Page 190 of The Games Gods Play
We come across the fox making his way back to us, and he turns to run in the same direction. More running and following.
We run until we come to another T, one way leading up, the other on the same level. We do the same thing, just to be sure, but this one seems obvious. Sure enough, the fox returns first, and we head upward, after the panther.
We emerge onto the second level. This one is all glass, the level between the stone maze below my feet and the top level above. Sunlight dissipates the shadows here…and I can see bugs everywhere, running this way and that. I catch sight of several of the other champions, too, and when I look up, I see faces in the immortal crowd filled with bloodlust and fascination, their cheers audible even down here.
I block all of that out and focus on only what’s directly in front of me. Solve one problem, then the next. And every single second, I’m expecting to hear Hades’ voice offering advice. Or maybe his butterfly showing me the way.
But I don’t.
I’m standing at another crossroads when a pounding on the glass has me whirling, heart thudding harder, crouched and ready to defend. But I find Trinica standing under my feet.
I drop to my knees as she stares up at me.
“Which way?” Her voice is slightly garbled through the floor.
Because of the clear tunnels, it’s impossible to tell if I’ve been in that section before. I point. “That way, I think. But I’m not sure.”
Easy to get turned around in here with the glass.
She frowns, hands going to her hips. “You’re not sure? Or you’re not helping me now that you need to win?”
I give her a look. “I wouldn’t not help you.”
After a second, she looks down at her shoes, then back up at me. “Okay. I believe you.”
I’m not sure she does. “You can do this. The way you should go always feels a little cooler and smells sweeter. It’s subtle,” I tell her.
“Subtle. Great.”
I put my palm to the glass. “I’ll see you on the outside.”
Which is when a wicked, stinger-tipped tail rears up out of the shadows behind her. “Scorpion!” I yelp.
Immediately, she scrambles straight up, using gauntlets at her wrists and ankles to climb the walls to the ceiling with apparent ease. Her gift from Hephaestus, I assume. The scorpion scuttles by underneath her, then tries to climb up after her, only to slip on the smooth walls. It can’t reach her with its tail, either.
Trinica, hanging upside down, grins at me. “Thank the gods those and the spiders can’t climb glass—or the spiders not without webs, at least.” She makes a face. “The hornets and the ants, however…”
Giving up, the scorpion keeps going, and Trinica drops to the ground. With a wave, she runs off in the other direction.
Which is when a sensation like being shot with a gun point-blank, like a metal bullet shredding through my flesh, strikes me in the thigh before my panther tackles the bullet ant away from me.
Already on my knees, I clutch my leg and rock back and forth as I try to breathe through agony. “Fuck,” I mutter. “They weren’t kidding around when they named those things.”
The bug is dead in seconds, but I am dying more slowly over here. I expect to see blood leaking out of me, but I don’t. Because it wasn’t a real bullet, just a stinger the size of my thumb.
The panther prowls over and noses at me, as if to say she’s sorry she didn’t get to it sooner, but a second, still-oozing corpse to my left tells me why—a hornet, its stinger like a knife protruding from its yellow-and-black abdomen. I hadn’t even heard it coming.
“Thank you,” I force out through gritted teeth.
The pain isn’t subsiding. It’s still pounding with every heartbeat, throbbing. I can’t just sit here, though.
“Lyra?”
I jerk my head up to stare through a blur of tears at Dae standing at the other end of the tunnel. Nothing separating us.
Oh gods. This is it.
He’s going to kill me while I lie here in so much pain that I can’t run or fight. I grab my axe, which I dropped on the ground earlier, and hold it above my head, ready to throw. I’ll aim at his shoulder, try not to kill him.
