Chapter 37 #2
I felt my way along, slower now that I couldn’t follow the torch, and I turned when I got to the end of the corridor. Another shadow—or the same one?—swam in front of the now-distant light of my torch, and suddenly, the light lurched upward.
My gaze rose, following it, and I realized that Pryce had found the center of the arena. He’d gotten out, thanks to my work!
As I pressed forward again, my free hand trailing along the wall, the murky shadow that had been following Pryce pushed upward toward the surface, only to suddenly reverse course and plunge toward the floor. The shadow looked too big. It…
The shadow splintered into two silhouettes, a tempest of flailing arms and legs, and I realized that something had just fallen into the watery arena, colliding with the competitor who’d been about to emerge.
Then, as I watched, still making my way slowly toward the center of the maze, frustrated when my path led me ninety degrees in the wrong direction, a third form plunged into the water, feet first and deliberate, and this form was carrying my torch!
Even in the murky water, even blurry across the distance, I would have known that form anywhere.
Wilder.
He’d taken my torch from Pryce—he’d thrown Pryce back into the arena—and he was coming for me.
My heart leapt into my throat, and I kicked harder, despite the exhaustion in my legs and the ache in my empty lungs.
I lifted the air bladder to my lips and tried to inhale, but it was empty.
A fit seized my stressed lungs, and I coughed into the bag, sucking my own used air in and out rapidly until it eased.
Then I let go of the deflated air bladder and quickly seized the smaller, still-full one.
As I struggled to untie it, the empty bladder floated in front of me, still tethered to the first, the viable air coating giving off a faint green glow.
Finally I got the second bladder open and took a deep breath from it, then I kicked off against the nearest wall and felt my way forward again. Heading for the light.
But the light hadn’t found me. I could tell from the crazed way Wilder was waving it back and forth as the two shadows at his back swam up toward the surface, fighting each other sluggishly and silently for the right to climb out first.
I wanted to shout for Wilder. I wanted to wave my arms to catch his attention, but that would have been a waste of time, effort, and breath, so I kept swimming, working my way around corners and past intersections, gleeful every time I turned toward the center, devastated every time a path took me the other way.
But finally, just as I sucked the last of the air from my second bladder, I emerged from a transparent pathway into the broad center of the maze.
Wilder was just emerging from a corridor he’d taken in error, and he saw me.
He lurched across the open area, pulling in powerful strokes against the water as I kicked toward him, exhausted and slow.
He got to me before I reached the center, and his free arm wrapped firmly around my waist. He hauled me forward, my lips sealed against a breath I desperately needed.
We made it to the opening just as another form reached it, his movements sounding muted and sloshy to my submerged ears.
Wilder pushed the poor man aside and shoved me upward, toward the surface.
Toward a crown of light and the silhouette of a familiar head peeking over the opening in the glass ceiling. Toward a hand reaching for me.
I reached up, and Yoslyn grabbed my wrist.
My head broke the surface, and I sucked in a great breath, bringing in a spray of tiny droplets with it.
“Amber!” she shouted, and vaguely I was aware of a form behind her, pushing past her.
Desmond grabbed my arms and pulled me effortlessly from the hole in the glass, water streaming from my drenched form. I collapsed on his lap, soaked and shivering as he ripped off his cape and wrapped it around me.
“You’re okay,” he whispered. “You did it. You survived.”
I dragged in breath after breath, and as the world came back into focus, as forms regained color and clarity, I realized that half of the audience was staring at us.
At Desmond, who held me tucked neatly into his formidable embrace, and Yoslyn, who stood staring down at us, still dripping from her own ordeal and draped in a drying cloth.
The other half of the spectators were staring from their seats at the hole in the glass.
I turned just as Wilder lifted himself onto the glass floor, drenched, his underclothing clinging to his every trim plane and well-developed cord of muscle, and that was when I realized that he wore Pryce’s mask.
That he’d been breathing through whatever Pryce Wishart had come up with to allow air into his mouth while keeping water out, and that…
I turned and counted my classmates, who sat shivering, wrapped in thick drying cloths, on the lowest level of spectator seating, just above the glass-covered surface of the arena.
Directly below the Bluehelm and the highest-ranking professors and staff members, who stared at us, unmoving. Unspeaking.
And I began to count.
Keryth Malcom sat in the first position, but there was a gap on the bench to her left, which told me she hadn’t been the first out. Wilder had.
Lennox Pettigrove sat on her right, in third position, and next to him sat Adria, then Cressa, who stared at Wilder, dumbfounded.
Number six was Yoslyn, who stood right in front of me.
Then Gavin, number seven, who’d been collateral damage when Pryce was thrown back into the arena.
He’d made it out but had yet to take his seat.
I was the eighth.
Only I wasn’t, because Pryce Wishart had beaten me out of the arena.
Wilder had pushed him back in, without his mask, though he would have been able to swim right back up through the hole if he hadn’t tangled with Gavin on his way down.
Yet…Pryce was still in the water, along with Raelah, who must have gotten turned around after she’d passed me.
Wilder tore the mask from his face and marched across the glass ceiling toward his spot on the lowest bench. In first position. He glanced at me, and when our gazes met, the fury in his eyes faded. He grinned. Then he winked.
I pushed myself upright, out of Desmond’s warm grip, and raced across the slick surface toward Wilder.
He stood, frowning at my dangerous speed, and I crashed bodily into him, heedless of my drenched, largely transparent clothing.
Of my stringy, soaked hair and the tears streaming down my face. Of my very dignity.
“Amber? Are you—”
I shot up onto my toes and kissed him, right there in front of everyone. In front of Desmond, who I could practically feel watching us.
Wilder kissed me back, long and hard. His fingers dug into my hips, and I slid my arms around his neck, burrowing into the warmth glowing through his cold, wet clothing, and in the end, it was only the low, solemn voice of the Bluehelm that broke us apart.
That brought me back to myself, and to the ongoing trial.
“They’ve been submerged too long.”
I let Wilder go and stepped back to see that the Bluehelm had stood.
“Let’s get the victors somewhere dry and warm,” she said, stepping down onto the glass. “And let’s begin the recovery effort.”
Her words chilled me all the way to the bone, and I turned, Wilder’s hand warm in mine, to stare down through the transparent panels at the water below. It was too murky to see more than a couple of feet in, but somewhere down there, two of my classmates had—
“Look!” Keryth shouted. Her arm bumped mine as she stood.
Yoslyn gasped, and I followed their gazes to see a hand pressed to the glass. Clawing at it.
“Someone’s still alive!” Desmond shouted. Water splashed through the opening, and suddenly he was gone, and it took me a second to realize he’d jumped in.
He’d stood on the glass ceiling while I nearly drowned, but he’d jumped in without hesitation to save someone else.
A moment later, he bobbed to the surface of the water, framed by the hole in the glass, and shoved Raelah to safety.
Wilder grabbed her—I’d had no idea he’d disappeared from my side—and pulled her onto the glass, where she coughed up what seemed like buckets of water. She’d failed. But somehow, despite the fact that she’d lost her air bladder and had been down there far too long, she’d survived.
“How…?” Wilder asked, and someone stepped down from the spectator’s benches to hand him a drying cloth. He draped it over Raelah, and Yoslyn knelt to pound on her back. “How do you think—”
A pounding cut him off, and I jumped, whirling to look for the source. The sound echoed again, and this time I saw a fist hit the underside of the glass, several yards from the opening.
“There!” I shouted, pointing.
“Pryce is still alive!” Adria yelled while Cressa stared in stunned silence beside her.
Desmond dove under the glass again, and I watched the blur of his movement. His form met the other one, and he hauled a coughing, choking, still-blue-tinted Pryce Wishart into the air.
A buzz had begun among the spectators as they voiced quiet disbelief and confusion. As they made soft conjecture, while Pryce coughed up absolute leagues of water, shivering in a puddle.
No one had offered him a drying cloth.
He coughed again, then looked around in utter confusion, all animosity washed from his expression by the shock of survival. He was trying to say something, but the words seemed stuck.
Pryce spit out more water. Then more. He cleared his throat. Then he said something, the syllables cracked and broken. Disjointed.
“What was that?” the Bluehelm demanded, lifting the hem of her robe out of a puddle as she stepped carefully closer.
“I said, you can breathe it!” Pryce shouted. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. “You can breathe the star-cursed water!”
Silence descended across the arena.
“He’s delirious,” a professor said softly at my back. “Mad from the experience of near death.”
“No, he’s right,” Raelah said. “And it’s the damnedest thing.
I ran out of air, and I couldn’t find the center of the arena, and I thought I was going to die.
I held my breath as long as I could, but then…
my mouth opened. I couldn’t help it. And water…
I was choking on it. Sucking it into my lungs as if it were air, because that’s what lungs do, whether you want them to or not, and—” She blinked, staring at the glass beneath her feet.
“I didn’t die. I was breathing the water.
It was thick, and it was hard to push in and out, but it worked. ”
“You can breathe it…” Pryce repeated, his eyes wide, hair plastered to his skull and trailing down his cheeks.
And finally, as we all stared at one another, and at the hole, and at the glass surface in wonder and astonishment, but mostly in confusion, the Bluehelm stepped down from her place in the stands and cleared her throat.
“I don’t yet understand how it happened, but today, for the first time in the history of the White Trial in its current incarnation, all of the participants have survived!”