Akarnae (17 page)

She almost fell out of her chair when the results appeared. Not only were past students listed, but so was everything else about them, including their relatives, friends, neighbours—
everything.
Each individual’s entire history was listed and available for public perusal. There was just too much information for her to look through, so she found the task bar and typed in ‘Aven’, hoping to refine her search. The page loaded instantly:

There are 0 matching results. Similar listings include:

1. Avette

2. Aeina

3. Arianne

4. Astella

The list continued down the page, but there was no listing for Aven. Alex returned back to the yearbooks and sighed as she took in the overwhelming amount of data that she would have to sift through in order to find the mysterious stranger.

Better get started
, she thought to herself as she opened up a random year,
because it’s going to be a long night
.

“You’ve been here long enough, Bookworm. It’s time for some fun.”

Alex looked up at Jordan and Bear’s expectant faces and said, “But I haven’t found anything yet!”

“That’s too bad,” Jordan said, without much sympathy. “But you can come back tomorrow. It’s almost curfew and there’s more for you to see before we leave.”

Alex consented without further arguing. They’d given up their night for her, after all. And their dinner.

“Now, in the future when you come down here, to get out again you just have to go back into the room with the slide, open the encyclopedia to the last page, and press your hand to the paper,” Bear explained. “You’ll see a door appear in the wall and when you go through it you’ll find a Bubbledoor that’ll take you straight back to where you first picked up the encyclopedia—which will also disappear during transport, by the way.”

“Why are you telling me and not showing me?”

“Because we’re not leaving that way,” Jordan answered with an excited gleam in his eyes.

She rose from her seat and stretched the kinks out of her back. “How are we getting out of here, then?”

“Keep up and you’ll see soon enough.” That was all Jordan said before he spun on his heel and walked away, jerking his chin as an indication that she should follow.

She glanced at Bear and he winked before heading in Jordan’s footsteps.

Alex trailed after them, shaking her head.
Boys
.

The Archives had cleared out significantly of people in the hours that she’d been researching, but there were still a few stragglers lingering around. Because of this, Alex wasn’t completely surprised when Jordan and Bear led her towards a corner at the back of the room that was out of sight.

“Have a seat here and we’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” Bear said.

The moment Alex’s backside touched the ground, she was airborne. It was a completely unexpected sensation, especially since she was moving
upwards
, and at an incredibly fast speed.

Alex gasped and glanced down to find that she was still sitting on the floor, but only a square metre of it which was acting as her express elevator—‘express’ being the key word.

She didn’t even have time to scream before she slammed into the ceiling.

Fifteen

I’m dead, Alex thought. Squashed
like a
cockroach. What a way to go.

Only, she wasn’t squashed. And she wasn’t moving upwards anymore, either.

Alex opened her eyes—not even sure when she’d closed them—and carefully looked around. She was sitting on the floor still, but the Archive terminals were nowhere in sight.

She realised that she must be on another level of the library, and she hurried to move off the ground in case her friends came up after her. The instant she moved aside, the square metre of elevator floor vanished into thin air and Bear was propelled into view.

He grinned at her.

She glared at him.

Then the floor disappeared again, causing Bear to scramble quickly to the side.

“That is such a safety hazard,” Alex mumbled as Jordan appeared on his own carpet square.

“Nothing to it,” Jordan said, standing and brushing off invisible dirt.

“Feel free to tell me the next time something like that’s about to happen,” Alex said pointedly.

Jordan and Bear looked at each other and chorused: “That would’ve ruined the surprise!”

She shook her head with amused exasperation. “Where are we?”

“Another level of the library,” Bear answered.

Alex sent him a look. “Obviously.”

He chuckled and added, “Another
secret
level, I should say. One we doubt many people know about. It’s how we realised the Archives are part of the library itself, otherwise there wouldn’t be a way to get in here. Pretty clever, really.”

Jordan was nodding in agreement. “We found the entrance in our first year, completely by mistake. It was a busy day in the Archives and there was a queue of people lining up to access the TCD panels. So we walked over to the corner to get out of the way and sat down to wait.”

“I still remember the look on Jordan’s face when he flew into the air,” Bear said, smiling at the memory. “Absolutely priceless.”

“Of course, Bear followed straight after me,” Jordan added. “Even with the forewarning, he was still green-faced when he crashed into me.”

“Crashed into you?” Alex winced. “That sounds painful.”

“I hadn’t moved off the entry square since I was a bit, uh… dazed by the experience,” Jordan said. “So, really it was me who crashed into him, since the floor disappeared with me still on it. Luckily there wasn’t far to fall because the squares move so fast. It was more of a smack in the face than a crash, but whatever.”

Hearing his words, Alex was glad she’d thought to move off the square before it had disappeared under her. Rather than linger on what might have happened, she spun around and squinted into the darkened room. “There’s nothing in here.”

The only light source came from two flaming torches, one on a bracket near where they were standing and another on the other side of the room. Both flames were bright enough to illuminate most of the large space, but there wasn’t anything to see.

“Are you sure?” Bear asked.

She looked around again, squinting into the firelight. But nope, still nothing. The only thing that was even slightly out of place in the room was the carpeted floor. It was patterned into different coloured squares, each about the same size as the express elevator floor.

Alex felt her stomach tighten with unease as she looked down. She was standing on a wooden square, which was odd since the rest of the floor was carpeted. No, that wasn’t quite right, she realised. A number of the squares around the room were also wooden, including the ones that Jordan and Bear both stood on. In fact, all the squares directly beside the area they’d entered from were wooden, along with a few others splattered across the floor at random intervals.

“We call this the hopscotch room,” Jordan said. “We come here when we’re bored.”

“Hopscotch?”

He nodded. “It took us a long time to figure out how the room works and how to get across it—”

Bear mumbled something into his hand that sounded suspiciously like, “Without serious injury,” and Alex glanced at him sharply.

“—but we managed to work it out,” Jordan continued loudly, ignoring Bear’s interruption. “We had to, since the only safe exit is over there and there’s no other way out.” He pointed to the flaming torch on the other side of the room.

Alex gulped. It was a lot further away than she’d originally thought. And she didn’t even want to know why he had used the word ‘safe’ before ‘exit’. Were there
unsafe
exits?

“What’s with the floor?” she asked.

“Wooden spaces are safe,” Jordan explained, tapping his foot on the floor he was standing on. “Grey carpet takes off upwards into the air and vanishes within five seconds.”

Alex realised that they’d all arrived on the grey-coloured carpet, which explained why the floor had vanished before the next person’s arrival.

“Blue carpet is okay to stand on if you have no other choice,” Jordan continued, “but your body goes numb if you stay there for too long. Black carpet isn’t actually carpet at all—it’s just empty space, so avoid those squares.”

“What happens if you fall down one of them?” she asked.

Jordan just looked at her. “Don’t.”

Bear noticed her expression and said, “We dropped a torch down one once. It just kept going and going until we couldn’t see the light anymore.”

“Right,” she said, feeling slightly ill. “Avoid the black squares. Got it.”

They nodded at her.

She looked at the floor again and realised that there was one colour left. “What about the red carpet?”

The boys exchanged glances and Jordan said, “Trust me, you’re better off not knowing. Just steer well clear of any red squares.”

Seeing that Jordan wasn’t going to explain, Alex sneaked a glance at Bear. He mimed a quick action with his hands coming together before snapping his fingers out and mouthing a single word: ‘BOOM’.

Jordan hadn’t seen their interaction, but he must have noticed the panicked look on Alex’s face because he hurried to reassure her. “It’s fine, Alex. We’ve done this hundreds of times.”

She looked at the red squares dotted across the room and simply said, “You’re crazy.”

“It’s a piece of cake,” Jordan promised. “You’ll love it.”

“Yeah,” Bear agreed. “And besides, the red squares aren’t the problem. The real challenge is that all the squares change colour.”

Alex gaped at the boys before turning her attention back to the floor. Sure enough, within a few seconds a number of the squares changed colours. They pulsed for three warning beats before the change took place. One red square became grey, while another red square turned to wood. A black square turned red, while a blue square turned black. There was no sequence or order to the colour changes—they were completely random. And there didn’t seem to be a set time, either. Some of the squares changed within seconds; others weren’t changing at all.

It was a death-trap, but according to her friends it was also the only way out of the room.

“All right, let’s do this,” she said, causing both Jordan and Bear to whoop excitedly.

“I’ll go first, then you follow me, Alex, exactly where I step. Bear will come behind you,” Jordan said. “And remember, only one person on a square at a time.”

She hadn’t been told that before. “Why?”

Jordan grimaced and said, “They’re kind of… booby-trapped.”

“Booby-trapped,” she deadpanned.

He looked at her innocently and shrugged as if to say it wasn’t his fault.

“You know what?” Alex muttered. “I don’t even want to know how you know that.”

Jordan’s smile widened when he realised she wasn’t going to yell at him. “Ready, then?”

He took her terse nod as an affirmative and turned his attention to the square closest to him, waiting for it to change from black to a safer colour. The moment it became a wooden surface, he jumped.

I can’t believe I’m about to do this
, Alex thought, as Jordan moved to the next square over, leaving her to jump after him.

The first jump was the hardest, but it became easier after that. She continued following Jordan around the room, only glancing back occasionally to make sure Bear was still following them. Both boys frequently asked how she was doing, but she was so focused on not tripping onto the dangerous squares that she couldn’t say much more than “fine” or “still here” or “I’m going to kill you later” without losing her concentration.

The further they travelled across the room, the more her confidence grew. It really wasn’t so hard. In fact, she could almost understand the thrill that both Jordan and Bear seemed to get from the experience. She felt a distinct sense of accomplishment every time she narrowly avoided a dangerous square or made a particularly impressive jump onto a safe one. It was… exhilarating.

“Still with us back there?” Jordan called, glancing over his shoulder.

Seriously? Where else would she be? Alex looked down at the ominous black square to her left and realised that perhaps he wasn’t enquiring just to annoy her. She felt tingly all over as she looked into the empty space.

“Yeah, I’m still—” Alex broke off when she realised that something wasn’t right, since her tingly feeling was escalating. Glancing down, she saw that the wooden square she’d been standing on had changed to blue. She hadn’t even noticed it pulsing, but now her legs were quickly turning numb.

“Jordan, move!” she called, hurrying him along.

“I can’t—I’m boxed in!”

She looked ahead. Sure enough, all the squares around his safe wooden one were either black or red. He wouldn’t be moving on until they changed colour, and none of them were pulsing yet.

“Alex,” Bear called urgently from behind her. “Move to your right.”

“But I—”

“NOW!” he ordered.

Trusting Bear, Alex jumped awkwardly off her square just as it turned a dangerous red colour. Her semi-numb legs almost sent her careening right over the other side of the new floor, but she managed to balance herself just in time. Unfortunately, she’d landed on another blue square, increasing her discomfort. The space diagonally opposite her was wooden so she leapt for it, but her wobbly legs couldn’t hold the landing this time and her momentum carried her onto the next piece of carpet.