Nobody had an answer.
“Do you guys…remember what the first trial was?” Cook asked.
“Or…the second?” Anika.
We thought hard for a second.
Nobody had an answer to that, either. Maybe if I tried hard enough, and for longer, Iwouldremember, but there simply wasn’t enough time.
At least that’s what I told myself.
The ceiling of the ballroom was made of glass, thick, blurry, covered in dirt everywhere. The red and white carpet that covered the floor was torn, burned, just as dirty, and the tables and chairs were all over the floor. Dust clung thick to everything, and cracked chandeliers dangled like bones from the fractured glass over our heads. Cobwebs stretched between wooden partitions that sliced the room into maze-like chambers for no obvious reason we could see.
Velvet curtains lay rotten and heavy along the walls, their color faded to ash. A stage stood at the far end, warped and half-splintered, its instruments abandoned and broken—violins split in half, a cello with snapped strings, a grand piano gutted open like a corpse.
But eventhatwasn’t what filled us with dread going in.
Above us, suspended by threads so fine they were nearly invisible, hung masks.
There were dozens of them, all clean, spotless, and theyswayed gently to a wind we couldn’t feel, casting strange shadows from the broken sun rays slipping through.
The air was thick in here, not just with dust but with silence—the kind of silence that came after destruction. And this room had indeed been thoroughly destroyed.
As we moved deeper toward the partitions, it felt like the room shifted with us, and those large pieces of wood closed in behind us. Like the ballroom wanted to keep us here—or maybe it was just my fear talking.
When we reached the middle, we stopped. Looked around at the masks and the partitions and the ruined tables and dishes…
“What now?” asked Seth, and his voice echoed in the high ceiling. There was plenty of light coming through from the sun, and it was easy to see that there was nobody here but us.
Then the doors behind us groaned like living beasts. We turned just in time to see them closing with a loud bang that made the floor beneath our feet vibrate.
The click of the lock turning in place came last.
Shivers raised the flesh on my forearms.
“Guys…” someone whispered, but they couldn’t even finish the sentence. The silence that followed the sound of that lock didn’t last.
The next second, a key struck.
A piano note.
We jumped again to the other side of the room, to the ruined stage where the broken instruments were, and we saw it with our own eyes how the keys that were still intact on the piano moved down as if some invisible finger was pressing on them.
Next came the strings on the violins and on the cello.
A minute in, and the instruments were playing themselves, the sound of them warped, distorted,wrong.
“Just stick together, okay? Just-just stick together,” Russsaid, and we were already moving closer to one another in a circle, and March’s hand was still on mine, thankfully, because the room was not done surprising us yet.
The light slipping through the ceiling began to shimmer, and as the warped melody played in the background, figures made of light and dust began to simplysplitfrom behind the many partitions and glide into our view.
Cries and gasps and whispers.
They were people without faces, wearing suits and dresses and jewelry around their slender necks. Their colors were faded, made of flickering light, but they were moving, jumping around, hopping from side to side,dancing.
The figures were swirling around us, grabbing the tables and chairs and pulling them upright, grabbing half broken glasses from the floor and pretending to sip from them as they moved.
So many—and more were coming through from behind the partitions as we watched.
