She looked down to see what had been the culprit, and found the broken shards of a teacup.
That darkness lifted its fingers at the same time as the corners of her mouth:
Zahril had made her tea.
***
Aasha had been to enough tournaments of the Otherworld to know what to expect. Her heart didn’t race when she walked to the end of the hall and found that the passageway to the kitchen had disappeared, replaced with a tunnel of darkness.
A sign floated in front of her, written in light:
Get Out
A different version of Aasha would have taken it personally, but Zahril’s command was clear. Her task was to find her way out.
The moment she nodded, the darkness rippled.
Walls peeled off from the tunnel, stone grinding together as the slabs of rock closed around her. Her breath tightened. She didn’t like tight spaces.
Earlier in their lessons, when Aasha had fought back on what the use of these lessons were, Zahril had only laughed.
“The purpose of this is to teach you how to think,” she had said. “Everything else can be learned on the job.”
Think,thought Aasha.You already know how to do it all.
It was that one thought that comforted her, especially when she found herself looking at a bright, empty room devoid of windows and doors. The light seemed to emanate from the walls, like a cavethreaded through with quartz. Maps littered the floor. Aasha knelt, touching them, searching them for a riddle. How could she get out when there was no exit? It’s not like she could burn a hole through the ground and escape. Zahril was sneaky. She may have drilled Aasha on the five senses, but she shifted them out of obvious focus. Taught her to think in the manner of absurd things. Taught her that using her senses meant not trusting them at their core level.
She studied the maps.
Maps of cities she’d never traveled to, of oceans where creatures rendered of ink and ash widened their jaws, ready to swallow an empire. She trailed her finger up… a square of black.
A series of triangles. Mountains.
Close-knit spirals. Ocean cyclones.
A broken line. Treacherous roads.
The symbols all stood for something, and she realized what it was from wandering through the Bharata archives. A map key. She pressed her palm to it, and felt it—that sensation of magic, an unexpected burst of cold, like mistaking pulverized ice for a dusting of sugar. Zahril was not averse to using magic in her lessons, and when Aasha drew away her hand, she felt something cold and metallic against her skin…
A key.
She grinned.
But if she had the key, she needed a door. There was nothing in the maps in the shape of a door. Nothing that might even be the semblance of one.
“What makes something a door?” she asked herself aloud.
It was a barrier. An entrance. An exit. And all doors had thresholds, a line that split one place from another.
She stared at the maps. An idea struck. She gathered them one by one, until her arms were heavy with thick papers and sweet-smelling scrolls. Then she arranged them in a line down the room. With the key in her hand, she stepped over the line.
The room split.
Beneath her, the floor shattered. Dark earth flecked the threshold of maps. The smell of damp, growing things and something else… something rancid and sharp dug into her nose. And then she heard it. The snuffling. Scuffing of creature paws.
The room had warped and pinched, darkening as it transformed into the mouth of a cave. Only this time she wasn’t alone. Something was making its way to her. A creature like a rat.
But Zahril hadn’t left her entirely in the darkness. The smell of growing things revealed itself. Bushes with sprays of berries. Some were the bright purple of a new bruise. Others were the toasted yellow of turmeric. The creature ambled toward Aasha, and she could smell its breath. The rank, bitterness of food gone unpicked. She stifled a cough, and pressed her arm against her mouth. The creature had a row of needle-teeth, and a long, furred nose. Its eyes were pale as pearls. Nothing at all like the milky eye of Zahril that gazed at something else at all times. She watched it from a distance. It brushed past the purple berries, shivering as it moved, and then nibbled at the yellow berries. Then it licked its small, red mouth.
