by Audrey Grey
They don’t think they’re dogs, either.
One daring hyena darts forward. Lady Knowles yells, kicks out, and he jumps back with ease, a curious, almost intelligent look in his beady black eyes.
Lady Hood pulls something shiny out from her bodice and holds it in front of her. A dagger. She swings it back and forth, cursing.
But the hyenas don’t even seem to notice it. Something has changed. They’ve stopped curiously prodding the girls, stopped their circling. The longer fur on their backs has ridged into a sort of mane.
The concerted attack is silent and efficient. Lady Knowles swings once, twice, and disappears with a surprised scream beneath a writhing mass of shaggy fur and guttural growls.
My stomach twists as the sounds of bones crunching echo off the walls, and their tunnel grates wider, while the one we occupy grows smaller.
Lady Hood has her arms out, stumbling wildly, her jumper in tatters. Somehow she has escaped. Just as her hopeful eyes lock on mine, a whooshing noise fills my ears and a roaring wall of orange flames block her exit, the heat blasting us backward.
Now our walls barely allow us to stand apart. I think Merida will protest leaving them, but she stays quiet. She pretends, just like I do, she cannot hear Lady Hood’s screams for help, muffled behind the roar of the firewall and the horrible animalistic laughing noises.
My hands ball into knots at my sides as I struggle to fight off the panic. We have to think! There has to be a safe way out. Perhaps we can find another pair and follow them, using them the same way? No, too inefficient, and we cannot control our route. Even if we make it safely through, it’s still a race against time.
My frustration only grows as we take a triangular path that leads us back to the same entrance. They’re trying to confuse us. To confuse us and scare us and defeat us.
And so far it’s working.
This time the tunnel opening is on the left. The mud has dried, so I use Brinley’s phoenix brooch to poke my fingertip, using my blood to mark our progress. An X, nearly black in the light, marks where we saw the hyenas. As if to taunt us, the walls now depict muscly, ferocious canines drinking from a winding river.
Merida leans against the stone as I finish, disturbing a loose chunk that shifts in the wall. I wonder if this can help us in any way, feeling for any more weak spots, but there are none.
Merida puts one foot into the passageway. “Should I go first? Or maybe we could take turns?”
I don’t answer. There has to be something that triggers it. Motion sensors? Without a second thought, I unlace my boot and hurl it into the darkness. It quietly thumps twenty feet away in the grass and comes to a rest against the barricade.
Nothing happens.
“Let me go,” Merida insists. She has taken another step. She knows like I do every second we waste will cost us.
I am halfway ignoring her. If not motion sensors, what? If it were ground sensors triggered by weight, the shoe would have worked . . .
Unless it wasn’t heavy enough.
“If we tried running in and back,” I say, thinking aloud, “we wouldn’t make it back out.” So it needs to be something heavy that can be thrown and somehow retrieved.
From far away comes the sound of surprised yells. A moment later, our walls creep toward us. The loose stone Merida disturbed earlier tumbles out. It’s bigger than I expected, about the size of a large watermelon, a crude rectangular chunk of gray.
Before I can think about what I’m doing, I dig my fingers into my corset and remove the wire, knotting it around the rock. Merida understands immediately and rips hers out too. We tie them securely together, affixing the loose end to my wrist, and lift the rock. It’s heavier than I thought, which means it will probably only travel five feet at most. Hopefully that’s far enough.
“On the count of three,” I say, my mouth cottony with nerves.
“One.”
“Two.”
“Three!”
The rock tumbles through the air and lands with a heavy thud in the grass. As if on cue, the walls of our passageway rumble together. When it stops, there’s only enough room for us to stand single file with Merida in the lead.
“The next one will crush us,” Merida says, her voice breathless with panic.
“No, wait.” I hold up my hand. The sound of something mechanical I can’t place purrs from deep within the stone.
I don’t see her move until it’s too late. For a moment, as the metal against stone noise fills the air, like a large knife being sharpened, the word inside my mouth catches.
Then my breath bursts from my lungs. “Duck!”
Somehow over the screaming noise she hears me and falls, just as a flat sheet of sharpened waist-high metal shoots from a thread-thin crack in the stone.
The fire will be next. I drop, my hand slaps down on her ankle, and I pull, yanking her back into our little tunnel, where she flops down on top of me.
The heat inflicts instant, agonizing pain wherever it touches. Merida cries out and scrambles violently over the top of me in a desperate attempt at escaping the flames, her boots gouging my cheek.
By now the fire has turned the wire around the tender flesh of my wrist into a white-hot brand. I moan, dragging the rock and my body back through the tunnel until the air is cool enough to stop. I feel the ground, soft and pleasant against my back.
Merida’s low groaning draws me to her. The smell of singed hair and flesh makes me want to gag. Get up or you die. But I seem to have no control over my body.
For a quiet, almost peaceful second, our panting mingles into a nice, lulling cadence. A small sliver of dark silvery-blue sky peers down at us from above. I could just close my eyes . . . just close them and go to sleep.
Then you will certainly die. I mull the words over in my mind, let them sink in. But the nice little bubble of apathy I have created keeps them from having much impact.
In the end, it’s not the thought of death—certainly not as terrifying as what else undoubtedly awaits us in the labyrinth—but the promises I made.
Three, in fact. One to my father. One to Merida. And one to myself.
The hardest part is leaving my soft, safe spot on the ground. Once I’m on my feet, it’s as if I snap out of a trance. Merida gapes up at me, exposing her face. All her beautiful hair from the crown down the left side of her skull is gone. Burned skin sloughs from her cheek, neck, and shoulder. Her tattered jumpsuit is melted to her body, pieces still smoldering.
She takes a deep, groaning lungful of air and struggles to her feet. “I’m sorry.”
“Shh.” I put my hand on her good shoulder, trying to keep my voice steady. “How is the pain?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t . . . I don’t feel anything.” The whites of her eyes are huge, her skin bone-white. Her mouth is parted, slightly, panting. She is going into shock.
“Merida, we need to move. Can you do that?”
“Yes.” She answers without hesitation as she begins to shuffle back the way we came. I drag the rock behind me, my wrist screaming where the wire cuts into the raw, blistered skin.
Walk. Stop. Breathe. Our progress is slow, painful. More torches. Merida cringes away from the flames, her eyes following them as we pass. Me dragging my arm, her wobbling on lifeless legs.
When we come upon the next entrance, I heft the rock, which barely makes it four feet, swallowing my scream as the wire gnaws through my flesh. We wait for two minutes and then enter. This tunnel is wide enough for me to move into the lead position, but now I’m stumbling, my legs seemingly disconnected from my body. It’s a dead end, so we retrace our steps.
I hardly feel the brooch prick my finger. The blood smears into messy lines as I try to recall our progress so far. A circle marks the dead ends. Another toss of the rock. We wait longer than necessary, trying to gather our energy before entering.
It feels like forever until the next fork. I throw the rock to the left, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out again. Bl
ood trickles down my wrist into my palm, drips from my fingers. It takes two more times of pulling it back and throwing it again to make it far enough out. The pain in my wrist turns into a gnawing fire.
In our fatigue we must have miscalculated the time, because we make it four steps in when a sound pierces the fog wrapped around my brain.
Snuffling. Air being blown forcefully into the grass. No, something sniffing the ground. An animal. And there is only one reason an animal does that.
When it’s tracking prey.
“Run—”
A furious, ungodly roar cuts off my warning. The sound reverberates off the stone and through my chest and wakes Merida from her stupor.
Not hyenas. Somehow, even with all our planning, we have stumbled onto something worse.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Something enormous and black and angry erupts from the shadows, snorting and grunting, its talon-like claws gouging large chunks of earth in its wake.
An impossibly huge shaggy brown head, nearly as big as me, bobs up and down. I’m hit with a rangy, pungent, wet dog odor. Backpedaling, I slam into Merida. My foot gives out, the ground knocking the air from my chest. The ground vibrates my bones as the creature barrels closer, his body so large it seems to occlude the tunnel. The sound of my name being called registers dimly in the far recesses of my brain.
Digging my elbows into the grass, I kick with my feet, crab walking, my labored breath drowning out my pounding heartbeat. The thing lifts onto two legs, exposing an underside thick with tan fur, and lets out an earsplitting roar.
A word bubbles to the surface. Ursus Arctos. The grizzly bear. Max’s favorite extinct animal from the museum.
The bear drops his full weight back down, rattling the ground, but we are past the entrance. Safe. Where is the fire?
An angry roar rocks the tunnels as it keeps coming. For its size, it’s surprisingly fast. We need the fire. I know for certain there’s no way we can outrun it.
Now it’s six feet away. Five. Four.
All at once the bear stops as if hitting an invisible wall, his head tilted to the side, just as there’s a crackling whoosh and the firewall leaps to the sky. The bear bellows and disappears behind it.
I’m not aware of moving, but somehow I make it two more feet before falling to my knees. I drop my head inside my hands. Swallow the vomit creeping up my throat. The smell of charred, gamey fur clings to my mouth. The bear calls out angrily a few times and then goes quiet.
I’m dizzy and nauseous with the after effects of adrenaline. Perhaps that’s why it takes me a moment to realize what’s happening. The tug is tentative. I watch my hand jump a few inches toward the fire. My eyes focus on the wire. It’s taut. Realization hits as another harder tug jerks me closer.
“Merida!” I croak, craning my head back. She cowers near the wall, exhausted. “Help me get this—”
This time my head whips back with the force. I stumble, catching myself with my hands. My face smashes the ground. The bear grunts as he yanks the rock again. Straining the other way, I gouge my heels into the dirt and yell for Merida.
Merida flops down beside me, the flames turning her raw skin a bizarre orange color. Her breathing is shallow and rapid. With the protective layer of skin gone, it must be excruciating for her near the fire, but she doesn’t make a sound as her fingernails dig uselessly into my wounded wrist. Another jerk. Something in my shoulder pops, and the pain ricochets from my arm into my lungs, where I force it out in a choking, desperate wail. Angry white stars of pain burst inside my eyelids. Next one will take off a hand. Or arm. It would be easier to just let him have me.
The thought is less disturbing than it should be. In desperation I imagine swallowing Merida’s in-case pill. But no, I can’t even do that because I made a stupid, naïve promise. And what would Pit Boy say?
I know the pain has really messed me up because now I can see him, Riser. His face, anyway, shimmering red with firelight. My body is contorted sideways away from the flames, my arm stretched out at a horrible, unnatural angle. I fantasize about my arm popping off. A sacrifice I would easily make to end the pain.
I watch my hallucination from my upside down world. His face pale, framed by stars, black locks of hair tumbling across his forehead. A knife twinkles by his side. In the strange, ethereal light of my lens and pain-induced haze, I think he looks like the Hades from my mother’s paintings, the way he moves with the darkness, not a hint of doubt in his face, as if he owns the shadows, and death does not apply to him.
He bends down and begins sawing at the wire around my wrist. A moan escapes my lips. Shoulders pumping with effort, he catches my gaze. “Hold on, Everly. Keep fighting.”
My lips peel into a wild grin. “Stop telling me what to do, Pit Boy.”
All in the span of a second, the wire jerks hard, my arm springs free, my body rolls away from the heat, and the wire disappears into the flames.
My arm hangs dead and loose at my side. I stumble to Merida, huddled against the wall, leaning on someone, eyes half-closed. Whatever her body did earlier to protect her from the pain has run its course: She is shivering, eyes glazed with agony. Rhydian glances at me and nods before turning his attention back to Merida.
Her eyes flutter open. She focuses on me. “I tried, I did.”
Using my good arm, I support her armpit, and Rhydian and I nudge her to a stand. “You’ve been so strong, Merida,” I whisper, soothing her while fighting hot tears from my eyes. “Now you just have to be strong for a little longer.”
A ripping sound turns my attention back to Riser. Without a word, he wraps a strip of his tunic around my wrist. I bite my lip to keep from crying out as his fingers explore my injured shoulder. “That hurt?”
“Only when I move it.”
Riser nods. “Dislocated.” Taking my arm, he presses it into my ribs. “Take a deep breath and count to five.”
I get to two when he cracks it back in place. My vision goes black. I gasp, drawing in salving breaths. My throat is so dry I think it will crack open.
I open my mouth, half-groaning, “We need to move.”
“I know.” Riser places two fingertips just behind my jaw. They slide down to my chin, lifting it. He looks at me for a moment, silent, his eyes searching. “But you’re okay?”
“Yes.” I take my hand, the unhurt one, and rest my fingers over his. His hand is warm and sticky with what can only be blood. His, someone else’s, mine—it’s impossible to say. “You?”
“I’m fine now.” He squeezes my hand, hard, and then drops a faded silver pocket watch into it. A sly smile transforms his face. “Picked it from one of the Dandies.”
I examine it. Somewhere between the two and five is a thick obsidian line. Shadow Fall. According to the pocket watch, we have less than an hour. Riser leans in close. “If we leave Merida, I give our odds fifty-fifty.”
I hand it back. “And if we don’t?”
Riser glances at Merida. “Not a Fienian chance in hell.”
There’s a part of me that wants to run. Just run away from Merida and my stupid promise and my fear.
But I shake my head, Riser nods, and we both accept our fate. Riser checks on Merida and uses more shirt strips to bandage what he can, and we finally make our way down the path to our right.
The walls are nearly closed, so we walk single file. Riser first, then me, Rhydian, and Merida. I watch Riser, his careful gait, the way his body never touches the walls. Like me, he must hate the enclosed space, the claustrophobic feeling.
Either that or he’s perfectly at home.
We pass two entrances. The first is still warm from the firewall. The second looks promising until, just around the curve, I notice a leather boot peeking out, the ground around it churning as if alive, and the low, faint hum of hissing. Something slithers over the boot and lifts its hooded head, a delicate forked tongue tasting the air.
We move on, and a new pathway emerges. Without the rock there’s no way of testing it,
so Rhydian goes first. After two minutes, we follow around a curve and down a long, narrow tunnel.
A torch flickers up ahead. When we are close enough to feel its heat, I spy a wide swath where someone has wiped away part of the moss from the stone.
A horse . . .
All the air evacuates my chest at once. We are as good as dead. An onslaught of anger and frustration well up inside me, and I slap furiously at the drawing, a hoarse cry erupting from my throat. “Circles! We’re going in circles!”
I slump down the wall. The others have stopped to stare at me. I must look a sight, covered in green lichen-dust and blood. Massaging a palm into my forehead, I shake my head. “We passed this horse at the beginning. All of it was for nothing!”
A look of puzzlement flashes over Rhydian’s face. “Horse? From here it looks like a unicorn.”
I stand up and step back to look at it again. He’s right: My desperate attack on the etching has revealed the rest of the horse’s head, including a foot-long horn.
Riser comes up beside me. “When we started, there were men carved into the stone.”
My heart skips a beat. “Describe them.”
“One was leading a horse; the other carried a sword and shield. Otherwise, they appeared identical.”
Identical. My brain is whirling so fast I can’t complete a single thought.
“And,” Riser continues, “the walls changed after a while to—”
“A dog?” I interrupt softly.
“Yes.”
“Was it . . . um, I don’t know, by a lake or an ocean, any type of water?”
His eyes narrow. “It was leaping out of a fountain. And then, toward the end, it burned in a funeral pyre.”
“And it was small?”
“Yes.”
“Canis Major and Canis Minor,” I whisper. My breath comes out in excited puffs. Pushing past Riser, I fumble my way down the wall, counting the unicorns. Four. Depicting the four great stars, or canals, making up the constellation. Could it really be this simple?