I turned around, eyes locking on the triangular pedestal. “And I agree to that,” I said, reciting Robert Frost under my breath, “or in so far as I can see no way out but through.”
I squared my shoulders, held my head high, and returned my focus to the new puzzle. After dropping the sapphire back into the basin, I glanced over my shoulder, curious to see if returning the stone would open the wall again.
It didn’t.
Exhaling a sigh, I studied the pedestal’s surface. It seemed obvious to me that the solution to this puzzle required placement of each gemstone in the appropriate depression. There were nine holes in total, which meant there were well over a hundred thousand possible arrangements, maybe even hundreds of thousands. But there would be just one solution.
There had to be a pattern. Based on the last puzzle, I couldn’t imagine the builder of the labyrinth picking a random arrangement of the gemstones as the solution for this one. Then it wouldn’t be a puzzle at all, but more of a combination lock. And I was getting the impression that these puzzles meant something; they were tests, and only the worthiest—the one who could pass all of the tests—would reach the prize at the end.
I was tempted to just start arranging the stones, hazarding a guess at what the pattern might be. I glanced around the room. There was no saying what kind of traps lay in wait, ready to be triggered by even a single wrong move.
I narrowed my eyes.
The chamber itself was trap enough. Would the builder really have booby-trapped this space further? He or she—whoever they were—clearly wanted someone to make their way through the labyrinth. If that wasn’t the desired outcome, the builder would have nixed the puzzles altogether and made the prize at the end impossible to reach.
But this wasn’t impossible. It was extremely difficult and even more dangerous, but it was not impossible.
I stared down at the surface of the pedestal for a long time, weighing my options. I really only had one—to place a gemstone in a depression and see what happened. I would have to do it eventually, or resign myself to slow death by dehydration.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I reached into the basin, grabbed a gemstone at random—an emerald, this time—and dropped it into one of the holes.
I held my breath, waiting for spikes to shoot out of the floor or for the ceiling to start lowering.
But nothing happened.
It looked like I wouldn’t be impaled or crushed today—at least, not here, and not for attempting to falsely solve this puzzle.
Empowered by my newborn freedom to experiment, I scooped the rest of the gemstones out of the bowl and began arranging them in the divots in order by color, starting with the old rainbow-based standard: ROY G BIV. I placed the eighth gemstone, a deep violet amethyst, then stared at the ninth hole.
It was empty. So was my hand.
I looked at the basin, hoping I had missed a gemstone when scooping out the rest. But it was empty, too.
Had I dropped a gemstone in my haste to solve the puzzle?
I drew my bottom lip between my teeth, chewing on it as I slowly scanned the floor. I assumed the ninth gemstone would be about the same size as the others; they were all a little larger than the standard marble. And though I didn’t want to fall prey to a trap built of assumptions, I was thinking this last gemstone had to be a diamond—it was the only major gemstone that was missing from the set.
My slow scan of the floor faltered when I reached the corpse curled up near the wall, where the opening from the labyrinth had been. I felt the blood drain from my face and a chill settle into my bones. Looking up at the ceiling, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and swallowed roughly, searching for some other solution.
The last thing I wanted to do was search a decrepit corpse for the missing gemstone. Sure, looting dead guys was a major part of most of the video games I played—it was one of the main ways players stocked up on pretty much everything from armor and weapons to ammo and first-aid supplies in virtually all RPGs and action-adventure games—but the prospect of digging through a dead man’s pockets in real life made my stomach turn.
Groaning, low and slow, I opened my eyes and returned my gaze to the corpse. It was neither the most decomposed nor the freshest of the bodies I’d crossed paths with in the labyrinth so far. In a way, it was better preserved than the other bodies I’d come across—almost looking mummified—probably because, until now, it had been sealed in this chamber, untouched by even the movement of air. Despite Rome being a high humidity area, down here, it was cool and dry.
The corpse’s skin had thinned and, I guessed based on its straw-colored hair, darkened until it looked like tanned leather stretched over his skeleton. And I guessed the corpse to be male based on the short hair.
He lay face-down, thankfully, so I’d yet to catch a glimpse of his no-doubt grisly face. Based on his clothing—typical turn-of-the-century archaeologist fashion with khaki trousers, a linen shirt that was still off-white-ish in the places not directly touching the body, a leather satchel, a matching canteen, and a brown fedora befitting of good old Indiana Jones—I placed the man as at least a century dead.
His lack of stink was a pretty good indicator. And his clothing had a brittle quality to it that marked it as predating the modern era of pop-culture; the outfit hadn’t been influenced by our current notion of what a tomb-raiding adventurer should wear. This guy was the genuine article, not an imitation. Not that it had done him any good in the end.
I inhaled and exhaled deeply, shoulders rising and falling, then moved closer to the corpse. The chamber wasn’t large, and after two steps, I was nearly on top of him.
I slipped my backpack off my shoulders and set it on the floor beside me, then crouched down, reaching for the dead man’s bag with my uninjured hand. I turned it over and, with a flick of my fingers, flipped the leather flap open. I leaned forward to peer inside.
There was a book—one more to add to my rapidly growing collection—and a rolled-up leather case about as thick as my wrist, as well as a green, rectangular tin no larger than a standard bible.
I pulled out all three items, placing them on the floor before peeking into the bag to see what might be hiding at the bottom. I reached into the satchel again, grabbing a shiny brass compass and a collapsible telescope. I stared at the compass for a moment, watching the needle spin around and around. Brow furrowing, I set it down and stuck my hand back into the bag, scraping the bottom with my fingertips.
But that was it. No gemstone.
Resting my forearm on my knee, I took a quick breather, attempting to bolster my corpse-looting resolve with a series of deep breaths and a couple silent affirmations.
I am strong.
I am brave.
I ran through a mental list of all the strong, brave things I had done lately. Even if it felt like I had just been a passenger in my own body and Persephone had been in control, I had still done those things.
And I could do this.
I gulped and leaned forward, planting my knees on the floor, then reached for the dead man’s trousers, hand trembling. Whatever I told myself, I wasn’t really sure I could do this. At this point, I was an old pro at seeing dead bodies, but other than the skeletons I’d brushed against while searching for the trap door in the catacombs, I’d never touched a dead person. I really didn’t want to start now.
And I didn’t have to, I realized.
I pulled my trusty leather gloves out from my back pocket. Wincing, I tugged the left glove onto my uninjured hand, then stuffed the other glove back into my pocket and returned my attention to the corpse.
I inhaled deeply, held my breath, and slid my fingers into the dead man’s trouser pocket. The fabric was as stiff and brittle as it looked, and the front of the pocket tore on either side as I searched.
I blew out a breath and pulled my hand out. The pocket was empty.
I quickly checked the other pocket, but it was empty, too.
Sitting back on my heels, I sta
red at the corpse. The only thing left to do now was to turn him over to make sure he wasn’t lying on the missing gemstone. I shivered as I considered the possibility that if this guy had died on top of the gemstone, and over the decades his body had been in here, slowly decaying and mummifying, the gemstone could very well have sunken into his flesh.
After a quick repeating of my strong-brave affirmation, I reached across the dead man and gripped his far arm through his shirt sleeve. He felt petrified, almost like he had been carved of wood. I frowned, eyebrows rising. Surprisingly, this wasn’t as gross as I’d expected.
With a grunt and a tug, I awkwardly rolled the dead man onto his back. He was far from heavy, but considering his leathery, mummified state, I supposed that made sense. All of the moisture had probably long since left his body.
His face was about what I had imagined—dry, thin lips pulled back into a death grin and mouth surrounded by a short, scraggly beard. His eye sockets were vacant, and his nose stopped at the bone.
I tried—and failed—not to envision what his final days of life must have been like. I imagined the loneliness he must have felt. The panic. The fear and the sadness. I thought about his family, if he’d had one, and how they must have felt when he never come home. And I couldn’t help but wonder if this man had been in the same position I was currently in—if lives had been depending on his successful return.
The faint sting of welling tears tingled in my eyes, and I blinked a few times. I cleared my throat and took a deep breath. Now was not the time to commiserate with a dead man.
I laughed under my breath and shook my head. For all I knew, this guy could have been just as bad as psycho-Henry back in the vault.
I set aside sentiment and scanned the corpse carefully, from head to toe, then examined the floor where he’d been lying just a moment ago. No gemstone.
There was one last place to look.
Gritting my teeth, I pried the fingers of one of his hands open, snapping a few digits at the joints, then checked the other hand. Both were empty.
Exhaling heavily, I sat back on my heels and pulled off my glove. It was coated in dusty, dead man residue. I stuffed the glove back into my pocket with its partner, then added the dead man’s things to my backpack, keeping only the journal out.
The journal’s cover was soft and suede-like. I flipped it open, then thumbed through the pages, finding the last page of writing. I figured any clues pointing me in the right direction—or in the wrong one, considering the man’s state of deadness—would be at the end. The journal didn’t disappoint.
. . . I know Jack didn’t intend any harm. He was frightened, as was I. He panicked. I cannot blame him for fleeing when the wall started to close up again. And yet, the boy sealed my fate when he took the diamond. I shall not make it any further into the labyrinth without the ninth stone. A pity, truly. We made a good go at it.
Nina told me this would be the adventure that did me in. She called me Icarus, and told me I was trying to fly too close to the sun. I kissed her and told her not to worry. I told her I would return. In my heart, though, I, too, knew this expedition would be my last.
Should anyone find this journal and make it through the labyrinth, it is my last wish to have this book returned to my family . . .
“Well, shit,” I said, snapping the journal shut with one hand.
Some long-dead guy named Jack had run off with the diamond, leaving me one gemstone short and making the puzzle unsolvable.
After everything, this was it. The end.
I bowed my head over the journal. My death sentence—and my mom’s and Raiden’s—had been delivered in the words of a dead man, written over a century ago. It was almost laughable.
Or at least it might have been, if it wasn’t so damn sad.
36
“The regulator . . .”
At the sound of Persephone’s voice whispering through my mind, I snapped my head up and looked for her. But she wasn’t here, not like she was before.
I chalked up her earlier appearance to the mold. It had messed with my head, making me hear terrifying things, but maybe it had helped me, too.
“Try the regulator . . .”
“The regulator?” I repeated aloud, touching my fingertips to the pendant hanging around my neck. Did Persephone think it could serve as a stand-in for the puzzle’s missing piece?
I waited to see if she would give me any further direction, but it seemed she’d fallen silent once more. I was back to being on my own.
I considered my options and figured the couldn’t-be-that-simple solution was the first one to try.
Gripping the regulator, I pulled the necklace off over my head, gently shaking my ponytail free from the chain. I held the necklace up, letting the regulator dangle in front of my face. The stone still glowed that electric blue, but I remembered how it had looked when Emi had held it in her hand. Colorless and clear—like a diamond.
I pursed my lips and shook my head. There was no way the stone in the regulator was a diamond. For one, it was huge. And while blue and yellow diamonds did exist, last I checked, diamonds didn’t change color. Or glow.
Brimming with disbelief, I lowered the regulator down to the pedestal. I set it over the empty depression, stone-side down, then let go of the chain. I held my breath, counting my thudding heartbeats.
One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .
The sound started as a low rumble, but within seconds, it was a roar. The whole chamber shook, and I clutched the pedestal for balance.
Gemstones bounced out of their depressions. I just barely managed to snag the regulator by the chain before it fell.
Without warning, the stone beneath my feet dropped out of the floor.
And I dropped with it.
37
I dropped ten or fifteen feet. Far and fast enough to bruise, but not to break.
For long seconds, I lay on my back, just trying to breathe. The wind had been knocked clean out of me for the second time that day, and it was like my lungs had forgotten how to draw in air. I tried again and again to inhale, but all I managed was to gasp as my lungs spasmed. Bright spots danced around in the darkness encroaching on the edges of my vision as the threat of unconsciousness closed in.
I finally managed a lungful of air, and it was like I had been underwater and was just now breaking through the surface. I had been drowning, but now I could breathe.
Once I had put some distance between myself and unconsciousness, I propped myself up on my elbows and stretched out my neck. I winced, cringing. My hand and shoulder were still the brightest spots of pain, but I hurt pretty much everywhere now. I could only imagine how I would feel in an hour or two.
I sat up all the way, then looked around. On my left, the floor was about six inches above my landing spot; on my right, it was six inches below. Again, I looked one way, then the other, brain processing what I was seeing.
A stairway. I’d landed on stairs.
I studied the shape of the next stair up; it was a long, narrow wedge. Had the floor of the chamber become the stairs?
I looked up. Sure enough, the triangular pedestal was there, high overhead. Now that the stairs had settled in place around it, I could see that the pedestal was just the top part of a long pillar making up the axis of a spiral staircase.
I looked to the right again, craning my neck to see around the pillar. The stairs descended until well out of sight.
With a sigh, I planted my uninjured hand on the higher stair on my left and pushed myself up to my feet. I groaned as I stood.
Once I was up, I secured the regulator around my neck once more. I glanced down, watching as the stone filled with a subtle amber glow. Apparently, it returned to the active, psychic-input-blocking state if I put it down. Good to know.
My backpack was a few steps up, along with my dead companion. Most of him, at least. He’d lost his head during the fall; it was nowhere to be seen, and I figured I would find it at the bottom of the stairway. I could s
ee the end of the doru just poking around the pillar, back up near the top.
Feeling like my feet weighed a thousand pounds each, I lugged my sore body up the stairs. I gathered the handful of gemstones I passed, tucking away a ruby, sapphire, amethyst, moonstone, and a black gem I didn’t have a name for in the front pocket of my jeans.
I retrieved the doru, then started back down the stairs. When I reached my bag, I paused to stuff the dead man’s journal into the main pocket before hoisting the bag onto my back and continuing on down the stairs.
The farther I descended, the darker it grew, until I reached the final stair and the way ahead was pitch black. I was just starting to turn around to head back up to retrieve one of the torches when a spotlight flared, illuminating a three-foot circle about a dozen paces beyond the bottom stair. A moment later, a man flickered into existence in the center of the lighted area.
I staggered back. My heel caught on the edge of a step, and I lost my balance, landing on my butt a couple stairs up. Even as I fell, I raised the doru, aiming it at the man.
He flickered again, going completely transparent for a few seconds, like he might vanish into thin air. Like he wasn’t really there at all.
I straightened, planting the butt of the doru on the floor and standing. Tilting my head to the side, I studied the man standing maybe twenty feet away. It had to be a hologram.
He appeared somehow larger than life—taller than any man I had ever met, not that I’d met all that many, and exotic looking in an otherworldly way. He was fair, with alabaster skin and ashy, almost silver blond hair that had been pulled back into a low ponytail. His eyes straddled the line between blue and green. There was an unearthly beauty about him, set off by an overwhelming air of power, both physical and intellectual.
He was dressed monochromatically, his tailored pants, knee-high boots, and long, fitted coat that buttoned up from waist to collar all the same silvery shade. All he needed were a couple of pointy ears, and he would have fit right in on the set of a Tolkien movie.
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