Page 166 of The Amber Sunburst

When Lazarus is finally dragged into the room full of the eliminated Auxiliaries and all the Priestesses clear out, he begins his search for the emergency exit.

He has to look in short increments, stopping to feign unconsciousness whenever a Priestess enters with another fallen Auxiliary. But he’s come upon a problem: the entire room is cobblestone with no entries or exits except wherever the Priestesses are coming in from. Even when he’s sure he hears the noise of stones scraping against each other like a passage opening, he can’t see any new tunnels.

Lazarus is in the process of scanning the far left wall when he hears a Priestess and falls back against the wall to sit. Something static lightly shocks him and he’s rolling through the wall and into a tunnel.

“Wha—Ow!” His back slams into the hard stone floor, and Forms. He just found the emergency exit. By accident. Through a solid wall.

Well, okay then.

The fact that the exit is open means that the others have triggered their own escape routes and are probably already making their way out of the maze.

That just leaves him to get Arete and meet them at Arc Eight. He sprints down the exit tunnel, which takes a sharp turn at some point that he hopes is an indicator he’ll pop out next to the Arc One hospital like he’s supposed to.

This time there’s no hidden door at the end of the path, but rather a big metal one with a push handle and a locking mechanism from the inside. Above it, weirdly clandestine for such an archaic, stone setting, is a neon green exit sign.

He pushes out into the open and squints against the bright sun. He finds himself in an alleyway of Arc One which is—thank the Forms—closed in on one side by the hospital, right where they predicted he’d be.

The cloak that Arete was meant to drop off is on the floor by the door and the coffee shop they told her to wait in is only a block away. He pulls the cloak over his Auxiliary uniform and speed-walks to the cafe.

The shop is warm and cozy, but it still reeks of Arc One opulence. Inside, a small collection of people watch the Trial on their rings or tablets, eat food more expensive than a hundred meals at the Academy, and laugh jovially with their friends as Auxiliaries are knocked out or electrocuted or maimed one after the other.

The longer he scans for Arete the more worried he becomes. The shop isn’t very big but he doesn’t see her. So Lazarus, as he is wont to do, comes to the worst possible conclusion.

She’s not here.

But she made it to drop the cloak off, and if she got that far, how could she not have ended up here? Unless she found another shop she thought was more interesting or followed some stranger offering her candy or…

“Oh, thank the Forms,” he says when he finally spots a table scattered with tarot cards. Arete is still nowhere to be found, but she must be nearby. She wouldn’t leave behind her precious cards.

He falls into the seat she must have been using to wait for her and packs the cards up into their box. He’s nearly done when something catches his eye.

The Tower card. It’s been written on.

Trust Arete to doodle on a rare, nice set of cards. Hopefully the pen is erasable, he thinks, before he looks closely at the scribbles.

You want the girl? it reads. You’ll have to come up the stairs and get her.

He blinks in confusion. Then he gasps in horror.

Someone’s taken Arete, and they’re making him go back to the Academy to get her.

Meaning this whole convoluted scheme—escaping during a Trial to keep from setting off the alarms—is now meaningless.

He has the hysterical urge to start laughing. The Tower: representing, as he and Arete’s guidebook told them, carefully laid plans falling apart.

As much as he wants to sprint down to the docks, Arete be damned, he’s her brother now. She said so.

And he can’t leave his sister behind. So he pockets the cards, picks up Zeno’s violin from the floor, and rushes out of the shop to face what will probably be his own demise.

He scales the stairs three at a time, stumbling and tripping but somehow managing not to fall. The haste and adrenaline fuel him; he hardly feels out of breath. Because maybe the kidnapper just now wrote that threat, and he’ll manage to catch them before they make it to the Academy. Maybe they’ll see him sprinting and get intimidated. He is rather tall.

He comes to an abrupt stop when he reaches the top stair. One step up and two steps forward will put him into the bounds of the Academy. If he crosses the threshold, he won’t be able to leave again. Not without setting off the alarm. He’ll be damned, shamed, and probably killed.

He almost turns around. He wants to turn around. But then he sees Arete’s curly hair. There’s a gun to her head.

“Lazzy!” Arete shouts, and that’s his mind made up. He stumbles across the boundary without another thought to reach the Academy lawn. It’s not until he’s halfway to her that Lazarus recognizes Arete’s captor and his heart rate spikes all over again.

“Lazarus,” Apollonia says, her features set in their usual sternness.