39 Students Remaining #2
“What way out?” I snap. I motion to the room around us. There’s only the one door. “We’re trapped.”
I can hear my voice getting higher, bordering on hysteria. In contrast, Ian’s remains infuriatingly calm.
“That must be how we pass the test.” Ian narrows his eyes. “Solve the puzzles and a door will appear. Come on, Lia, think.”
I dig my hands into my hair and release a laugh that sounds slightly unhinged. This is impossible. How am I supposed to concentrate on anything with that incessant ticking?
Once, at this school I attended for most of ninth grade, some kid smuggled a gun into class.
It was just a flare gun, but I still remember the moment he pulled it out of his backpack and waved it around, how it felt like the world around me slowed, how I couldn’t get my brain to work, how my arms and legs didn’t seem connected to my body.
I was so sure I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
That’s how I feel now.
Ian suddenly grabs me by the shoulders and spins me around to face him. His expression is oddly intense as he says, “Hey. You of all people can do this. It isn’t any different from breaking into a school.”
“I was arrested for that!”
“I don’t think the cops are coming this time,” he says, but he doesn’t sound as snide as usual. His voice is practically bordering on helpful as he adds, “All we have to do is focus. Do the first thing, and then the next thing and the next. Until it’s done.”
The radio turns out to be our first clue.
I discover that one when the erratic bursts of static become so annoying that I can no longer tune them out.
I’m about to start fumbling with the top of the damn thing, hoping one of the buttons will switch it off, when I notice the chart pinned to the wall behind it: Morse code.
The static is coming in short and long bursts, at even intervals: a message.
We have to listen to it twice before we manage to piece together the words: Allied flags.
That’s easy enough. We locate the flags for Britain, the United States, China, and the Soviet Union on the walls around us. Each has two letters written on the back. All together, they read:
AA GH TP FGH
“There aren’t even enough vowels to spell a word,” Ian says, brow furrowing. He’s right. I feel something tugging at my brain, begging for my attention.
“It’s code,” I point out, running my fingers over the letters on the backs of the flags. Behind me, and closer than I realized, Ian softly swears.
“We’re going to need an Enigma machine.”
An Enigma machine is a cipher device that was developed and used during the war to encrypt military information. From what I remember of the photographs I’ve seen, it’s the size of a small suitcase.
It takes us the better part of a half an hour to find it.
I feel the clock ticking as we search, the dynamite behind the door seeming to pulse.
Ian figures out that the maps on the walls are puzzle pieces.
Each shows one of the beaches in Normandy.
When taken down and arranged according to the D-Day invasion plan, it triggers a drawer in the desk to pop open.
Inside the drawer is a slip of paper with a list of numbers on it. It takes us five minutes to figure out that the numbers are radio frequencies. I’m the one who gets that clue. I’m pretty proud of that.
I begin turning the dials on the radio, adjusting the frequency. Voices break through the static when I get to the right point, but it’s never clear enough to hear even a whole sentence being spoken, just a single word here and there. “Philosophy…Medicine…”
“The Klimt,” Ian says. He hurries across the room, sorting through the paintings we’d taken out of the crates. “The Klimt is one of a trio of paintings called Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence.” Ian stops looking through the paintings when he reaches a large piece.
I stare at the piece, trying to think past the ticking in my head. It’s louder now, vibrating through my ears and skull. It makes my skin and my bones tremble. We’re running out of time. Even now, I’m not sure exactly how much has already passed. Forty-five minutes? Fifty? Our hour’s almost up.
My hands tremble as I study the painting.
It’s a shame that I don’t have more time to appreciate it, because it’s beautiful.
I don’t know much about art, but I like this piece.
On one side, there’s a column of bodies.
A skeleton shrouded in a veil, a man’s back, the lines of his spine clearly visible beneath his skin, a woman who looks like a goddess staring straight out at you.
On the other side of the painting, there’s only a single figure, seeming to point…
Point.
I turn to Ian. “Does it look like she’s pointing at something?”
Ian is studying the painting beside me, but he looks up at the sound of my voice, follows my gaze to the pointing woman. “I don’t think she was pointing in the original.”
“Which crate did we get this out of?”
We take the painting back over to the crates and lean it approximately where it was when we started. From this angle, it’s clear that the woman is pointing at the floor. I look down, and there it is: a floorboard that’s a slightly different color from the rest.
I drop to my knees and dig my fingers below the edges of the floorboard. It pops up, revealing a dark space below. Ian crouches next to me, quickly removing the floorboard opposite until we’ve uncovered a shallow hiding space.
Inside is the Enigma machine.
“The flags,” I tell him, hauling the Enigma machine out of the floor.
Ian silently passes me the four Allied flags. A quiet settles over us as I key the codes from the backs of the flags into the machine. And wait.
Nothing happens.
“C’mon,” I murmur. “That has to be it.”
My heart thuds against my chest like a metronome. The room around us feels like a powder keg. One spark, just one, and—
Ian points. “Look.”
A panel on the wall draws back like a curtain pulled by an invisible hand. Behind it: a door.
“C’mon,” I say, leaping to my feet. I can feel the clock inside me, the relentless ticking. Do we have minutes left? Or seconds?
I make for the door—
Ian’s fingers wrap around my arm, jerking me back. “We have to get the paintings!”
He’s right. The assignment was to change the course of history. Which means the paintings have to come with us, or we fail the test.
We gather them as quickly as we can, but they’re large and awkward. It takes us long minutes to balance them between us and haul them through the door.
The ticking in my skull pulses. I picture a stopwatch, second hand sweeping closer and closer to the twelve. I forget to breathe.
Then—
Several short, sharp cracks fill the room, followed by a low rumbling that grows in intensity until it’s all I can hear, until I can feel the vibrations moving up through the floor beneath my feet.
Ian and I glance at each other. And then we’re moving, running out the door, the paintings wedged between us.
We’ve only just burst through the door, our breath coming in ragged gasps, when I hear a deafening roar from behind us—