The path forked into two. Both trails were thin and sooty, crooking away in opposite directions. Neither looked more hopeful than the other, but from reading storybooks, the girls knew.
Only one was correct.
“Which way?” Sophie rasped.
Agatha could see just how weak and shaken her friend was. She had to get her to safety. Hearing the skimming of arrows again, Agatha swung her head between the paths, burning trees growing nearer … nearer …
“Aggie, which way?” Sophie pressed.
Agatha’s eyes darted uselessly back and forth, waiting for a sign—
Sophie gasped. “Look!”
Agatha swiveled to the east path. A glowing blue butterfly flapped in darkness, high above the trail. It beat its wings faster and nosed forward, as if urging them to follow.
“Come on,” Sophie said, suddenly strong again, and surged forward.
“We’re following a butterfly?” Agatha retorted as she chased Sophie past WANTED signs on trees ahead.
“Don’t worry. It’s leading us out of here!”
“How do you know?”
“Hurry! We’ll lose it!”
“You don’t know what I’ve been through—” Agatha heaved, puffing behind.
“Let’s not play who’s had it worse, shall we!”
The butterfly sped up as if nearing its destination and veered around a bend, wings brightening to blinding blue. Sophie grabbed Agatha by the wrist, dragged her faster around the curve—
Into a dead end of fallen trees.
The butterfly was gone.
“No!” Sophie squeaked. “But I thought—I thought—”
“It was a special butterfly?”
Sophie shook her head, eyes welling, as if her friend couldn’t understand. Then, over Agatha’s shoulder, she saw a torch-lit shadow inch across the trees, then two more …
The hoods had found their path.
“We had our happy ending—” Sophie backed against a trunk. “This is all my fault—”
“No …,” Agatha said, looking down. “It’s mine.”
Sophie’s heart clamped. It was the same feeling she had alone in the church, thinking about how her friend had changed. A feeling that told her none of the last month was an accident.
“Agatha … why is this all happening?”
Agatha watched the shadows grow closer around the bend. Her eyes stung with tears. “Sophie … I—I—I—made a—mistake—”
“Aggie, slow down.”
Agatha couldn’t look at her. “I opened it—I opened our fairy tale—”
“I don’t understand—”
“A w-w-wish!” Agatha stammered, reddening. “I made a wish—”
Sophie shook her head. “A wish?”
“I didn’t mean it—it happened so fast—”
“A wish for what?”
Agatha took a deep breath. She looked into her friend’s scared eyes.
“Sophie, I wished I was with—”
“Tickets,” a voice said.
Both girls turned to see an alarmingly thin caterpillar with a top hat, curled mustache, and purple tuxedo poking out of a tree hollow.
“Thank you for calling the Flowerground. No spitting, sneezing, singing, sniffling, swinging, swearing, slapping, sleeping, or urinating in the flowertrains. Violations will result in the removal of your clothes. Tickets?”
Sophie and Agatha gaped at each other. Neither had the faintest idea how to call the Flowerground.
“Look, mister,” Agatha pressured, glancing back at shadows nearing the dead-end turn, “we need to ride right now and we don’t have—”
“Leave it to me,” Sophie whispered, and twirled. “Such a pleasure to see you again, conductor! Remember me? We met when you graciously escorted our class to the Garden of Good and Evil. And look at that lovely mustache! I just love a good mustache—”
“No ticket, no ride,” the caterpillar crabbed, and withdrew.
“But they’ll kill us!” Agatha cried, seeing red hoods turn into view—
“Special circumstances can be presented in writing on Form Code 77 at the Flowerground Registry Office, open on alternate Mondays from 3:00 p.m. until 3:30 p.m.—”
Agatha grabbed him from the tree. “Let us in or I eat you.”
The caterpillar bleached in her grip. “NEVERS!” he called. Vines shot out and sucked Agatha and Sophie into the hollow as arrows set the tree aflame.
The two girls fell through a pit of swirling pastel colors until vines flung them over a snapping Venus flytrap into a tunnel of blinding-hot mist. Shielding their eyes, the girls felt their vines cinch around their chests like straitjackets and hook on to something above them. Both peeked through their hands to see that they were dangling in midair from a luminescent green tree trunk stenciled:
“The butterfly called the train somehow!” Sophie yelled from her tight harness as the track propelled them ahead. “See! The butterfly was trying to help us!”
Coming out of the mist, Agatha gaped at the Flowerground for the first time, speechless. Before her was a spectacular underground transport system, big as half of Gavaldon, made entirely of plants. Color-coded tree trunks crisscrossed like rail tracks in a bottomless cavern, whisking passengers dangling from vine straps to their respective destinations in the Endless Woods. The conductor, perched in a glass-windowed compartment inside ARBOREA’s green trunk, grumpily called stops into a willow microphone as flowertrains flitted by: “Maidenvale!” “Avalon Towers!” “Runyon Lane!” “Ginnymill!”
Whenever passengers heard their stop, they pulled hard on their vine strap; the strap fastened around their wrist, unfurled off their track, and ferried them high to one of many windwheel exits that churned them out of the Flowerground and up onto land.
Agatha noticed their green line’s trunk was jam-packed with women in twittering conversation, some well dressed and cheerful, others oddly haglike and unattractive for Evers, while the red ROSALINDA LINE running perpendicular had only a few glum, scraggly-looking men. Under those two tree tracks, the yellow DAHLIA LINE buzzed with groups of beautiful and homely women, while its crisscrossing pink PEONY LINE had only three rumpled, dirty male dwarfs. Agatha didn’t remember the caterpillar saying anything about women and men sitting apart, but then again she couldn’t remember half his stupid rules.
She was distracted by two parakeets, feathers the color of a rain forest, who fluttered up with glasses of celery-cucumber juice and pistachio muffins. On the illuminated tree trunk above her head, an orchestra of well-dressed lizards struck up a baroque waltz on violins and flutes, accompanied by a chorus of caroling green frogs. For the first time in weeks, Agatha managed a smile. She inhaled the sweet, nutty muffin in one