Chapter Five – Jessa
Chapter Five
Jessa
This is it.
Damn it, I hate doing it again, going down into those cursed tunnels, but I must.
I’ve always been stubborn. It’s baked into my DNA, or something equally obnoxious and unavoidable. I have a track record of never giving up. Even when I probably should. This is just who I am – the girl who doesn’t know when to quit.
I give Mr. Tremaine a hug. He rubs my shoulders and wishes me luck.
“Be careful down there, Miss Holloway,” he says.
I pull away and start walking toward the castle. My boots crunch on gravel and dead grass. Castien is already waiting by the path, standing perfectly still. I adjust my backpack, tightening the straps that cross my chest until they dig in slightly.
“Let’s go,” I say.
He falls into step beside me without a word.
“It’s waterproof,” I tell him. “The backpack, I mean.” He hasn’t asked, but I need to say something to fill the silence. “I have food, water, and a change of clothes inside. I’m not dumb, I’m prepared.”
We go in and head toward the basement. Sooner than I like, we reach the heavy door we stared at yesterday.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Yes.” He says, his voice neutral, as always.
I wonder if he’s even capable of showing emotion. Probably not. He’s not human, so what am I thinking? He’s obviously a machine with an advanced AI program running behind those silver slits of his that pose as eyes.
“Are you ready?” he asks in return, surprising me.
I don’t think he’s truly worried about me.
It must be part of his programming to imitate live beings, so the clients he’s assigned to don’t get the heebie jeebies.
It’s certainly working. Most of the time.
He could do better, if one were to ask me.
I’ll make sure to mention it when Yasmin Bayard asks for feedback.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I answer.
I reach out for the door handle but hesitate.
Damn it.
When all my friends told me not to study psychology because it barely has a future, I ignored them.
Seriously, who needs friends who don’t support your dreams?
Not me. When everyone said I should just find a job – any job – and give up my fanciful dreams of treating patients with Dark Triad qualities, I dropped those friendships fast. Good riddance to bad advice.
Everyone says Dark Triad people are beyond helping, that they don’t want help anyway. But the truth is many of them do want help. They’re just dangerous, difficult, and the system isn’t there for them. Nobody wants to touch patients who scare them.
I do.
So yeah, track record of stubbornness and never giving up. Here I am, about to walk into death traps because I won’t quit.
Typical.
I push the door and it swings open, groaning on old hinges. I exchange a glance with Castien. His glowing silver eyes meet mine. We step inside together, at exactly the same time.
The door bangs closed behind us.
Water starts pouring from vents high in the stone walls, and within a minute, it’s already ankle-deep and rising.
I take in the room. The chamber has a high ceiling, maybe twenty feet above us.
The stone walls are slick with moisture and centuries of damage.
Four large vents sit near the ceiling, two on each side, gushing freezing seawater.
The trap door sits in the center of the floor, circular, maybe four feet across. The room is bare otherwise.
We walk to the middle of the room and kneel around the trap door.
It’s made of iron, green with corrosion and age, and set flush into the stone floor.
Six concentric bronze rings circle the edge, each one nested inside the next like a giant combination lock.
The rings are two inches wide and can rotate independently.
Raised symbols cover them: family crests, alchemical marks, Latin phrases, dates, animals, and sketches of weapons. The symbols are worn but visible.
A recessed circular panel sits in the center of the trap door, about the size of a dinner plate. Seven small circular indentations are carved into the panel in a pattern. They form the shape of a constellation.
I point at the rings.
“These need to align. Specific symbols have to line up across all six rings to create the pattern.” Then I point at the center panel. “Once they’re aligned correctly, blood goes into these holes. That releases the internal bolts.”
The rings are too stiff for me to turn alone. Centuries of corrosion have locked them tight, but Castien has the strength to force them. The sequence matters. Wrong alignment means nothing happens. Correct alignment plus blood at the end releases the mechanism.
I studied the family records and memorized the symbol patterns, however, the exact configuration changes each time thanks to ancient magic woven all through these caves.
The symbols stay the same, but their positions on the rings shift.
I have to figure out the current configuration by trial and error, but the fact that I succeeded once gives me confidence.
The water reaches our knees now, and the cold soaks through my pants. We haven’t even started. Is it me, or is the room flooding faster than the previous two times I tried this?
Right. To work. Focus, Jessa.
I study the outermost ring and trace the symbols with my finger.
“This one. The Holloway crest needs to line up with the anchor on the next ring.”
Castien grips the outer ring with both hands and forces it to turn. The metal groans before it gives.
“Three notches clockwise. Stop.”
He stops at my command, and I check the alignment. The Holloways’ lion crest now points at the anchor on the second ring.
“Good.”
The flood reaches our waists now. Well, my waist. Castien’s ridiculous height means the water doesn’t affect him yet. It won’t affect him at all, not even when the chamber floods completely.
“Second ring, four notches counterclockwise,” I say. “The alchemical symbol for gold needs to line up with... Wait.” I hesitate, second-guessing myself. The rising seawater distracts me, and the cold makes it hard to think. “Actually, two notches. Just two.”
Castien turns it.
I bite my lip and stare at the alignment.
“No. That’s wrong. Go back one notch.”
He reverses it without comment. I’m flustered. I can’t start making mistakes so early.
The level reaches my chest. I’m starting to shiver, and my hands are numb as I trace the symbols.
“This ring. Turn it until the date 1347 lines up with the crossed swords on the fourth ring.”
He turns it.
I frown. That doesn’t look right.
“Wait, no. The other direction. Go the other way.”
One mistake follows another. My anxiety is building, and I’m second-guessing everything.
The seawater reaches my shoulders, and I have to tilt my head back to keep my mouth above the surface.
I give Castien instructions and he follows them, but I realize they’re wrong and have him reverse the last three steps. Then I change my mind again. I’m panicking and can’t think straight.
The flood rises over my head, then his. The muffled rush fills my ears.
We keep working until I have to kick off the floor and swim upward, break through the surface, and gasp for air.
The ceiling is eight or nine feet above me.
I tread in place for a few seconds, my chest hurting.
No wonder I caught a cold from hell doing this twice before.
I really shouldn’t be in freezing water a third time. No pain, no gain, I suppose.
I take a deep breath and dive back down.
Castien is kneeling by the trap door where I left him. His glowing eyes provide light in the murky darkness. He doesn’t need to surface to breathe, so he’s waiting for me. I swim down to him and steady myself by gripping his shoulder.
I point at the fourth ring and indicate which direction and how far he should turn it, and he does.
I check the alignment and nod. I surface again for air, then dive back down.
I give another instruction, and he adjusts the mechanism.
I check the alignment. I surface again. The pattern repeats over and over.
The air gap at the ceiling gets smaller with each trip, and it takes me longer than last time to figure out the right configuration.
The fifth ring needs the Latin phrase “sanguis et aurum” – blood and gold – to align with a chalice symbol. The alignment takes four tries and two trips to the surface, but it finally clicks into place.
The sixth ring needs the date 1666 to align with a skull. This is the heaviest and most corroded ring, so Castien has to use real force. The alignment takes four attempts, and we still can’t get it right. This is the last one, and for some reason, I’m missing something.
This has been going on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It feels like hours.
I swim upward. My head breaks through the surface and I nearly slam my skull into the stone ceiling. I jerk back.
Maybe two inches of air space remain between the surface and the stone above me. I have to tilt my face up and press my nose against the ceiling to breathe. I gasp in the tiny pocket. The air is thin and stale.
My lungs burn, and every muscle in my body screams. My lips must be blue from the cold, and I’m shivering so hard that my teeth chatter. I can barely keep myself afloat.
Dread rises inside me. What the hell? I can’t do this. I figured it out once before, but I can’t do it again. My muscles lock up with fear.
Castien emerges beside me.
His hands reach for me and grip my ribs. They are enormous. His fingers wrap almost all the way around my torso. He’s holding me like he’s afraid of hurting me. I can feel him through my soaked shirt.
His steel body starts growing hot. It’s like he’s warming himself from the inside. The warmth seeps into my frozen skin, radiating from his hands and spreading through my chest.
Shock cuts through my panic. He’s warm, and the warmth helps my brain start working again.
We’re pressed close in the tiny air space. Our faces are inches apart, and his eyes are steady on mine.
“You can do this,” he says.
I nod. My throat is too tight to speak, but my response is enough for him to nod back.
We dive back down together, and his hand moves from my ribs to my lower back. His palm presses flat against the small of my back, right above my hips. The heat radiates from that single point of contact and spreads through my spine, my core, my limbs.