“It’s a key. It unlocks things. Mostly doors. You unlocked the White Room’s exit by waving your arm in front of it.”
Troy paused, once again his train of thought slamming to a halt. “Mostly doors? What else does it unlock?”
“You’ll see.”
“And what’s up with this tree-in-a-circle I keep seeing? It was on the Exit door in the White Room, and now it’s on this thing on my wrist.”
The ground was definitely easier to move across here, at an angle well below forty-five degrees.
“I honestly don’t know,” she replied, “but I assume it’s a symbol for something. Maybe life. Or survival.”
“But you already knew I had this thing on my arm,” he said, trying to swallow her words but choking on them instead. “How?”
A handfull of pebbles came loose from somewhere above and tumbled down, peppering his head and hands.
“You’re not my first Runner, Troy.”
He froze in place, even though the rocky surface had just become level enough that he could stand and walk. He thought of the bloody footprints he’d seen at the White Room exit. “How many others?”
“You’re the seventh Runner I’ve been connected to.”
Lucky number seven.
“And what happened to the first six? Wait, let me guess. You can’t say.”
Victoria sighed. “No, I can. But you don’t want me to. Not now. Make it through some more Rooms first.”
He walked across the jagged ground as he neared the bottom of the massive circle, turning the thought over in his mind. “Tell me about this connection between us, then.”
“Our minds are joined. There’s a term for it, but I’m not familiar with it.”
“Psychic?” said Troy. “Is it a psychic connection?”
“Yes,” she replied. “That’s it, exactly.”
He considered this. “So you can read my mind? I can’t seem to read yours…”
“From where I am, I can hear you speak, and I can see what you see as if looking through my own eyes. That’s all.”
Troy stopped and looked around the massive chamber. Whoever possessed technology powerful enough to build this place was somebody worthy of fear.
She had said “From where I am…” “So where are you? Are you inside the Corridor, or are you talking to me from somewhere else?”
She sighed again. “All I know is that it’s only my mind that’s awake and connected to you. My body is sort of…asleep. Another Runner called it ‘suspense’ or something.”
“Suspended animation,” said Troy.
“Yes, that’s it.”
This Victoria was no sci-fi fan, that much was certain.
At last he reached the exact bottom of the circle. The walls curved up on either side of him, a perfect, round valley. He knelt to the ground to catch his breath. Halfway there.
Already in the last hour he’d done more physical activity than ever before in his life. Some part of his brain—the part that was in denial that any of this was really happening—worried that he would be terribly sore in the morning. Assuming he lived to see another morning.
He stood once more and faced the opposite side of the valley. Now for the hard part. A half-mile climb up a curved wall of rock.
He could do this. He had to. He could make it. He could push himself and his feeble muscles further than they’d ever gone before. He would take one handhold after another, and he would hold on. He was not going to lose his grip and fall. That wasn’t an option. He had to make it, so he would.
The thought of tumbling down a curved hill made him think of Wile E. Coyote and other cartoon characters who cartwheel with arms and legs fully extended. Somehow a naïve look of frozen alarm always managed to save them in the end.
Troy took a deep breath and marched forward. In minutes, the slope was angling upward, gradually higher and higher until he had to drop to all fours and crawl.
As it turned out, easing into the climb this way was kind of nice. Better than facing a flat, vertical cliff wall and trying to hoist himself up. But as the climb continued to get steeper, he made a troubling discovery. His energy reserves were running lower and lower, and the task was becoming more difficult with every inch of ground.
“I hate P.E.,” he mumbled as he climbed, one hand over the other, one more foothold above the last. One more. Another. Now another. His muscles were trembling, causing his entire body to shake. He was suddenly glad Victoria couldn’t see him. “I hate that mean old drill sergeant Mr. Weller and his stupid climbing rope.”
“You’re in the military?” asked Victoria.
He couldn’t help rolling his eyes. “It’s just a figure of—”
Then, the Room’s orientation shifted. His muscles failed and turned loose of his hold on the rocks.
“Troy!” shouted Victoria.
He screamed in return, a terrified, girlish cry. He’d never heard such a sound emerge from his own mouth before.
“Troy!”
Even as it was happening, his heart was telling him it couldn’t. It mustn’t. No, he had to live. He had to survive this, make it to the end. He wasn’t ready to die. He wanted to go home and see his dad and go to college and find something and someone in this life that was worth living for. No, no, no! Still he fell on, and he knew the injuries were multiplying as he went. Tears to his clothes, cuts to the skin beneath, painful impacts against the hard rocks.
He scrambled to make it stop, to find a piece of rock sticking out nice and far that he could grab onto and save his life. But his exhausted body betrayed him.
He tumbled down sideways, at times flipping end over end, and there was the unmistakable crack of a bone breaking. He screamed, but the yellow rocks were rushing by too fast, and the sharp snap of the broken bone got lost amid a hundred other stinging pains cutting into his head, shoulders, knees, and rear end. This fall was nothing like his cartoon vision. This was no cartwheel, it was a ragdoll thrown down from on high. One particularly painful roll slammed his chest against the rock face, squeezing the wind out of his lungs. On and on he rolled, howling the whole way, until at last, he reached the bottom of the mile-wide circle.
Rolling one last time onto his stomach, he lay still. There, he screamed again. It was an achingly loud shout of protest and fury and frustration, his eyes squeezed shut as tight as he could make them, every muscle clenched in agony. The sound lasted until there was no breath left in his lungs. This task was already so hard, and now he would have to do it with a battered and broken body?
And something was wrong. It was the same something that had started his tumble down the rocks. He wasn’t lying still. Not completely. And it was eerily silent. Victoria said nothing. He felt alone, abandoned. Did she care whether he lived or died? Did she fear he was dying right now? Or was their connection broken because of his emotional state? No, that couldn’t be it. He was just in shock.
The answer came to him in the stillness broken only by his heavy breathing, so labored and hard that he heard it echo back from the far end of the circular chamber. She was allowing him a moment of grace, to regroup.
Finally, her gentle voice spoke. “Troy? Are you alright?”
There was a sharp throbbing coming from his left wrist, and he suspected it was what had broken. He focused on breathing and took a mental inventory of his many cuts and bumps.
When he opened his eyes, he figured it out. He knew why Victoria had fallen silent for so long. Why he could feel movement even though he was lying perfectly still. Why he’d fallen.
The room was spinning. The Yellow Room was a giant hamster wheel carved out of solid rock, spinning silently without an axel via some technology or magic he didn’t have the capacity to imagine. It spun forward, the way a car’s wheel would if it was moving toward the Exit.
Troy glanced down at the tears in his jeans and t-shirt. Warm trickles of blood oozed from gashes underneath, and brown dirt stuck to his sweaty flesh. He tasted blood on his tongue, and wiped away a red
smear from the edge of his mouth. He was just thankful to be wearing a long-sleeved shirt and long pants. His sneakers were a godsend as well. His summer attire typically never deviated from shorts, a tee, and flip-flops, but last night had been different, he had been on his way—
Where? What happened before he was brought here, to the Corridor? He couldn’t remember.
He couldn’t stay here, lying still this way. Already the wheel had turned so that he was at a slight incline with blood rushing down toward his head. He had to find a way to get back on his feet and keep moving, or the wheel would drag him up higher and higher until he tumbled down again.
With more pain than he’d ever felt in his life, Troy gingerly pushed up to his hands and knees. Instantly, his right arm gave out, and he yelped in pain.
“What?” asked Victoria.
“My wrist,” he moaned. “I think it’s broken.”
“Can you move your fingers?” she asked.
He wiggled them. “Yeah, more or less. Hurts, though. A lot.”
“Doesn’t look like it’s misaligned…” she said, and he was reminded that since he was looking at his wrist, she was, too. “Might be fractured. What do you have on? Do you have anything you can wrap it with?”
“Um…” he mumbled, his weary mind struggling to keep up with her. “I have a pair of jeans on, some socks under my shoes…Would socks work?”
“No, leave those. You may need them later.”
He didn’t really want to know at the moment what she meant by that. “I’ve got a long-sleeved t-shirt on.”
“Can you tear one of the sleeves off?”
He stood so he could keep pace with the slow spinning of the Room’s giant wheel, then did as she suggested. It took some rough tugging, but after a minute or so, he’d torn the seams of the right sleeve of his green tee. He put one end of the sleeve in the palm of his hand, and began to wind it around his wrist.
“You want it nice and firm, but not so tight it cuts off the circulation.”
He nodded, and was soon satisfied with his work. He tied the end off with a simple overhand knot.
Troy was panting and cradling his arm as he spoke the question that was gnawing at his insides. “Did you know that was going to happen? That the Room would start to move?”
There was a moment’s hesitation before Victoria replied. “I knew it could. But I’d hoped you would escape before—”
“Why didn’t you tell me!”
“I wasn’t allowed. If I say too much about what’s to come… It happened with my second Runner. I tried to prepare him in every way I could. The Corridor cut off our ability to talk to each another, but I could still see through his eyes. I had to watch in silence…as he…”
Troy couldn’t think of anything to say. It was clear she was trying to help him, even protect him. But there was nothing charitable on his tongue just now.
His eyes fell on the steel wall that enclosed the sides of the wheel, and he saw something else, barely visible. A spot where the steel was rusted and peeling, revealing black underneath.
He ran. The wall was a mere dozen feet away, and when he reached it, he slammed his entire body up against it, sideways, trying to break through.
“What are you—?” said Victoria.
He ignored her and punched the wall with his good hand, trying to make a dent or a hole in it. Something, anything. One little sign that he still had a tiny measure of control over his life. The wall was reinforced somehow, despite the crumbling surface, and it refused to show any evidence of his actions, aside from the red blood from his knuckles. He tried slamming his entire body up against it again. When that didn’t work, he clawed at the hated thing with his fingernails.
“Let me out!” he yelled.
“It’s not smart to waste your energy,” remarked Victoria.
“There has to be something behind this wall!” he replied. “What’s it made of? Metal? Cement? Plexiglas?”
She said something, but he was kicking against the wall now and couldn’t hear her. When that yielded no results, he switched back to pounding against it with his one working fist.
“Let me out of here!” he screamed. “Let me out! I can’t do this!”
A crack appeared in the metal and he stuck a few fingers through. He promptly received a jolt of electricity for his trouble, and screamed from the sensation.
“The only way out of the Corridor,” said Victoria, “is to Run.”
“I have to get out of here,” said Troy, huffing.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
With a surge of outrage, Troy spun, clenched his fists at his side, and raised his head to the heavens. “You’re not hearing me!” he screamed. “Victoria—whoever you are—I. Can’t. Do. This!”
In the silence that followed, his skin faded from angry red to a drained pale, and he dropped to his knees, his body limp and spent.
He wasn’t able to stay there long, thanks to the spinning of the room. With effort, he stood and took a few steps toward the bottom of the wheel. He glanced up around the circle until his eyes found the Exit. It was high up near the apex of the wheel just now, barely more than a dot at this distance. Climbing the direction he had been going would be a pointless exercise; it would be like going the wrong way on an escalator. He was feeble and inexperienced at rock climbing enough as it was, and now with an injured wrist, he’d never be able to climb faster than the wheel was turning.
Finally, he found his voice again, but it had grown miserably small. “I can’t climb it again. I don’t have it in me.”
“I know,” replied Victoria. “And I think that’s the point. The Corridor wants to see what you’re made of. By exhausting you physically, it forces you to think more tactically about your decisions.”
Troy considered this, but he found it hard to concentrate with the pain he was feeling from all over his body. “So there’s another way, then?”
“Always.”
He looked up and felt a twinge of hope as his eyes searched the rocky surface of the wheel. There had to be something, some little detail he’d overlooked. A solution of the mind, not the body. He had the best grades of any kid in his class, so this could be a challenge he might be equal to.
But there was nothing. No escape hatch, no hidden button to make the spinning stop. Just the entrance, and the Exit. Spinning on opposite sides of the wheel, in mutual orbit of one another.
He watched in silence, stumbling slowly along to keep pace with the turning as the entrance door crept towards him. He wondered if the Exit could be opened from anywhere on the wheel. Maybe he could just wait for the Exit door to come to him, and then open it. He suggested as much to Victoria.
As always, she seemed to be expecting this, and was all too ready to pour on a cold dose of reality.
“Only the door is moving,” Victoria said. “The opening behind it, leading to the next Room, is fixed. If the two don’t line up, the door won’t open.”
This girl was really getting on his last nerve.
The entrance neared and he stepped around it, allowing it to pass and watching it climb up the back side of the wheel toward the place where he’d entered. Slow and steady, it glided smoothly up, up, up…
Troy snapped to attention as an idea struck. It was wild, and it would be an insane risk. He might not even be able to do it. But if it worked…
His eyes fell quickly to the yellow rocks beneath his feet, and he scanned them back and forth, looking for what he needed.
“What? What are you thinking?” asked Victoria.
“Just…give me a minute,” he said. In truth, he didn’t want to give her a chance to shoot down his idea before he could try it.
These rocks were mostly smooth, but broken at sharp angles. Looking closer, he saw traces of blood in one spot. It was dried and crusty.
If he could just find...
There! He spotted an outcropping of rock that stuck out a good four or five inches from the other rocks. But this cluster was diff
erent. An opening, a small hole, stuck out sideways along the rocks, just big enough to fit a hand through. Maybe even both hands. To an ant, it might have looked like a natural land bridge. To a human, it was a handle.
And the Exit door, having crept slowly down the side of the wheel, was only about ten feet in front of this “handle” made of rock.
This was the solution to this puzzle. It had to be.
Before he could second-guess himself, he knelt down, looped his good hand through this natural hole, and tested his grip. It felt good. The rocks sticking out wouldn’t be painfully sharp when his weight would be supported by the thing. He put both hands through the loop, and then looked under his body, searching for something to put his feet on. He located a pair of jagged rocks, sticking out a few inches from the surface and curving slightly in on themselves. When his shoes dug into them, they created a natural, easy traction.
Satisfied with his position, Troy took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Here we go.”
Victoria said nothing. He decided to take that as a good sign. Would she be allowed to tell him if he’d found the right solution? Probably not.
It was predictably easy going at first. A chance to rest, even, with his body hugging the ground as the wheel rotated ever-so-slowly across the base and angled gently uphill toward the side. It trailed the Exit door, accompanied by no sound but the muffled grinding of whatever mechanisms were making the giant Room spin.
He passed the ninety degree mark a lot sooner than he expected, and soon he was supporting his own weight as he moved vertically up the wheel.
Troy became aware all too quickly that his hands would never be able to hold on for the entire trip around the wheel. Thinking fast, he slid out his bad hand and pushed his good one farther into the rock, until the handle was up to the crook of his elbow. It was agony hanging from the wheel this way, particularly as it curved upward towards the apex. But it required a lot less exertion than trying to keep his fingers glued to the rock.
“That’s it! Hold on!” Victoria said in a sudden, excited burst. Was she risking their connection by telling him he’d figured out the solution? Or had the muzzle come off, making her free to discuss this with him?
Corridor (A MythWorks Novel) Page 3
