The flash of fantasy paralyzed her.
“Where?” said Adrian.
“Inside the fun house,” said Nova, the words feeling robotic and rehearsed. “Oh, wait. I think it might have just been that creepy doll up on the balcony.”
She lifted her eyes to the remains of a mannequin on the second floor. It was wearing a sodden clown costume—though someone had long ago taken its head.
They watched, unmoving, for a long while.
“Maybe we should go inside and look around?” she said.
Adrian nodded. “If we do see Nightmare, you know not to let her touch you, right?”
She shivered, looking again at his dark skin, his lithe fingers—touching her, but not really.
“I know,” she murmured, and moved back just enough to break the hesitant contact.
Reaching up, Adrian began to draw onto the side of the ticket booth again. Nova closed her eyes while she waited. She focused on her breath, trying to drown out the surge of sensations flooding her body. She needed to stop thinking about handsome smiles and small touches and kisses and dates. If Adrian liked her—really liked her—it was only because he didn’t really know her.
He would never like the girl beneath the lie. He would never like Nova Artino. And it didn’t matter to her anyway, because she could never fall for a Renegade.
That word shattered the cloud of doubt that had gathered around her, and she opened her eyes, solid again in her resolve.
He was a Renegade.
He was her enemy.
He might have come here today with ulterior motives, but then, so had she.
“Ready?” he said.
She started, her skin prickling with apprehension. He had drawn himself a gun.
On closer inspection, she realized it was a tranquilizer gun. This alone might have given her pause, except she had so recently seen him shoot. She doubted she had much to worry about.
She gave him a fierce nod.
“I’m ready.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THE FUN HOUSE—what the photograph had shown to once have been called The Nightmare—was a rickety two-story building covered in peeling white-and-orange paint. Its few windows sported crooked shutters and slatted boards long ago nailed across them. There was no glass. Spiderwebs, some as thick and dark as yarn, were strung across the overhang of the wraparound porch. As they passed beneath it, Adrian glanced up at the headless clown. He assumed it had once had a head, but it was hard to know for sure. The place was so creepy it was only with exaggerated imagination that he could picture what it must have once been—a place of amusement and whimsy. A place that people didn’t enter while their stomachs filled with dread.
The porch groaned beneath his weight as he stepped up to the double-door entrance, where a mural of twin ballerinas had been painted to welcome in the visitors. One of them had a speech bubble that read, “Welcome to our fun house!” And the other, “Enjoy your stay!” And Adrian could just picture their little heads spinning around as he pushed open the doors, their tinny voices adding, with a haunting cackle—Or else …
But the mural was just a mural and there were no eerie voices when he and Nova stepped into the first chamber of the house. There was no noise at all beyond the distant carnival music coming from the amusement park they’d left behind.
This first room was without windows, and he held the door open long enough for them to get their bearings, though they could not see very far into the old attraction. A wall was built only six feet in front of the door, encouraging visitors to move quickly beyond the foyer and into whatever lay beyond.
“Someone’s been here recently,” said Nova, pointing at the ground, where clear footprints could be seen passing through the years of accumulated dust.
Nova reached into a pouch at her belt and pulled out a small device. She gave it a snap and it began to glow luminescent yellow. She tossed it into the next doorway.
“That’s neat,” said Adrian.
“Exothermic micro-flares. I make them myself.”
He smiled at her. “If you happen to run out of them, I could also draw a flashlight.”
She scowled as she stepped forward into the shadows.
Adrian let go of the door and it creaked loudly, then shut with a resounding click, trapping them inside with the stale, silent air. He followed Nova around the bend and through a series of switchback paths that looped back and around on each other a number of times. Nova left her micro-flare as they passed it, perhaps as a way to track the direction they’d come, lighting another and then another as they made their way through the narrow lanes. Adrian trailed his left hand against the wall to keep them from treading back over old ground, and though the maze seemed a little childish, he could imagine how disconcerting it would have been to try to traverse it in pitch-blackness.
After turning into two dead ends, they found themselves at the end of the maze, standing before a long hallway that was made up to look like the corridor of a quaint old house. Two small square windows donned lace curtains and the walls were covered in blue-checkered wallpaper.
They stepped out into the hallway, and the floor tilted beneath them.
Nova gasped and tumbled to the side, knocking into Adrian. He instinctively wrapped his arms around her as his back crashed into the wall.
They froze, neither daring to move while the hallway settled around them. He could feel Nova’s heartbeat pounding, and when she met his gaze, her cheeks were flushed.
He couldn’t keep his fingers from curling, just slightly, into the fabric of her uniform.
Nova let out a self-deprecating sigh. “Heads up—the floor moves.”
Adrian grinned. “You don’t say.”
To his disappointment, Nova pulled herself away, leaning on the wall for support instead. “It’s activated by weight,” she said. “If we both stick to this side, we should be able to keep it pretty steady.”
“Wow, you really are good at physics.”