She waits, then she waits some more, but no one answers.
Across the room she can see more writing appear. Perhaps they are trying to communicate with her that way.
She warily leans forward into the doorway and strains again to read the words on the screen, but she can’t.
Then she gives up.
“Okay, I can wait. You know someone’s coming. You know and I know. And this is only a game if I consent to play it, and I’m not consenting.”
Nina walks back into the vestibule corridor and sits down on the floor, her back to the wall, and waits. She can wait as long as it takes for Joe to get here, and unless they do something she is not going any farther.
—
OVER THE NEXT HOUR THE temperature in the vestibule steadily creeps from an ambient twenty-one degrees Celsius to an intensely uncomfortable forty-one degrees Celsius. Nina sporadically removes layers of clothing until she wears only her shorts and a hastily put-on sports bra. The heat is becoming unbearable. She paces now, no longer able to comfortably sit on the hot floor, her sweat running in rivulets down her spine onto the ground, her movement providing the only flow of air available. And she is parched now, the rhythmic stop/start of the tap in the next room impossible to ignore.
She is being flushed through the system, Nina knows that, but it doesn’t stop it happening. She needs water.
And just like that she enters the room.
The door closes behind her as she heads straight over to the flowing water and bends to slurp furiously at the cool intermittent bursts of it: bursts that Nina can’t help but notice are irregular in their duration, though clearly preprogrammed to be so.
However, she does not have time to contemplate that fact further as her ears prick up to focus on Bathsheba’s voice.
“Welcome, Nina. Proceed to the control panel to begin.”
Nina pauses, rising from her thirsty gulps at the tap, cool water still dripping from her chin as Bathsheba slips once more into silence.
Her eyes travel to the screen. Text flutters onto it, scrolling as it appears.
The door is now firmly closed, the vestibule, atrium, and other floors of Anderssen’s Opening long gone. She is in whatever this is now. She is in the heart of the game. And her opponent is showing her their next move.
She wanders to the control panel, wipes her mouth, and reads the text. A poem or a riddle, repeated and repeated and repeated as it scrolls. Nina blinks, a certain part of her coming alive. That Thursday-evening-with-her-father part of her, the vast swaths of useless knowledge she gathered and tended in order to keep up with his mind now uncurling inside her. She made it her lifework to live up to her father, to keep pace or at least not slow him down. If ever anyone was ready for this sort of thing, then it would be her, surely?
She blinks and rereads:
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
Nina realizes with a flush of triumph that it is a section from the third stanza of “The Waste Land,” but her thrill of recognition is short-lived as the sentiment of the final sentence hits her.
Fear death by water. The phrase overtakes everything in her mind. Nina’s hand rises to her wet mouth as dread blossoms neatly inside her. She just drank the water. Potentially poisoned water?
She bends quickly to the flowing water and sniffs. Then she pulls back, frowns, and sniffs again. Her mind filing through her complete knowledge of poisons.
There is no scent of garlic: phosphorus. Heart failure, coma, low blood pressure, death.
No scent of sulfur: hydrogen sulfide. Delirium, convulsions, blindness, death.
No scent of ammonia: ammonia. Shortness of breath, coughing, blindness, degenerative organ failure, death.
No scent of almonds: cyanide. Headache, dizziness, shortness of breath, slowed heart rate, vomiting, death.
