Page 48 of The Tribes of Magic
“And then you decided to skip those boring lessons, so you could spend some time with me instead? Fantastic! I’m clearly having a good influence on you.”
“I didn’t skip out of training,” I told him. “I was looking for Orion.”
“Oh? Did he get lost again?” Conner sounded amused.
“No, actually.Igot lost. I was flipping through the dimensions, and I must have taken a wrong turn.”
“And found me! How fortuitous!”
“Uh, right. So do you think you could point me in the direction of Gaia?”
“I can do one better. I can escort you back there myself. We wouldn’t want you to take another wrong turn and end up in a dragon’s den, now would we? Of course, I don’t know exactly how you got here, so we’ll have to take my way back. Just a quick snap back to our dimension, and then a short stroll to the Spirit Tree?—”
“No!”
Conner blinked at me in surprise. He stopped smiling. “Is something wrong, Red?”
“Yes. Conner, listen to me. You can’t use the Spirit Trees to get back to Gaia. The General has Watchers guarding all the trees. The moment you come through the tree, they’ve been ordered to arrest you.”
“That’s…unfortunate. But not to worry. I’ll just turn myself invisible before I go through the Spirit Tree. The Watchers can’t catch someone they can’t see!”
“That’s not going to work anymore, Conner. The General’s on to you. He had the Alchemists make the Watchers some kind of anti-invisibility tech.”
His expression soured. “Well, isn’t that fantastic? But no worries. I’ll think of something. I always do.”
Conner exuded confidence like a kitten exuded cuteness. Even so, I couldn’t help but worry about him.
“I’ll be fine, Red. Just fine,” he assured me. “This won’t be the first time I’ve outsmarted the General. Thanks for the heads-up, though. You’ve been a big help. I only wish…”
“Savannah Winters!”
Orion’s voice drowned out Conner’s. And then Conner himself disappeared too. The moon went next, followed by the field. The crickets fell silent. The fog flooded in, swallowing me.
Ice-cold hands gripped my shoulders, wrenching me back. I fell sideways, tumbling and turning and thumping like an old pair of sneakers caught in a dryer. My breaths came heavy—then not at all.
I couldn’t breathe!
Something slapped me hard on the back. No,someone. It was Orion. He held my limp body with one arm. The other was thumping my back repeatedly. Black splotches danced in front of my eyes.
“Savannah!”
“She’s not breathing!”
“I…That…Eris…Find…Killjoy…”
Their voices were bleeding away. The world was bleeding away. The black splotches melted into total darkness.
Air filled my lungs. I heaved in a deep breath, and it burned. Every breath burned. But at least I was breathing again.
My vision slowly cleared. The watercolor maelstrom subsided. The violent blotches and blurs calmed and faded away.
Eris’s face came into focus. “Savannah? Are you all right?”
“By some definition.” I tried to sit up, but that so wasn’t happening right now. It felt like the world had tipped upside down. I closed my eyes and counted down from ten, waiting for everything to stop spinning. “What happened?”
“You fell into an inter-dimensional eddy,” Orion told me. “It was pulling you under.”
“Orion had to pull you out.”
