I struggled to breathe for almost a minute, as the hot air continued to engulf me, and then the growling cut out, the cylinder lifting just as suddenly as it had come down. It shot through a hole in the ceiling, the panels resuming their formation a moment later.
I patted myself down, feeling my clothes and hair. They were still damp, but I was no longer dripping. Which I guessed had been the purpose of that particular surprise.
Inhaling, I gazed once more around the chamber, only to realize that it looked completely different. So much so that I half wondered if that cylinder had transported me to a different room entirely.
The dim red lighting remained, but a high metal wall loomed in front of me. It spanned the length of the room,stretching from edge to edge and trapping me in one quarter of the chamber.
I was about to run to the edges to be doubly sure there was no way through it when small blue lights glowed in the wall ahead of me. They illuminated the outlines of two doorways.
I approached cautiously.
Two long passageways stretched beyond the doorways, both leading in different directions. As if to emphasize the point, two arrows blinked to life above the doors—one pointing left, the other pointing right.
I moved to the threshold of the right entry, my eyes fixed on the gloomy passageway beyond.
A child’s cry pierced the silence.
It sounded like a young girl, either terribly frightened or in some kind of pain, and it carried distinctly from somewhere behind the wall on the far right. It was so realistic that the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, even though I knew it had to be some kind of simulation.
I stepped backward, away from the right entrance, and approached the left doorway instead, peering through at the seemingly identical passageway.
The crying stopped.
I stalled in the doorway, confused.
What am I supposed to be doing here?
Enter one of these two doorways, I assumed, but…
Another noise punctured the quiet. This one much louder than the child’s cry. It was a chorus of shouting and screaming: pleas for help. They came from men and women—a crowd of at least five to ten, from what I could tell—and originated distinctly from my left.
I stepped back, my heart hammering against my ribcage. The child’s cries started up again, mixing with the adults’screams and filling the chamber with a cacophony of desperate voices. They echoed off the walls, piercing through my ears and reverberating in my head.
“Choose your entrance to the maze,” the male, computerized voice returned, its cold, clinical tone somehow cutting above everything else.
I stared between the two entrances and the murky passageways that stretched beyond them. This was amaze?
“Whichever party you reach first will be saved,” the voice went on. “The other will perish.”
My gaze lifted to the ceiling where the voice had come from, as if I were hoping to find a face up there and give it an incredulous stare.
It was asking me to choose between saving the lives of possibly a dozen men and women, and a single child?
I wet my lips, my stomach tensing as I considered it. If I were to be honest, my first instinct was to dart toward the child, but perhaps that was just because I had a sister who sounded her age.
And this wasn’t about personal inclinations. I needed to figure out which option Fairwell would most approve of. I knew their protective attitude toward children, but against a crowd of adults, would they really expect me to save the child?
Some of the adults could be young, for all I knew. Going after the child would feel to me like a purely emotional reaction rather than one based on logic, which I guessed was not how Fairwell’s outreach branch operated.
So, after another long moment of deliberation, I approached the left doorway.
Blue lights flashed along the floor of the passageway when I stepped onto it, giving me a better idea of how far it stretched. And then, after I’d walked five feet, there wasa sharp metallic clang. I whirled to see a door slam down behind me, trapping me inside.
A moment later, everything went dark.
TWENTY
The darkness was all-consuming.I couldn’t see a single thing. I stood rooted to the spot, trying to find my bearings. My other senses sharpened, the cries that still reverberated around me becoming louder in my ears, my nose picking up on a distinctive metallic scent I hadn’t been conscious of before… I shivered. It smelled eerily like blood.
