rope to get a flag tacked at the very top and held on to it for the rest of the course. The only way out from here was a rope ladder angled up at forty-five degrees, anchored on hooks so it swiveled with your weight.
I hated this one. Even when I was in peak physical shape and not sporting a chewed-on ankle, I had trouble and had fallen off more than once. I used the anchor post to stand up. My ankle cried at the pressure, and my arms were shaking. My vision blurred. Just terrific.
Claws scrabbled against the wall separating me from Gar-Bat. It was trying to climb. I guess it was too wounded to fly out.
I closed my eyes and felt for the Break. It was there, on the fringes of my mind, taunting me. Too far. And I was too upset. A tremor seized my spine and shook my entire body. Not the shock I got when a blocking spell was being used; this was my body protesting the idea of teleporting. No strength for it. Fuck.
The rope ladder swayed on its own, mocking me. Climb it and escape, or wait and see if Gar-Bat makes it over the wall. Both choices sucked.
I reached as far up the rungs as I could, looped my left ankle around a lower one, and lunged. The ladder swiveled upside down. I clung to the ropes, dangling. Hand over hand, foot over rung, I inched my way up the twenty-foot rope ladder. The floor below was more hardwood. The trainers put down mats the first two times you ran the course. If you fell after that, you ate floor.
Having eaten enough floor for one day, I concentrated on my ascent and nothing else. Sweat dotted my hairline and upper lip. The rope seared my scraped palms. My ankle was probably leaving lovely little blood smears behind. Up, up, up, until the top anchor post was just one lunge away. Urgency almost made me reach. The unwillingness to fall two stories and start over blocked that urge, and I inched my way up. Grabbed the post with my right hand and the floor with my left and hauled ass up to the platform. I hugged the wood, polished smooth with years of hands and bodies doing just what I’d done.
Gar-Bat screeched. Either he was getting frustrated by his own inability to climb the wall or he didn’t like my progress. Maybe both.
I had a better vantage point over the course from here, so I sat up. Heat whizzed by my cheek, slicing the skin. I jerked back. My knife was buried in the anchor post. Hell’s bells, the thing had thrown my own knife at me!
The next challenge made my heart sink. Six erratically spaced uneven bars were my only path to the next platform. Some trainees were gymnastically inclined and had excelled at this one. Me? Not so much.
I looked at my palms, both weeping and scraped. Then at the ground below. The air mattresses were deflated. One more time I tested my Gift. That same brittle distance filled me. If I tried, I’d probably end up inside of something or dead from my brain exploding.
“Fuck!” It came out like a plea and bounced around the open gym. Where the hell had Milo gone? He’d better be off saving lives.
Screw this. One wrong move on those bars and I’d break my neck. There had to be another way. I perched my toes on the edge of the platform and leapt for the nearest bar. My grip nearly slipped. I held tight and stiffened, stopping all motion. Inched sideways until I got to the support post, shifted my grip, and shinnied down to the floor.
The court was narrow and long, built up on all sides with two-by-fours nailed into thicker beams. Something slammed against the wall on my left. Gar-Bat was still at it. I worked my way along the opposite wall, checking for any sort of access or hatchway. The trainers had to have some way to get around this course. I just needed to find it.
At the end of the court, hope presented itself in the form of a square sliding door. I pried it up to reveal a crawl space barely large enough for a grown man to slither through. Good thing I was smaller than that.
Gar-Bat shrieked, this time above me. I looked up as a shadow fell. It was perched on the platform, braced to jump. I crawled through the rabbit hole and immediately sneezed. Didn’t stop. Seconds later Gar-Bat was scrabbling at the hole, too large to follow me inside.
I crept along the narrow path until it opened up into what looked like the interior of another raised platform. Judging from the wide spaces between the boards, it was another sort of climbing wall. I slipped through one of the wider slats and stumbled. My ankle was numb, making it difficult to walk. No sign yet of Gar-Bat.
I hobbled fast across another open floor, getting much closer to the end of the course. Two, maybe three, challenges lay between me and the end.
My frustration at being stuck doing this was nothing compared to my anger at not being outside, part of the ongoing battle. Had they killed the rest of the hounds? How many of Thackery’s projects were loose? How many had been captured or killed? How many of our people were wounded? Dead?
I dropped to my knee when the shadow fell, drawing the knife from my right ankle sheath. Blood dripped from above, viscous and bluish. Gar-Bat dive-bombed me. I pitched sideways at the last moment and thrust up, dragging the blade across its lower belly. More blood splashed on my hands and arms. Its rear legs lashed out and slammed me to the left even as it crashed to the floor. It thrashed and flopped, spreading its blood across the floor like a fresh coat of paint.
The raw-sewage odor turned my stomach. I crawled away, slipped, and finally got to my feet. The stink was on my hands. I wiped them on the seat of my jeans, then repositioned the knife so the handle was clasped between both hands. Gar-Bat’s thrashing had slowed. It lay on its stomach, wings folded close to its back, the pool of blood widening around it.
I almost felt sorry for it, whining in pain and paling quickly. It hadn’t asked to be created, and now it was paying the price. I thrust my blade down, directly into Gar-Bat’s skull. The impact jolted my wrists. Bone cracked. Matter oozed. My enemy lay still.
“Class dismissed,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-six
With less haste now that I wasn’t being hunted, I limped through two more hidden hatches and crawl spaces—bypassing a grid of dangling chains one had to swing through to pass and a complicated setup of balance beams, tires, and parallel bars—and hit the finale. A mirror maze, not unlike those found at carnivals and fairs, only this one didn’t just try to fool you into hitting a dead end. The space between each panel was supernarrow, twenty inches on average, and most of the joints hid a cruel punishment—nearly invisible razors. I’d gotten my fair share of slices in the past.
I remembered one trainee who’d barely passed the obstacle course, getting so tired and beaten up over the run of it that he’d been unsteady going into the maze. He’d stumbled out sobbing, coated in blood, but on his feet. Just barely. Too bad he’d failed the final exam.
Desperate to skip this one, I searched for another way out. A hatch or ladder or means to climb up and over. Screaming in frustration, I sucked in a breath and went in. I hit a wall first thing. Inched through sideways. Nicked my wrist and elbow on one turn. Sliced my other elbow on another. I ignored my reflection, uninterested in how awful I must look coated in blood and gore and sweat. All I wanted was out.
Out so I could finish helping. So I could try to save some lives today. Urgency kept goading me to speed up, but I battled to remain careful, steady. Patience wasn’t in my nature; taking it so slowly was torture. Even when the end seemed in sight, I kept up my tentative pace. One sliding step sideways, careful turns. Only a handful of cuts accompanied me outside.
Fucking finally!
I stumbled through the exit, into the narrow strip of open corridor that bordered the wall of the obstacle course and the wall of the gymnasium. It circled the length of it in straight sections of twenty feet or so, then sharply angled into the next. From above, it looked like a giant octagon or something, only with more than eight sides.
I turned and started jogging back toward the ladder, or any other way up that presented itself.
Halfway back I turned a corner and tripped over a headless corpse. Male, standard trainee outfit. I gagged at the heavy odor of blood and stepped around, only to nearly fall over two more. The three kids from the ropes. They’d made it through the obstacle course only to die here, ripped apart. Torn flesh and bits of guts made it hard
