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behind him that he could follow back to the path if he needed to. And he made rock piles every ten yards or so.
    The brush had mostly disappeared from the forest floor. No gnarled roots. No surprise rocks to trip over. Everything remained flat and eminently passable. The light was farther away than it first appeared, like when you’re swimming far out in the ocean and it takes forever to reach a shore that appears to be close by. Still, he trudged on.
    Teresa must be hysterical by now.
    The light wasn’t getting any closer, and Ben was beginning to get the feeling that Mrs. Blackwell knew what she was talking about. There was a heavy stir off to the side. Here came the dread: full and horrible.
    Another step and he saw their outlines in front of him: two men, with the silhouettes of their heads in the moonlight flanked by short, floppy dog ears. The yellow light was nothing more than bait. He turned and sprinted back along the path of bread hunks.
    â€œGET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!”
    He could hear them stampeding after him, their laughter growing. They sounded as if they had been born in a pit. In the shifting moonlight, Ben could barely make out the cubes of bread he had left for himself along the ground, but he kept his focus down on his feet and never looked back. He saw the rock piles and breathed a sigh of relief that, at last, some things in this world had managed to stay in place.
    â€œWe’re going to rip your face off and show it to you before we kill you.”
    Ben began screaming nonsense again. By the time he was back on the path, his vocal cords were raw and stinging with cold, as if he had swallowed a box of tacks. The path kept straight, as always, and the men followed close behind. Ben almost
wanted
them to catch him.
May as well get it over with.
The path was coming to an end up ahead. The wide canal between the trees was about to give way to a wall of pure forest. There was no town. There was no one to save him. Once he reached the end of the path, this would all be academic.
    Except . . . Well now, he had that bag of seeds.
    Ben slipped the backpack off one shoulder and dug into the front pocket for the little leather pouch.
The first one you throw down on the ground will become an iron tower. The second, a wolf. And the third, a wall of flame.
Which seed did what? They weren’t marked “WOLF” or anything. Did the order matter?
    He grabbed one hard seed out of the pouch and threw it up ahead. Three steps later, he smacked hard into the wooden door of an iron spire that stretched a hundred feet up into the air, standing sentry over the woods.
    â€œHoly . . .”
    Ben could hear the dogfaces closing in, so he threw the tower door open and closed it behind him. There were lit torches encircling the atrium, and a series of locks lining the front door from top to bottom: hinges and bolts and chains and knobs. He locked every last one of them as the dogfaces reached the door and began pounding on it. The fevered percussions rung in his skull and sickened him. They sounded like they were going to eat their way through the door, so he backed away, until he tripped over a small stone stair. To the right, there was a
second
door that led . . . Well, he was through trying to figure out what led where. Behind him, the stairs wound up and up and up. He would have the high ground on the dogfaces, but also be trapped up at the top if they managed to knock the door down.
    The pounding wouldn’t stop. The killers seemed to get stronger as the minutes passed on. Ben saw a knife go full through the heavy door,the blade twisting and bending, the dogfaces trying to weaken the oak. They would not stop. They would not simply go away. He was their quarry. They were created for killing him.
    He climbed the stairs three at a time, pausing to rest at one point because he had already physically pushed himself well past any point in his lifetime in which he had previously