Wynona awoke in damp earth. 

Home, she thought. 

But the dirt beneath her hands was too loamy, too loose. And too warm. This couldn’t be Claybay. She was still on Tephra—still in the volcano?—in a cave somewhere, alone. 

She always ended up alone. 

Fear began to set in. She was surrounded on what seemed like all sides. All she could make out in the dimness was a few wet edges of rock. How did she end up here? How would she get out? 

“Loch?” she cried out. Her voice was hoarse, like she’d been asleep for a long time. “Trent? Anybody—?” 

The silence told her what she’d already known. 

Heart racing, Wynona tried to push herself onto her feet, but she only succeeded in slamming her head against something directly above her. This wasn’t a cave. The walls were closer than she’d thought. She was trapped beneath debris, outside of her mech, in a pocket of air barely bigger than herself. And now her head throbbed. Something else in her body felt off, maybe even broken, but she couldn’t tell what. Every inch of her ached. As Wynona blinked, trying to fight off the warm and sleepy feeling at the back of her head, the pain worsened. Was it her shoulder? Her hip? She groaned. This had to be the worst pain she had ever felt, and no one was around to help her.

Panic began to set in. Wynona’s heart was pounding. And wasn’t she breathing too fast, wasting too much air? She tried to shallow her breaths, but it only made her chest seize up worse. She panted, pressing her hands to the dirt, trying to leverage herself up—slower, this time, so she didn’t hit the ceiling—and realized she couldn’t put any weight on her right arm.

She was wounded and airless and stuck, here in the darkness, here in the dirt. It would not be long before she did not have the energy to move at all. 

What could she do? Crying out was pointless. Could her magic—? 

It didn’t always work when she wanted to. There was no guarantee. But Wynona fought against the pain and shifted her hands as best as she could so that her palms were lying flat against the earth. She squeezed her eyes shut, breathing heavily. 

Come on, she thought, trying to call out to the dirt, to shape it, break it. It would not budge. Another wave of panic swept over her: Her heartbeat somehow doubled, her vision was blurry. Frantically, she hit her palms against the dirt. And again. And again. 

“Ugh!” Wynona slammed her small hand against the wall again. The clay was hard, wet; it felt like a slap against her palm. As with every other time she’d done it, nothing glowed, no exit formed. “It’s no use. I can’t—I can’t get us out.” 

“Great job, Wynona. You killed us. We’re dead.” 

“Shut up!” Wynona screamed. “It’s not like I wanted this to happen!” 

The boy sneered. “Well it did, and now we’re all stuck down here, because of you. I can’t believe we trusted you to do something right for us.” 

“I—” Wynona felt hot tears pricking the corners of her eyes. How could she respond to that? He was right. She’d messed up again. Badly this time, worse than ever. She was going to be the reason her friends all died.

A pang in her chest, her face flushed, Wynona turned away. She walked as far as she could along the cave wall and then slumped against it, tucking her knees to her chest. She buried her head in her arms, staring at the clay beneath her feet. 

“Wyn…” There was a hand on her shoulder, warm and nervous. Kala. “Nobody blames you, not really. We’re just scared. You know you’re the only one who can get us out of this.” 

Where Wynona’s tears met the ground, the clay darkened. Like she was staining it. Ruining it, like she’d already ruined everything else. “What if I can’t do it?” she whispered. She stared at her hands, closing them into tight fists, opening them like stars. “You know it doesn’t always work the way I want it to.” 

“I believe in you,” Kala said firmly. “I’ve seen what you can do, Wynona.”

Wynona looked up at her, feeling helpless. But she looked back with a smile, and took Wynona’s hands in hers. “You can do anything you set your mind to.” 

Her gaze didn’t waver. She wasn’t lying. She believed in Wynona, for better or worse. She gave a confident nod. Wynona echoed it shakily. Kala released her hands. 

Wynona closed her eyes, took a deep breath. She made two fists, then opened them. When she looked down at her palms again, they were glowing.

Wynona opened her eyes, trembling just a little with the weight of everything—the debris that pressed against her, the fear coiling in her chest; the pain of that young memory, and the hope of it too. “Okay,” she said. 

Or tried to say. Would have said, if her mouth wasn’t full of dirt. She spat out the mud, scraping her tongue with the one thumb that could reach it. “Ugh. God. Okay. Okay, Wyn. You can do this.” 

Slowly, every muscle trembling, Wynona pushed herself onto her knees. She screamed when her right shoulder took the weight of her torso, but she did it, and then it was over, and then she was upright. “You can do anything,” she whispered to herself, blinking through the film of tears the pain had caused.

She pressed her hands to the damp ground. At least this was familiar. Anywhere she traveled, there would be dirt beneath her feet—wet, dry, dense, rocky; it all responded to her in the same way, eventually. “Feel the vibrations. The energy in the dirt. Then the mud… the rocks.” 

Wynona felt it. She could feel the way the earth moved—yes, moved, incrementally, shifting and changing over millennia. She could hear the skittering of the tiny creatures that roamed its tunnels and caverns. She could sense how it held itself together. It was a living thing just as any other. All she had to do was break those millions of tiny bonds, and—

The ground collapsed. Wynona fell straight through, and after one brief free-falling scream crashed onto hard rock. Something in her body gave a crunch. 

Wynona lay there for a moment, staring at the hole she had just fallen through. She wasn’t dead. Everything hurt, but she wasn’t dead. Her magic had worked. Whatever she’d done to end up trapped, she’d undone at least some of it. Wynona took a deep breath. Hopefully, the hardest part was over. 

Getting up was easier this time. Somehow, she even managed to stand. 

The world came into focus. Wynona took in her surroundings, breathing in the muggy air. It was hot, almost suffocatingly so. She’d fallen deeper within the volcano. Maybe even under it. Warm fog clung to her hair and her clothes; her skin felt sticky. 

She was standing by a pool of water so still and so clear that she could see the algae accumulating on the floor beneath it. Why couldn’t she have fallen into that? 

The ground was a strange, powdery white, and the walls were grown over in places with thick moss. The greenery didn’t look like anything she’d seen on the surface of Tephra. Even the rock was out of place: She realized with a start that some of it wasn’t rock at all, but crystals, jutting out of the ground in jagged layers. 

“What is this place…?” 

Wynona studied the water, frowning at her battered reflection in the blue-green surface. Then she saw it—the pool narrowed into a river that was flowing toward another nearby cave. In the darkness, something glittered. 

The fastest way to get there would be downstream. It wasn’t deep. Wynona hovered a foot over the pool, ready to dip her toe in, when a small geyser burst out of the water. 

It was boiling. Even through her suit, Wynona could feel how hot it was; she knew immediately that if the water touched her bare skin it would burn. It was a good thing she hadn’t fallen into the river after all. 

And there was still another, albeit inconvenient, way. The river didn’t reach all the way to the walls, leaving just enough space to walk sideways. Wynona breathed in, breathed out, then nodded firmly. She unzipped her suit halfway—it was too damn hot in here for sleeves—and tucked the fabric into itself at the waist. Then she got to it. 

The dense, peculiar moss extended into the tunnel. She had to grab onto it to keep her balance as she walked along the river’s edge. It was a little awkward, but it definitely wasn’t the worst part of her day, so Wynona wasn’t about to complain. 

Her shoulder ached; breathing was difficult in the hot air. But the river itself wasn’t too much of an obstacle. As she walked along the wall, Wynona finally had the time to ask herself a few questions. What had happened after she’d failed at killing Gelata? Where were Loch and Gwen and Trent? Did the Tephrans know how far deep this volcano went? Would there even be a way out? 

This last question made her shiver. She pushed it to the back of her mind. She’d been lucky enough so far. Maybe she’d stay lucky. 

It wasn’t long before the river had widened again onto a broad pool of steaming water at the center of another cave. If “pool” was even the right word. She couldn’t make out the far edges of the water—it may as well have been a lake. The cave itself was bigger than the first, and much taller. 

Wynona took a step onto more solid ground, relieved. 

Then she saw it. 

Luck, indeed.

“A boat?” Her voice echoed in the cavernous expanse. “What’s a boat doing all the way down here?”