Five of us took inventory in the corridor because it was something to do with our hands.
Half the rations and one coil of rope. Grace’s kit, lighter than a healer’s kit should be this deep in. Whatever the pack still held, which Colt knew to the gram and kept to himself.
“Room seven,” Freya said, reading the arch ahead. A set of scales, carved in relief, perfectly level. “Libra. Balance.” She looked around at us. “Anyone else’s mum do horoscopes, or did we bury the whole department?”
Colt made a sound that was closer to a laugh than anything he’d managed since the bull room. She’d been aiming for that, and she caught my eye afterward to check it had landed.
✦ ✦ ✦
The scales inside were the size of the room.
Two bronze pans hung from a beam lost somewhere in the dark overhead. One pan held a block of black stone, polished, dense as a held breath. The other hung empty at chest height.
Script surfaced on the beam.
THE DOOR WEIGHS WHAT YOU BRING. PAY AND PASS.
We paid.
Rations first, then the rope. Vika’s spare blade went in with the plates off her forearms. Grace’s kit went in a piece at a time, and the pan barely noticed any of it. The block sat there like a number we couldn’t argue with.
Colt was the last to move. He stood holding the straps, and nobody said anything, because there wasn’t a version of saying it that helped.
“He carried it further than this room will ever know,” Colt said to the pan, and set the pack in whole.
The beam shifted, though nowhere near enough.
The pan wanted more, and we were out of things, and I understood before I wanted to. Weight was never the currency; the pan was another cup wearing a different shape.
“Stand back from it.” I put my hand over the empty pan. “It takes what things cost the most. Fine.”
I drew on the core and let mana run off my palm like water off a roof. Grey, thin, and apparently expensive, because the pan began to sink at once.
The crack in my chest lengthened. Something in it gave the way lake ice gives, a seam opening somewhere under the white star, cold running a new route.
The pans kissed level and the door opened. I stopped, and stayed on my feet mostly as a matter of presentation.
Grace’s hand arrived at the centre of my back anyway.
“I know,” I said.
“You don’t,” she said. “But you’ll.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Room eight was Scorpio, and the sting came before the script did.
It was mist, thin and sweet, out of the floor cracks the moment the door sealed. Vika got two words into a warning before the first cramp folded her sideways.
Freya went down next, then Colt, curling around their own stomachs like the room had reached inside each of them and made a fist.
I felt it hit me and started looking for something to grip.
I knew this feeling. Not this thing, but something with the same slow grammar to it, moving wherever the body’s traffic moved. Mine had been rerouted for years, channels gone half to frost, and this venom crawled through me like traffic finding a road already dug up.
The one mercy Jack ever gave me.
“Slow your breathing.” I got Freya and Colt flat on their backs, and put Vika’s hand against her own throat. “Count your pulse. Get it under sixty and keep it there. It travels at the speed you let your blood run. You’re not fighting it, you’re boring it.”
“How do you,” Vika managed through her teeth, “know that?”
“Later. Breathe.”
Grace was up on her knees, and her hands were lit.
She purged Freya first, youngest to oldest. No discussion.
White light went in through the chest, and Freya’s whole body unclenched. Grace was moving to Colt before Freya finished gasping.
Colt. Then Vika, who tried to refuse and got overruled with one look.
By then the light coming off Grace’s hands had gone from clear white to light brown, and her breathing had a hitch riding in it. She turned to me.
“No,” I said. “Mine’s crawling. I can bore it out on my own. Save what’s left.”
“There’s enough left.”
“Grace. Look at your hands.”
She looked at her hands. Then she said the only wasteful sentence I ever heard from her.
“Somebody always has to go, love. I told you that at the well.”
The purge went in through my chest, warm as the first mouthful of tea. The venom let go of its grip all at once.
Grace sat back onto her heels, kneeling, palms coming to rest flat on her own knees this time.
She stayed quiet; that was how we knew.
Freya crawled to her and held one of her hands against her own face. She didn’t make a single sound the whole time, which from Freya was the loudest thing in the room.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Colt sat down against the wall with nothing to lean on and nothing left in his hands, and looked at nothing.
He had worked out by then that this was a thing a person could do, and that nobody here would make him say why.
The mist went out of the room.
It didn’t drift or thin. It stopped being there, as though something had finished with us and saw no reason to linger over it.
Script surfaced on the wall above the door, taking its time.
THE CURE IS FINITE. SPEND IT WELL.
Freya read it twice. Then she made a sound I am not going to write down.
The room had never told us the terms. It had waited until the only person who could have rationed them was past hearing.
I looked at Grace’s hands, palms up on her knees, brown to the wrist.
She would have done it in that order anyway. Youngest first, no discussion. Knowing the rule would have bought us nothing except the chance to argue with her about it, and nobody had ever won one of those.
✦ ✦ ✦
Nine was the archer and ten was the climb, and both have stayed with me the way a passage of scripture stays, word for word, long after the meaning stopped needing repeating.
Sagittarius was a corridor that shot at you in rhythms. Freya heard the pattern before I saw it, four beats and a rest, like a song missing its singer, and called our crossings like she’d called tea rounds.
She sent Colt through on the second rest, ahead of herself, and made nothing at all of doing it.
Capricorn was a wall. You climbed, or you stayed. Vika climbed it twice, the second time with Colt’s wrist in her fist after a hold crumbled under him, hauling him the last three metres on one arm with a sound I’d only ever heard from lifting equipment.
Nobody thanked anybody by then. We’d stopped keeping those books. Your hand just went where it was needed, and that was the whole language.
My core spent something in both rooms. Small draws, taps on cracked ice, each one travelling further along the seam than the last. By the top of the climb there was a taste in my mouth like a coin left on the tongue.
✦ ✦ ✦
Aquarius was filling when we got the door open.
Water, clear and moving, knee-height and climbing. At the far end, a wheel-door, submerged to the hub. The room’s script was underwater before anyone could read the terms, which I suspected was itself the terms.
“Wheel,” Vika said, and went in again.
She got it turning while the rest of us were still wading.
By the time the water hit my chest she had it half-open, feet braced on the frame, whole body a lever. She stayed down holding that wheel against the current for all three of us to pull through the gap.
She came through last, lungs empty, streaming water, and stood there getting her breath back, her jaw still set as it had been since the cup room.
“You’re not the joke on this roster,” she said to me, unprompted, furious about it. “Fine. Noted in the report. Don’t answer.”
I didn’t answer. Freya answered, from the floor, wringing out her socks. “Can I be in the report?”
“No.”
Pisces was two channels of black water cut side by side into the stone. The current in both ran brutally hard against us.
Between the channels was a thick stone divider, built solid at the top and bottom, with a hollow gap running straight through the middle. A single, thick rope passed through that gap, connecting the two channels.
Underwater, at both ends of the rope, heavy iron shackles waited.
The carving above showed two fish, connected by a single line. Script beneath it:
THE CORD HOLDS. THE FAR STONE FREES.
Mounted on the divider, just above the waterline, was a knife.
I read it twice and it stayed simple, which is what worried me. Shackle to the wrist, swim, and a rope running through a hollow gap in the wall between the two channels so that neither of you can see the other and both of you are tied to whatever they do next. Nothing about it needed explaining. That was the point of it. Every puzzle in this place had been simple in exactly this way, simple enough to look survivable while you were still reading it and working out what it wanted from you, with the cost only showing up once two people were in the water and one of them was already losing.
“Pairs again,” Vika said.
Freya had Colt’s sleeve before anyone else moved. “Me and him.”
“You’re the water sign,” Colt said.
“I’m a Sagittarius, actually.” She locked the iron shackle around her wrist. “I want a refund.”
Vika and I went first. We locked our shackles underwater. Stone grates slammed down across the entrances, shutting us in. We matched our strokes perfectly, keeping the rope loose between us. We hit the winning stones at the far end, and the iron shackles clicked open, dropping off our wrists.
Then Freya and Colt locked in. The grates came down.
They both swam comfortably until a massive surge of water crashed down Colt’s channel. It hit him out of nowhere, folding him under. The current owned him instantly, sweeping him backward toward the start.
The rope went tense.
Freya was yanked violently underwater. She was slammed against the divider, pinned right where the rope disappeared into the hollow gap. She was suddenly fighting the dead weight of Colt and the unusually strong current pushing against him.
The knife was right above her head. If she cut the rope, she lived.
“FREYA. THE KNIFE,” I screamed.
“He’s nearly,” she said, her head just barely above the violent water. “Got it. He’s nearly.”
She took one massive breath and went completely under.
She grabbed the rope with her free hand, planted her feet against the underwater stone of the divider, and pulled.
Staying underwater, she fought his brutal current. She anchored herself to the wall and hauled the line toward her, hand over hand. Every metre of rope she dragged through the hollow gap pulled Colt one metre forward.
Colt broke the surface, choking. He felt the rope pulling him forward and used it. He swam hard, fighting the water, while Freya hauled him from deep underwater on her side of the wall. He crashed over the edge at his far end and slammed his hand onto the stone.
After that, the water drains itself.
He was moving before he even had air in his lungs. He scrambled over the thick stone divider.
Freya was still standing, braced hard against the stone divider.
“Freya,” he gasped, his voice cracking in the room. “We did it. The water’s gone. Come on.”
But Freya didn’t come up. Her eyes were closed, a faint smile frozen on her pale face, and she wasn’t breathing.
She never reached for the knife. I was close enough to see both her hands the entire time, and both of them stayed on the cord, pulling him all the way up.
She was faster than him. She could have been faster than him again.
✦ ✦ ✦
Vika, Colt, and I sat on the far stone and didn’t speak. Colt was crying, hunched over his knees.
He had her shackle in his fist. It had come off her wrist when the water finished with her, and he had taken it out of the drain without anyone seeing him do it, and he didn’t put it down again.
My chest had gone past pain into information, and I read it the way a man reads a final demand.
The last door had opened onto a corridor, long, sloping down, and at its end stood a door with no carving above it at all.
“Twelve rooms,” Vika said. “Your ceiling said thirteen.”
“You saw me count.”
“I see most things.” She got up in stages, like tired soldiers do. “So what’s behind a door the map won’t admit to?”
The corridor answered her before I could.
They came out of the walls at the halfway mark, two serpents of the same stone as everything that had killed everyone, each one almost as wide as the corridor. Between them, the unmarked door.
Vika looked at them for a long moment. Then she looked at me, at Colt shivering on the stone, and whatever she saw, she did calculations on it faster than I could argue with the result.
“You’re spent, and he can barely stand,” she said. “One of you still reads rooms, and it was never me.” She rolled her shoulder, the posture habit, one last time. “Middle of the corridor, Vance. Take him. Don’t stop walking. Whatever happens behind you, that’s my paperwork.”
“Vika.”
“It always lands on me,” she said. “I put that in writing on day one.”
She went at the left serpent the way she’d gone at everything today, but louder this time, throwing her entire presence into the dead space. The stone heads snapped instantly toward the movement, locking onto her as the immediate threat, completely ignoring us.
The corridor came apart into noise and stone dust. I grabbed Colt by the strap, dragged him up, and did the only thing left that honoured any of it.
We didn’t stop walking.
The unmarked door opened ahead of us without being touched, the first door in this place that had ever seemed glad to.
The corridor behind us went suddenly, absolutely quiet. I pushed Colt over the threshold, and we walked into room thirteen.