other Ker indicates. The wall is cool, but it heats up quickly when I touch it. The warmth spreads through my hand, travels up my arm, and goes all the way to my chest, where it connects with my heart to verify that I am alive and sends that message back out through my hand, which is now glowing red, like a siren light. A subtle vibration passes through my fingers and out the ends. The light then extends from my fingertips, a thin red laser light that cuts into the wall, moving up, across, and down to carve a door. When the door is finished, the light disappears, the wall cools, and the door swings open. Before I know what’s happening, the Ker ejects me from her body, shooting me into the tiny room like a cannonball. I hit the far wall, and the door slams shut. Its outlines disappear, and I’m sealed inside my cell.

I stand up and rub my bruised shoulder. The room is about ten feet square and twenty feet high. A thin light filters in through a single square window near the ceiling. The place is like a jail cell made of black glass. A bed sticks out from the wall like a shelf, and there’s a black toilet in the corner. There is no way out of here. I sit down on the bed, suddenly exhausted. My fatigue is so intense that I can’t keep my eyes open. I lie down and immediately fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. I sleep soundly until a slamming door awakens me.

A circular peephole has appeared in the wall. On the floor is an onyx tray with a plate of fruit.

I run over and peer through the peephole. On the other side, an eye looks back at me.

“Hello!” I yell through the wall. “Who are you?”

The eye blinks nervously, but there is no response.

“Don’t be frightened,” I say. “Did you give me the fruit?” I wait for an answer, but the eye just stares and blinks. Whoever it is, is not going to talk to me.

I pick up the tray and take it over to my bed. Three round fruits have been sliced in half. In the half light, the fruit glows with life and color. The insides are blood red and filled with seeds the size and shape of pearls. They glisten with ruby red juice. I pick one up. It’s soft and ripe. The aroma of citrus and honey fills the room and my mouth waters. I remember Minotaur’s warning, but the smell and appearance of the fruit has provoked a craving that I can’t subdue. When I put a seed on my tongue, the desire intensifies. The inside of my mouth shivers with pleasure as the jelly-sweet casing melts on my tongue, leaving a tart, woody core. When I crunch it between my teeth an intense sweet-sourness spreads down into my jaw, up the sides of my face, to the top of my head, where the substance from the seeds soaks into my brain. I quickly eat everything on the plate except for three seeds, which I hope to cultivate when I get back aboveground. It takes all my willpower to keep from eating them. I stash them in my pocket and their juices make a small red stain at the seam.

Saving the seeds is the last coherent thing I do; the fruit is affecting my mind. I can observe my own thoughts, and I have the creepiest feeling that some of the thoughts aren’t mine. My whole body tingles with the same sensation I felt on my tongue, and my limbs feel heavy and strange, as if they belong to someone else’s body. I stare at my arm and tell it to move, but it doesn’t.

My dark cell is changing. The floors become a grassy lawn. The walls disappear and the ceiling becomes a bright blue sky. I am aboveground once again. The warmth of the sun is on my face, and when I open my mouth to take a deep breath, the golden twig leaps out and begins boring a hole in the dirt.

I lean over to retrieve it, afraid of losing it, but it’s spinning like a drill so I can’t touch it. In a moment, it has burrowed through the topsoil. As the ground begins to fall away, I see that the earth’s crust is as thin as an eggshell; the twig dances along the edge of the break, widening the hole. I peer down and see the underworld City rotating in the darkness like a glistening iron ball at the bottom of a well. The sphere is open on top and the inhabitants are staring up at me. The golden twig is no longer spinning. It teeters at the edge of the hole, and I grab it just as it begins to fall in.

The twig becomes part of my hand the way it had become part of my tooth. My fingers transform into twigs. As I pull on the golden twig, trying to separate it from my stiffening hand, the ground crumbles under me and my legs fall into the hole. But only my legs fall—that’s the strange part. I’m hovering above the City. Everything from my waist up is aboveground, and the rest of me is below. My hands and arms continue their transformation, and now my legs are changing, too. They merge and stretch downward, like a taproot. As soon as I touch the City, a network of roots blooms outward, filling the sphere and then spreading further. Souls are drawn up through the capillaries of the roots as my aboveground parts finish their transformation. My torso has grown and hardened into a trunk, and my arms and head are the branches. I can feel the souls flowing through me like water, pulled up from below and aspirating out through my leaves. My thirst is unquenchable. I drink up every soul in hell. Thirsty still, I drink from the foul river Tartarus. It turns my leaves black, but still I can’t get enough. With each soul, I grow a little, until I’m huge. My roots spread across Asphodel and dip into the river underneath the White Oak. I extend myself south, until my roots reach a vast red desert, but the moment the roots touch the red sand, the spell is broken and I begin to shrink, expelling the souls and recovering my human form, falling through the hole and landing, with a painful thud, on the floor of my empty cell.

I lie on the floor for a moment, trying to understand what just happened. My belly is swollen and distended, and I feel as if I’ve been stretched and pummeled. Every part of my body aches. The hallucination is still vivid, and I try to figure out what it meant. It reminds me of a dream I had when I was a little girl—I was swallowed whole by the White Oak, and my family members were caught in its branches like ornaments on a Christmas tree. I shiver slightly as I wait for my breathing to return to normal. The underworld feels utterly strange and, at the same time, familiar.

The dark walls of my cell begin to lighten. They slowly change from black to gray to clear glass. The effect is like smoke clearing from a room. I stand up slowly and look around. My glass cage is sitting in the middle of a large room with high, coffered ceilings decorated with gargoyles and cherubs. The marble floors are paved with diamond-shaped black and white tiles. The smooth plaster walls are adorned with marble pilasters.

I’m in a courtroom, where a trial is about to be conducted. Behind me is a gallery for the spectators, with rows of seats separated from the front of the room by a marble bar. A large wooden table and a podium stand in front of my cell. On the left side of the courtroom, two creatures with the bodies of humans but the heads of squirrels are working at a small desk. They thumb frantically through papers in preparation for the trial. One of them has a large rubber stamp, which she pounds on the lower right corner of every form. The other is feeding a thin sheet of paper into a device that reminds me of an old typewriter. They turn to look at me, frowning and shaking their furry heads in disapproval.