Free The Water and the Wild by Katie Elise Ormsbee

adjoining bathroom, which looked just like a normal bathroom from back in New Kemble, except that the faucet was lined with pearls and a glass chandelier hung directly over the toilet. Though she was tired, even more so Lottie felt dirty from biking in rain all day, avoiding death by tree, and traveling underground or upground, or however it was that she’d gotten to this place. She peeled off her clothes and climbed into the shower. As the hot water streamed down on her, the numbness began to unwind itself from Lottie’s ribs, and she began to properly think and feel again.
    Could she really believe any of it? That she had fallen down a tree into another world? Lottie looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She pressed her thumb to her perfectly smooth forehead, which showed no trace of a scab or a scar. Mr. Wilfer’s medicine had made that wound better. He could make Eliot better, too. Whatever else she believed, Lottie had to believe there was a cure.
    Lottie tried on the nightgown that Adelaide had left her. It pooled past her toes and cinched her at the waist, and the frills along the cuffs and collar scratched her skin. She grunted and pulled the gown off, deciding she preferred her old clothes, dirty and damp as they were.
    Lottie fell back onto the giant canopy bed, but she could not possibly sleep at a time like this.
    There were questions that Mr. Wilfer had left unanswered, but that didn’t mean Lottie couldn’t try to answer them for herself. She laced Eliot’s sturdy green sneakers back on and then sat down by her door, counting off minutes and listening closely for any movement outside. Each time she thought it might be safe to crack the door open, though, she swore she heard a rustle or a scamper or a flitter in the hallway, and she would have to start counting over. Perhaps she was so tired that she was simply hearing things, but Lottie didn’t want to risk getting caught.
    At last, convinced that it had been dead silent outside her room for more than an hour, Lottie stretched out her tired legs, creaked open the door, and, after glancing left and right a total of five times, crept out. It was so dark in the corridor that she could not make out the end of the hallway. Deep shadows hit her feet as she padded down the passageway to the spiral stairs.
    Then Lottie felt something rush by. The air went cold beside her, and
something
ever so slightly brushed her cheek. She bit the inside of her lip, trapping in a yelp, and scampered all the way down the winding staircase. The foyer was empty, and that gaping archway at the end of it lookedlarger and more like a hungry mouth than ever. Lottie wanted very much to run back up the stairs and jump back into that comfy canopy bed. She simply couldn’t, though, because she’d already come so far and was now only a nose’s breadth away from the laboratory doors.
    Lottie glanced around, swallowed, and tried a door handle. It was locked. She cursed under her breath. The foyer echoed the bad word back, making Lottie blush. Steeling herself, she tried the handle of the other door. This one obligingly gave way. Lottie slipped inside the laboratory. She walked briskly down the long, drafty room, careful not to sneeze at the clouds of dust circling her or to look around at those looming vials and instruments lest she frighten herself. At last, she reached the second set of doors and, remembering her previous luck, tried the left door first. The handle slipped down, the door creaked open, and Lottie was back in Mr. Wilfer’s study.
    The room was far less cheery now that the fire had died out, but moonlight streamed in from a row of curtainless windows, and its light was bright enough to show that the study was a wreck. Since Lottie had last been there, desk drawers had been opened and dozens upon dozens of papers scattered on the floor. There were discarded vials, too, some broken, some unstopped, and all of them empty.There was one