“No idea,” he said after a sharp gasp as he’d nearly run into an unexpected fire wall. “My granddad gave it to me when I was eleven. Or maybe twelve. It was brand new.”
“And you…wore it out?” asked Victoria.
“Never used it,” said Troy, wiping sweat out of his eyes that came from his forehead. “I wouldn’t even know how.”
Another pause from Victoria. “Then…?”
“Granddad died a couple of years after he gave it to me. So I keep it on a little perch on my desk, in my room. Just something to remind me of him. Funny thing is, I don’t let it. I never think about it. Or him. I must see that knife a dozen times a day, coming and going. But I just pass it by. I never think about what it means. Why I keep it. Who gave it to me.”
Troy reached a dead end, and had to turn around. It was wearisome, but he took careful note of the path that brought him here, and retraced his steps back to the last turn he’d taken. Via process of elimination, it was inevitable that he’d find the way out. The only question was whether he’d find it before being burned alive.
“You know,” he said, continuing his train of thought, “I’m not even sure I ever opened the knife to see what kinds of attachments it has. Wouldn’t know what most of them were called if I did. I know there’s a corkscrew thing, and a tiny pair of scissors. A few different knives. What else do pocketknives have?”
Victoria faltered. “I’ve never seen one.”
That’s odd. Never? “It’s just…I can’t stop thinking of all the things of significance I breeze past, all the time, running, running. Always running. Why I never slow down to appreciate the things that mean something. Man, that sounded lame.”
“It was actually kind of deep,” Victoria replied. “You say that sort of thing a lot?”
“Just been that kind of a day.”
She laughed. “Troy?” asked Victoria in a quieter voice.
“Yeah?”
“Why are you afraid of fire?”
Troy felt dead inside at hearing the question aloud. A profound sense of dread washed over him, and for a moment, he forgot where he was as it all came rushing back…
“Please tell me,” said Victoria.
He pushed the memories to the back of his mind, compartmentalizing them as he’d learned to long ago. “I lost my mother to a fire.”
Victoria’s silence was heavier than it had ever been.
Troy was listening to memories of his mother’s voice. The more time that passed, the harder it was to remember the sound of her voice.
“How long ago?” she asked.
“Nine years. She worked in this really old office building that burned down. Place was ancient. Miracle it lasted as long as it did. The police told us she probably died from breathing the smoke, or she might have had a heat stroke before the fire touched her. But she still burned.”
“I’m sorry…”
“They had to identify her remains by her teeth,” said Troy, with a note of anger. “Her teeth.”
“That’s horrible,” said Victoria. “I think I’d be afraid of fire, too.”
“I’m not afraid of it,” Troy said, raising his head to continue his hike through the maze. “I hate it. Passionately. Violently. As much as a human being is physically capable of hating anything—that’s how I feel about this.”
Victoria fell silent. He was over halfway through the room now, he had to be. He was almost sure he’d caught sight of the Exit through the thick, orange flames.
It was so hot. Boiling and terrifying. Troy just kept swallowing, again and again. His dry tongue felt thick in his throat and offered no relief, but maybe the physical action would help deal with the emotional torment.
For a moment, he let it in—the thing he hadn’t let himself think since he first stepped through the fire. This was what his mother had felt. This scorching, blistering heat. A heat not hypothetical or intangible, but physical. A very real thing that could reach out and touch you. Singe you. Burn you alive.
“Your mother…do you still cry over her?” asked Victoria.
“It was nine years ago,” Troy said, shrugging. But then he froze. “Of course I do.” He surprised himself, admitting something so personal. It was the isolation of this place. It was getting to him.
And the heat. The tremendous, unbearable heat, causing him to sweat buckets. He chanced a brief pause for another swig of his water. He had to stay hydrated. More importantly, he had to stay calm.
Had his mother been able to stay calm at this point? What was she thinking and feeling when she was trapped in that office, knowing her end was near?
Had she thought about him the way he was thinking only of her?
Troy began jogging when he saw that the fire had eaten another inch out of his path. He shook his head to clear it, to shift his focus away from his mother and onto the task at hand. That was the real challenge here anyway, right? Mind over matter?
The maze was getting precarious now, and most of the time he had to turn partly sideways to clear the flames. He’d been on this path for more than ten minutes, following it this way and that, refusing a possible turn on the left to continue to his right. The path continued on, and he realized it was the longest continuous path he’d found yet. This gave him hope to keep going, even though the flames touched him at every turn.
All the times Troy had imagined his mother’s final moments on this Earth—assuming he was still on Earth, which he didn’t—his worst nightmares of the intense heat of the fire couldn’t compare to this. This was a furnace, an incinerator, a place where you burn the dead. This was skipping across the surface of the sun and trying not to get cooked.
How could the person he loved more than any other in the world have suffered such a horrific fate as this?
“Any idea how much farther?” said Troy, his breaths coming shallow and quick. He wiped at the sweat streaming down his forehead, his cheeks, his neck. His clothes were soaked, but there was nothing he could do about any of it. His only chance was to escape the flames.
“Can’t be far,” replied Victoria, her voice coiled tight like a spring under tension. “I think you’re on the right track.”
The words had barely escaped her mouth when he saw a dead end straight ahead.
He wanted to pass out. Let his weakened, weary muscles go, and collapse into the bliss of unconsciousness.
This couldn’t be happening. There was no way he could double-back all the way down this path and find a new route before the path constricted so tight that his skin caught fire. It was over.
“I can’t—I can’t keep going,” he said between wheezing breaths.
“Why not? You’re so close!”
He looked toward the dead end again as he drew nearer. At the end of the path was a fork in the road. One turn went exactly ninety degrees left, the other the same to the right.
There was no time for mistakes now. If he didn’t burst into flames in the next couple of minutes, he would surely melt.
It was a fifty/fifty chance. Victoria said nothing to sway his decision. Maybe they would both lead to the Exit.
Yeah, right.
There was no more time to waste. He turned left.
Ahead, the path stretched on for twenty or thirty more feet before turning again to the right. He ambled onward, shuffling sideways and dying of thirst. He wanted only to get out of this fire and bathe in the ice cold water from the steel cylinder.
Right turn. Another right. Then left. Left again.
The path was less than a foot wide now, and his clothes were catching fire in so many places, he couldn’t keep up with them all. His strength was fading, but the end was close enough to give him one last jolt of adrenaline.
Ignoring the burning sensations across his body, he broke into a sprint and made three more turns before he spotted the Exit, dead ahead. He didn’t slow now, bursting through the last wall of fire sideways and feeling fire touch nearly every part of his body. On the other side, he dropped immediately and rolled.
When he was on his feet again, standing at the threshold of the Exit and looking back at the gigantic maze, he coughed at the smoke rising from his smoldering clothes.
He turned to the door and waved his arm in front of the tree emblem. It glowed and rose slowly from the ground.
“Congratulations, Runner thirty-seven thirty-five. You have escaped the Orange Room.”
“Well done,” said Victoria, sounding just as out of breath as he was.
“Yes I am, though I was hoping for medium rare,” he joked, but suddenly fell silent and spun sharply to look back at the inferno of the Orange Room.
What was that? His gaze circled the Room, but found nothing. It had been so faint…
It must have been nothing.
TROY WAS GULPING WATER from the metal cylinder when the door finally raised up high enough for him to squeeze through. On the other side, he dropped the nearly empty tube in shock.
“You have got to be kidding me!” Troy shouted. “Lava? We have to do lava, too? Fire wasn’t enough?”
His eyes traced the typically huge Room, finding high walls that enclosed the Room in a perfect circle. The walls curved inward as they climbed, forming a massive dome. It felt to Troy rather like a sports arena. Its continuous walls were a faded red color, but the Room’s chief feature was the cooling, crusted lava that covered every square inch of the ground. It was clumped together in mounds scattered around the room randomly. The tops of the mounds were still made of red, oozing liquid, while the lower areas appeared more hardened. But even there, he could see spots where the molten goo peeked out through the cracks.
It was warm in this Room, but not as searing as the Orange Room’s walls of pure flame. Maybe this one wouldn’t be so bad. It was probably akin to an elaborate floor tile puzzle where he had to find the right spots on the ground to step on. Only if he stepped on the wrong spot here, his foot could melt into the rock.
“This,” said Victoria, “is the Red Room.”
In his nervousness, Troy felt an irrational desire to lighten the mood. “Straight to Red, then. What, no Fuchsia?”
“What’s Fuchsia?”
“It’s this sort of violent shade of…never mind.” Troy ran his good hand through his dark, matted hair, picked up the steel cylinder and tucked it under his arm, and began inspecting the ground nearest to him.
“Troy, wait,” said Victoria, and he pulled back sharply, muscles tensed and ready to snap. “Listen. Before you begin, there’s something you should know. Something important.”
His heart began beating faster. “I’m listening,” he said, looking up from the ground.
Victoria let out a long breath, but her voice was still anxious. “If you make it through the Red Room…there’s a secret I’ll be allowed to tell you.”
Troy’s eyebrows knotted. “What kind of secret?”
“The kind that very few Runners make it far enough to find out,” she said softly. “It’s the biggest secret I know about the Corridor.”
Even Troy’s thoughts ground to a halt, and it was more than a minute before his weary mind was able to form a response.
He spoke slowly and uncertainly, drawing out the word. “Okay.”
Whatever Victoria was hoping to reveal to him was contingent on his surviving the Red Room. Which was actually a pretty good incentive. Answers were the only thing he wanted as much as survival.
Time to get on with it, then. The sooner he got through this one, the better. There couldn’t possibly be another hot, fire-themed room after this one. What color would come next, anyway?
“I’m guessing the object here,” said Troy, turning to the business at hand, “is to navigate the floor without breaking the cooling lava shell on top.”
Victoria said nothing. Troy rolled his eyes and wished he could spare enough energy to work up a little anger at her silence.
“At least tell me if there’s another water bottle in here,” he said.
“Not that I know of. Sorry.” Her voice suggested that she truly was.
Cautiously, tentatively, he set about walking on the precarious, cooling lava. The first shell of rock he stepped on was so fragile it cracked under his weight, forcing him to jump back to the safety of the entrance’s landing. After catching his breath, he sidestepped that spot and jumped to the next nearest foothold that looked sturdy. But this time instead of waiting to see if the rocky shell would hold him, he kept going, ignoring whatever sounds he heard from underfoot and leaping from spot to spot as quickly as possible.
Despite his tiredness, he was encouraged by the simplicity of the Red Room. He could do this. He just had to avoid the big mounds and keep to the lowest parts of the ground. As long as he kept trusting his instincts about which parts of the ground would hold his weight without crashing through to the lava underneath, this was doable. Simple, even.
Still, it would take ten to fifteen minutes to cross the enormous expanse of the Red Room. So Troy took the opportunity to throw some new questions Victoria’s way.
“You mentioned that the Corridor talks to you,” he said, leaping three feet to the next safe spot. “Are you linked to it? Like you are with me?”
“The sensation is…similar. In a way,” said Victoria, and he could hear her surprise at his abrupt interest in grilling her for answers. “But it doesn’t speak to me with words. I sort of get these images in my head that… show me what it wants.”
Troy stopped short. “Wait, it doesn’t speak? Not ever? So it may not even be—”
“Of human design?” Victoria finished. “I’ve wondered about that for as long as I’ve been here. It would explain why the Corridor needs someone like me. It can’t speak our language, so it needs a human go-between. God only knows why it picked me. I’m nothing special.”
Troy wished he could contradict her. It felt like the polite thing to do. But he knew nothing about her. Any words of support would come out hollow. What could he back up such a claim with? Best not to insult her intelligence with a meaningless compliment, he concluded.
Voice. She was the Corridor’s voice.
“Wait, is that you, announcing when I’ve succeeded?” he asked, jumping to one side. A crack appeared in the crust and a few drops of lava splashed on his shoe. “You know, the ‘Congratulations, Runner, you’ve escaped the whatever…’?”
“It’s my voice,” she replied with a note of disdain, “but I’m not in control when it happens. The Corridor sort of…pushes its will on me.”
“But—but you must be here to do more than just speak for the Corridor,” he pointed out. “I mean, you’ve done more than that all this time. You help me. And I don’t get the sense that the Corridor is forcing you to do that.”
“It’s not.”
Was she paying a price for choosing to assist him?
“When you were all formal and announcing my welcome or whatever, you called me Runner thirty-seven thirty-five. Does that mean—?”
“That there have been three thousand, seven hundred and thirty-four Runners before you? It’s possible.”
Troy considered this while leaping to another spot, but found that his mind kept returning to something else she’d told him.
“You said our connection was mutual. But I can only hear your voice. I can’t see anything you see.”
“My own eyes see nothing. It’s difficult to explain… My mind is working just fine, but my senses are completely cut off from my body. So my only information comes from my connection to you, and from what the Corridor tells me.”
A small stream of lava brought Troy up short. “Wait, how long have you been here?” he asked while searching for another route.
“The Corridor wakes up my mind when it has need of me. When there’s a Runner. The rest of the time I’m asleep. But I know it’s been a long time. Years, maybe.”
For the first time, he felt like maybe Victoria had gotten the worse end of this deal. What he was doing was impossibly hard, but he’d only been here for three or four hours. How much of her l
ife had Victoria lost to this place? Would she ever get it back?
He jumped over the lava flow, even though it took him over a crusted mound that looked higher than he liked.
“How old are you?” Troy suddenly asked.
Victoria hesitated. “I was fifteen when I was brought here.”
Troy understood. With no way of knowing how long ago she’d arrived at the Corridor, she couldn’t know how old she was. She could still be fifteen, or she could be forty, for all she knew.
“Where are you from?”
“Oklahoma. Grew up on a farm there.”
“They don’t have fuchsia on farms in Oklahoma?”
Victoria actually laughed. “I guess we don’t.”
Troy smiled. It was the first time he’d done it since arriving here. “Well, for whatever it’s worth…I think you’re special.”
“What?” she asked, surprise in her voice.
“You said you don’t know why it picked you, since you aren’t anything special. But the very fact that the Corridor did pick you proves how special you are.”
He found a solid footing and glanced about. A little over a third of the way there. This one was proving to be the easiest Room yet. Which made his stomach churn with anxiety. It was going to get harder. That was a given. The only question was when.
The ground gave a tiny pop and then a slight lurch.
“Ah! Oh, jeez!” he yelped.
“What?”
“My shoe’s stuck!” he cried, looking down so she could see.
The ground-hardening lava had given way beneath his left foot, causing the sole of his shoe to drop down an inch or so into the lava beneath that was somewhere between red hot liquid and black, burned rock. His shoe’s rubber sole was already gooey and melting faster by the second.
“What do I do? Take it off?”
“No!” she replied with a surprisingly forceful tone. “You’ll never survive this Room without something to protect your feet. You have to pull it out! Pull as hard as you can!”
“If I was holding anything back, I would tell you!” Troy snarled.
“Try pushing your foot down farther into the rock!”
Corridor (A MythWorks Novel) Page 5
