“Climb!” I called back to her.
Grabbing one handle of a file cabinet after another, we did just that—continuing to scale the stacks a block of them at a time.
We were up against the clock, as every twelve seconds or so the floor beneath us would glow again and suck more cabinets through. I moved slower than the others due to my natural aversion to climbing pairing badly with the slipperiness of my wet hands. Add to that, each time the floor opened up and more files sank down there was an accompanying tremor that almost threw me off whatever cabinet I happened to be clinging to.
Still, while these room-shaking episodes slowed me down, at least I never fell. I gripped the handles with conviction and resisted the urge to freak out as I hung on for dear life until the shaking subsided each time.
My uncoordinated climbing aside, we were moving relatively fast. And those intervals between the sinkages caused us to gain a decent lead in our race against time. So much so that a minute later, when we’d all made it to the tops of our respective stacks, we were actually above the level of the desired doors by at least twenty feet.
It was good news, as was the fact that I’d managed to climb up this high without slipping and/or dying. But the victory dance had to wait, as we still needed to make it to the other side of the room.
Without any discussion each of us began to hop from one row of cabinet towers to the next—making our way to the distant doors in a manner akin to a grand, life-threatening game of hopscotch. It seemed to be advancing us pretty quickly, but after my third jump I suddenly stopped when I realized something. I’d forgotten about the cabinet I’d been after before.
My friends and Daniel were a good ways ahead and still going forward. I had to make a decision before it was too late and they noticed my delay.
Ok, Crisa. The floor is literally disappearing. If you go back now, what if you can’t make it to the other side of the room before the doors are out of reach and you get trapped below with nowhere to go? Turning back makes absolutely no logical sense here.
I turned back.
This was not the time for logic; this was a time for gut instinct. And mine was telling me that whatever was in that cabinet was immeasurably important.
I hopped back to the stack adjacent the one I’d originally come for. My eyes began scanning downwards—squinting through the dim light as I read the names printed on each of the cabinets.
“Nye Vanderbelt, Norman Lerman, Nona Sanchez, Neil Diamond . . .”
I looked farther and farther down—reading several dozen more names.
Come on, I know I saw it.
“Nehari Brown, Navara Burell . . .”
Wait! There it was! The last cabinet—the one closest to the floor—was the one I was after.
Yes!
Alas, my triumph was cut short in the next instant when the very cabinet I sought was digested by the floor portal.
No!
What do I do, what do I do?
As it happened, what I did was probably the stupidest, most reckless thing I’d done all weekend. Which was really saying something.
I jumped.
My body swan-dived into the watery room below along with the latest stack of cabinets.
When I hit water I immediately started swimming downwards. The cabinet I was aiming for was only one of several to have been sucked down in this latest interval of sinkage. Though since it had been the closest set to the portal it was now only a slight ways away.
Upon reaching it, I pulled the top drawer open and found a single, glowing folder inside.
With no time to spend wondering how the water hadn’t already disintegrated the thing, I shoved it into my satchel.
Above me the ceiling lit up once more and I took that as my cue to swim for it. I had to get out of here before the portal closed again. Which I totally would have managed to do—by the way—had it not been for the unfortunate fact that right at that moment I was distracted by the unexpected sight of another body diving into the water.
Daniel?
He swam over to me, a surprised and angry expression on his face that nowhere near matched the surprised and angry expression on mine. I seriously would’ve yelled at him then had it not been for the lack of oxygen. So instead I mime-yelled at him before making my way up to the now resealed barrier.
At the next opening we climbed back into the file room and started to scale the cabinets anew. “What were you thinking?” I shouted at Daniel as I gripped one handle after another in ascent.
“What was I thinking?!” Daniel scowled. “I saw you fall off the stacks and went back to help you.”
“For your information, I didn’t fall, I jumped!”
“Fine then. You’re not clumsy; you’re just stupid!”
I was about to respond when the floor acted up again and unleashed a much larger tremor than usual. The force threw me off the cabinet I was holding onto, but I was able to grasp another handle with my right hand before I fell more than a few feet. I swung from the grip and when I looked up I was infuriated to see Daniel reaching out for me.
“Here,” he had the nerve to say. “Give me your hand.” Now it was my turn to scowl. “I. Don’t. Need. Your. Help!” I focused my strength and pulled myself up until my foot found another cabinet to boost up on. Once it was secure, I kept climbing the tower and ignored Daniel until we reached its summit.
The walls around us had grown a lot in our absence. And even though we were as high as we could go, the doors on the other side of the room were no longer far below us. They were now exactly at eye level, yet still a good hundred-foot dash ahead.
SJ, Blue, and Jason, on the other hand, had just reached them. They stopped short at that point, for it seemed only then had they noticed that Daniel and I were missing from the group. When they looked back for us I waved them to continue forward as Daniel and I started hopping from one row to the next in our attempt to catch up.
“Keep going!” I called out insistently.
They seemed reluctant to proceed without us, but since the exits were rising and would soon have moved past them, Blue reached out and twisted the knob of the nearest door. It swung inwards and she jumped in first, followed by SJ. When SJ made it inside however, another layer of files sank and the door rose above Jason’s head.
Even with this obstacle he was not waylaid. He quickly responded by backing up and getting a running start toward his target before jumping off the cabinet stack.
Jason’s hands barely grasped the bottom edge of the doorframe, but he was still able to pull himself up into whatever room the exit led to. Meanwhile, Daniel and I leapt from one tower of cabinets to the next in a mad rush to get to the other side before it was too late for us to do the same.
Despite our best efforts, we just didn’t make it soon enough. By the time we reached the far wall, the door our friends had gone through was a solid twenty-five feet above our heads and counting.
We had no way of getting up there. And it wouldn’t have been long before the rest of the cabinets we stood on were absorbed through the floor and the two of us were trapped inside that inexplicable oceanic chamber along with them. I began rummaging through my satchel—searching for something that might give me an idea.
Let’s see. I have my wand, the survey Debbie left me, a dinner roll, and . . . wait a second, Blue’s enchanted ball of yarn!
I hadn’t gotten the chance to give it back to her after she’d loaned it to me the night before.
Thank goodness this satchel is so deceptively big; there aren’t many practical handbags in the world that can hold so much random junk like this!
Small victory aside, the yarn wasn’t enough to get us out of our current predicament. While the discovery was helpful, the door we were aiming for was too high up now for me to throw the other end of the transformed rope to my friends. Add to that, the height and angle of the door paired with the flopsy, lightweight nature of the ball itself made it impossible to simply toss it up to them in this form either.
No, the yarn alone would not be enough for an escape. But I knew what would.
If only I had a . . .
“Crisa!” Blue shouted from the doorframe above—as if reading my mind. “We searched the room and there was a box of arrows in here! Did you bring your—”
“Yeah, I’ve got it!” I interrupted.
Blue carefully tossed down one of the arrows. I caught it and removed the ball of yarn from my satchel.
“Tie one end of this to the arrow,” I ordered Daniel.
“Why?”
I squeezed the ball of yarn three times—morphing it into the giant pile of climbing rope. “That’s why.”
As he tied the rope to the arrow, I angled away from him and shoved my hand back into the satchel. My wand was so not something I was about to show Daniel. Wrapping my fingers around it, I transformed it inside the bag before taking it out.
Bow.
A moment later I pulled a newly transformed, silver and slightly glowing archer’s bow from my bag.
Daniel stared at me in disbelief. “You carry a bow in your purse?”
“Well, with all the lipstick and perfume there was no room for a machete. Yes, I carry a bow in my purse, Daniel. Now give me that!” I snapped, snatching the arrow with the attached rope from his hands.
I drew the bow, aimed, and with a focused exhale, released. The arrow shot expertly through the doorway above us.
Huh, I guess aim really does improve with practice. Thank you dartboard and late night homework procrastination.
A few seconds passed before Jason gave us the signal that their end of the rope had been securely fastened. I handed Daniel our end, which was unraveling as it was pulled upward every time another layer of cabinets sank down and the room it was anchored to moved higher overhead.
“You go first,” I commanded.
“No way, you go!”
I refused to take the rope back from him. “Look, I suck at climbing. By the time I get up there, the room will be too high up and you won’t be able to reach the rope at all. So just go! Quickly!”
He seemed to want to argue, but knew I was right. Whichever one of us went first would have to scale the rope super quickly for the other person to even have a chance of reaching it when it was their turn.
I was not too proud to admit that it would take me a lot longer to climb up than it would for him, which was why I insisted he go ahead of me.
Much to his displeasure, Daniel was forced to agree with the rationale and wrapped the rope tightly around his hand before swinging off the cabinets. He used his foot to keep from ramming into the wall, and to steady himself as he hung from the rope. Then he pulled himself up one hand after another toward the distant room—walking up the wall like a mountain climber.
I morphed my wand back to normal and stuffed it into my satchel as I waited anxiously and watched my hopes of escaping move farther and farther away.
When Daniel reached the door, the others helped pull him inside and reeled in the rope. Bundling it up, Jason threw it back down to me.
I was at the very edge of the cabinet and stretched out as far as I could, but even before the rope unraveled completely I knew it would not make it. Sure enough, it came down just a couple inches out of my reach. As a result, it swung through the air and—with no one to catch it—straight toward the wall.
Oh boy, here goes.
Before any more time could slip away I backed up and jumped off the cabinets in pursuit of the lifeline.
I hit the wall. Hard. But I was able to grab onto the end of the rope with my left hand. After dangling there for a second, I harnessed a combination of luck and upper-body strength to pull myself up along it.
Stupid . . . climbing . . . why . . . did it have . . . to be . . . climbing . . .
Eventually (or amazingly I should say), I made it all the way to the door. Naturally, at the exact instant I tried to pull myself in, the wrath of the portal shook the whole file room again and caused me to be launched through the opening with a lot less grace than hoped for. I was thrown inside—falling forward and knocking a nearby Daniel over with me.
“Get off,” I spat as we hit the floor and the room settled. I pushed him away and shuddered like I’d just kissed a frog.
“You knocked me over,” he said, getting up just as vehemently.
I was about to shout back a retort, but that’s when I noticed I didn’t have to shout anymore. Just as suddenly as they’d come on, the alarms had totally stopped.
Whatever the reason seemed unimportant for the time being. I just knew that I was grateful for a moment to think things through without that awful sound ringing in my ears. As I wrung the remaining water from my hair, I began to do just that—commencing with analyzing the room we currently found ourselves in.
The place was relatively cold, yet fairly musty. Rafters crisscrossed around the ceiling, supporting strange iron gas lanterns, which emanated the greenish glow that provided the room with its limited, eerie source of light.
These lanterns, along with everything else in the room for that matter, were covered in cobwebs. Sitting in the shadowy corner across from me there was a dirty desk with a filth-covered leather chair. And all around the room—blocking entire portions of wall and stretching up to the rafters—were stacks upon stacks of dusty boxes, some open, some closed.
Not seeing another exit at first, the five of us went over to the pile of boxes to endeavor to find one behind them. In the process, though, we couldn’t help but rifle through some of the boxes’ weird contents.
Based on the layout of the room, the professional looking chair, and the desk, which still had a dusty stapler and a stack of withered yellow notepads sitting on top of it, I deduced that this was some kind of office that hadn’t been used in ages. What kind of office had it once been, though? Of that I had zero idea. The objects we proceeded to find in those boxes were as perplexing as they were diverse.
One had a bunch of bronze arrows like the kind Blue had thrown down to me. A second contained only a single item: an onyx-colored dagger with a leather handle and a golden, swirly design carved into its base. The third box I opened was filled to the brim with broken hand mirrors that must have once been beautiful before time had shattered their faces and taken their rusting toll.
I picked up one of the mirrors by the handle and turned it over in my hand. There was something engraved in the back. With the damp edge of my sleeve, I rubbed the dust around the letters away until the words “Mark One” revealed themselves.
Intrigued, I picked up a second mirror from the pile and repeated the process. Again I discovered the same words etched into the back of the destroyed mirror. “Mark One.”
Huh, weird, I thought to myself as I fingered the aged looking glass. I wonder what it means . . .
The five of us continued to rummage through the objects inside the various boxes. As this went on, we found stranger and stranger knickknacks. There were empty bottles, shriveled flowers, surprisingly ripe fruit, and the list only got more bizarre from there.
Jason, clearly as put off by the discoveries as we were, held up one of the ripe fruits (a perfectly yellow, practically glittering lemon) and posed the question each of us was thinking. “What is all this junk?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Blue said as she bundled up the last of her rope and returned it to yarn form. “But we better keep moving. Something tells me this isn’t a yard sale we want to be caught looting through.”
She was right. Prolonging this aimless investigation was not in our best interest. If anything, it was just causing us to lose time and become one step closer to being apprehended.
All of us in agreement, we put down the various knickknacks that had distracted us and continued to work on shoving stacks of boxes out of the way.
Eventually we managed to clear the back wall enough to see the wooden edge of a doorframe. At that, it only took a few more moments of team effort to clear the path for our exit.
The hallway we entered
into next was as white as all the others. However, there was one thing about this corridor that distinguished it from the others we’d been bolting down earlier—there were no numbers written on the doors. Rather, every door had a name and title printed on it. Looking back at the door from which we’d just exited, for instance, I saw a semi-disintegrated title that read: “Paige Tomkins: Magical Transfers, Tracking, & Recalls.”
My brain made a mental note of the name as we fast-walked down the hallway—anxiety rapidly building in the silence around us.
It was now starting to make me a bit nervous that everything had gotten so abruptly calm. After all, it was barely two minutes ago that we were immersed in ear-piercing alarms and sinking rooms. Going from impending doom to total tranquility without explanation or a hint of logical transition felt super suspicious.
Jason, SJ, and Blue were discussing this very thought up ahead while Daniel and I trailed behind. I didn’t get to join in the conversation though, as Daniel once again baited me into one of our own.
“That was a pretty impressive jump, Knight,” he said, his voice low so that only I could hear him.
“Whatever,” I shrugged.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “You’re not still upset I followed you when you dove off those file cabinets are you?”
“No,” I replied.
“Cuz I only did it because I thought you were in trouble and could use the help.”
“I said I’m not upset, Daniel,” I insisted. “But for the record, even if I was in trouble—in case I didn’t make myself clear before—I don’t want your help.”
“Yeah, I figured that out when you chose to fall five hundred feet today instead of letting me give you a hand in the tournament.”
“Good. Glad the message got across.”
“Seriously, that’s your response?” he asked in disbelief. “Come on, Knight, what’s your damage? If you had just given me your hand back there today, you could’ve avoided the embarrassment of having everyone see what happened to you. How is that not a better option than what you ended up doing?”
Protagonist Bound Page 23
