Chapter 26: Attempt Nine Hundred and One

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which the way out is clearly marked, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry through the hedges. What has a hundred ways in, one way out, and, on certain unlucky evenings, none at all? The answer will be waiting for you at the end of the Chapter, and it will be waiting very patiently.

Hadjer looked at Lyra for a long moment, and the grass between them gave up.

She did not say anything. There was nothing in her face that could be called an answer, and it was probably the cruelest thing she could have done, and she did not do it on purpose. Behind Lyra, eight whistles were still lifted. Not one of them had blown yet. A whistle that has not been blown is a very patient thing.

"That’s enough," said Arthur, and took her sleeve. "Go."

Then the whistles blew.

It sounds like a train in a tunnel. It goes through your teeth first, and then your knees. Six children and a snake ran for the sandbox because it was the nearest thing in the yard that was not a fence, and because Arthur was shouting "SANDBOX!" at the top of his lungs in a voice that did not leave much room for discussion.

"Why the sandbox?" said Matt, running badly in expensive shoes.

"Because they’ve got nothing to lose and we’ve got two thousand each," said Arthur. "Every touch costs us. Every touch pays them. We can’t outrun eight of them across an open yard, so we’re not going to try."

"So what are we going to do?"

"Fistfuls," said Arthur. "On three."

He did not get to three. Carter, who had a grip like a vise and no patience for counting, scooped two double handfuls of sand from the box and hurled them into the face of the first monitor to arrive. The boy of ten yelped. The gaunt teenager behind him got most of the rest, and the woman with the shadowed eyes, who had been at the front of the line and had no intention of being anywhere else, flinched and shut her eyes and kept running blind straight into the swings.

"Everyone!" said Arthur.

Jaquan threw sand with the flat, grudging motion of a man dealing cards. Bliss threw it with her whole body. Matt threw a handful, looked at his clean hands, sighed like a man at a funeral, and threw another. Hadjer did not throw anything. She did not need to. The three monitors nearest to her skidded to a stop on the asphalt ten feet short, and stood very still, staring at the grass dying under her shoes, as if somebody had told them the stove was on.

A sudden wind rose out of nowhere and blew the cloud straight back into the line.

"That wasn’t me," said Matt, quickly. "That was definitely me."

"Hedge," said Bliss.

It was the first thing she had said since the benches in a voice that was not apologetic. Everybody stopped.

"Left past the slide," she said. "Then the third gap. Then right, and right again, and it closes behind you. Go."

"How do you..." said Jaquan.

"Go," said Bliss, and they went.

The hedge was taller than it had looked from the yard. Inside, the sound of whistles went thin and far away, the way a radio does in the next room, and the light turned green and slow. Nobody breathed for a while.

"Okay," said Jaquan, finally, flat on his back in the leaves. "I want to say a few things. The first one is: that was the most terrifying minute of my life, and I once lost a staring contest to a dentist."

"The second one," said Arthur.

"The second one is that Bliss just walked through a maze without blinking." Jaquan sat up. He looked at her over his clipboard, which he had somehow not dropped. "I think it’s time for abilities. We’re doing it in order. Starting with the one who knows the way."

Bliss, who had been sitting with her knees drawn up against the back of the hedge, looked at her shoes.

"Come on," said Jaquan. "We’re a team. We have a clan. Matt’s already told us his passive twice."

"My passive," said Bliss, "is Compass."

There was a pause.

"It gives me a perfect sense of direction," she said. "I always know where north is. I always know exactly where I am and exactly how to get back to where I started. It’s useless." She said it very quickly. "I’ve known where I was every second I’ve been in my Labyrinth. I just never knew where I was going."

Nobody said anything.

"And my active," she said, "is Happy Place."

Every head turned, and Carter, who had been watching the gap in the hedge with his arms folded, turned his as well.

"Hers?" said Hadjer. It was the first thing she had said in a long while.

"It’s stupid," said Bliss. "It’s stupid, you don’t have to look at me like that. It doesn’t do anything."

"Wait," said Jaquan, sitting up very straight. "Wait. Use it."

"What?"

"Use it. See if it redirects his. Or pushes it, or overlaps it, or... something. We’ve got no plan, no coins to spare, and eight people who’d love to see us in uniform. If hers can even put a dent in his, that’s an exit."

Bliss laughed. It was a short, dry little laugh, with nothing under it.

"There’s no way," she said. "There’s no way my Happy Place is stronger than his. He’s an announcer, he’s a whole person, he’s special. Look at me. I don’t even qualify as a side character. I’m a blurred-out background person in a gray hoodie, the kind they put in the back of the crowd shot. Why would the universe give me anything strong enough to beat his?"

"That’s stupid," said Arthur.

She blinked.

"It’s stupid," he said again, evenly, "and I say that as someone who has been a gray character for most of his life. Everyone is special. Even a blurred-out extra gets to pick up a camera and perform." He tilted his head toward the sky, where, far above the hedge, a very small mechanical hummingbird was drifting hopefully back and forth. "There’s one up there. Take it."

"It’s not that simple," said Bliss.

"It’s exactly that simple."

"A Happy Place is about will," said Jaquan. For the first time that day, he said it with no sarcasm anywhere in it. "That’s how it works. How badly you can make it real. And you’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met. You’ve been trying to beat a solo Labyrinth for nine hundred attempts, and it was impossible, and you did it again. And again. You’re the most willful person in our clan, and I include Ken, who once refused to leave a level for nine hours because a bug had insulted him."

"It was a personal insult," said Arthur.

"Try it," said Jaquan.

Bliss said nothing.

"I’m with you," said Matt, from the leaves.

She looked at him.

"I’m with you," he said again, crossing his legs, with the faintest bright edge of a smirk. "And my luck will help. You’re welcome. It’ll make it easier. It’s the least I can do, for a clan that I personally summoned."

It was, as speeches go, a perfectly self-centered one. He said it like a boy handing out gifts at his own birthday. But it was also the first time anyone had told Bliss, aloud and in front of witnesses, that they were with her, and the sentence, however badly it had been packaged, reached her where it was supposed to.

She let out a very long breath.

"Whatever," she said. "At least if I try, it’ll let us move on to another solution."

"That’s the spirit," said Jaquan.

Nobody ever loved a maze for the exit it was hiding,

but for what a person did when they refused to quit it.

"Hold on to each other," said Bliss.

Hadjer’s hand was gray at the fingertips. She had been sitting at the edge of the circle, with six feet of dead leaves around her on all sides. Arthur reached out and took it, as though it were a perfectly ordinary hand. Carter took Arthur’s sleeve. Jaquan took Carter’s. Matt took Jaquan’s, with a look of immense suffering, and Bliss closed the circle by taking Matt’s, and then, after a moment, Hadjer’s other hand, which nobody had ever offered to hold in her entire life, and for which she was not prepared.

Bliss closed her eyes.

"Labyrinth," she said.

The hedge forgot it was a hedge.

The leaves went dark and glossy, and then stone, and then something older than stone. The sky above them folded itself up and put itself away. The floor grew a pattern of cracked gray tiles, and the green dimness thickened to a deep, steady blue, like the light at the bottom of a pool. Walls rose on every side, high, smooth, and quiet, with torches burning in iron brackets that gave off no smoke. Somewhere far above, a ceiling that did not seem to have been built by anyone arched over everything.

It smelled of cold water and old paper.

They stood with their hands still clenched in one another’s, and for a moment, none of them let go.

"It worked," said Carter.

"It worked," said Bliss. She was staring at the corridor with her mouth slightly open, as if she had opened a door at the end of a long hall and found her own house behind it.

"I knew it," said Matt. "I said."

Jaquan, who had gone very still, was staring at the nearest wall with an expression of vast, carefully managed astonishment. He had arranged his face into its usual flat line in less than a second. Only Arthur, who had known him for years, saw it happen.

Then, one by one, it became the most beautiful thing any of them had ever seen. It was quiet. There were no whistles. No monitor had followed them, and no clock tower hung in the sky. For the first time in the whole day, they had a roof.

"Okay," said Jaquan, clapping once. "Good. We’re safe. We have a place nobody can touch us. Excellent work. Now you can make the way out, and we’ll come out behind them, and..."

Bliss looked at him.

"...And we escape," he said, a little less sure. "Back out. The exit. That’s the plan."

She was still looking at him.

"Bliss."

"I can’t make an exit," she said.

Nobody moved.

"I’m sorry," she said. Her voice shrank. "It’s not that I won’t. I can’t. It’s my Happy Place, and I’ve only ever been inside it. I never found the way out. You have to find it."

Jaquan opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

Matt had been smiling, with his arms folded and his chin at its most dignified angle, as though everything in the place had been arranged by him. The smile did not fade, exactly. It simply stopped being supported by anything, like a tent when the pole is pulled.

"Solo," said Bliss, very quietly, to the floor. "It was impossible solo. I thought if I had a party..." She did not finish.

Nobody answered. One by one, as if somebody had opened a window and let the air out of the room, they sat down on the cold tiles. Carter first. Then Jaquan, with his clipboard across his knees. Then Hadjer, a little apart from the rest, with the stone around her untouched, because stone had nothing to wilt. Arthur sat down last, with his back against the wall, and let his head fall back.

Even Matt.

It is a remarkable thing to watch six children lose hope in unison. Matt lost his last, and loudest, with a long breath out through his nose, like a tire.

"Okay," he said, to the ceiling. "So that’s how it ends."

"It doesn’t end," said Bliss. "That’s the problem."

"It’s fine," said Arthur, to nobody. "We’ll figure out..."

"Bliss," said Hadjer.

She was not looking at the others. She was looking at the girl with the chalk in her fist, and her voice had gone very quiet.

"Your compass. What does it say?"

Bliss frowned, and closed her eyes, the way she did when she was reading a map that nobody else could see.

Then she opened them again, and her face changed.

"North just moved," she said.

"What?"

"It moved. It’s never done that. Not once, in all my countless attempts to figure out my happy place." She had gone the color of paper. "Somebody’s walking. Not us. Something’s walking toward the middle, and the walls are shifting to let it through."

Far down the right corridor, past the bend where the blue light deepened, a torch leaned away from the wall, as if from a sudden draft. Then the next one. Then the next. And under the quiet, slow and patient, on the old gray tiles, came the sound of something very large or very powerful, taking its time.

Matt, very softly, said, "Is it possible to run out of luck? Does anybody have a clue what to do?"

Nobody did.

TO BE CONTINUED...