She glowered at him. “Now you decide to become sarcastic?”
Cheeks twitching, Adrian followed her through the corridor, each of them keeping their footsteps as close to the wall as possible to keep it from swaying beneath them again.
At the end of the undulating hall, they pushed through a hanging curtain and Adrian spotted two shadowed figures rushing toward them. He yelped and grabbed Nova’s elbow to pull her behind him, when his brain caught up with his eyes and he realized he was staring at their own reflections.
At least, their own distorted reflections. One of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors was curved to make Adrian appear short and squat, while Nova’s was altered to look eight feet tall.
He exhaled. “Sorry. This place might be making me a little jumpy.”
Nova pulled her arm away and turned to face him, settling her hands on her hips. “For the record, while it’s very charming that you keep trying to protect me, I would like to remind you that I actually know how defend myself.”
He grimaced. “I know. It’s just … instinct.”
“Well, stop it.”
He held his hands up. “Won’t happen again.” He hesitated. “I mean, unless I’m pretty sure you’re about to die, then I’m absolutely going to rescue you, whether you like it or not.”
Rolling her eyes, Nova headed into the hall of mirrors, which was another sequence of corridors that wound back and forth, so that at times they were surrounded by countless versions of themselves reflecting into infinity, and at other times the optical illusion of the hall made it impossible to see where the next break in the mirrors was, so that it felt as if there were no way out. At one point, Adrian found himself gaping at a version of himself in which his legs and head were shrunk to doll proportions, leaving his torso to stretch eternally between them, when from the corner of his eye he could have sworn he saw Nightmare herself dart past his view.
He gripped the tranquilizer gun and spun to chase after her, promptly crashing into a wall. When he did make it around the corner, he saw only Nova frowning at him. “What’s wrong?”
Blinking, Adrian shook off the vision, realizing that it must have only been her that he’d seen, his own imagination getting carried away with another distorted reflection.
“Nothing,” he said. “How do we get out of here?”
They fumbled around for another minute until they found a staircase. Adrian noticed small holes in the floor as they made their way up, and he suspected they were intended to blow bursts of air, probably up into the skirts of unsuspecting girls, but whatever mechanism had caused it must have been out of order, and they made their way to the top without incident.
Adrian stared down the next corridor. It was wider than the one downstairs. There were no windows here, just dark wood floors and a collection of framed oil paintings hung on the thick-striped wallpaper, mostly portraits of stoic-looking aristocrats. Stacked up against the nearest wall were dozens of burlap mats.
Adrian stepped out first this time, preparing to catch himself, but the floor held stable.
They made their way forward, side by side, waiting to discover what new surprise this room had to offer.
“I think they used those burlap mats for slides,” said Adrian, peering at a painting of a man with a wiry gray beard. He frowned. There was something off about the picture. Something about his eyes that made Adrian pause. Had he imagined them moving, tracking him and Nova across the hall?
An optical illusion, probably, but he couldn’t quite resist stepping closer to it, when he heard a loud ka-thunk and Nova screamed.
He spun around just in time to see Nova disappear through a square trap door. Adrian launched himself forward, trying to grab her, but the door snapped shut. All he’d caught was the sight of a metal slide leading back down to the floor below.
“Nova! Nova!” He fell to the floor where she had fallen through, trying to dig his fingers into the edges of the trapdoor, to no avail. Standing, he stomped around in the same spot, but the door did not give. “Nova!”
From down below, he heard her calling, “I’m okay!”
At the same moment, the painting in front of Adrian popped open and a head launched itself forward. Adrian cried out, lifted the gun, and fired.
The tranquilizer dart shot past the disembodied head, clunking harmlessly into the wall beside it.
“He-he-he-he!” chortled a high-pitched mechanical voice. “You’ve lost your pal, oh boo-hoo! But don’t stop now … the only way out is through!”
The head bobbed a second longer, and Adrian could see it was attached to a springy base, like a jack-in-the-box toy. It was painted like a clown, with garish red lips and a black diamond on its cheek, and he wondered if it was supposed to be the missing head from the doll outside.
The picture frame slammed shut. Inside the wall, he heard the click of gears as the mechanics reset themselves.
He swallowed, and realized he was shaking.
“Adrian?” Nova yelled from below.
Panic ebbing, he tucked the gun away and dug out his marker. “Hold on, I’m coming down to you.” Kneeling over the floorboards again, he started to draw a trapdoor of his own.
“No—wait!”
He paused, tilting his head to listen more closely.
“I think there might be two routes through this place,” Nova yelled. “We should keep going—check them both out.”
He frowned. There was nothing appealing at all about being separated, especially when this really might be Nightmare’s secret lair. Though the longer they stayed, the more Adrian questioned how anyone could stand to spend more time here than they had to.
Finally, Adrian forced his shoulders to release some of the mounting tension. “Okay,” he yelled down to Nova. “I’ll meet you at the exit.”
She didn’t respond. Perhaps she had already moved on.