Page 119 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

Gurlien jumps at the noise, but the door hisses open.

“See, this would be a good place for Chloe,” he says, waiting for her to scan the room before she ventures forward.

“Why?” Ambra asks, only half paying attention, nestling her magic into the nooks and crannies, testing for traps.

“Her specialty is actually traps and locks,” Gurlien replies easily, like that’s not insanely impressive by itself. “What, that’s how we made it past the locking traps.”

She pulls up short, crossing her arms at him. “What?”

“That’s how we did that…what, did you think we had more help?”

Ambra hadn’t actually thought much about how her rescue came to be, just that they were there and the alchemist had been damn impressive and exhausted.

“I am absolutely going to ask her questions later,” Ambra informs him, before a tendril of her magic smarts, snapping back to herself.

There’s a trap.

It’s a small trap, designed to stop the unaware, one of Nalissa’s favorites. One wrong step and it’d close around anyone, sticking their feet to the ground and stopping all sense of time passing.

It’s also, of course, right in front of the door they have to get through, deeper into the laboratories.

The easy answer is to snap it, to unravel it, push onwards. It’s not terribly far to where Nalissa stays, to her office where she sits for all of her events, they might be able to get through to there before they can muster up a response.

“Shit,” Ambra mumbles, keeping an arm across Gurlien’s chest, stopping him from moving forward.

She skirts her magic around it, testing the tiles, the grout, leaving little puffs of powder where the tiles give way, and Gurlien hisses in a breath.

“That you?” he murmurs, and she nods.

“Trap, trying to find a way around. If I wasn’t…” if she wasn’t stuck in a human body, it’d be simple, but that still gives no way for Gurlien to get over, and she’s not leaving him. “I can destroy it, but there'll be alarms, so I’m trying to get around it, find a weakness.”

“Which type of trap?” he asks, and she forgets that he’s also intelligent, also just as learned as she is.

“Sticker type, just a nasty one, she would keep them in front of private things to keep people out…”

Almost at the edge of her hearing, there’s a clatter of footsteps behind them, down the staircase with the unconscious guard.

They both straighten, staring at each other.

A startled yell, someone calling for help.

“Destroy it?” Gurlien asks.

“Yep,” Ambra says, and before she can even do so, before she can even grip it in her hands, a low, lolling alarm tolls through the hallway, setting Ambra’s teeth on edge.

“There it is,” Gurlien mutters, and more footsteps echo their way.

So Ambra grips her power in both hands, digging it underneath the tile, and slamming the tile upwards until it crashes into the roof, sending dust flying through the room.

And thoroughly destroying the trap.

Gurlien jumps back, but Ambra grabs his wrist and hauls him forward, right as two more guards round the corner into the room.

Before she can think, she clenches her hand into a fist, dragging down the ceiling on top of the guards with a thundering crash.

Buying them a little more time. Not nearly enough.

She pulls him along, even as the dust tries to settle in their hair, and his eyes are wide, starkly wide beyond the eyeliner.

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