Nina steps forward onto the ash but quickly pulls her bare foot back to the safety of the doorway. The ash is hot. Really hot.
Nina sees the screen across the room fill with text. If she wants to find out how the hell to get out of here, she has to get to that screen. She takes a breath, braces herself, and runs as fast as she can across the hot ash.
She skids to a halt on the raised area beneath the screen. She’s safe here. She shifts her weight quickly from one scalded foot to the other to ease the discomfort of the brief run.
Nina could have predicted the name of this room before she even looked up at the screen—and when she does, she sees she was right.
Welcome, Nina, to Burnt Norton.
The key to the door is all that’s left here—if you
dance you can persevere.
“Find a key in here?” Nina exclaims, looking at the vast ash-filled room. “You have got to be fucking kidding me!”
She takes in the sheer square footage of the room, every bit of it covered in thickly packed ash except the raised area where she stands and the entrance and exit doorways. It will take her hours to search through all the dust—which wouldn’t be a problem if the floor weren’t burning hot. She has barely been able to stand on the floor for more than a few seconds.
The screen beside her updates, a temperature reading appearing where the text was. The floor is currently forty-five degrees Celsius.
As she watches, the screen clicks up to forty-six degrees. It’s going to get hotter. It will just keep getting hotter and her prospects of getting out of here will fall exactly in line with that.
She needs to get in that ash now.
Another wave of dizziness floods her senses. Nina forces herself to focus, to remember the poem, the room’s namesake. There will be a clue in all this, she’s sure.
The poem is about the past and the future; about time. About the present and seizing it. Well, that sentiment is certainly relevant now.
She recalls that Eliot wrote the poem after visiting a manor house called Burnt Norton. It isn’t actually about a burnt house, though the room clearly uses that symbolism. And in a way it’s beyond apt, because God knows Nina wishes this whole house would burn to the ground or slip into the sea as James suggested the day she arrived.
James has not popped into her head for a while and as he does, she knows with certainty that he is a part of all this, to what degree unclear. But Nina knows he was aware that something wasn’t right here when he left her that first day. She pushes the thought away. There is no time.
She needs to work out the room’s riddle.
Nina racks her brains for lines from the poem and something pops out of the ether, a line instantly recalled, one of its most famous: there the dance is, at the still point of the turning world.
She looks out into the center of the room: the still point of the turning world.
She will have to go out there, right into the middle. And she will have to stay there awhile and dig in that hot ash.
The temperature readout beside her clicks up to forty-seven degrees Celsius. And without a second thought Nina runs straight into the middle of the room, dives down onto all fours, and begins searching in the burning ash for a key. Intense dizziness floods every part of her as she tries to push away the pain and find the one object that will save her.
CHAPTER 43
JOON-GI
J oon-gi’s heart is thundering in his chest as he hits the edge of the beach, his sandals filled with warm sand as he swings around the final stair post and propels himself not toward the beach, but along the line of trees that back it.
The substation down here was built during construction of the house, so that the construction site could be powered while still off-grid.
The people running the house hadn’t been aware of it until Joon-gi found the old cabling. They’d asked him to make the house impervious to power outages given the obvious problems blackout would cause, and he had fixed it.
It must be beyond irritating for them, he thinks, that the original programming on the rooms’ safety doors is impossible to override; a built-in check and balance that they can’t subvert. The house was built to challenge the participants but ultimately protect them from their own stupidity. While they were clearly able to change that programming on the limits of the challenges themselves, they could not rid themselves of the fact that technology requires power.
He flies through the tropical forest undergrowth, the sound of waves breaking through the woods just beyond him. And then the sound of something else.
Another noise catches Joon-gi’s attention. The low hum of something. He pushes it away; whatever it is, it isn’t an imminent threat.
He bundles through the branches and suddenly emerges in a small cleared area. A tiny brick outbuilding with a chipped light-blue door stands in front of him.
