“Children, open the door.” Dorf’s voice is tense now, his control slipping.
I start walking toward the red eye in the wall. Wrap my fingers around the key-chain light, locking it behind my knuckles. I reach the panel. Above the red light is a camera lens.
“Come and get me,” I say under my breath. Grit my teeth and smash my fist into the tech panel. Glass crunches. It hurts, but I don’t bleed. The hologram flickers out.
Everyone’s on their feet now. I hurry back to them. We have about five seconds of silence, and now two more panels slide open further down the hall. Two new lights blink on. The red lines collide. Dorf springs up a second time.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Dorf says, and the cool sheen in his voice is completely shot. He sounds nervous. “A team of trackers is being dispatched from the other end of the palace. They are three miles away at present. Wait for them to arrive and do not, I repeat, do not, go further into the hall.”
“Trackers?” Lilly asks, her eyes wide, the whites huge in the darkness. “What are trackers? What do you want from us?!” She shrieks it, and she sounds animal, jagged and raw throated. There’s something in her hand—a pointless, useless bracelet. She hurls it at the hologram. It passes through with barely a blip and skitters away over the marble.
Jules is starting to fidget, and now he runs straight for the hologram, all skinny legs and rage, like he’s going to tackle it. He tumbles through, twists, falls on his back.
“Stop moving!” Dorf shouts. “Do not move! Someone open that damned door!”
I race toward the next red eye, my fist raised. Will is going for the one on the other side of the hall. We smash into them at almost the same time. The hologram blinks out a second time. But Dorf’s voice keeps coming, echoing through the hall–open-the-open-the-door-don’t-DON’T-MOVE—
And I snap the trip wire. I barely feel it. A slight tug against my ankle, and the speakers cut out. The hall goes silent. Almost.
Under the thumping of the blood in my ears, I hear something—a hurried ticking, like a pocket watch. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, somewhere in the walls.
I stand perfectly still, trying to place the origin of the sound. It seems to be coming from everywhere at once, rippling through the huge space.
“Uh—” I look down at the severed wire, coiled on the marble. “Guys?”
A sharp clank. The sound intensifies, thumping now, rolling along the paneling. I imagine the hall as a huge aquarium; there’s a squid just beyond the walls, its tentacles batting along the glass. Lilly sees the wire at my feet. She looks up at me from where she’s crouched on the floor, wide-eyed.
“What did you do?” she whispers. “Anouk, he said we shouldn’t move, he said we’d die—”
The rumbling stops. It’s replaced by a gentle, shimmering hum.
My head snaps around. The sound is coming from the far end of the hall.
Ssssss. A hiss, like Penny dragging her mangy toy crocodile over the floor by its tail. Like fingernails sliding through a groove, sand pouring through an hourglass.
Will and Jules turn slowly. Lilly stands, twisting toward the sound. I stare, paralyzed.
At first it looks like a thin strip of mirror, two hundred feet away, stretching from one side of the hall to the other. Except the mirror is rising. And now it’s coming closer.
“Anouk, what did you do—?” Jules starts.
It’s not a mirror. It’s a wire. A single glinting wire, skimming approximately five feet above the floor. Not fast. Not slow. I stare at it, transfixed. And now it reaches a tall oriental vase and slices through it like butter.
My skin turns to ice.
“Duck!” I scream. “Duck, duck, get DOWN!”
I slam to the floor. Flip onto my back. The wire sings over me. The others are sprawled in a circle around me, shoes squeaking against the tile eyes of the butterfly. “We need to get out of here,” I say, panicking. “We need to—”
I push myself onto my palms. At the far end of the hall is a door. Huge, gilded, set in an ornate marble frame. It seems to be glowing dimly in the shadows. I hop to my feet. Will is right behind me.
“Move!” I shout. “Get to the door!”
I glance over my shoulder. The wire has reached the end of the hall. It pauses. Another clank, reverberating down through the expanse. And it’s coming back. Two feet lower. Twice as fast.
Lilly’s on her feet now. Jules isn’t.
“Run!” I scream. “Get up, run!”
Will heads for Jules, jerks him upright, and we’re off, sprinting down the center of the hall. In front of us, three new wires emerge from above the golden door and drop down, shooting along the tracks on either wall. All different heights.