by Mary Weber
“We need to move faster then.” Will steps into one of three openings that have just appeared, and the rest of us barely make it in before it regrows.
“There’s too many options!” Lawrence says.
“Just keep moving!” Seleni shoves Lawrence onto a path in front of us, but something’s niggling at me. It’s not just that there are too many options . . .
The poisoned hedges are starting to shift faster. I look up at the starry night sky. Then back at the path as a new opening emerges. The niggling gets stronger.
I watch another route sprout open at the same time the entire hedge in front of us ripples and seems to grow larger. Which is when I see it.
The paths are growing narrower.
I yell at the group—to tell them it’s shrinking—to say we only have a short time to figure this out. But it’s unnecessary. The moment we turn the new corner, the hedge narrows again, and the boys’ expressions say they see it too.
Beryll looks at Lute. “Any ideas? What if—?” His voice cuts off as his eyes grow round at something to the right of us. He lets out a soft whimper.
Lute and I turn just as a series of shrieks starts up through the Labyrinth, beyond our hedge corridor. But it’s the thing Beryll’s staring at that about rips my spine from my skin.
An impossible mirage materializes to the side of us—it’s of Beryll’s father. Beside him stands what appears to be Beryll as a small child trying to get the man’s attention. Except the mirage alters, and Beryll’s father suddenly becomes a basilisk monster that stalks toward us—toward Beryll in real life. In the maze.
I jump back as Seleni gasps and Lawrence lets out a scream. Except the air now ripples around me, and suddenly my mum is in front of me, lying dead in a grave with dirt being thrown on top of her. I retreat and shake my head. What is going on? Why am I seeing this? Except just like Beryll’s, the image is changing and I am the one in a grave, with an older version of Vincent standing over me, and he’s mumbling something about me having become the pliable wife who got him to the positions of fame he needed.
My eyes water as the scene alters—even as I’m aware that more screams have picked up—not just from Beryll but from others in my group also as maybe they’re seeing their own horrors. The vision in front of me changes to a scene where I’m waiting with dinner in hand as Vincent tells our children to stop stressing him out. He comes over and puts his hands on my face, and right before he kisses me, his face and eyes turn into those of a ghoul.
I lean over and vomit onto the grass at my feet.
When I look up, no one else is watching. Seleni is screaming at her vision of Beryll kissing another woman. Lute is weeping as a mirage in front of him shows Ben standing alone at Lute’s and his mum’s graves. I can’t see what Sam and Will are looking at, but from their gaping expressions, they’re drowning at sea.
What did Holm do to us? Maybe the fog he disappeared into had a mind-altering compound. Either way . . .
I force my gaze past the boys—through their visions to the shrubs. We have to get out of here. We have to move.
I seize Seleni’s arm and start shoving at the rest of them. “Guys, we have to go!”
Maybe a different part of the maze will bring relief.
The motion brings Lute around. He shakes his head and blinks, then glances back at me and my vision of Vincent that’s following even as I desperately try to block it out. He frowns and tilts his head, then grits his jaw and jerks his gaze up at the sky. He grabs my shoulder and calls for us to go to the right, then the left. Then straight. Then peers up at the sky again and points us to another left.
He’s using the stars to lead us east, away from the Labyrinth gate entrance.
We follow down one path, then another, and with each turn we make, the nine-foot-high foliage regrows. But at least we’re heading in the right direction.
I think.
The next time the hedge opens up, Lute pushes to the left again, then curses and trips as we run smack straight into Germaine, Rubin, and Vincent who are standing frozen in front of their own visions. From the corner of my eye, I see Vincent’s nightmare. It’s of his own face as a roomful of dead people sit up and begin to come for him. They look diseased.
Something lands at my feet and the next second I’m smacking Will, who’s slumped to the ground. “It’s not real,” I snap at him. “Follow Lute.” I grab his shirt and hoist him up, then sprint forward.
The maze keeps shifting and we keep falling, getting up, and running—single file now—until it feels like time is lost and escaping from these visions is the only thing I’ve ever done, and we are stuck in an endless loop of a nightmare sequence.
A sequence.
Like in math.
I stop so fast both Sam and Seleni plow into me. I shut my eyes and try to remember Kellen’s voice. What did he ask? “How well do you know your maths?”
I spin my mind back over the number of turns we’ve come through and approximate number of steps I’ve run for each. It takes a minute of counting until I land on what is one of the latter maths I learned in my studies with Da. But Lute’s right—it has to do with the stars. The maze is an equation.
“It’s a Foradian equation,” I yell.
“What?” Lute and Vincent both blink through their visions and stare at me.
“A Foradian equation. Count the moves according to the stars—add them up—and follow the formula to find the correct path out.”
Beryll nods even as his mouth stays open in a continuous scream, and Sam shakes his head because he never went that far in school. But Lute and Vincent are already eyeing the sky and calculating the formula same as me.
Count the steps, Rhen. And move.
I start forward but my nightmare’s suddenly in front of me—that image of the ghoul screaming, with its hands on my face.
Ignore it, Rhen.
The scream grows louder and so gut-wrenching, it tears at my blood.
Don’t blink. Don’t alter your gaze. The equation is simple—five left hedges forward, plus three closed behind—
I begin counting off aloud as Lute and Vincent do it with me, and soon Germaine and Seleni are doing it too, until there’s a sudden opening in front of us.
We step through and a flash of something silver wrinkles in the greenery ahead. A door. I have no idea whether it’s back the way we came or forward to the next obstacle. I don’t care. I just want out of here.
Lute presses my shoulder toward it, then turns and grabs Seleni’s, then Sam’s, as Rubin and Vincent and Germaine bolt for what I swear is solidifying into a tangible piece of metal. “Let’s go, Beryll,” Lute yells.
But Beryll’s not coming—he’s staring at the shifting hedges we just erupted from. “Where’s Lawrence?” he’s asking. “Where’s Lawrence?”
“You need to move, mate,” Lute yells. Seleni turns and her eyes go wide, but Lute’s already jumped backward to grab him, and I am reaching for the door Germaine’s just gone through in an effort to keep it open.
“Here—help me!” I shout at Seleni. The thing is far heavier than it should be.
Seleni obeys, then lets out a screech as a green-eyed ghoul plows from the hedge right for us. I shove the door open as hard as I can—and it’s enough for Lute to clear the threshold with Beryll before Seleni and I tumble inside after them.
The door slams shut, and Seleni, Vincent, and I shove our entire weight against it until we hear a click.
Which is when the lights go out.
16
You guys all right?” Sam asks. “Will?”
“I’m here.”
“Lawrence is gone.” Beryll’s voice quivers.
“And you should be glad of it.” Germaine groans through the dark. “Now why not be useful and turn on the bloody—”
The lights flick on, and I’m squinting and blinking at the faces of Vincent, Germaine, Rubin, Sam, Will, Beryll, Seleni, Lute, and some kid I’ve never met.
“Nice work,” Germa
ine says, getting to his feet. “You do that, Vince?”
“No. It was automatic.” Vincent pushes away from the door and Seleni and me, and gets up to look around the space.
It’s a white stone room no bigger than Uncle Nicholae’s study, except with no shelves, no windows, and no doors other than the one we just came through. I reach up to ensure my hat’s still in place before I sneak a peek at Seleni’s grease-and-dirt-creased face. It’s still good. She catches my look and mouths, “You’re still a boy.” To which I nod and follow Vincent’s cue to move from the door—in case anyone else comes slamming through.
Except the moment my hand releases the handle, the thing dissolves, just like the door in the hedge maze. “What in hulls?” Sam mutters.
“Looks like we’re locked in a box, chaps,” Will says.
“I believe it’s called a sarcophagus,” Beryll attempts to joke.
No one laughs but Seleni.
Beryll shrugs and strides to the only freestanding item in the room—a narrow table—upon which rest a coin, a book, and an apple. Then he moves on to the far wall where a pad with buttons is attached to the otherwise smooth stone surface. Vincent and Rubin follow, and I’m about to, until the look on Lute’s face stalls me.
“Hey, kid.”
Lute’s staring at Vincent as if he’s about to launch across the room and strangle him.
“Kid.”
I peer over and—oh. Germaine’s talking to me. He juts his thick eyebrows at my chest, then Seleni’s, then at the new boy. “Names?”
I stiffen. “That’s Sedgwick. I’m Renford. Don’t know the other.”
“Tippin,” the new boy pipes in.
“Good. Now you get to come help me, Renford.”
I snort, and start to tell him to shove it, but Seleni stops me with a look of warning.
Fine. I stride over to where Germaine is standing along the left wall beneath the only other items in the room—two square clocks hung halfway up, one set right side while the other is upside down, and a giant oil painting mounted evenly between them.
Germaine tips his head at the painting. “The depiction’s an exact replica of this room.”
“An exact replica, minus us.” I scan it for any other anomalies.
“Here, give me a lift. I’m going to inspect it.” Germaine puts his foot up and waits for me to link my fingers crisscross under it. When I do, he places his full body weight in my hands and pushes up. I heave forward—toward the wall for countersupport—and try not to imagine how enjoyable it’d be to accidentally slip and drop him on his hindside.
The sound of a scuffle erupts from where Rubin and Beryll are messing with the button box. “Of course it’s a code, dimwit,” Rubin snaps. “You have to enter the correct combination.”
“Hey, boys.” Germaine points at the miniature button pad in the painting—the same I’ve been trying to decipher from my view beneath his bony rear. “It’s got a set of numbers,” he calls out. “Try 8–8–6–1.”
Beryll punches the code in with one finger, and the pad instantly lights up. But that’s all it does—until the half-baked voice of Kellen suddenly rattles the air with a chuckle and makes Germaine jerk backward so hard I lose my grip. The two of us tumble together to the floor, and unfortunately my elbow somehow lodges in his rib cage. Oops. He gives a satisfying yelp that makes even Lute smile.
“I see you’ve made it inside.” Kellen’s voice crackles through the room. “Well done—although, careful as you go—because upside down and all around your world will slowly turn. Choose wisely, deduce correctly, to open the key to your future. Choose unwisely and you’ll fall into the Labyrinth of no return. The question now is simply—how good are you at thinking outside the box?”
There’s a whirring sound, and the button pad lights turn off again.
“Think outside the box,” Sam murmurs. “Not funny, gents.”
“Actually, it’s ’ilarious,” his brother says. “Because we’re in a room that’s like a box, and—”
Sam smacks the back of his messy-hair head.
“Will you two shut it? Here, move over and let me at this thing.” Rubin prods Beryll aside with his broad shoulders to try the button pad for himself just as Germaine heads for them, nursing his rib cage, to gape at it too.
I’ve just turned back to the painting when Lute is beside me. I brace and don’t look at him. I don’t know how much of my vision he saw. Was it enough to put two and two together? And if he knows it’s me, what then?
I squirm and wait for his comments or challenge as to why I’m here, but they don’t come. And when I peek up he’s not acknowledging me. Instead, he simply indicates the corner of the painting.
I squint and stand on my tiptoes until I can get a good view of what first appears to be the artist’s signature but is actually four words swirled together:
WHY ARE YOU HERE?
“Just like the hedge maze question,” I murmur.
Lute reads it aloud before he walks over to the room’s corner that matches the one in the painting. I follow. Unlike the portrait, the stone in the real-life recess is blank. I press around for any crevice or levers, then watch as Seleni, Vincent, and Tippin do the same over the rest of the room’s corners and floor.
I glance at Lute, then at the painting again.
Why are you here?
“The answer better not be another horror fest,” Beryll grumbles. “Because whatever drama that was out in the maze seemed wholly unnecessary.”
“Holm probably thinks himself pretty witty giving such deep life questions,” Germaine says from the wall pad.
Seleni deepens her tone. “Yes, but what does it mean? The question.”
“If the one from the maze outside is any indication,” Vincent mutters, “this one’s another misdirection, not a clue. He’s treating us more like rats than students. And now he’s got us caged.”
“Okay . . . but what do rats do?” I scan the room looking for anything familiar. “They go back to what they know.”
“And what is that exactly?”
But even as he says it, I note he’s spent the past two minutes proving my point. He’s been staring at the painting’s words and retracing them with his slender fingers in dust on the ground. I look closer. He appears to be assigning numbers to them.
I lift a brow. He’s seeing if the words are a numerical code.
I peer at Lute again, but he’s refocused on Vincent, who a moment later stands, swipes his blond hair back in place, and says, “Germaine, try these.” He cites a variety of combinations, which Germaine starts entering in. He inputs one, then another, then another, but there’s no reaction other than a one-time replaying of the message from Kellen that we already heard.
I shake my head. The numbers and letters are starting to spin and mix in my head, but there’s something wrong with them.
I shut my eyes and try to clear my mind—to concentrate on the question that, just like the one in the maze, Holm must’ve put here for a reason. Why are you here?
Why are any of us here—?
A scream rips through the room and dissipates as fast as it came. It’s followed by the sound of metal grinding against stone.
I spin around as the others do the same. “What just bloody happened?” Vincent barks.
Sam points at the floor. “He . . . fell.”
“Who?”
“The kid.”
I look at who is here. There were ten of us; now there’re only nine. I count off—Germaine, Rubin, Vincent, Sam, Will, Lute, Seleni, Beryll, and me. “Tippin?”
“He was standin’ right here.” Sam is delicately pressing on the stones in the corner where Tippin had apparently been. His face is white as a ghost. “It was lookin’ like he’d figured something out and pressed a spot on that wall. Except the bloody floor slid open and swallowed him into a pitch-black shaft.”
“Okay, new plan—nobody touch anything without telling the rest of us,” Lute says.
“Agreed,”
Germaine says. “I don’t want to die because one of you makes a stupid mistake. Now let’s just all walk through this entire room methodically.”
We do. And then we do it again. And again. The same walls, same cracks, same levers and corners, minus the one Tippin fell through, and that same painting on the wall that seems to indicate the clue is somehow tied to them all, but we have no idea how.
“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me.” Rubin swears. “If I lose this test because I’m paired with a bunch of idiots . . .” He puffs back his wide shoulders and stares directly at Seleni and Will.
“What about the items on the table?” Will says to the rest of us. He’s gone back to them at least five times now, rearranging them to match the picture, stacking them, then pulling them all off before replacing them in their exact spots. “In the painting they’re this way. But maybe if we try mirroring them—” He arranges the coin, book, and apple as he talks, but nothing happens other than Beryll hops up to join him, and Rubin scowls before strolling over too.
“Maybe we have to answer the question,” Seleni offers.
“Excuse me?” Germaine growls.
“He said maybe we have to answer the question,” Lute says in clear warning for Germaine to watch his tone.
Beryll glances up. “What question?”
“The one in the painting.” Seleni points. “Why are you here? Maybe it’s an audible cipher and we have to answer the question in order to release the lock.”
“What—like we all take turns answering why we’re here? That’s ridiculous.” Germaine scoffs. “We’re here because none of you ninnies can get us out of here, nothing more. Now if you’re not going to help, at least let the adults work.”
“I’ll start.”
All eyes turn to Beryll, who shrugs. “There’s nothing to lose, right?” He rubs the back of his brown hair and squints down at the dusty floor. “I’m here because my father wants me to be. And to hopefully have the type of future I want.”
He’s met with nods of agreement from a few of the boys.
In a deep voice Seleni goes next, even as her fingers shake. “I came because I wanted to see what the Labyrinth contest is like.”
