“Yeah. I thought of that, too. Everyone else, go back to the hallway and wait for me. No sense in all of us being in the crosshairs.”
Sofia patted Leon on the arm, then surprised him by going up on tiptoes and placing a quick kiss on his cheek. She said nothing as she turned and followed Annie and Hiss away from the second door. Shoo and Malcolm remained outside the room.
Leon lightly touched his cheek where Sofia had kissed him. His heart stuttered in his chest and he felt a flush rise in his face. He did not know quite what to make of the act. Did Sofia like him? Or was she merely thanking him for taking this risk on their behalf? It could also have been nothing more than a proactive goodbye in case he didn’t survive whatever happened next. He shook the questions out of his head and forced himself to focus on the orange door. He could ponder Sofia’s intentions later.
Or not. If he got himself killed, none of that would matter.
When the room was empty save for himself, Leon grasped the black circle on the orange door as he had with the red one. It pulled free as easily as the first and, as before, the rectangular wall crumbled to a thousand smaller orange pieces, spilling out across the floor. As it fell, it revealed a third, pale yellow door behind it. This time, Leon did not stand around and wait for something to happen. He placed the cylinder on the floor a few feet from where the red door had reformed and ran to join the others in the hallway.
When he crowded into the narrow space, he could hear Shoo counting quietly to herself.
“Five. Six. Seven…”
She was timing how long it would take for the new door to reconstitute itself. Assuming it behaved in the same manner as the first one, this might be useful information to have. Shoo reached twenty-four when the loose pieces on the floor began to vibrate and shift. Unlike the cylinder from the red door, the second black tube did not remain where Leon had dropped it. It rolled back to where the orange door originally stood, barricading the exit. The loose pieces followed, thousands of tiny baby ducklings chasing their mother. They piled chaotically over the cylinder for another moment before pulling together into a more uniform mass. The door reformed.
“Thirty-three,” Shoo concluded.
“Why did it go back to the same place?” Annie asked. “The first one stayed where you dropped it.”
“I don’t know,” Leon admitted. He had thought the second door would act the same as the first and simply assemble on top of where he had left the cylinder. “The black tube acts like a keystone, and all the little pieces pull together around it. But why the tube went back to block the exit, I have no idea.”
“Magnets?”
Leon pondered the suggestion for a moment. “Maybe. Maybe I didn’t move it far enough away from the yellow door, so it got pulled back. There’s an easy way to check that theory. Stay here, I’ll be right back.”
Leon crossed the room to the orange door. With a more practiced effort this time, he grasped the black centerpiece and pulled it free. Without waiting to see the door collapse, he turned and carried the cylinder to a point in the room several feet beyond where the red door had reformed. He returned to the others and waited as Shoo again counted out loud.
When Shoo reached thirty-three, the orange door again reconstructed itself in its original location.
“Not magnets,” said Leon to himself. “Or else, much stronger magnets in the orange door than in the red. Hang on.”
Before anyone could ask what he was doing, Leon approached the red door in the middle of the room and pulled the black cylinder out. As the red fragments of the door scattered around him, he laid the cylinder down in the spot he had earlier dropped the centerpiece from the orange door. He did not retreat to the hallway this time. His previous observations of the doors’ behavior suggested they were not a direct threat to him. The risk in this room was not one of immediate physical injury or death. Instead, the challenge appeared to be figuring out how to get past the series of barricades before they all died of old age.
A half minute later, the red door stood whole and undamaged exactly where Leon had placed the cylinder. This door made no attempt to move back to its previous location.
“I don’t get it. The red door doesn’t seem to care where it goes, but the orange one won’t leave the exit path. Anybody? Any ideas?”
“Maybe yer just too slow,” Malcolm commented.
“What?”
“Maybe you have to tear down as many of the bloody doors as you can, as fast as you can. Make a temporary pass we can slip through before they stand back up.”
Leon’s eyes widened. The idea seemed plausible, which was unexpected. Malcolm had not made a habit of offering many helpful suggestions in the past. This one, however, might work.
“Okay. Let’s try it. I’ll start knocking down the walls as fast as I can. Somebody else will need to watch the pieces to make sure they don’t start forming up behind me and trap me inside.”
“I’ll give an alarm,” said Malcolm.
Annie shook her head emphatically. “Fuck that, blondie. I’ll be Leon’s lookout.”
Malcolm gave a casual shrug. “Aye. You do that, then.”
Leon stood in front of the orange door. He glanced at Annie, who gave him a nod of encouragement. Grabbing the black centerpiece and pulling it free, he collapsed the first door. Without pausing, he dropped the cylinder and reached for the black circle on the yellow door now standing in front of him. It did not budge.
Regardless of the direction in which he attempted to move it, the cylinder in the yellow door refused to move. He twisted clockwise then counterclockwise with equal futility. Attempting to pull the disk free of the door also did not appear to be an option. He tried for a full half minute before he felt Annie’s hand on his shoulder pulling him backward.
“They’re moving,” she said. “Get out of the way.”
The door rematerialized in front of him as he stepped away.
“It was worth a shot. I guess we need to do this one door at a time after all. Any other ideas we can try?”
Shoo tapped the red door with a large hand, making a loud enough noise to draw the others’ attention.
“Perhaps the middle doors, an anchor, need. By themselves, cannot stand. Perhaps red door, an end door and anchor, is. They, anywhere, can stand.”
“How do we get the orange door away from its anchor?” asked Leon. “It keeps crawling back whenever we move it.”
“We, another anchor, give. Red door, perhaps, anchor?”
Leon shook his head in frustration. “I tried that. I put the orange door right next to the red one. It still crawled back to where it started.”
“Yes. You, close together, placed. You, touching, did not,” Shoo insisted.
Light dawned in Leon’s mind. He understood what Shoo was trying to tell him. “No,” he agreed. “I put them close together, but I didn’t have them touching. You think if the orange door is up against the red one, it might stay?”
“Of knowing, only one easy way, there is,” Shoo told him, throwing his own expression back at him.
Leon smiled in acknowledgement of the rebuke. For the fourth time, he pulled the black linchpin from the orange wall. When the wall broke apart, he carried the cylinder to the middle of the room and placed it on the floor, making certain this time that one end touched the red wall. As the orange pieces began to vibrate and slide along the floor, the door’s centerpiece did not move with them. It remained fixed in place. Malcolm whooped with excitement and pumped a fist in the air as they all watched the orange door reform next to its red companion.
When the door was complete, it aligned perfectly with the red door behind it. Top to bottom and edge for edge, the two doors formed one solid, bi-colored slab.
“You were right, Shoo. The ends of this stack of doors act as magnetic anchors. I didn’t use the red one properly. Nice job,” he told the alien.
Although the Many did not have the ability to blush, Leon got the impression that he had embarrassed Shoo with the co
mpliment. She ducked her head slightly and waved a small hand in an attempt at casual acknowledgement.
Leon thought this challenge was progressing well. After only a short period of experimentation, they had already figured out a method for clearing the passageway out of here. They needed to move the barricades out of the exit path and line them up in the room. When that was complete, they would be on their way to the next challenge.
While the process of moving doors was a simple procedure, he could only relocate one door at a time. Leon had already tried to deconstruct two doors at once and the second door had resisted his attempt, which meant depending on how many doors they faced, this could take a significant amount of time. The other members of the group moved to the sides of the room to give Leon space to maneuver.
The centerpiece of the yellow door slipped free when Leon pulled on it. He did not reveal his trepidation to the others, but he was secretly relieved at how easily it came out. He had briefly wondered if his earlier attempt to pull it free meant that it was not going to come out at all, that perhaps the yellow door was going to require a completely new strategy to relocate. Deconstructing one door at a time seemed to be the answer they needed, as this time the cylinder offered no resistance. The yellow door reformed next to the red and orange one on the first try, leaving a green door behind in the hallway.
“The next one should be blue,” said Sofia. She settled herself on the floor with her back pressed to the wall to watch Leon work.
Leon moved the green door as he had the previous three. In the hallway, the next barricade was indeed blue.
“How did you know?” he asked.
“I didn’t really, but the colors have been red, orange, yellow and green. It’s the colors of the rainbow in sequence. It was just a guess that the pattern would continue.”
“Is it significant?”
Sofia shrugged, unsure. It was difficult to say what in these tests was significant and what was coincidence. Still, Leon felt better knowing there was a pattern here. If it proved important later, at least they already knew about it. If not, no harm had been done.
The blue door gave way to a block of the same violet purple as the rest of the room. Leon turned to Sofia with a mischievous grin. “What’s next?”
Sofia shook her head. “Um. I don’t know. It might reverse the sequence or start again at red. Or we might discover a new color that we’ve never seen before.”
“Maybe there is no next door,” Leon said, hopefully. “This might be the last one.”
The violet door collapsed as easily as the others. Leon felt a slight disappointed to find another red door behind it, but he dutifully carried the central piece to his row of doors in the middle of the room. Three more doors followed the violet door: red, orange, and yellow in sequence. Leon collapsed the next door, a green one, to reveal another blue door behind it.
“Stop!” called out Shoo. “The keystone, please, drop.”
Leon complied, dropping the black cylinder in his hand to the floor. He stepped out of the deepening hallway he had excavated to find out what was concerning the alien.
“No more room, remaining, there is,” she told him, pointing to the gap between the yellow door he had last moved and the wall of the room. Leon recognized the problem.
Each door he had moved was slightly more than a foot thick. The first door, the red one, had been placed roughly in the center of the room and subsequent doors stacked onto it. There was a growing wall of doors that now covered half the distance across the room. One more door could be placed in the remaining gap between the yellow door and the edge of the room, but that would not leave space for anything else. If Leon moved the green door, there would be no room for the blue one behind it.
In addition, with the green door sandwiched between the other barricades and the wall, he would not be able to reach the center block to remove it again if necessary. In order to keep removing doors from the hallway, they needed more space.
“We, the first door, must reposition. We, the full width of the room, must use.”
The others now saw the problem as well. Leon needed to start again with the first red door placed flush against one wall of the room, giving them the maximum possible space with which to work.
“I can move the red door to the wall,” Annie volunteered. “I don’t mind moving the others you already put in the room, too. When I’m done, you can start again with the ones blocking the hallway.”
“Sounds good,” Leon agreed. “The black circle in the middle pulls straight out.”
“I’m not an idiot,” she shot back. “I’ve been watching you and I’m pretty sure I can figure it out. Unless you think it’s too difficult for a girl?”
Leon laughed and flapped a hand at Annie. He knew better than to bite on this particular bait. Annie grasped the black circle and pulled back. It slid free without resistance. The red wall obligingly collapsed into its component pieces.
So did every other wall in the middle of the room. The resulting torrent of tiny, multi-colored blocks spilled outward to cover every square inch of the floor.
“What do I do?” asked Annie, sounding a little panicked.
“Same plan,” Leon told her. “Put the cylinder against the wall and get out of the way. I’m hoping the entire row will reform together.”
Annie set the black centerpiece in place and stepped back. The scattered blocks on the floor began to shiver and shift around each other. The red pieces moved to the side of the room as they had expected. The others, however, did not.
Leon, standing in the mouth of the exit hallway, watched dumbstruck as a multi-colored wave rose up and rushed in his direction. He tried to step out of the hall and dodge out of the way of the approaching mass, but he reacted too late to the threat. The first of the racing pieces struck him across the shins and ankles and knocked his feet painfully out from under him. He fell face down onto the blocks crawling along directly behind the first. They rushed under and over his body like a riptide trying to pull him back into the narrow passageway he was attempting to escape.
Sharp little corners and edges beat at him mercilessly. It felt like wasps stinging his face as the rushing pieces struck him and cut shallow gashes in his skin. He threw up one arm to protect his eyes and minimize further injury. As he fought to protect himself from the onslaught, he could feel himself sliding further backwards into the open tunnel. If he didn’t manage to get up and fight his way forward, he would soon find himself bricked up and sealed into the hallway. He did not know if the pieces would form around him and leave him alive or crush him to pulp in their efforts to reform into a solid mass, and he certainly did not want to stay in here long enough to find out.
He pulled his knees up underneath himself and lurched forward. Sofia shouted his name, but her voice became nothing more than background noise as his focus remained on surviving the next five seconds. He pushed himself forward again, sweeping his arms beside his body to give him more momentum. Leon felt as if he was attempting to swim upstream against a fierce current or struggle up the side of a sand dune that had begun to collapse. It was a struggle to simply not lose any more ground. The multi-colored onslaught continued, and he thrashed and pushed against the tide of blocks racing toward him.
Pushing with his knees and feet against the floor, he gained a few more precious inches in the right direction. His hand, stroking through the debris, struck something solid. He grabbed at the object, grasping desperately for a lifeline. It was the edge of the hallway entrance. Leon’s fingers hooked around the ledge and he hung on desperately by his fingertips. With one arm anchored, he brought his other hand to the same edge, trying to get a more secure grip. He kicked his legs toward the opposite wall. If he could brace at least one foot, he might gain enough leverage to drive forward and free himself. His foot slipped, and the cascading blocks swept his legs behind him again. The flow of rainbow pieces began to slow as the individual doors prepared to reform. Too much of Leon was still in the hallway and in on
ly a few more seconds, the doors would solidify around him.
A pair of hands locked around his right wrist. He felt himself being tugged forward. The tiny bricks around him were sluggish, but still loose enough to allow movement. He kicked out again with one foot and this time found purchase on the wall. Another hand gripped his left wrist, a hard, pincered claw that clamped painfully over the bones and flesh of his arm. Although it hurt, he was happy for the assistance. With a few more kicks against the wall to assist his own progress, his would-be rescuers jerked him free of the hallway.
Clear of the colored tide of blocks, Leon rolled sideways across the floor, giving himself more distance from the space that had threatened to swallow him. When he stopped rolling, he looked back at the hallway and found all the pieces were gone. In their place he saw only a solid orange door at the front of the passageway. He had escaped with no time to spare.
He glanced up at his saviors and found Sofia and Annie staring down at him with concerned expressions.
“Are you alright?” Sofia asked.
“I’m alive, thanks to you two.”
Sofia shook her head, ruefully. “No. Not me. Annie and Hiss pulled you out. I was too far away to help.”
Leon saw Hiss a few feet behind Annie, casually examining the fingers of one small hand as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “Well then, thank you, Annie and Hiss.”
Curious, Leon glanced to the back of the room to see Malcolm and Shoo watching the scene impassively. He could not claim to be surprised they had done nothing to help him; they had made no secret of their own self-interests from early on. Still, he found himself a little offended by their complete unconcern with his well-being. He also promised himself he would remember this moment if their roles should ever become reversed.
Sofia knelt beside him and brushed a finger across his cheek. “You’re bleeding,” she told him, holding up her finger to show him a red smear on the tip. “It’s not bad, though.”
“I think I’m okay. Nothing feels broken or hurts too bad.”
Testing Grounds (On Dangerous Grounds Book 1) Page 20