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She moved through a maze, and atevery junction of that maze, it seemed that there was a fresh puzzle: acrossword that contained words in Ancient Greek, a patterned rug that wasactually a cunning maze of knots to slide a single bead along. Amber solvedthem, although she wasn’t quite sure how she solved some of them, when theyseemed half there and half not, requiring impossible things. For one, Amberseemed to need to pinpoint the feeling of deepest loss. For another, she had toimagine a color that didn’t actually exist.
And she had to solve chessproblems. There were boards set up every other junction now, with puzzles setup on them. The first few were almost ludicrous in their simplicity, checkmatein one problems that took Amber a second or two at most. Slowly, though, theygrew to problems of the most fiendish complexity, the kinds of things thatAmber might have spent much of an afternoon staring at before they started tomake sense.
Amber solved those problems too,before she moved on. She didn’t know why, but she felt as if she had to solveevery problem she encountered, as if the maze somehow wouldn’t let herkeep going unless she found an answer.
So Amber solved the puzzles, oneafter another, moving around the maze, trying to find… what was she trying tofind? She was trying to save someone, wasn’t she? She couldn’t remember who,though. Maybe she’d never known who. Maybe working that out was a partof the bigger puzzle of it all.
She knew who was setting thepuzzles, though: Colm O’Rafferty. Amber could see him now, ahead of her in themaze, looking back at her from time to time with those cruel eyes, even whilehe smiled at her progress. Amber got the feeling that he was mocking her,taunting her without ever saying anything.
The twists and turns of the mazecontinued, and now there weren’t puzzles to slow her progress. There was justthe question of finding her way to the heart of it, catching up to Colm as hemoved swiftly ahead of her.
Amber was running now, although itfelt as if her feet were moving in slow motion. She couldn’t see Colm anymore,so she had to guess her way through the maze, applying what she knew about theprinciples of their design to cut through this one, taking turn after turn asshe followed.
Finally, Amber made it to the heartof the maze. Colm was there, waiting for her, still smiling the same smile asin the photograph of him. Amber started towards him, determined to catch him,determined to bring him to justice.
She’d almost reached him when shefelt the ground give way beneath her feet, and now Amber was falling, tumblingdown into endless darkness…
Amber woke with a gasp, cold sweatsticking clammily to her skin. It wasn’t even fully light yet, the first raysof the sun just starting to break in through her apartment window. She couldstill feel her heart beating fast in the thrill of the chase and the terror ofthe fall, only starting to settle a little as her dream faded.
Amber knew there was no way thatshe was going to get back to sleep, and in any case, maybe this would let hermake an early start on the case today. She got up, showered, and dressed in asimple dark suit. While she ate some cereal, she started to look over the filesagain on her laptop.
She took out the evidence bagcontaining Alice Chan’s pendant, setting it down on the counter in front ofher. Amber pulled up the image of Katrina’s Gemini pendant, wanting to confirmto herself again that they were the same. Seeing them there next to one anotheronly told Amber that she was onto something because the style of the designswas identical.
So far, it was almost the onlyphysical connection between the victims. Two victims, two years apart, bothinto astrology, both young women, both seeming to represent their astrologicalsign. Yet they didn’t seem to have anything else in common. There was no signthat they’d ever met, they weren’t connected on social media, they had verydifferent lives.
The two pendants suggested a pointof connection in otherwise separate existences. Could it be as simple as thembuying the pendants in the same place, or did they symbolize something morethan that? Did they indicate some kind of shared experience that Amber simplydidn’t know about yet?
Amber started to look for thependants online, but that was easier said than done. She was looking for aparticular style, not necessarily an exact match, so a simple image searchwouldn’t give her what she needed. Instead, Amber had to start the frustratinglyslow task of looking through images of such pendants manually, rejecting oneafter another as not being quite the same as the ones Alice and Katrina hadowned.
Amber was still looking throughimages when a knock came at the door of her apartment. She checked the time andrealized that Simon must have come to drive the two of them back over toKeystone. Amber rushed to grab her things, hurrying to the door. She hesitatedas she opened it, slightly worried about how Simon would react after everythingthat had happened between them last night. Everything that had almost happened.
He was there, waiting outside thedoor, looking as good as ever. Looking as worried as Amber felt, too, as if hedidn’t know quite what to say about it all, either.
“Hey, Simon,” Amber said. “Are youready to go?”
Simon nodded. “Amber, about lastnight-”
“We don’t need to say anything,”Amber said.
“I think we do,” Simon replied.Were they really going to have this conversation here, now? Amber didn’t knowwhat to do about that, although she did have a pretty good idea of someof the things she felt about Simon.
“I don’t regret kissing you lastnight,” Amber said.
“Nor me,” Simon agreed.
“But?”
“But how does any of this work,Amber?”
“I think it works pretty simply,”Amber replied. “I like you, you like me… you do like me, right?”
“I’m not sure that ‘like’ is astrong enough word for a lot of the things I’m feeling,” Simon said. There wasan intensity to his gaze that made Amber wonder if he was going to kiss heragain. She kind of hoped that he might.
“Well, what’s the problem?” Amberasked. “We’re both adults, we’re-”
“We’re both FBI agents. We’repartners. Both of those things complicate this. Palliser would probably demandthat we work in separate departments if we’re going to start dating.”
“Are we going to startdating?” Amber asked. She liked the idea of that, of being able to go somewherewith Simon and spend time with him when it wasn’t all about death and violence.
