Chapter 55: The Maze

The corridor was dark.

Kara ran with Patricia, with Derek, with the other players. Their footsteps echoed. Their breath was loud. The lights above them flickered.

"This way," Patricia said. "I know this place. I was here before. When it was still a hotel."

She pulled them through a door, down a staircase, into a kitchen. The lights were off. The windows were dark.

"Where do we go?" Kara asked.

Patricia looked at the door, at the corridor beyond, at the darkness.

"We wait," she said. "The others are coming. They'll be here soon."

"What others?"

Patricia smiled. "The ones who are going to burn this place down."

Derek had been falling his whole life. He just never admitted it until now.

The pit opened beneath him without warning. One second he was walking, his hand on the glass wall, his eyes on the corridor ahead. The next second the floor was gone and he was dropping, his arms windmilling, his stomach somewhere above him, his throat too tight to scream.

He hit the bottom hard. Something in his leg snapped. He felt it before he heard it, a bright white pain that shot up his thigh and settled in his hip and made the world go gray for a moment. He lay there on his back, staring up at the hole he'd fallen through, the light from above cutting a rectangle in the darkness.

He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't do anything but lie there and wait for the pain to become something he could name.

It took a long time.

When he finally sat up, his leg was wrong. The knee was swollen, the shin was bent at an angle that didn't match the other one, and there was blood soaking through his pants. He touched it. His fingers came away red. He wiped them on his shirt and tried to remember the last time he'd been hurt like this.

Three years ago. The collection facility. The processing room. The men in white coats who'd taken him apart and put him back together and taken him apart again. He'd survived that. He'd escaped. He'd spent three years running from the memory of it.

Now he was back.

He looked up at the hole. The walls were smooth, no handholds, no ridges, nothing to climb. The light was fading. Or maybe that was his vision. He couldn't tell anymore.

He crawled to the wall, put his back against it, and closed his eyes.

He thought about Kara.

He'd met her in the collection facility. She was the one who'd found the door. The one who'd pulled him through it. The one who'd run with him for three days and three nights until they were far enough away to stop. She was the reason he was alive. She was the reason he'd kept running when every part of him wanted to lie down and let the world swallow him whole.

Now she was somewhere in this place, playing the same games, falling into the same pits, and he couldn't do anything to help her.