He starts talking, fast. “It’s Perdu. I don’t know if I was imagining things or what, but when he was in the panic room, he—”
Hayden doubles back. “Stay close,” he mutters. I recognize the bedroom we’re in. The ornate four-poster, tasseled ropes missing from the canopy. Somewhere up ahead I hear a dull rushing, crackling sound, like a distant waterfall.
I look over at Will, waiting for him to continue, hoping he’ll save it for later.
He sees my expression. Nods. “I don’t know what I saw,” he says, moving away from me again. “I’m going crazy.”
Join the club. We’re back in the antechamber to Jellyfish Hall, the cloakroom with its dozens of small drawers and cupboards. It seems smaller somehow. Our light beams bounce on something. Something that definitely wasn’t there before.
“What the—” Jules starts to say. My stomach drops.
A roiling mass hangs in the darkness. The doors to Jellyfish Hall are half gone. Blue fumes are creeping toward us in a hissing, bitter wall.
“Get out!” Will yells. “Out!”
We stumble backward, turn, run. Hayden’s screaming, raging, like the whole universe has conspired against him. We back into the bedroom, try the set of doors in the eastern wall. They lead into a room buzzing with magnets. It’s not the one we passed through earlier. This one is a billiards room, and the orbs are still in the walls, shimmering, ready to smash anyone who enters. Hayden is almost jerked in, the gun in his pants dragging him through the door. We all pull him back, clawing at his shoulders, trying to get him into the bedroom. Will slams the doors shut. We pile up against the bed, gasping.
“Now what?” Lilly whispers.
Now what, indeed. We can’t go back to the panic room. It’s Perdu’s tomb now. I think of him shut up in there, wheezing, almost dead, maybe all the way dead.
Hayden has his head in his hands, fingers working his scalp. “I want out,” he says, his voice awful, deep and grating. “I hate this. I hate them.”
“We can get around,” Lilly says. “We can backtrack and keep heading north a different way, like we were going to do in the first place. It’s—it’s not the worst thing that could happen.”
But it is. We waited six hours for nothing. We banked on getting through Jellyfish Hall and getting out, not running back into the middle of the palace.
I tuck my flashlight under my arm. My head aches. “I think Perdu told us something about this. At least, he tried to. He said if you go along the edge of the pond you’ll fall in, and if you jump in the middle you’ll be all right. I think he meant the traps. That the traps go along the perimeter of the palace. And if Dorf wants us in the hall of mirrors, it’s probably going to be somewhere at the center. Which means there’s no other way to go. They’ll keep the traps around the perimeter triggered. We’ll have no choice but to go find them.”
“We’re dead,” Jules says. “We’re just done, over, terminated—”
“You guys made it this far,” Hayden interrupts. His face is greasy, sweating. “How hard can it be to get through a couple of trap rooms?”
I laugh bitterly. I don’t care if he’s angry, so am I. “We made it this far because we had help. They saved us in Razor Hall, then someone triggered the magnet room before we got there, then you rescued us from Jellyfish Hall. They didn’t want us dead, or maybe something else didn’t want us dead, but now I think they’re done being patient. They need us for something and we’re not cooperating, so either they’re going to scrape us dead out of their trap rooms, or catch us. I wouldn’t be expecting any merciful treatment anymore if I were you.”
“Merciful treatment?” Hayden snaps. “I’m suggesting we run. I’m suggesting we force our way out at all costs. What do you suggest we do? Nobody hold your breath; she’s not that great at being helpful.”
I sit up. “Oh really? I could try kicking your teeth in, Hayden. I think that might be really helpful.”
Hayden looks like he’s about to go ape, pummel everything, me included. I press my thumbnail into the grid of lines on my flashlight’s grip, until I no longer want to smack him with it. “We can fight,” I say.
Hayden snorts. “I’d take you out in two seconds.”
“Not us, idiot, we can fight the Sapanis. We can go to the hall of mirrors. Dorf thinks he can bag us when we get there and that’ll be the end of it, but what if we’re not that easy? What if we stop freaking out and actually do something instead of just running around screaming?”
“I think running around and screaming has been really acceptable behavior under the circumstances,” Jules says.
I shake my head. “They’re fighting something, too. They already lost a bunch of trackers. Their camera feed is down. We have a gun.” I point at Hayden.
“They probably have more guns,” Will says.
“We have the element of surprise,” I say. “They think we’ll be terrified and panicked—”