“Wake up.” A rough, low voice pierced Rohan’s consciousness. “I saidwake up, damn it.” Water splashed on Rohan’s face, and that did it. He opened his eyes to find himself in a white room—white ceiling, white floor, white walls.
Toby Hawthorne hovered over him. “Good,” the man grunted, stepping back. “You’re awake.”
“Awake,” Rohan replied in his poshest accent, “and dripping.” It took him only a second longer to register his bare chest. He and Toby had both been stripped of their shirts—and vests.
So much for plan A.
“That was our only drinking water,” Toby informed Rohan. “I could have left you here and taken it with me, but I didn’t. The maze on the walls of this room—it isn’t a maze.”
Rohan stood. He hadn’t even realized therewasanything on the walls.
“We’re looking for the place all three paths converge,” Toby told him. “I know this room—or one like it, anyway.”
Focus, Rohan told himself.Build the labyrinth back up and lock it all away.
Rohan managed to find the convergence before Toby did and pressed it. The wall parted just enough for Rohan’s body to slip through, for Toby’s to do the same. There was no light in the next room except for what little spilled in from the chamber they’d just left, but even that was enough for Rohan to tell that this room was lined with mirrors.
Floor, ceiling, walls—all but one.Rohan walked toward that wall, one measured step at a time. “You know what this is, don’t you?” Rohan said, his voice echoing off the mirrors.
“Another puzzle.” Toby stood very still. “Another test.”
“That long-ago Ascendant called it the Culling in her letters,” Rohan said. “It’s one of the early stages of the Crucible, puzzle after puzzle, challenge after challenge, chamber after chamber, designed to make sure that only the truly extraordinary make it out to compete in the rest.”
As Rohan’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he registered that the backwall, the one that bore no mirrors, was not entirely solid. What little he could make out of it resembled a massive spiderweb.Metal?Closing in on it, Rohan lifted his hand to that web, but the moment he touched it, blood bloomed on the surface of his skin.
Blades.Whatever the puzzle in this chamber was, it involved mirrors, light, darkness, and a web made of razor-sharp blades, the space between one and the next not quite large enough for Rohan to stick a hand through.
A voice spoke from the darkness beyond those blades. “You bleed, Proprietor.”
Rohan registered the tenor of that voice: low, husky.
“It’s a fault of mine,” Rohan quipped, like he hadn’t a care in the world. “Bleeding. Poor decision-making, really, to have skin that’s less than invulnerable and so much unsightly red liquid in my veins. Inexcusably messy, really.”
On the other side of the bladed web, there was silence.
“Katalin Aquila Reyes, I presume?” Rohan said. The woman’s voice bore just enough resemblance to Lyra’s to justify Rohan’s inference.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that name,” the woman said.“Who I once was, I am no more. Who I am, I was not before.”Those words smacked of rhythm and meaning—an oath, perhaps.
“You’re the Woman in Black,” Toby said. “The Hand. The Omega. Theend.”
“And the two of you have not been judged,cannotbe judged while the Crucible is in process.”
Rohan took that to mean Katalin was a rule-bound sort, a true believer in more ways than one. That suggested a certain level of black-and-white thinking he might be able to use.
“When the Crucible ends,” Rohan noted, “youwill be the Judge.”
“Very good, Proprietor.”
Her second use of his new title gave Rohan all the opening he needed for plan B. “Care to strike a deal?”
A low, vicious sound escaped Toby’s throat.
“I am not here to talk toyou,” Katalin told Rohan, and the next thingRohan knew, she was standing directly on the other side of the web, so close that Rohan could make out the whites of her eyes through the gaps in the blades.
Nothing else—just her eyes.
“You’re here for me,” Toby concluded behind Rohan. He stepped forward, one heavy, audible footstep at a time.
