Page 90 of Mud

The horn went off again, and I could have sworn someone spoke somewhere in the distance. The voice was coming from all sides at once. Speakers.

I heard nothing but the loud beating of my heart, though. Saw nothing but the players who were rushing to get into that maze. They disappeared between the many openings on the walls made of grey stone blocks. They disappeared eagerly, running, cheering still, because none of them wanted to think aboutdeathright now. They were as full of hope as I was full of terror.

But even so, I followed them when the last of the players disappeared between those walls.

I followed them because I had no other choice.

My weapons were on me. My heart raced and my hands shook, but my mind was calm, my thoughts crystal clear.

The Iris Roe had already begun.

Chapter 20

Rosabel La Rouge

Present Day

The darkness swallowed me the moment I stepped between those walls made of stone. It cut off the sound of the cheering spectators so abruptly that for a moment, I wondered if I’d lost my mind. So much noise had been in my ears one second, and complete silence the next.

I stopped, closed my eyes, breathed in deeply. No need to panic—I was in the game now. Billy said we would be separate from the outside world, and this was exactly what he’d meant. Probably.

And even if he didn’t, even if I’d lost my mind for real, that wasn’t going to change the fact that I needed to keep moving.

Footsteps everywhere around me. I reached for my two M17s as I moved ahead and saw nothing but a little bit of red light coming from the west. I followed it, just likeeveryone else around me did, and the closer to it I went, the more I heard the noise.

No—the music.

The walls to my sides that were making me claustrophobic finally ended. I walked out the other side with my breath held and took in my surroundings, confused.

Red lights were everywhere on tall lampposts. A thin mist hung around them, taking away half their intensity. The street was wide and set with cobblestones, and there were houses on either side—houses without light, without windows, some even without doors. They looked completely abandoned behind those lampposts, and the red light gave them ahauntedkind of vibe, like, if you went close to those houses, you were bound to run into a ghost, no matter that they didn’t exist.

The music was coming from ahead, near the biggest source of red light, and people, a lot of players but not half as many as I’d seen coming down those stairs, were looking around, too, as disoriented as I was.

I stopped, breathed, turned back to see the stone walls exactly like they had been on the other side. About twenty of them, and between them was only raw darkness.

More players poured out of it like they were coming through a portal from a different realm altogether.

Then I looked up.

My breath caught in my throat and my heart skipped a long beat to see rows upon rows of seats filled with people surrounding us on all sides. They were everywhere, whichever way I turned, looking down upon us, cheering, though the sound of them couldn’t get through to me over that music.

Lab rat. That’s exactly what I felt like. A fucking lab rattrapped in this massive colosseum with no way out but through, surrounded by people watching me, by cameras, by supervisors—byeveryoneand their mother.

I thought seeing them like that was going to make me panic even more.

Instead, it pissed me the hell off.

I started walking again, trying to calm the race of thoughts in my mind, trying not to want to set everything on fire—realfire—just to hear these people screaming while they died. Watch their eyeballs melt and their hair burn. Watch their bones turn to ashes.

Fuck, I hadn’t wanted to see someone die as much as I wanted to see Madeline cut into a thousand pieces—preferably atmyhand—in a very long time.

The deeper down those cobbles I went, the bigger the haunted-looking houses became. Two stories, three, then four, until I couldn’t see the spectators at all anymore, just the dark sky far,farabove us. The music became louder, too, and then more players were coming from between those tall buildings all around us.

All around what looked like a stage with a big red floodlight on the top of a metal structure at its back that marked the end of the street.

That’s where the music was coming from. There was no actual band making it, no people or any kind of creatures, only instruments spread across the wide stage. Only instruments that the air itself seemed to be holding up and playing.

Or maybe ghosts really did exist here but we just couldn’t see them.

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