Labyrinth

At last, she sighed. “All right, let’s try it.”

Kessel flipped open the cover before Annja could stop him.

“Hey…”

He stared at the book. There was nothing on the pages. Annja leafed through it but found nothing at all written in it. She glanced at the spine just to make sure she hadn’t missed something.

“Well, that’s weird.”

Kessel frowned.

Annja tried to pick the book up off the table, but it didn’t budge. “Is it stuck?”

Kessel tried, too, but it wouldn’t give. Annja nudged him out of the way and started leafing through the pages again. “There’s got to be something in here we’re missing.”

On the fourth time through, she finally found it at the back of the book. The last page covered a small button in the upper corner. Annja glanced at Kessel. “What do you think?”

Kessel shook his head.

But Annja poised her finger over it. “What have we got to lose? If we don’t press it, I don’t see anything else in here we could try. We either stay here and starve or press this and take our chances.”

Kessel nodded.

Annja pressed the button.

Several things happened in the next instant. First, the lights went out, plunging the entire room into total darkness. Annja heard sudden movement and a grunt.

“Kessel?”

And then there was nothing but silence.

“Kessel?”

No response.

Wonderful, she thought. Now she truly was alone. Villain though he might have been, Annja had felt at least some small measure of comfort knowing he was with her in the maze.

Now she was alone.

Then the floor gave way underneath her. Annja felt herself falling past the table, past the King James Bible trap that she’d triggered. She plunged down, unaware of how far she was falling until at last she fell into water. Annja dunked under and came up sputtering, gasping for air. The sudden cold shock had stunned her almost senseless.

She guessed that she’d fallen at least twenty feet but couldn’t be sure. It was still completely dark in the…pool she found herself in, adding to her insecurity about her position. After all, Fairclough had warned her that it would become obvious there were challenges within the maze itself. And Annja had the distinct impression that meant Fairclough might have stocked the maze with a few living surprises.

There might even be piranha in the water with her right now.

She wiped her eyes and tried to focus.

In any event, she was out of the room with no exit. Now she just had to figure out where she was.

And what had become of Kessel.

Chapter 8

The first thing she did was determine the size of the pool she’d dropped into. Annja swam in one direction until she bumped into stone. A wall. There, she thought, that tells me there’s at least some end to this.

She swam back the way she’d come but grew tired partway across. It wasn’t a small pool.

Annja took a deep breath and dove down, but again, she couldn’t find the bottom before her lungs threatened to burst. She surfaced and gasped for air.

Not good, she decided. Better to stay close to the stone wall she’d felt. So she paddled back over and felt the cool, slimy stones, covered in mossy algae. And Annja hadn’t detected any chlorine, so this was a natural body of water.

And that meant there might be other things living in it besides the algae.

Almost as soon as she came to that realization, Annja felt something brush against her legs. She jerked them up and away. She wasn’t in salt water, so that ruled out sharks. And while she didn’t relish the thought of facing anything in the dark, she could control her panic.

Now might be the time to see what it is I’m up against here, she thought. Annja visualized the sword waiting for her in the otherwhere. Instantly, the sword was in her hands, forcing her to tread water with her legs only. But the dull gray light the sword cast provided much-needed illumination.

Annja held the blade high overhead and attempted to see where she was. She glanced up at the ceiling and saw she’d misjudged the distance she’d fallen by perhaps a dozen feet. She could see the hole in the ceiling where she’d come plummeting through.

Any higher and I would have broken my back when I landed, she thought. Fairclough must have worked it out that way on purpose.

The stone wall at the one end gleamed in the light. Annja could see that the stones reached all the way to the ceiling, but looked impossible to climb. Then she slowly traced the wall. It went all the way around the water. She estimated that the pool was the length of a football field. Completely enclosed by the stone wall.

Again, she was in a room with no apparent exit.

She’d already tried to dive and hadn’t reached the bottom. So how deep was it? And did the exit lie somewhere beneath the surface?

One way to find out.

Annja took a deep breath and dove, holding the sword out in front of her while she kicked through the water. Just having the sword gave her a lot more strength and her system felt flush with energy. Her lungs didn’t protest so much as she swam deeper.

She could make out all sorts of plants and a sandy bottom roughly thirty feet below her.

She marveled at Fairclough’s construction of this maze. It wasn’t the type of maze she’d expected. This wasn’t a series of corridors and dead ends; it was a complex series of rooms, each with its own unique set of conditions. In order to get through this, Annja was going to need all of her wits about her.

A school of small fish swam away from the light of the sword, and Annja saw their large white eyes, more accustomed to the darkness than the light. What else lived down here?

She got her answer a second later as she spotted what looked like a bull shark. It cruised lazily some distance away from her. Annja felt her heartbeat kick up a notch as she remembered that bull sharks could live in fresh water. They’d been found up rivers hundreds of miles away from the ocean.

The shark suddenly seemed to notice her and altered its course. It wasn’t huge. But at roughly six feet long, it was still large enough to give Annja some problems.

If she’d been unarmed in the dark, it would have made short work of her.

But with the light and the sword, Annja felt ready for anything.

She hoped she wouldn’t have to kill it. It was simply doing what it was supposed to do. As an apex predator, its job was to hunt and eat. But when it swam suddenly closer with its pectoral fins jutting downward, Annja could see that its attitude had changed from mild curiosity to anger. It seemed to view Annja as an intruder.

I don’t blame it, she thought. If I ruled this place and someone threatening showed up, I’d be pretty pissed, too.