Page 202 of Mud

“What’s that?” I wondered because something must have been happening at the statue.

Taland was already on his feet. “I don’t know. I’m going to check it out.”

Slowly, I raised the vulcera’s head and put it on the sleeve of my jacket that was still over her body. “I’ll be right back,” I promised her in a whisper, and I made to stand.

Every inch of me was indeed frozen because it took me a good minute and a lot of pain. Taland waited for me, curious eyes sparkling now as he looked at the growing crowd near the statue.

“Let’s go,” I said, needing to move, to breathe easier, to feel some heat in my ice-cold veins.

There were eleven players from all covens near the statue now, staring at the back of the roc. They all looked like shit, worse than in any other challenge that I’d seen, some who had smaller familiars, like Taland, holding them to their chest—a rabbit, a squirrel, a nantak, which was basically a cat with a bat face and leathery wings on its back that didn’t actually fly. The closer we got the more we realized that they were looking at something not on the roc’s back, but on the ice cube that the bird stood on.

From so close up, I got claustrophobic. It was huge, so big I couldn’t see the head of it at all. The cube alone was at least three stories tall, and the roc’s left talons that cameout the edge of it were gigantic. The smallest of the four was as big as my entire body, if not more.

I slowed down without even realizing it, looking at the bird of ice in awe, reminding myself that it was just ice.

According to the stories, once upon a time, the roc had been the opposite of a phoenix, forever warring with the firebird, sworn enemies for eternity. Like the phoenix’s feathers were fire, his had been ice. The phoenix burned and rose from its ashes once every decade, while the roc froze himself until the ice cracked to reveal a brand-new version of his same old self.

Now, as Taland grabbed my hand and led me to the crowd at the back of the statue, I remembered everything I’d read about rocs since I was a little girl. The stories, the books, the cartoons I’d watched.

But when I saw what the people were so focused on, what was engraved on the surface of the cube, everything else became irrelevant.

A perfect circle was barely visible on the ice, and it had a lot more lines inside that became more visible to me the harder I focused. It was separated into five triangles, with a circle in the very middle, with shapes and names engraved in them, too small to make out from the distance.

The lake that supposedly surrounded the statue of the roc was frozen over completely. What could have been a fence—or maybe a concrete ledge before it froze over—surrounded it, but the only difference on this side of the ground was that the ice was slightly grayer, whereas around the statue, it had a blue tint to it.

“I can’t see,” I told Taland, and I needed to. The ice looked thick enough to hold me perfectly fine. So, I crossed the fence that divided us and kept on going with his hand still in mine, ignoring the paranoia that wanted me tobelieve the statue was going to fall on my head any second. Ignoring the paranoia that said the ice might break and I might drown in an icy lake. Ignoring everything and keeping my eyes on that engraving, until I was right in front of it.

At last, I saw it in detail.

It was a map of the playground, just as I suspected. Separated into five areas that surrounded the mountain where the colors of the Rainbow were locked away. Each area was then divided into two, and I recognized the names I knew just fine—Night City, Ghost Festival, Valley of the Roc.It was an actual map to the Iris Roe—and it was moving as we watched.

Different triangles meshed together and changed, moving from one side of the circle to the other.

I wanted to look at every little detail, but I couldn’t because all the other players, even more than before, had come on this side of the statue, too, and they kept pushing and cursing and threatening one another to move out of the way. They were frustrated, afraid, in pain, and if a fight broke out here, there was no telling how it would end.

So, I stepped to the side together with Taland, and we moved away from the crowd in silence, went all the way back to where the vulcera was lying on her own, same as before.

My heart wept for her, and my thoughts were a mess I needed so desperately to put into words. I couldn’t do that yet, but what I could do was grab one of my knives and draw a circle on the ground as big as my arm reached.

Then I made the smaller circle in the middle, and divided the triangles like slices of pizza, while Taland put his eagle on the ground near the vulcera, still wrapped up in his leather jacket. We were both freezing but alsofocused, and when he reached for a knife in my holster, I hardly even saw it, just continued to draw what I remembered. With my knife he kneeled on the other side of the circle and filled in the details I’d missed.

“This is the Rainbow,” Taland said, pointing the tip of the knife to the small circle in the middle. “We’re here—the Valley of the Roc. It moves, the playground, and it has a different way out than it did in.”

I nodded. “I came through Ghost Festival, but the way out of the Rainbow mountain through Redfire territory would be through the River of Blood. Which, considering the challenge, is all the blood that was spilled on this playground.” Shivers washed down my back as I imagined those puddles I’d had to search for my key in, coming together, filling up so much that they formed an actual river.

“Correct,” Taland said. “I came through Night City, but if I were to walk out of the game from the Blackfire territory, I’d have to go through the Land of the Dead, where I imagine all the reincarnated bodies that were used for our keys would be.” In the map, the Land of the Dead had had nothing but straight linessort ofshaped like people. “Greenfire here was a jungle with oversized animals. I had to make myselfgreenwhen I came back to Night City from it.”

I did a double take.

“Are you serious?” I did remember him saying that we could go back to the challenges we completed, but I had no idea it would be throughotherchallenges.

“It was easy. The eagle kept most animals away,” Taland said, waving his hand, unconcerned.

My goddess, he wasabsurd.I wanted to both kiss him for it and scream my guts out at him for being so damn careless.

In the end, I chose to just focus on the challenge at hand. If we ever walked out of here alive, we could talk about the rest.

“Now we’re in Whitefire territory.” I went back to the Valley of the Roc. “And if we wanted to get out of this challenge and go back to another to, say, find medicine for our familiars to heal them, we’d have to go through…”

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