14 – Together

“Do something!” a man screamed from near the back of the clustered would-be challengers. Someone threw something metallic at the door, and it clanged, bounced off, and spun away down the pit.

“Anyone got a bow? Shoot an arrow into it!” a woman yelled. Ward thought about it, wondering if maybe the door wasn’t solid copper. Maybe it was only a thin sheet of metal over wood, and the woman’s idea would work.

Ding, ding.

“Oh, gods!” Haley cried, leaning close to the ledge, peering down. Ward gripped her shoulder and edged his back closer to the wall, watching the crowd, expecting someone to do something stupid any second now—he’d seen plenty of panicking people, and it always got worse in crowds.

“Careful,” he growled, keeping his voice low and calm. Just then, with a twang and a metallic plink, someone fired an arrow at the door, and it bounced off and up, hitting the marble ceiling and then falling into the shadowy depths below.

Ding, ding, ding.

“What do we do?” a woman wailed.

“Hold my rope!” Ward watched as the mean-faced warrior-type tied a rope around his waist and then handed the loose end to the people standing nearby. His companion, the one who’d walked with him away from the wounded challengers, was first to grip it, nodding grimly.

Ward pulled Haley back beside him against the wall. “This ought to be interesting.”

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

The armor-clad man backed up two steps, then charged forward and leaped at the flat, copper door. Everyone collectively held their breath as he soared over the gap and impacted the metal. Ward hadn’t noticed at first, but he held a gleaming hatchet in his left hand and swung it as he got near, trying to, it seemed, wedge it between the door and the marble. It skittered over the metal surface, failing to find the gap, and the man screamed as he slid down the tarnished copper and fell into the abyss.

His friend leaned back, bracing himself, holding the rope. Unfortunately, the other four people holding on weren’t so well prepared, and he caught the brunt of the falling man’s weight by himself. Regardless, his muscles stood out on his forearms and shoulders, and he grunted ferociously as he stopped the man’s descent. He started to slide forward, but the others holding the rope finally caught on and hurried backward, hauling on the tether, alleviating his strain.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

The chimes came incessantly now, and Ward knew they were out of time. He looked back down the corridor toward the stairs, wondering what fresh hell would be unleashed. Would it come from the pit? The door? The passageway behind? He got his answer as the chimes stopped sounding, and a gout of flame erupted from the corridor wall back near the entrance. It was like someone with a flamethrower was standing behind the wall, firing it across the corridor, blocking off the exit.

“Look!” someone screamed. Everyone turned to see the distant flames, and that’s when everyone really started to panic. More and more people threw things at the door, and the guy hanging from the rope screamed to be pulled up. His friend tried to comply, slowly walking backward, hauling on the rope, but when more flames erupted in the tunnel, closer to the end where they all stood, several of his helpers let go of the rope, and he stumbled forward, tripping and sliding toward the edge.

Ward leaped away from the wall, intent on helping, reaching for the rope as it slid through the man’s hands, but he was too late; the friend let go, and with an echoing, receding scream, the mean-looking armored man fell into the abyss.

“My damn hands!” the helper groaned, holding them up, displaying the rope burns. Ward scooted back against the wall, standing with one foot only inches from the abyss. Haley hugged the wall beside him, eyes wide with panic as she watched everyone going into hysterics. Another gout of flame erupted in the corridor, and Ward estimated that each flame jet was about ten feet closer to them.

He leaned close to Haley’s ear, speaking softly, “We’ve got about a minute before those flames get to us if they keep getting closer.”

She looked at him with wide eyes. “What do we do?” Ward could barely hear her over the shouts and screams of the others, most of them asking the same question. He thought about it, about the alarm on the stairs, about the consequences of not hurrying. Was this place that cruel? Was it just going to kill them all here?

There’d been an easy, straightforward solution to the first alarm—get off the stairs. What about this one? There certainly wasn’t an easy solution, unless jumping into a nigh-endless abyss was it. Ward had good instincts. People always told him that. He had one of the best closure rates in the CID, and his instincts, those same ones that helped him find traffickers and hunt down missing shipments and people, were saying that jumping wasn’t the answer.

“Hey!” he shouted. Another gout of fire erupted only twenty feet down the hallway, and the screaming panic intensified. “Hey!” he shouted again, this time really putting his belly into it. A few people quieted down and looked his way, so he kept yelling, “Listen! Calm the hell down! Just stand still—it’s a test!” He felt Haley’s hot fingers grip his wrist, squeezing tight.

“A test?” someone asked.

“Yeah! Just stand still and don’t jump off. This place isn’t going to force us to jump to our death or be cooked. It’s testing our nerve!” Ten feet away, another gout of fire erupted with a whoosh, and the hot, billowing air wafted over the group, making Ward’s words hard to swallow.

Unfortunately, nobody knew him; nobody knew to trust his gut, and those flames were hot, close, and terrifying. The next jet would be right on them. Ward figured that was why the first person jumped. It was the man who’d burned his hands on the rope trying to save his friend. He just walked up to the edge and stepped off without a sound.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“It is a test!” another man cried. “It’s testing if we’re brave enough to jump!” He, too, leaped off, but he screamed all the way down until his voice grew inaudible. That was the tipping point. As the seconds ticked down, and the next gout of flame was due to burst into life on top of them, first a handful, then a dozen people jumped off the edge. Ward looked down at Haley and saw her eyes were squeezed shut; judging by how tightly she clutched his arm, he didn’t think she was planning to jump.

When he lifted his gaze, he saw the woman in green, Lisa, standing against the opposite wall, staring at him with a fierce smile. A man and a woman hugged each other, standing near the pit's edge. Ward could only see the woman’s face, but she had her eyes closed tight, much like Haley. Another man, youngish, wearing spectacles, sat cross-legged on the marble floor, his hands open on his knees, a serene expression on his face. Was he meditating? Everyone else was gone.

The air was hot and dry from the flames, and the threat of one of those terrible jets bursting to life here in this last section before the drop was panic-inducing, but he still couldn’t believe so many had jumped. Ward hoped he was right, hoped he’d at least have a chance to leap off the edge before the fire burned him too badly if he was wrong.

Before he could second-guess himself further, just as suddenly as they’d appeared, the flames winked out of existence. A loud click sounded from the copper door, and it descended, opening from the top down and extending over the pit like a narrow, metal bridge.

“You were right!” Lisa stepped away from the wall and approached the new bridge.

“Hold it!” Ward held up a hand. He smiled briefly down at Haley, relieved to have her stop squeezing his wrist in a death grip. “Let’s not make a mistake and rush ahead again. I don’t know what triggers those timers, but if there are more of them, let’s make sure we’re all ready to move on together.”

“And if the bridge closes?” Lisa tapped the copper walkway with the toe of her shiny black boot. The two people who’d been hugging separated while Ward and Lisa spoke, and they both moved to the bridge and looked over the sides.

“Did . . . did all those people jump to their deaths?”

“Who’s to say?” The young man with the spectacles stood from his meditative pose. “Could be the magic of this place simply teleported them elsewhere.” He looked back the way they’d come to where the corpses lay at the foot of the perilous stairway. “Or, they could be dead.”

He was an interesting character, Ward thought, watching him walk toward the bridge where the other three stood. His head was shaved clean down to the tan flesh of his scalp, and he had a dozen or more blue, wavy arrows tattooed on his scalp. His spectacles shared the same aesthetic as many of the pieces of tech Ward had seen in that world—brass and glass with a distinctly hand-crafted look.

“Well,” Ward started forward, checking that Haley was following him, “Lisa may be right. We should cross, I guess.”

“A wise man.” Lisa smirked and started forward, her bootheels clicking and echoing strangely on the metal. Ward wasn’t sure if he liked her, exactly, but he appreciated her waiting long enough to hear his response before starting forward.

The two huggers followed behind her and then spectacles. Finally, Ward led Haley across. The doorway opened into another room, this one considerably smaller than the other spaces they’d seen in the catacombs. It was square, with a ceiling only about eight feet high and a dark archway in the center of each wall. A pedestal sat in the center of the space, and atop it was a tarnished copper plaque stamped with text.

Ward was still looking around, taking in the room's layout, when Lisa approached the plaque and read aloud, “No more than three may pass through each doorway.”

“Ah,” the kid with the spectacles said, “the one consistency from the accounts of the catacombs that I’ve studied—the place has a way of separating people.”

“And if more than nine of us made it to this room?” the other man asked, clasping his companion's hand.

“Then it would be a race!” Lisa replied with a chuckle, and Ward began to wonder if her humor was mean-spirited or if she just thought everything was a bit amusing. She looked around at the other five of them, then shrugged. “I’ll be going through the center doorway. Feel free to follow if you’d like.”

Ward opened his mouth to say something but paused. He didn’t know what to say; the only word on the tip of his tongue was “wait,” so he just let it die, pressing his lips closed. Lisa stepped through the central archway, and it seemed to pulse with faint gray light, then fade to black again. He kind of wanted to follow her because she seemed the most capable or at least the most confident of the people he’d met, but the man and woman holding hands hurried after her. The archway flashed two more times, and when it faded, nothing but a smooth stone wall remained.

“They were quick to follow the moonstone.” The young man with the glasses turned and looked at Ward and Haley, then back at the two remaining archways.

“Moonstone?” Ward asked before he could stop to think about how it might make him look.

Haley answered, “Because of her eyes and their soft white glow. Some people label them that way—I mean, on Cinder, well, probably the whole of Vainglory. I could tell you were from off-world. Do they have a different name where you’re from?”

Ward thought about it briefly, then said, “Yeah, on my home world, they just call ‘em wizards and witches and whatnot.” He nodded and folded his arms, stepping back and looking from Haley to the young man. “I’m Ward, by the way. Do you all want to try to stick together?”

He pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “I’m Nevkin.”

“Haley.”

Nevkin nodded. “I saw you at the ceremony. From Tarnish, hmm? Sorry about your brother's fate.” He looked at Ward. “I would like to try to travel with you both, but we should all be cognizant of the fact that these ancient tunnels and vaults will likely try to separate us or even pit us against each other.”

“I was thinking about that.” Haley’s voice was soft, and her eyes were downcast, probably upset at the mention of her brother. “What the other man asked—if more than nine people had made it to this room, it may have gotten bloody.”

Ward nodded. “Yeah, I had the same thought.” His arms were still crossed, and the lump of his .357 under his hand was comforting as his mind went down dark paths.

“So?” Nevkin gestured left and right, from one archway to the other. He was wearing a small, circular leather pack, a thick gray, poncho-like garment, and pants that reminded Ward of the cowboys' jeans in old movies. His narrow boots looked sturdy, and overall, Ward had the feeling the kid was pretty capable. He looked at Haley, wondering if she had an opinion, but she was staring at the far wall where Lisa and the others had gone, her eyes unfocused. He figured she was probably still dwelling on her brother.

“I don’t know. Flip a coin?”

“Sure.” Nevkin reached into a pocket under his poncho and pulled out a silver glory. “Face or number?”

“Face,” Haley mumbled, then shook her head, snapping out of her trance. “Wait, it doesn’t matter; if I’m right, what way will we go?”

Nevkin shrugged, flipped the coin with ping, and snatched it out of the air, slapping it onto the back of his hand. Before he uncovered it, he asked, “If it’s face, we go right, number we go left?”

“Sounds good.” Ward stepped forward to witness the coin’s reveal. Nevkin lifted away his hand, and there, Ward saw the coin with its prominent X on display. “Left it is.” He walked over to the archway and tried to peer into the darkness, but just as the light in the room they stood in had no source, the darkness seemed utterly devoid of it. “I’ll go first.”

“Wait!” Haley hurried forward and reached out to take his hand. “Together.”

Nevkin shrugged and sauntered over, taking Haley’s other hand. “Together, then.”