Page 131 of Thief of Hearts

I did so and he cut the trip wire, flinging himself back as he did so.

Long, sharpened pikes shot straight up out of the floor where we had been standing just a moment earlier. We would have been impaled.

My eyes were wide as I turned to look at him.

“One down, a thousand to go,” he said. He moved a bit farther into the room, testing the ground in a way that only he seemed to understand. I held up the torch and used it to investigate the rest of the area. I wanted to know if I could locate some traps, too.

When I held the torch off to the right, I saw something I didn’t understand. “Zain? Do you see that? It looks like an hourglass embedded into the wall.”

He stopped what he was doing and followed the light. “Why would there be an hourglass . . .” His voice trailed off and he swore. “This is timed. The sand is falling.”

I didn’t need to ask what would happen if all the sand fell to the bottom. I was sure the answer was “death.”

And there wasn’t much sand left in the top. I sheathed my sword and kept the torch in my left hand.

“We’re going to have to run through,” he said. “Follow me and do exactly as I tell you.”

Zain tapped a ring on his right middle finger and then said, “Ready?”

I nodded and he started forward.

“Jump!”

I jumped and felt a group of arrows slice the air under my feet.

“Down!”

I immediately crouched, just as a massive axe swung sideways out of the rock. I told myself not to look at the hourglass. I would follow Zain and he would know what to do and we would get out of this.

We both straightened back up and began to run again. Before he could say anything, he grabbed me and put me on his left side, keeping us an arm’s length apart.

“Wait,” he said.

Another giant axe came out of the ceiling and swung at us, but we avoided having it split our heads down the middle as it passed harmlessly between us.

He looked ahead of him and then over at the hourglass on the wall. “We’re going to run for three steps and then I want you to jump as far as you can toward that opening! On the count of three. Three, two, one, go!”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

We ran hard, and elongated flames burst out of the walls, straight at us. The oppressive heat was too much, but I knew that if I stopped moving, I would be engulfed in fire.

“Jump!” Zain said, and I used my running start to go as far as I could, hanging on to his hand. I pulled him along and crashed into the stone wall on the far side. I let out an “oof” when I hit, and then Zain was already in motion, tugging me into the opening.

We turned to see that the hourglass had run out and every trap in the room tripped itself, filling the cavern with weapons and fire and what smelled a bit like poison.

“Let’s keep moving,” he suggested, and we hurried away down another hallway. Would the poison follow us or would it be contained to that one room?

The hallway led into a much smaller room. I used the torch and could see a large metal box in the center of the room, with a metal door behind it.

“Is it safe to go in?” I asked.

“I think so,” he said.

That did not reassure me. “I really hope those aren’t the words that are going to be put on our gravestones.”

We entered the room quietly and I swung the torch from side to side, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

Not that a large box sitting in the middle of a room was ordinary.