I chewed my lip for a moment and stepped away from the edge, peering around for a solution. There had to be one. There always was.
I tested the weighted platform with one foot, just tapping it at first, then putting more and more weight on it until it finally turned blue along with the rings behind me. I releasedit, plunging us back into the red light and unreachable rings. Almost my entire body weight; that was what it took.
Hands on my hips, I looked all around. There was no way Dante and I could lift a boulder heavy enough to weigh down the platform, let alone carry it up our hastily built rock wall. But maybe we didn’t have to.
“Give me the rope,” I said, leaning over the edge.
Dante frowned. For a moment, I assumed he was going to question me, but then he untied the rope from his belt and tossed it up. I unravelled it as quickly as I could and backed away toward the center of the platform, staring up at the beams high above us. I took a deep breath and sent the rope flying high toward the ceiling.
The first attempt failed.
The second wasn’t much better.
But on the third, the rope finally wrapped around one of the thin beams and fell back to the top of the platform on the other side of it. I grinned, victorious, and gripped one end tightly before tossing the other down to Dante.
“Get whatever mid-sized stones you can. Not so heavy that they’ll break the rope or that I won’t be able to lift them but heavy enough to make a difference on this weighted platform.”
His lips parted and he nodded once before scrambling back down the rock wall and searching the remaining stones scattered around the floor below for any that might properly fit the task. He tied the rope around one soon enough, and I pulled on my end, lifting it up and over the platform where I could lower it down, untie it, and transfer it to the weighted pad before tossing his end of the rope back to him and waiting for the next stone.
It wasn’t until we were halfway through our task, with me directing him toward stones I thought were the appropriate weight and him testing them out at the bottom, that I started feeling strange. Just a twinge, at first. Hardly anything to causeconcern. But noticeable all the same. I glanced down to where Dante was busy tying our rope around yet another stone. He hadn’t so much as hesitated. He didn’t appear to think that anything was wrong. So I shrugged it off and kept going.
A few minutes later, though, I felt it again.
“Dante—” I started but was interrupted by a gasp.
I looked over the edge of the platform. He stood only a few feet away from the bottom, his hand on his chest as he gulped in a huge breath of air and stared up at me, wide-eyed.
“What—” he stuttered, looking up and all around in confusion. “What is that?”
There was nothing in the room but stones on the ground, those rings behind the glass, and the rope that we were using to raise the rocks. There was no one else in the room but us. And yet, I felt it too. Sitting heavily on my chest was a weight I couldn’t see. It pressed insistently down upon me, firmer and heavier by the minute. I felt it in my arms as well, and my legs. It was getting harder to lift them, harder to take a step forward, as if the air itself was thickening. By just a minuscule amount for now, but if this continued, the weight of this nothingness would crush us before we had a chance to reach the rings.
“They must have affected the gravity in this room somehow,” Dante said. He whirled around as if he could locate the cause of this strange phenomenon. “Forced it to grow incrementally stronger.”
I hadn’t heard the termgravitybefore, but I could figure out what he meant.
“It’s a time limit,” I told him.
He turned back to me, eyes wild, and nodded.
“Right,” he replied, his tone taking on a manner of business. “Ignore the small ones, then. Tell me what you see. Which ones are our best chance?”
Without taking a moment to appreciate just how well we were actually doing with this whole working together thing now, I started pointing in different directions, barking out descriptions of the stones I could see from above that looked like they would work. Dante ran as fast as he could to each one, tying them quickly rather than carefully and swinging them toward me before I even had a chance to lift the rope. It was still working, for now, but it was sloppy. And I couldn’t help but notice that, every time Dante went for another rock, it was taking him longer to get there than it would have otherwise.
My legs felt like lead, and every minute I spent lifting the stones tied to the rope, they grew heavier.
When we’d accumulated enough stones at the top of the platform for the weight to be enough, the glass box disappeared and the room was bathed in blue. I nearly fell to my knees and wept with relief. But we weren’t done. Dante had to get up onto the platform too. We had to finish this together. Always together.
“Start climbing,” I hissed, doubled over as I fought to catch my breath. My lungs squeezed with the effort.
A grunt was the only reply I received. I shuffled forward on my knees and peered down over the edge as my partner began to climb. He dropped the rope behind him and stumbled forward on shaking legs, practically falling onto the pile of rocks we’d created. He grunted again as his fingers dug in between the stones and he hauled himself up an inch, then another. He placed his foot a bit higher and rose again, but it was slow. Too slow. My chest was caving in, my lungs were collapsing, even my vision was starting to blur.
“It’s okay,” I ground out, though whether I was encouraging him or comforting myself, I wasn’t sure. “We can do this. You can do this. We have time. We have time.”
He grunted again in a way that made me think he didn’t quite agree, then groaned as he hauled himself up another inch. I could see how hard he was fighting just to rise that small amount, the weight of the air bearing down upon him, heavier than ever. His muscles strained with exertion, thick veins popping out along the hard ridges of his biceps. I knelt at the edge of the platform, panting and watching as Dante groaned and dragged himself up the jagged rocks with a strength I couldn’t fathom. He was practically crawling on top of them in an effort to reach me.
I now understood the button below.
Surrender.
