Chương 57: Book Two - Chapter 7: SKEVINGTON'S GYVES

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ZONE TWO INCINERATION: 05: 30: 45 The corridor we picked was half as long as the main hall, with the same narrow, metal walls and welded seams. Our formation shifted a bit, with me now in the lead, Tre and Liam behind me, and Isabel bringing up the rear. I had started to second-guess the decision to take this path, and walking in near pitch-black gave my brain too much time to unravel. What if the heat source down the other corridor was something good? Colder isn't always better.

Outer space is cold, and we'd die if we stepped out into outer space. The right wall I'd been keeping close to (per Liam's suggestion) vanished. The metal gave way to darkness. I checked the left wall. Same deal. There was a gap just wide enough to walk through, leading into a lightless space beyond. It was impossible to tell what was in there, because the last work light we passed was a good three minutes back.

"We really should have taken more flashlights from the shop class," Tre noted unhelpfully.

"What about the one Nora had at camp?" Liam asked.

"You mean the one Evan stole from me and then dropped in the sand when he died?" Liam flinched, making me instantly regret my flippant reply.

"Shit. I'm sorry. I didn—""All good," he said, cracking his knuckles.

"We goin' in or what?" Isabel stepped back from the opening.

"It's either a dead end or a room. We should go back." Tre's tilted his head.

"If it's a room, wouldn't there be a door?"

"This is a door," Isabel said, pointing to the opening. Liam took two steps back.

"An invisible door?!"

"No!" Isabel clapped her hands once.

"This is clearly an opening where a door should be. One could slam down once we're inside. Like the fire doors at school."

"I have a map." We all stood around the dim light of the screen as I opened the app. The map showed the corridor we'd come down was nearly as long as the first, and ahead was a big old cloud of fog.

"That's such bullshit," Liam growled.

"It won't clear until we enter." Tre pointed at Isabel.

"She was right."

"Thank you. Let's go back to—" Tre didn't let her finish.

"To what? It's the same unknown. Just… with weirdly warmer air."

"If it's a room, it's a dead end," Isabel argued.

"Or there's a door on the other side," Tre said, keeping his voice level.

"Or it's got no doors. Or the hallway gets really wide for another who knows how long." Liam's eyebrows hitched up.

"Is it always like this?"

"We can't debate every decision like this, guys. We're on a clock." And it had been ticking away in my HUD the whole time we'd been walking down corridors.

"I'm going in." I crossed the threshold. Even in the dark, the sudden shift in draft made the space feel twice as wide. The air felt less oppressive and stilted, like it had extra room to move around. Even so, I tiptoed, braced for some trap to spring. Ten paces into the room and nothing bad happened. There was still no light, but I hadn't been stabbed or impaled or pulverized.

"I think we're good," I said, turning back to the group. Tre entered first; my ride-or-die to the bitter end. Liam followed him in. The fear in his eyes told me he was just desperate to stay with the herd. Isabel was last, hovering in the hallway.

"This is a bad idea." The fact that Liam, with his lower Loyalty score, moved before her stung. If I wanted to repair and maintain the relationship with Isabel that we had been building, we'd have to discuss it eventually. I added it to the list. It was a literal list of tasks and notes I'd started keeping for myself in the LifeLine's Journal app. The idea came to me back in the bathroom safe area; I'd been thinking about ways I could have utilized the LifeLine better in Zone One.

So far, I'd only added a few things: 1. Follow up with Liam about Bk's "tested & failed" comment 2. Check in with Tre. 3. Talk to Isabel about everything"You in or out?" Liam asked. Isabel hovered in the corridor, near the spot where the walls stopped.

"Can you guys see anything? Maybe one of you should walk further in and make sure it's not a dead end." A raw, panicked scream scraped its way down the corridor behind us. Isabel shivered.

"Fuck this place."

"What was that?" Liam turned around to peer back down the dim hallway. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Sounded like a girl," Tre said.

"It did," Isabel said, pushing past us, "let's not wait to meet whatever caused her to yell like that." I followed Isabel. After a few steps, I stretched my arms out to the sides. My fingertips didn't find any walls, meaning the space was significantly wider than the corridor had been. We moved further in; the four of us instinctively fanned out, slowly moving toward what I hoped were the sides of the space.

The air had a faintly sweet chemical tang that I couldn't place, and the stale non-odor of a space that hadn't been disturbed in a while.

"I think this is a room," I said.

"Should we go back?" Liam's words spilled out fast. Scared.

"The only way out is throu—" The floor behind us groaned, cutting off Tre's platitude. A thick metal slab smoothly rose from the ground, filling the doorway. By the time I rushed back, the gap was gone. The edges where the door met the frame were completely flush, as if it had been a solid the whole time. Then the light kicked on, illuminating the room, making it easier to see the thin gap between the door that had just come out of the ground and where we'd crossed to enter the room.

We stood in a large square space with the same industrial feel as everything else we'd seen so far. A monitor was mounted on the far wall. In the center of the room was what I initially thought was a sculpture, or maybe a piece of furniture. The thing had a heavy oval base from which two wide arms, bent out and up, met at the top to create an arching, inverted-U shape. At the very top, where the curved bands met, an iron block had been fitted with a hole through the middle.

A metal column rose from the apex of the arms, topped by a large bolt mechanism that made it look like an upside-down wishbone. I'd never seen anything like it before, not in life, movies, TV, or on the internet. And I'd seen some truly heinous shit online. I walked toward it slowly. The others fell in behind me without discussion, and we all slowly circled the device. It was bigger up close than it had looked from across the room. Big enough for a person to kneel down and fit into the upside-down U space.

Tre huffed.

"It's like trashy modern art. Look, I know art's subjective, but I just don't get it. Like Jeff Koons… god, make it make sense, please. It's all just random garbage slapped together, then some dumb rich person gets conned into buying it for a million dollars." I had no idea what Tre was talking about, so I stayed quiet and continued to examine the weird thing.

"It's not art." Liam knelt beside it, taking a closer look at the insides of the arms, which were lined with needles. Short, barely the length of my thumbnail, thinner than the acupuncture ones. And there were hundreds of them. They were set in a single dense row along the inner surface, close enough together that at a glance they just looked like texture.

"I think it's like a machine." Liam rose up on his toes to get a better look at the bolt-looking thing on top.

"What kind of machine?" I asked. Isabel scoffed, eyes locked on me searching for something.

"The torture kind." We stood in a loose crescent around the metal wishbone. Liam tussled his own hair, leaving walnut strands pointing in every direction. Tre rubbed his soft vinyl face, as if he could still grow scruff, while Isabel continued to stare straight into my soul. I'd have looked away if I wasn't so nervous that it would confirm or deny whatever answers she thought she'd find in my eyes. The screen on the far wall lit up.

It was mounted at almost ceiling height, large enough to see clearly from anywhere in the room. The Boargore King's massive boar skull mask appeared, and the camera pulled out to reveal he was seated on a metal stool in a workshop.

"Welcome to Room One," he said, in the same unhurried, pleased-with-himself way he'd had back in the entry area.

"The device in the center of your little gathering is a type of compression frame. Originally called Skevington's gyves, later known as the Scavenger's Daughter, it is a mid-16th-century torture device named after its creator. One of the most remarkable features of this device is that it could cause blood to shoot from a victim's nose, ears, and mouth without leaving any visible external wounds. Although I've made some modifications to the original design as a means of spicing things up a bit."

We'd known, or at least assumed, this was going to be a Saw -inspired zone, but the reality of what that meant and the purpose of the abstract thing in the center of the room hit me with sickening clarity. You knelt on the base and folded forward, and the curved arms closed around your torso from both sides, and then your head went into the top of the U, where there was probably something to hold it in place, and then the screw on top would turn, and the whole thing would get smaller and smaller.

Oh, and the needles. I now understood the needles would press into you first, before the device even started squeezing you. And they weren't even the worst part; that would be the closing act, when there was nowhere left inside of you for all your guts to go. It reminded me of something Tre and I once heard in the waiting room at Cedars. We'd rushed Mom over after she slipped in the kitchen and hit her head on the table, and were just sitting around when the E. R.

doors opened, and they wheeled this guy in, screaming his head off. An army of nurses and doctors rushed out and took the gurney into the emergency exam room, and the two paramedics who brought the guy in just stood around for a beat. Then the one paramedic turned to the other. Tre had grabbed my arm when the guy said it. The body has a surprising amount of give, he'd said. Until it doesn't. The Boargore King's voice pulled me back.

The boar skull muffled his speech, a pathetic, try-hard villain detail that would have been funny under any other circumstances.

"It's a simple game," the Boargore King continued.

"One of you steps in the frame. The cycle runs its course. When it concludes, you are free to proceed. Simple as that."

"What?!" Tre screamed; it was like he could read my mind.

"Your mask makes it hard to hear."

"If you remain perfectly calm, you'll be fine. Some surface wounds. Nothing a salve can't fix," the Boargore King continued, ignoring Tre.

"If your Fear rises, the machine will respond. The higher and faster it climbs, the quicker and harder it tightens."

"Excuse me, BK—I refuse to say the full name—but what happens if we simply decline to get inside your weird death machine?" Tre said. To our surprise, BK answered, confirming a suspicion I had earlier that the cameras in BK's basement were mic'd up and meant for him to watch over us.

"As with all rooms in my basement labyrinth, you have until the timer runs out. If you have not escaped the room in time, you will be compacted and sent to recycling."

"Compacted?" Isabel whispered. I glanced up at the open ceiling, and here, too, there was a large metal slab, about the size of the room, suspended above us.

"You have fifteen minutes," BK said. The disgusting boar's head was replaced by a fifteen-minute timer that started counting down immediately. Isabel looked at me.

"What does he mean we'll be 'compacted'?" I pointed up without a word and moved closer to the torture contraption. Isabel followed my finger and looked at the sheet of steel hanging above.

"We'd better move quickly." The timer on screen read 14: 20. We'd already burned half a minute just standing here processing what 'compacted' meant. Then she moved toward the frame. I was already moving when I registered that she was too, and we reached the device at almost the exact same moment, close enough that we had to either stop walking or collide.

"My Fear baseline is lower than yours right now," Isabel argued.

"And I've got less to lose if something goes wrong in there. You're the one who has to survive all thirteen zones." She wasn't wrong about which of us the game had designated the "Final Girl." With that designation came the burden of surviving the whole game or dooming all of humanity. Real low-stakes shit.

"You're right. I have to win," I said, taking her hand.

"I'm the Player. The game gives me advantages for exactly this kind of thing. Let me use them." There was a restfulness to standing in a sealed room faced with a simple choice. One person gets in and suffers. That was something I knew how to do. It had to be me. Isabel studied my face. She was impossible to read.

"Fine."

"Fine? That's it?" Tre squawked at Isabel.

"I thought we agreed we weren't going to let her shoulder all the damage."

"You agreed what?" I asked. Isabel ignored my question, talking to Tre instead.

"It's not worth fighting over."

"Wuss." Tre turned to me.

"Nora, I forbid you from doing this thing." He was completely serious, hands on his hips, forehead scrunched, every inch of him radiating something I recognized immediately. Anger flared— he hadn't been asking— then disappeared just as fast. Isabel was right. This wasn't worth fighting over. I knelt inside the frame.