Chapter 37
What in the name of all chaos…?
I stared at the bright white glow as it sank toward my feet, drifting back and forth with the current.
My viable air coating, which I’d tested on the wick, was somehow allowing it to burn underwater!
With a jolt, I remembered a line running up the margin of Past Amber’s notes on her candle experiment, noting that her candle had stayed lit in the rain and reminding herself to test that particular side effect for its cause and limits.
Its limit, evidently, would blow right past complete submersion in water.
Suddenly inspired, I turned and sloshed through waist-high water to grab the torch mounted on the white marble wall at my back.
It was still burning, and for the first time, I noted that its flame was the normal yellowish color of every stove and fireplace I’d ever seen, rather than the stark white glow of the torches mounted in the halls of the Conservatory.
On impulse, and despite the risk that I’d be unable to see well enough to finish my second air bladder, I slogged three slow steps back to my workstation, where water now sloshed over the edge with every move I made, and smothered the torch flame with my miraculously still-dry frock.
This particular torch appeared to be constructed of resinous wood and fabric scraps soaked in animal fat, to extend the length of the flame.
I added several scraps from my dress, binding them tightly to enclose the remaining original fuel.
Then I carefully poured half of the remaining viable air catalyst onto the cloth binding the fuel and poked at it with a set of laboratory tweezers to compress the material in strategic places, spreading the catalyst and helping it soak through the fuel.
While the torch dried at the center of my work surface, I spread the remaining viable air catalyst in a thin layer over the inside of my second air bladder and blew it dry, then tied it closed with a strip of material torn from my dress.
Then, just as the water rose fully onto my work surface, I snatched up my still-burning candle and lit my treated torch.
The flare of light was so bright that even I gasped.
As water washed supplies and equipment from my work surface, extinguishing my burners, I climbed onto the table, where I sat shivering in my drenched and somewhat translucent undergarments while water lapped at my legs.
I held my torch in one hand, and as my inflated air bladders floated past, I snatched them, fumbling with cold, stiff fingers to tie them together with a strip of material from my drenched dress while I balanced the torch between my knees.
“Are you ready?” Yoslyn asked, and I turned to see her standing chest deep in murky water, facing me through the transparent barrier, dressed only in undergarments that clung to her thin form. Which was when I realized that water was now pouring into our cells much more rapidly than before.
Now that the work surfaces had been submerged, effectively putting an end to the performance of alchemy, the trial had been accelerated. The arena was filling quickly.
I slid off my work surface and gasped as water washed up to my chest. My air bladders bobbed on the surface beside me, tethered to the strip of fabric wrapped around my left palm, while I held the torch in my right hand. “I don’t think any of us are truly ready for this.”
“He is,” Yoslyn said, and as water rushed over my shoulders, I turned, following her gaze, to see a form at the center of the arena, staring up at the hole overhead.
It was Wilder. He’d gotten his cell open and was ready to let the water lift him from our labyrinthian womb, ostensibly purified by the murky water. Though I had serious doubts that even the White Trial had challenged him.
As I stared at him, treading water now that the level had risen above my chin, he turned, still evidently flat-footed, to look at me.
And I swear to the stars that he grinned right at me.
“Can you see the path?” Yoslyn asked. “I can’t tell where it goes. It’s impossible, since the walls are transparent!”
She was right. I could see the light of my torch—the only light left in the arena—reflecting from the tops of dozens of translucent panels, but I could not see where any of them turned, diverged, or merged.
“Get a deep breath!” Yoslyn shouted as the rising water lifted me.
Wilder was swimming now, treading water directly beneath the opening in the ceiling, and I could no longer feel the ground even when I pointed my feet.
Suddenly, a great grinding noise startled me. I gasped and sputtered when water washed into my mouth.
My cell was opening, the translucent panel sinking into the floor, causing fresh ripples that rocked me back and forth as they lapped against the other walls of my watery cage.
I moved toward the opening, and my head brushed the translucent ceiling. There was less than four inches of air left above the water, and the door hadn’t opened far enough to let me out yet.
Panic crashed over me. I felt like I was suffocating, even as I tilted my head back to suck at the last of the air.
“Amber! Let’s go!” Yoslyn shouted, and I turned to see her suck in one last, great breath. Then she pushed through the water toward the widening gap at the end of her cell, tugging a single air bladder of her own.
I took a moment to calm myself. Then I dragged in as deep a breath as I could get and plunged beneath the surface.
It took a bit for me to orient myself as I blinked in the cloudy water. The torch blazing on one edge of my vision sent a triumphant bolt of glee through me, and it was hard not to open my mouth and shout for joy.
But then I saw Yoslyn’s bare toes kicking ahead of me, and I lurched into motion.
I’d made it several feet through the translucent corridor, blinking constantly against the burn of water in my eyes, carefully analyzing the reflection of my flame in the glass walls, when something brushed my leg.
Startled, I kicked, and I heard a muffled oof behind me, along with a burst of air being released. When I turned, I caught just a glimpse of Raelah’s furious face before she grabbed my ankle and yanked, hard.
I felt myself sink through the water as she used my body as a launchpad to kick off of, and suddenly she was swimming away from me down the corridor.
I struggled to reorient myself in a world where there was no up or down.
No forward or backward. Then Raelah was gone, and I was alone in water I could hardly see through.
I grabbed my largest air bladder and used my teeth to loosen the cord.
Despite my desperate lungs, I forced myself to move slowly as I pressed the opening of the bladder to my mouth, forming a seal against my skin before I loosened my grip on the neck of the bladder.
If I lost air to a bad seal, I might run out.
With the bladder pressed against my mouth, I inhaled deeply.
The burning in my lungs eased, and I squeezed off the neck of the bladder again.
With that relief, I was able to focus. I waved my torch slowly until I found the marble floor of the arena, then reoriented my body so that my head was up.
And I pressed forward into the corridor again.
I was pleased with my progress, until I turned the corner ahead—and found myself back in my original cell.
I’d gotten turned around during the collision with Raelah, and I’d wasted both time and air going the wrong way!
My heart pounding, fear burning through my veins and into my lungs, I spun around and swam as fast as I could in the other direction.
Two lefts and a right later, I finally saw a set of bare feet churning swiftly through the water.
I kicked as hard as I could, but I had to stop when my lungs began to burn again.
As I was sucking from my larger air bladder, a shadow appeared in the bright glow from my torch.
I turned just as a familiar, bluish silhouette swam toward me, and alarm tightened my chest. I clutched the air bladder closed and verified that the smaller one was still tethered to it.
Then I mentally pleaded with Pryce Wishart to just swim on past.
He had no air bladder, nor any other equipment that I could see, but there was a strange mask tied over his mouth, and his blue skin had an odd glint when he swam into the light of my torch.
For one terrifying second, his face appeared in front of mine, close enough to be clear in the cloudy water. His eyes were narrowed, his brows drawn low. His navy-tinted hair floated around his face, shifting with the underwater current. And for a moment, I thought he would just…go.
Then his hand shot toward me through the water.
Some irrational instinct made me close my eyes in defense of a blow, even though the water denied him any real momentum. An instant later, the torch was tugged from my grip.
My mouth opened in a rage-filled shout that water rushed in to douse, and I found myself coughing, choking on water as the light I’d crafted, through a formula I’d developed, swam away. Leaving me alone, disoriented, and still choking in water too dark and murky to clearly see through.
Near panic, I gritted my teeth and forced water out of my mouth with my tongue, then I sucked at my air bladder, careful to keep the marble tile beneath me and the light of my own torch ahead.
With my lungs again refreshed, I followed that light, flinching every time I passed an open cell door, both fearing and hoping for the sight of a fellow competitor.
If there were none left, then I was last. I’d failed.
But if I was ahead of anyone, that person was unlikely to survive.
The light moved swiftly, and twice it doubled back, but I was unable to keep up. Once, as my largest air bladder began to lose its shape from being emptied, I put on a burst of speed and crashed directly into a translucent wall. Pryce had managed to put several panels between us, and…
Something swam in front of the light. Another competitor.