Page 178 of Mud

The door was right there. If he jumped inside the building, the dragon couldn’t get to him.

But he was still coming. He wasn’t going for the door—he was still coming toward me.

What the hell are you doing?!

Then he shouted, “Jump!”

He jumped onto the ledge of the rooftop, the one I was holding onto, trying to get to him. To the door. Trying to get inside—but I didn’t need to because I had the key now. It was in my hand.

All I had to do was fall.

I jumped, too, and the dragon roared right over my head, its underbelly made of pale green scales as it flew not thirty inches away taking my focus for a short second.

Then the dragon lowered its head, opened those monstrous jaws that would forever haunt my dreams, and I saw the fire as it ignited in its throat. I saw it as it shot for me while its tail was still over my head, its wings steady.

Taland’s voice was in my ears even if I didn’t understand what he was saying. The dragon’s fire was maybe three feet away from devouring me completely. I felt the heat of it against my skin like I’d suddenly gone too close to the sun.

I jumped.

I fell for what must have been mere seconds, but to me they felt an eternity long.

I fell, and the heat was gone, and I landed on something white—ropes covered in glitter, woven together very closely, and I bounced on them for a little bit.

But the ropes were also sticky, so they stopped me from bouncing too hard.

Darkness around me, and then there were these blue lights in the distance that I couldn’t quite focus on. I caught movement somewhere to my left, and I blinked my eyes a million times until I was able to see Taland’s face as he struggled against those ropes that wereeverywhereapparently.He struggled to turn over on his back, as he’d fallen on them on his stomach.

Ropes.

But…they didn’t look like real ropes, did they?

And the blue lights that were coming from far away—they were on these disgusting looking trees that oozed some kind of a dark liquid. These ropes were attached to the naked branches, too, and they were everywhere I looked—everywhere.

North and south and east and…west.

Where something else moved, something…as big as a house.

For a second there, I thought the dragon from Night City had followed us here—to the Bluefire challenge, if those blue lights were anything to go by.

But the large creature that was moving slightly to the west, luckily far enough that it hadn’t seen us—yet—was no dragon.

“Rose,” Taland said while he tried to look around, too, disoriented still.

“Don’t. Move,”I whispered as low as I could, but he was just four or five feet away from me, so he heard.

He stopped. He looked to where I was looking, at the large creature who was turning toward us slowly…

No, it was most definitely not a dragon from Night City.

It was a spider the same size, with eight legs and eight sapphire-blue eyes—and the ropes we were stuck to were her webs.

Chapter 34

Rosabel La Rouge

Present day

Water below us. Something dripped on it and the sound was the first indicator. There was no ground here, and we weren’t stuck in endless levels of branches like in the Tree of Abundance. No—here, there was only dark water that reflected the blue lights slightly as something continued to drip on the surface.

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