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 myside. 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.
