The familiar, stomach-dropping lurch of the portal was the only transition. One second, Lilith was in the baking silence of the desert. The next, she was plunged into a world of roaring sound and blinding green.
The ninth floor was a jungle. Not a calm, beautiful forest, but a violent, overgrown riot of life. The air was thick, hot, and wet, smelling of damp earth, rotting fruit, and something sharply metallic. Vines as thick as her arm hung from towering, ancient trees whose canopies blocked out almost all the sky, leaving the world below in a permanent, green-tinged twilight. The noise was constant: the shriek of unseen birds, the buzz of giant insects, the rustle and crunch of things moving just out of sight.
Noah's trail was here too. It was like a faint, silver scar on the fabric of this place. But it was crisscrossed with hundreds of other, newer energy signatures—hot, hungry, and closing in fast. He had passed through like a storm, and the jungle was still angry about it.
