I glanced at Dorian. "What's the chance we can walk through walls?"
"I'd be willing to bet we might be able to do a lot of crazy things in this place." He exhaled slowly with a bittersweet twist of his lips.
Together, we took a step forward. We phased through the wall as if it were nothing.
The blue zero blinked inside my mind.
I let out a surprised yelp as suddenly the world flipped around. We landed sprawling on a panel of yellow glass. I glanced down and my heart sank. Starving vampires sat below us in cells like the ones in the sanitarium. They bunched together in a huddle. My skin pricked with unsettled goosebumps.
Dorian glared down at them. They were likely illusions, but they looked so real. He let out a furious snarl. "Those sick bastards." They were having us literally walk on Dorian's kin. I swallowed.
"They’re just trying to mess with our heads. We’ll give them a few choice words after all this. We’ve made it through the first trick. There has to be a way out of this one." I looked down to see that the corridor was much like the first, but the floor was indeed a series of cells, one after the other. I heard sounds of footsteps from somewhere in the distance, and the clacking of hands against machines. It was a reminder of the sick scientists who used us and the vampires for research. It was hard to look down and see the bodies huddled together. For a moment, my eyes blurred with tears as I remembered those terrible times in the yellow cells.
We walked until we reached a dead end. Screams rang out down the hall. I tensed upon hearing it, trying to remind myself that it was all an illusion. Even knowing it wasn’t real—it can’t be real—a cold dread sank into my bones. Dorian’s shoulder went rigid. He slapped his palm against the wall, and this palm print was much angrier and darker than the others. I stared at the dead end, thinking. No monsters so far. Was that odd? Or did they intend to drive us insane by torturing us? Dorian stared at the ground, and I darted a look down.
To my surprise, one of the vampires was looking up. He was staring up at me. Something in his eyes was strange, unfeeling and white… He was fake, of course.
"I think we need to imagine ourselves in the cell below us," Dorian said.
What? I turned to him, alarmed and resistant to the idea. But it made a horrible kind of sense. The arbiters were trying to manipulate us, disguising the direction that we needed to go in as the least desirable option. When I thought about it, they were actually trying too hard. They’d overplayed their hand.
I cursed under my breath, nodding.
Dorian, though… he didn’t look repelled by the fake vampires. His initial fury had softened to weary sympathy.
“Do you think they feel pain?” he asked. It was as if he couldn’t help caring about them, even knowing that they were proxies set in place to manipulate us. This was why he fell into the leadership role so naturally, why I couldn’t help but love him.
The arbiters, with their nonexistent sense of duty, could never have anticipated Dorian. He’d seen through their scheme in less than five minutes, just by empathizing with beings they barely distinguished from furniture. I felt the sudden urge to kiss him, but I squeezed his hand instead.
“I hope not,” I answered quietly.
We imagined ourselves in the cell beneath us. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach, a tug like when we traveled through portals, then we were in the cell. The vampires were all around us, and the cell was thick with the stench of fear. Dorian and I stuck close to one another as the bodies pressed in on us, their fangs descending. Just as I thought we were going to have to fight our way out, the vampires disappeared into a puff of smoke along with all of the light. I blinked, confused.
Dorian stayed back to back with me, lighting up his hand in a flash of red light as we registered a soft, slithering sound a half second before a dark, thick shape suddenly launched from the wall. We jumped apart, and it shot through the space where we'd been standing. The serpent hissed, a strange rattling sound, then let out a roar of flames.
Dorian sucked in a sharp breath as blue fire caught the edge of his elbow and snapped up his shoulder. He let out a hiss. In such a confined space, our weather attacks would be hard to control, but we needed them to escape the beast. I focused on my feeling of determination, almost relieved to face a physical opponent instead of another puzzle. The blue lasso circle I used during training appeared in my mind. A thousand training sessions and practicing on Jia were hard to forget.
As the serpent attempted to lunge toward us again, propelling itself off the wall, I imagined the ring around his tail. I wanted to anchor him against the wall. It took a tiny chunk of my energy. Just like the other Games, this one caused us true exertion. The snake attempted to lunge forward, but he was stuck against the wall, stretched to his full form of eight feet. Dorian grinned, although he winced as he sent a lightning blast of anger at the shadowy beast. It evaporated into smoke.
We searched the empty cell but found no way out. Dorian hadn't bothered to burn a handprint here; we had the scorched remains of the snake to keep track. The blue zero flickered briefly inside my mind, on the verge of turning into a one. Was this near the end of the first challenge? If there were four challenges, we had three more after this. That meant the wall and the vampire cells and the snake had all counted as one obstacle. God, I loathe Krysh and her designs right now.
But we still needed to beat the first obstacle, and apparently killing the snake hadn’t quite done it. I frowned and stooped down to look at the remains. Why had it been left behind when the snake turned to smoke? The other proxies hadn’t left any marks behind, when we killed them in the previous trial. I touched the charred floor, and to my surprised horror, my fingers went inside the mark.
"I feel we need to…" I trailed off as I shoved my hand through the opening. It was no longer a burn mark, but some kind of portal to the next room. Dorian whistled quietly. In my head, the blue number flickered to a one. “I think they’ve given me a counter inside my head. I see a blue number. I think we might’ve just cleared the first challenge.”
"Let me go first, just in case," he advised. I nodded.
He lowered himself through the scorch mark, barely able to fit his broad shoulders through even though the serpent had been massive. He sank beneath the black shadow for a moment. I peered down into the inky darkness. His head popped out of the hole.
"I think I found the next stop," he said with a grim look. "You're going to hate it." Like I don’t hate all of this?
He grabbed my hand and helped me down. We landed in an arena—the ground floor of a giant amphitheater—and the portal above us vanished.
It was like an arbiter had tried to design a soccer stadium but had built it like it was an ancient arena. Unfamiliar forms filled the bleachers on all sides. When I looked closely, I realized they were merely shadows of figures. Cold dread seized me. It was us, alone, with illusions… for now. A muscle twitched in Dorian's tightened jaw as blinding lights suddenly beamed down on us. This is sick.
"Ladies and gentlemen, our contestants have finally arrived!" A proxy shaped like a tiger cub with wings appeared in front of us. He grinned, revealing a sharp-toothed smile. The crowd roared. "Welcome to the Battle Royale section of the Games. These lower beings say they're tough." The monkey cupped his ear toward the crowd, who burst into eerie echoing laughter.
I grimaced. It seemed the arbiters had slapped together some sliver of modern human sports culture with their own Games, weaving it into a terrible combination. My only question was, who would we be fighting?
The proxy grinned. Could he sense my fear? He snapped his fingers, and for a moment his eyes went stark white like Un's abnormal gaze.
"Fighters, start!"
Dorian and I braced ourselves. The bleachers started above a ten-foot wall that surrounded us on either side, a railing blocking us from going into the seats. Shadows danced on the wall, flitting across the white surface. Three black doorways appeared on the wall beneath the bleachers. Doorways w
hich led… to us. The floor was made of the same reflective tile.
"You took my hand," accused a raspy voice. "They gave me a new one, though."
My blood turned to ice. Zeele emerged from the center door. Sempre, his body barely sewn together, stumbled through the left. Pus gushed from the sections between his open body parts. I fought a wave of nausea. Focus, Lyra. And the third? Vonn, grinning and beaming at Dorian like they were old friends.
Dorian swore. "So, it’s like that? We’re going to fight our past, the bastards."
I shook my head as I stared at Zeele. It was him, and yet it clearly wasn't. The edges of his face were all wrong, like messy smudges on a painting. His new hand was a mechanical contraption with a grappling hook in the center. My stomach churned in absolute horror. They look so real. The crowd cheered. Vonn lunged toward us first. These creatures, these demented proxies, moved fast.
I conjured a whirling tornado fast enough to trip up the rag doll Sempre and fling Vonn into the side of the wall. Dorian pounced on Vonn, ready to take his revenge despite the fact that this was only a twisted echo of what he had once been. Zeele managed to lurch across the tornado's path, barely missing it. I gasped as the grappling hook shot out of his new hand. I threw myself to the side, the hook only narrowly missing my throat. I landed in a forward roll and immediately hopped to my feet again.
"I'll take you out just like I fed all those vampires to my beloved plants that you destroyed. I wonder what it would feel like to juice you,” Zeele snarled, blood dripping from his ripped, rotting face.
I grabbed onto the cord of the grappling hook before he could pull it back and yanked as hard as I could, summoning a gust of furious wind behind him to give me extra power. Zeele cried out as he flew toward me. Good, I wanted access to his stupid throat. I pulled him in like a yo-yo and managed to circle behind him. I wrapped the cord around his neck and strangled him with his own weapon.
He choked, spitting out threats when he had the breath for them. It was only a shade of Zeele, but I sensed true vitriol alongside these dramatic theatrics. Kyrsh had captured the hatred Zeele showed for us, but the underlying sensation was a clunky form of seething. It was an arbiter trying to make emotions without fully understanding them… without fully understanding what I went through in that lab when I sliced off this ruler’s hand. For some reason, that made me even angrier. I finished him off, and he disappeared into smoke. When I looked up, Dorian had just driven Vonn's fangs into Sempre's neck. Dorian sank his knee into the back of Vonn’s head, crushing the proxies’ skulls against one another. The two vanished. Our winds and trembling clouds calmed for a moment.
I tried to focus on the blue counter in my brain, but it gave me nothing. Oh, no.
Dorian held his injured shoulder. Before I could ask if he was alright, the monkey proxy appeared back in the center of the ring. He laughed and clapped.
“Delightful! Let’s begin Round Two.”
More doorways opened. Far more than three. My heart stopped for a moment. Two of the hunters we had killed in the battle by Lake Siron — the albino hunter and female hunter who had wielded the barbed chain—emerged from the tunnel closest to me, their bodies leaking black brain matter onto the white tile of the arena floor. So they expect to throw proxy after proxy after us. To what end? I eyed the oncoming threats, the ghosts of our past, with steely fury. Now I knew—the blue counter evaded telling me anything, but clearly this was far from over.
Again, and again, Dorian and I fought. We sent winds, tornadoes, bolts of lightning, and anything else we could at these reanimated ghosts from our past. After the sixth round, I was nursing aching ribs, wounds that reminded me of how many times my poor torso had been hurt in the past. My movements had slowed, and so had Dorian’s by the end.
The monkey gave another chuckle. “Last round, pets.” It was the voice of Irrikus, and it was lying. The “joke” had worn thin rounds ago as he promised the same thing each time.
My blood boiled with rage. Tens upon tens of new doorways opened up now. Hundreds of proxies scuttled out like mice from holes. They were something like mice, but with razor-sharp fangs and red eyes.
We gave it everything we had. I thought of every person Irrikus had hurt—whether he realized it or not. My red tornado and Dorian’s combined into one giant storm that circled the whole arena, tearing at the walls and sucking up the shadowy crowd from their seats as well as our enemies on the ground. We sheltered against the wall, clinging to the railing in front of the bleachers with one hand and directing the tornado with our free hands. We held on for dear life, the force of our combined power threatening to suck us up as the mice let out little shrieks and wails. They disappeared when the winds flung them against each other and the walls.
By the time the storm died down, the mice were gone, but almost immediately, a textured wave of smoky air started to pour out of one of the dark doorways and into the arena. Dorian swore and hauled us up onto the railing as an enormous flock of flying birds—miniature yet oddly grotesque redbills—shot out of the tunnels. I gasped. How were we supposed to fight all of them?
Or… maybe we weren’t supposed to. Was this just another version of the endless hallway, the endless stairs? I’d assumed we were meant to show off our fighting abilities, but maybe we were throwing all of our energy in the wrong direction. I scanned the arena, looking for a clue, anything we’d missed. Something, a quiet intuition, pulled my gaze toward the top of the staircase that ran up the bleachers. They always make us do something illogical. There was the tiniest outline of a dark doorway. I shot a fervent look at Dorian, pointing.
We have to give up this battle to win it.
He understood immediately.
We bolted up the stairs, striking out at any of the screaming shadows crammed onto the bleachers who reached out for me. The birds squawked behind us, but we took turns sending out waves of buffeting wind while the other ran on ahead, covering each other’s backs as we ran. The force of it sent the birds tumbling into one another. My sides burned by the time we reached the hazy doorway and stepped onto the shadowy threshold.
As we did, I turned to see a dozen birds diving toward us, talons out, beaks open in a scream. They slammed into an invisible forcefield in the doorway and burst into smoke. I heaved a relieved sigh as all the birds disappeared at once. The crowd began to clap automatically, which was absolutely eerie to hear. The door led us to a small room with a steep staircase down into darkness. Behind us, a wall materialized to shut off the stadium. The unsettling cheering stopped suddenly. I licked my lips as the eerie counter floated up in my mind. Two.
“We’re on the third one,” I said. “So the maze was number one and the stadium battle was number two.”
Dorian panted heavily as we rushed down the stairs. I rubbed his shoulder gently.
"Are you okay?"
"Yes."
I wasn't fooled. He said that because he had to be okay. So did I. We had no choice. We needed to keep moving. We hit a door at the bottom of the staircase. He eyed it with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, which I shared. I rubbed my sore sides, surprised by how physically drained I felt. Those enemies had actually hurt us. I had a sneaking suspicion that Dorian had taken more damage than I had in the fighting, trying to keep me out of the worst of it, and his shoulder clearly gave him pain.
In the shadowy hallway, we stopped for a moment. It seemed safe here—it was just like one of the corridors in the maze, except more ghostly. Only a singular soul-lantern, mounted on the wall like the kind from the Hive, provided light. I studied Dorian's tired face. I was sure I didn't look much better than he did.
"I’m honestly terrified of what they have next for us," Dorian muttered. He rubbed his shoulder again, trying to hide a wince.
I nodded, out of breath. "They're working against our linear expectations. We see a wall and don’t expect to go through it on instinct. Walking through walls, facing our past, making us give up a battle to win it." I shivered as I recalled the sight of
Sempre’s ragdoll form crumbling beneath the weight of itself. Krysh had truly outdone herself with this horrifying mind game of a course. It was disturbing in all the right ways when I thought about it.
I pressed my hand against my chest, and my heart rate steadied. We opened the door to reveal nothing but black. The world beyond ended abruptly and plummeted into darkness.
"I think my understanding of the Games is growing stronger by the minute," I said, taking one more calming breath. "And I think we need to jump."
"Jump?" Dorian echoed.
I glanced at him. "Do you trust me?"
"Always."
We jumped. I better be right.
We plummeted, but instead of smashing into solid ground, we landed on our hands and knees on pillowy white material that felt like marshmallows. My hands sank into the plush. When I looked around us, I realized that there were four floating islands above a devastating abyss. A craft that resembled a rudimentary skimmer from the Immortal Plane waited by the edge of our cushioned stone platform. There was no way to get to the islands except for the skimmer. I hopped onto it, Dorian following me.
I tried the controls, but they refused to budge. I glanced around again. There were no indications that there was anything but the stone platform, the islands, and the drop below.
Dorian frowned. "There’s no presence of wind and no alternative fuel to power this skimmer. I think I know what this is…" His eyes went from island to island. "It wants us to fly this thing with the weather. Perhaps a bit of karma, after our storm show during the trial.”
It was a test of our control.
I swallowed my fear as I stared into the abyss below.
Chapter Thirty
I had to hand it to Krysh. She knew how to design a game to test the trust between two partners.
The chasm stretched ahead of us, littered with the small rocky islands and patches of puffy clouds. Far across on the other side, I could see the illuminated arch of a doorway, giving us a goal to aim for. But it was barely visible from here and the yawning darkness below us kept drawing my attention downward.
Darklight 6: Darkbirth Page 38