Chapter Twenty-Four
“In crisis, when forced to choose, we all default to either fight or flight. The best of us knows that there’s a time for both.”
Myrine had placed an order with a seamstress weeks ago to obtain new outfits for us to wear in our Trials.
They were the colors of House Viper, emerald and gold, and created to withstand extreme pressure or tension.
They were tight, form fitted. My bottoms were much tighter than Dante’s, fitting me like a second skin and accentuating every curve of my behind so as to leave nothing to the imagination.
Why did they keep insisting on showing off so much of my figure every chance they got?
My only consolation was that Dante’s outfit was fitted too, even if not to the same extent.
For such a devout family, though, having my every curve on display was a bit unsettling.
And it made me question if their goal was to explicitly catch my partner’s attention, to make his decision easier.
I hated to admit it might have been working.
I’d caught Dante staring at my rear on several occasions already this morning and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate being able to count his abdominal muscles through his shirt either.
For the first time, we looked like true candidates as we made our way to the sixth tunnel a month after the patriarch’s declaration that Dante would choose a bride.
As we descended the final staircase to the southern deck, I understood why Myrine and Cosmo had been making such a big deal lately about our appearance.
A massive crowd awaited us, one which burst into cheers and screams the moment we became visible.
They cried out our names, wishing us luck as they wove banners dedicated to us.
The colors of House Viper were everywhere, on flags in hands and ribbons in hair, on poorly dyed clothing and painted faces.
People chanted the most popular, most well-known prayers, words I’d heard infrequently on the bottom rings throughout my life, only on holy days or seasonal changes.
They even screamed for Myrine, shouting out their memory of her own success up to the fourth Trial.
Dante glanced my way, just as stunned as I was.
Cosmo, however, wasn’t. He joined us on our journey toward the Trial, he and Myrine both, and while the latter smiled serenely out at the crowd, Cosmo looked smug. He kept his hands folded within his cloak and took in the sight of his own house’s colors adorning every body present.
It was then that I truly understood the power of the Trials for the first time.
Dante took my hand. I looked up. We’d come face to face with the black abyss of the sixth tunnel.
The crowd’s screams hammered against my eardrums, but they seemed to almost fade into the background as Dante looked my way, nodded, and we stepped forward into the void together.
As usual, we were encased in our separate tubes and hurtled along toward our sixth Trial.
The familiar anxiety that always came at the beginning of a new test bubbled up again as I whirled through the darkness, but I pushed it down, flexing my fingers and stretching my legs as I waited to be deposited into our next ordeal.
A metallic ping echoed out as my feet slammed into the grate below them, leaving a slight indentation where my significant strength cushioned my landing. I rose slowly in the dark, turning toward where I sensed Dante beside me.
A blinding white light blazed to life, illuminating our surroundings. We stood at the end of a long bridge made entirely of shining chrome, only four feet across and falling off into an endless, dark chasm on either side. I looked to my left. Dante stared out at the bridge, his lips parted.
We had been deposited onto a ledge wider than the rest of the bridge, which seemed to flare out on both ends.
Nothing greeted us on the other side of the chasm other than a looming gray wall.
In the center of the bridge, though, rested something which appeared to be a command center of some sort.
It had buttons and knobs and behind it was a wall of thick glass.
It appeared to be the only thing that might have anything to do with whatever our task was.
I looked at Dante again. He shrugged and took a step forward.
A moment later, he hissed in pain. He reached his right hand up to extricate a thin, sharp dart which had penetrated the skin at the base of his neck. With a grunt, he pulled it from his flesh and held it up for examination.
“Are you okay?” I asked. I shifted forward, but he held up a hand to halt me. I froze. “Dante?”
The dart still pinched between his fingers, he pressed his other hand against where it had stuck him.
“Numb,” he said aloud. “I can’t feel my neck.”
Panic crawled up my throat, but I swallowed it down. As Dante’s partner, I needed to focus on staying grounded and talking him through this.
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head. Dante pulled his hand away and flexed his fingers. “And the rest of me is fine. It seems to be localized to point of impact. I feel a bit more…sluggish, but my movement hasn’t been compromised.”
“Can you heal it?”
“No. I already tried. There’s something…off about it. Maybe something in the dart that interferes with our healing.”
We stood in silence for a moment, contemplating what that might mean.
“They’re coming from the walls,” he informed me, keeping perfectly still as he nodded toward the gray walls a hundred yards away from us on each side. “But they have quite a distance to go before they reach us. If we run for it—”
“For what?” A bit of my panic escaped with my question. “There’s nothing here but that panel, and it’s in the center of the bridge.”
“It’s shielded by that glass barrier. That’s where we have to go, Adrian. It has to be.”
I nodded and attempted to regain my composure. “Then we’ll go. Can you run?”
He nodded, and we both readied ourselves.
“One…” he started, releasing a breath and bending his knees slightly in preparation, “Two…”
We took off when he’d hardly uttered the third count, dashing to the control panel. Dante was faster than me, he always had been, but he hissed twice as darts found their target. I took on four along the way. One to my neck, like Dante. Two to my left arm. One to my right thigh.
The sensation was strange and altogether unpleasant.
It was precisely how Dante had described it.
The numbness was centralized to the two to three inches surrounding the point of impact.
My left forearm felt like jelly and hung uselessly by my side.
My neck was merely sore, but my right leg moved slower than my left, throwing me off balance.
Dante had been hit twice in the left calf, but he stood strong when I joined him behind the glass shield.
We stared down at the six buttons on the control center. Each a different color, each with a different symbol I’d never seen before.
Dante frowned as he studied them, just as clueless as I was.
A picture that looked like the rings which always signified the end of our Trials was etched into the top of the console.
That seemed to indicate we were on the right track, but the Trial necessitated our choosing the right button to reveal them, and neither of us had any idea what those strange symbols or specific colors meant.
As we deliberated, the thick glass barrier between us was pummeled by darts.
“The old language,” Dante said, running a finger over a symbol etched into one of the buttons.
“I’m assuming you never learned that in all your lifelong studies?”
He cast an annoyed glance over his shoulder, then returned to his examination.
“I recognize this one.” He pointed to the orange button. “Archi. Beginning. But that doesn’t seem right. This is the sixth Trial, not the first.”
“That one looks like a dart.” I pointed at the blue one. “Best not to push it.”
“Unless it means to stop them.”
A loud crack reverberated around the cavernous room, and both of our gazes snapped up from the panel to each other. We turned to the glass wall shielding us from the barrage of darts; it had cracked.
“I think we’re running out of time,” I told him.
Dante ran a hand through his hair as his eyes shifted around the switchboard.
“There’s only one way,” he muttered.
I pulled my gaze away from the splintering glass. “What do you mean?”
“Get ready to run like hell.”
“What?”
In one swift motion, Dante slammed both hands down on the panel, pressing all of the buttons at once.
In an instant, three things happened. One, part of the wall on the opposite side of the bridge slid up, revealing the rings. Two, the barrage of darts increased tenfold. And three, the glass shielding us from the onslaught shattered.
I cried out in pain as one of the darts jammed into my back, inches from my spine. Dante hissed as one slammed into his ear. We bolted for the rings on the other side.
A third of the way down the bridge, two more darts hit home in my right ankle.
My already semi-numb leg grew clumsy. I slowed down significantly as I pulled myself along with my left.
Halfway there, Dante let out a scream when a dart pierced his left thigh and another stuck into his arm.
Three quarters of the way, he stumbled as his left ankle gave way.
I rushed forward and caught him. He met my eyes as we rose together, him standing solely on his right leg while I stood entirely on my left.
Together, we formed one being as we staggered onward.
Another dart pierced my back. Then one more hit my shoulder. The edges of my vision blurred and blackened, closing in. I blinked rapidly and sprinted desperately forward. Dante’s eyes were almost closed, but he kept moving, his breaths coming in heaving gasps just as mine were.
At the end of the bridge, we fell and scrambled away from the onslaught of darts. We found a moment’s respite on the flared end of the bridge where the darts couldn’t reach, but the way the floor spun and my vision grew darker wasn’t a comforting sign.
“Dan—” I tried to speak but my tongue wouldn’t work.
Dante, I reached out to him mentally instead. He sent back a feeling. Not a word but a sensation to let me know he was still there, still conscious. The rings. Get to…rings.
He crawled forward, flat on his stomach, his fingers of his right hand dragging his body along the cool metal.
His left arm hung uselessly at his side.
I tried to stand but fumbled and crashed back onto the ground, the hard metal slamming into my calf.
I could hardly feel it through the patches of numbness, but I would surely feel it once we finally got out of this Trial.
Dante made it to the rings before me. Three feet away, my vision narrowed to a pinprick, and no matter how many times I blinked, I simply couldn’t see anymore.
Adrian, come forward. Just a few…more…feet…
Driven into a frenzied panic by my blindness, I tossed my body forward and stuck out my arm. Dante’s fingers gripped my wrist and raised it up to the rings.
This time, with the burning came another sensation as well.
A cool liquid seeped into my skin where the rings had made their mark.
It spread throughout my body and, in every place it touched, feeling returned.
My vision cleared, my breathing evened. I could move my legs again, flex my fingers, and turn my head.
A whooshing at the other end of the bridge let us know that our loyal transports had returned. But, despite our success, neither of us were in a hurry to cross that bridge again. Even with the darts no longer a threat, we would be forced to face our adoring fans.
“Dante?” I said as my airways began to clear and I gulped in lungfuls of air.
“Hm?” He asked from my side, doing the same as I was and flexing his fingers now that he could feel them again.
“You’re a crazy son of a bitch.”
He laughed. At first, it was just a low chuckle, then it grew to all out hysteria. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he shook his head, clutching his stomach. I couldn’t help but join him.
It felt good to laugh, but it felt even better to breathe, to see, to feel once more. We didn’t speak again. And even as the laughter died down, we simply sat there in the silence and enjoyed a few moments of peace before we had to return to the world of expectations and realities.