Then Seth showed us the door.
It was half-buried at the edge, indeed, where the hedges gave way to exposed gears and vine-wrapped pistons—a narrow seam in the ground that didn’t belong to any path. He leaned down and pressed his hands against it, and the ground shifted with a muted click, revealing a metal door flush with the soil.
I’d never seen something so well hidden that I wondered how Seth had even found it, but there was no time for questions. Our eyes were wide and our ears perked up, just in case someone came and saw us while Seth pulled the door open. The hinges gave soundlessly, breathing out air that smelled of metal.
Below it, a narrow stairwell spiraled down into the dark.
“Light, anyone?” Helen whispered, and Anika was the first to raise her hand. White smoke rose over her palm andgathered into a small ball that burned brightly a second later.
“Guess I’ll go first,” she whispered, afraid, but also excited. We all were.
What could be down there, and what more could we learn about the coming trial if we could actually see the inside of the Labyrinth? I already couldn’t wait to find out.
We went slowly, as silently as we could—well. Considering all the hissing and complaints andouch—you stepped on my toes again!,I wouldn’t say it was silent, but we did descend two levels in just a couple minutes. The metal of the stairs vibrated faintly. Pipes threaded the walls, these ones not painted, not decorated, not trying to pass for something they weren’t down here.
At the bottom, the passage opened into a low, vaulted corridor carved straight into the rock. There was plenty of light there, old lanterns burning with bright flames, and through a series of grated openings in the walls, we caught a glimpse of the strangest, most incredible thing I had ever seen.
The actual understructure of the Labyrinth.
We stopped, all of us at the same time, looking out the openings, at the massive interlocking rings suspended in the darkness, rotating slowly. Symbols were carved onto most surfaces, symbols I couldn’t even begin to understand, that glowed faintly as something passed through them—like small charges of electricity. Or maybe magic?
Thick conduits ran along the ceiling, pulsing with light that brightened and dimmed in perfect rhythm. The smell was very close to boiling potatoes, indeed, just like Cook said. The air was dense, weighted, and the floor thrummed beneath our boots, which meant the machinery went down lower than this level. Possiblymuchlower.
“That’s Sparetime,” whispered Russ, pointing at theopening on the right, where those interlocking rings with the glowing symbols rotated. “See that—that’s Sparetime being harnessed!”
I leaned in closer to see better—we all did. If Russ was to be believed, we were actually witnessing one of the most important things in our world—the harnessing of Sparetime.
We couldn’t really see much, unfortunately, just those rings spinning. We would need to get closer to see more, to see what they were connected to.
“C’mon, let’s keep moving, see what else is down here,” March said after a moment, and we moved forward together.
Not for long, though. The corridor went on for another few feet, and then took a sharp turn to the left.
Suddenly March stopped walking and held up a hand first, then turned around and brought his finger to his lips to tell us to keep quiet.
We all stopped moving, stopped breathing, stopped blinking.
Someone’s there,March mouthed, pointing his thumb behind him.
That’s when we heard the voices slipping through the openings on the walls.
Holy Hour, someone was going to catch us—and that only made this whole thingmoreexciting.
Mimi went closer to the wall on the lefton her tiptoes and peeked through like she could see something the rest of us couldn’t.
Then she stopped. Froze for a tick.
When she turned to us, her mouth was open and her eyes wide, and she mouthed something a few times but we still didn’t understand.
What?!we mouthed back, so she finally whispered, “It’s Talik!”
Right away, Russ and March, who were taller than therest of us, went to see for themselves, but they didn’t need to bother. Mimi knew what Master Talik looked like, and I didn’t doubt for a second that it was him she’d seen. He would be impossible to mistake for someone else.
But then March and Russ turned, too, even more shocked than Mimi had been.
Russ whispered, “Calren.”
It was like a slap to my face, and I was sure the others felt the same. Suddenly, we were all moving toward the corner, trying to see, trying to hear better, because there was no way any of us was going to leave without hearing what they were talking about first. Not after we’d already gone through all three trials, and not after how Master Talik had behaved in his workshop today.
