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The blast threw them off their feet. Morgan instinctively rolled to soften her landing. Jake took the force of the fall to protect Camara and landed hard against some rocks with a groan.
A crevasse opened up behind them and a fiery pillar twisted into the sky as if reaching toward Heaven. It burned with the colors of the Garden, the bright carnelian and violet of its flowers with forest green at its heart, washed with the blood of those it devoured.
Morgan scrambled over to Jake. “Are you alright?”
He groaned and rolled onto his back. “Just about. But I don’t think I can carry the professor much further.”
Camara lay prone next to him, her eyelids fluttering, still deep in a fever.
Morgan stood up, testing her strength as she looked back at the chasm, a fresh scar on an ancient mou
