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“Okay, that’s not an improvement,” I muttered. “Artie?”

“I don’t know! There were no instructions, remember?” The mouse clicked again. “Nothing’s happening.”

“So this must be the next puzzle,” I said. “We have a rotating protection symbol and giggling in the shadows. What can you extend a triskelion into?”

“Annie, I don’t do runic gingerbread.” Artie sounded like he was on the verge of snapping. I couldn’t blame him. This was a pretty terrifying situation, and at least I was armed. Artie wasn’t much of a fighter. He was more of the “stay home and research and don’t get shot at” school. “I have the book of runes and everything, but it’s not like I’ve ever learned how to
use
them.”

“Okay, okay, sorry. I just…triple spiral!”

“What?”

“It’s an earlier form of the triskelion. See if you can pull the lines apart or anything like that. You’ll need to get rid of the interior dots, too—try dragging them into the lines.”

“Just a second.” Artie hunched forward, focusing on the screen. One of the dots moved, merging into the nearest curving line of the figure, and the line promptly stretched, twisting outward into one arm of a triple spiral. “Got it!” Whatever he’d done, he repeated it twice more, and the triskelion morphed entirely, becoming a triple spiral before beginning to spin, faster and faster, like a portal opening.

“Oh, fuck,” I said, unable to feel more than dull disappointment. This was supposed to have been a perfectly normal Saturday. Even we Prices (and Price-Harringtons) don’t normally have to deal with evil video games threatening to suck us into portal dimensions if we don’t play along. “Artie, if we get pulled through, grab my hand. You don’t want to lose track of me.”

“Okay,” he said glumly.

The image continued to spin, morphing into a white disk that filled with static before becoming a clear picture of a dark-haired, pale-skinned woman. It was black-and-white, except for her eyes, which were a shade of clear ice blue that looked more like it belonged on a beetle’s wings than on a person’s face. I gasped. So did Artie.

“Sarah?” he asked, sounding equal parts hopeful and horrified.

The image smiled. “Hello,” she said, and it wasn’t our cousin Sarah, which was a relief but also somehow sad—Sarah was convalescing in Ohio with our grandparents, and while trying to suck us into another dimension wasn’t exactly a
nice
way of saying “I’m feeling better,” it would have been a wonderful indication of her recovery. “I’m so pleased that you were able to solve the first rune. Robin Goodfellow is a tricky sort, and he needs to be contained.”

“That’s a cuckoo,” I said. “There is a cuckoo in your computer.” Math-obsessed telepathic ambush predators. Again, we have an interesting family.

“I know,” said Artie.

The cuckoo woman—who was clearly a video file, and couldn’t see us, thank God—continued, “There are twenty runes ahead of you, each more complicated than the last. Complete them all, and Robin stays contained. Fail, even once, and you’ll share his fate.”

“There has to be a catch here,” I murmured. “Cuckoos don’t go around refreshing the wards on ancient evils for shits and giggles.”

“They also don’t have the magic to do this kind of programming,” said Artie. He leaned forward, until his nose was almost brushing the computer screen. The cuckoo woman was smiling at him beatifically, her part in this little production finished, at least until we did something to trigger another video clip. I couldn’t tell whether the video was still going. She could have become a still frame.

Artie stabbed his finger at the screen. “Look there: behind the door. That’s a hand. She’s working with the hidebehinds.”

“Or the hidebehinds are working with her,” I said. “Shit.”

There’s no such thing as magic, according to my grandma Alice, and since she married a witch and has spent the last thirty or so years jumping from reality to reality looking for him, I guess she’d know. Magic is just a sort of physics we don’t fully understand yet, the kind that allows men to turn into monsters and semi-visible humanoid cryptids to use their uniquely folded perspective on reality to code video games that conceal dimensional portals. Hidebehinds are oddly refractive, and their way of seeing the world doesn’t match up with anything else we’ve encountered, either in this dimension or the ones that they occasionally disappear into. They’re usually harmless. The thought of them joining forces with the cuckoos, who were anything
but
harmless, was enough to make me want to hide under Artie’s bed and wait for the nice video game to eat us. At least then I wouldn’t be in a world where the hidebehinds and the cuckoos were going to gang up on me in the night.

“No, no, this is a good thing,” said Artie. He leaned forward again, this time focusing on the corner of the screen. “See, if the cuckoos had made this by themselves, it would have been all math problems. The hidebehinds like hidden-eye stuff—naturally—and concealing puzzles in plain sight.” He clicked something. The game’s camera zoomed in on what I’d taken for a smudge, revealing a cobweb with several large swaths missing. The spider was perched in the top corner, black and gleaming.

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“Patch the web.” I couldn’t see Artie’s face, but I could hear his frown. “The question is, do we need to do it in a single pass, or can we strategically choose our moves?”

“Let me see.” I leaned forward. Artie shifted his head a little to the side, giving me a clear view of the puzzle. “Hidebehinds are big on barrow imagery, which tends to be Celtic in nature—not always, but something like eighty, ninety percent of the time. Celtic knots depend on the unbroken strand, or at least the illusion of the unbroken strand.”

“And hidebehinds are all about illusions,” Artie agreed. “Okay. So where’s the move?”

I frowned, leaning closer still. My feet were still stuck to the floor, which created the bizarre sensation that someone was holding me down as I tried to see how to draw the correct line. Finally, I reached up and touched the bottom left corner of the broken web. “Here to…here,” I said, drawing the first line. “Then here, here…” I kept moving my finger, repeating the path Artie would need to send the spider along over and over again as I waited for him to give me the okay to stop.

After the fifth repetition, Artie said, “All right. I think I have it.” He began moving his mouse, replicating the motion of my finger. Finally, he released it, said, “Cross your fingers,” and hit the space bar.

The spider began to move. It raced along the path Artie had traced, leaving a line of gleaming silver behind it. The newly patched web began to glow, and then the camera pulled out again, leaving us looking at the motionless cuckoo, the open closet door, and the otherwise featureless little room.

No: not completely featureless. “Left side, wainscot,” I said. “Is that another puzzle?”

Artie tilted his head. “I think so.” The giggling from the shadows got louder when he tapped on the left side of the screen, and a message popped up:

YOU ARE NOT READY FOR WHAT YOUR ACTIONS WOULD UNLEASH.

The camera didn’t move. Artie sighed. “Okay, well, on the plus side, it’s not going to let us try an advanced puzzle before we clear out the basic ones.”

“Yeah, and on the negative side, we’re stuck here until we either get sucked into another dimension with an ancient evil—which is
so
Syfy Saturday night, I can’t even—or until we finish the whole game. How big is this thing?”

“I don’t know. A few gigabytes. And hey, we could always die of mysterious causes before we do either.” Artie began mousing around the screen, looking for something clickable.

I groaned. “Way to look on the bright side.”

“I try.”

I resisted the urge to strangle my cousin. It wouldn’t have done either one of us any good, and I couldn’t reach the keyboard from where I was stuck. “All right, while you find the next accessible puzzle, how about you tell me why a bunch of hidebehinds would be targeting you via evil video game. That doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that happens at random, you know?”

“I don’t know! I haven’t done anything!”

I smacked him in the back of the head.

“Ow!” Artie twisted as much as he could, trying to look at me. “What did you do that for?”

“You’re not thinking. You’re supposed to be the smart one. One of the smart ones. Smarter than your sister, or mine. So
think
. Why would someone be out to get you? What have you been posting on that forum of yours?”

“Nothing.” Something about his tone made it pretty clear that he was lying. I stayed silent. Artie sighed. “Nothing
important
. There’s a forum about cryptid injuries is all. You know, like ‘how do you patch a tear in the webbing between your fingers,’ or ‘what kind of mange treatments work for therianthropes.’ That sort of thing.” His voice took on a defensive note as he added, “It’s hard not being the dominant species. You don’t always know where to turn for information, you know? So sometimes we turn to each other.”

“What were you posting, Artie?”

He clicked a stripe in the wallpaper. The camera zoomed in, showing another knotwork puzzle, as he said miserably, “Sarah. I was posting about Sarah. How there was this Johrlac girl I knew, and she’d managed to hurt herself pretty bad, and did anyone know what I could do to help her get better.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from smacking him again. It wouldn’t have done any good, and more, it wouldn’t have been fair. He was asking the same questions we’d all been asking for months. He’d just taken them to a new forum. The fact that he might have gotten us killed in the process was almost irrelevant.

“I guess maybe someone could have gotten upset by me talking about taking care of a cuckoo like she was a person, even though she
is
a person,” Artie concluded morosely. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know you didn’t mean to,” I said. “Given that there’s a cuckoo in the game, I’m going to bet that it wasn’t talking about Sarah like a person that got you into trouble. It was admitting that you knew she existed at all. This is an assassination attempt.”

“Really? Cool.” Artie dragged something down the side of the line of knotwork, which warped into another series of figures. He began swapping them around, exchanging them for each other at a speed that made it clear he knew what he was doing, even if I didn’t. “I mean, bad and terrible and probably something I’m going to get yelled at for, but you know. Also cool. I don’t get many assassination attempts aimed in my direction.”

“Yes, you’re the family wallflower, I know,” I deadpanned. “What are you doing?”

“This is something Sarah showed me once. It’s a series of mathematical transformations. Fun, huh?”

“Yeah, fun,” I said uneasily. “Okay: cuckoos can’t use magic, at least not runic magic, which means our mystery cuckoo didn’t design the game.”

“No, the hidebehinds did that,” agreed Artie. He clicked his mouse. The figure went through another transformation, going smooth and blending into the wallpaper. The camera pulled out again, and the cuckoo’s lips curled upward in a warm smile.

I jumped—or tried to, anyway, and had to grab for Artie’s chair to keep myself from going sprawling on the tarry floor. I’d grown so accustomed to the cuckoo woman being a still picture that I hadn’t expected to see her move.

“You’re smart; that’s good,” she said, and the disturbing part was that she sounded like she
meant
it. It was more fun for her if we were smart. “This room has been used to keep Robin imprisoned for generations. Every piece is a puzzle. Every puzzle has a solution. If you can complete them all, the runes will be redrawn, and your release will be at hand.”

“Sounds good,” said Artie, and he started to move his mouse again. I grabbed his arm, freezing him in mid-motion.

“The video hasn’t finished,” I said softly. “She’s still watching you. Look at her nostrils.” The cuckoo woman’s nostrils were very slightly flared, like she smelled something unpleasant. That was the only sign that the feed was still live.

“So?”

“So she said that everything in the room was a puzzle, and
she’s
in the room. I think…I think if you try to trigger another puzzle while she’s active, it may count as losing. I’d really rather not lose, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Yeah, no, getting sucked into some unknown dimension to hang with Robin, not my idea of a good time.” Cautiously, Artie brought the mouse back around to the cuckoo woman, and clicked on her nose.

Her face split into a grin even wider than the one she’d been wearing before. “Fearless questers, brave and true, what gift can I give to you?” She stopped then, and appeared to be waiting.

“What?” I demanded. “That’s not a riddle. That’s barely even a question. That can’t be the whole puzzle.”

“Sure it can,” said Artie philosophically. “She’s a cuckoo, and cuckoos are all assholes. I bet that’s a super long, easy riddle by their standards. I mean, really, the question is whether or not she’s playing fair. If she
is
, then there’s an answer we can guess from what we already know. If she’s
not
, I might as well just do a keyboard smash, because we’re about to be eaten by a video game.”

“Hidebehinds are inherently fair,” I said. “Assume that since they programmed the game—”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“Assume that since they
probably
programmed the game, they’re making her play fair. That means the riddle has an answer. I can’t promise we won’t be penalized for capitalization or anything, but at least we have something resembling a fighting chance.”

“Oh. In that case…” Artie leaned forward and typed something in before I could object. We both focused our attention on the screen, barely breathing as we waited to see what would happen next.

The cuckoo’s smile faded. “Really? That’s what you want from me, out of everything in this world? I won’t forget.” Then she turned and stormed out of the picture, opening the door on the far wall to reveal a hallway beyond. The door swung slowly shut behind her, but the screen remained lit, and no dread portals appeared. We hadn’t lost the game yet.