Page 51 of Akarnae

She shook her head with amused exasperation. “Where are we?”

“Another level of the library,” Bear answered.

Alex sent him a look. “Obviously.”

He chuckled and added, “Anothersecretlevel, I should say. One we doubt many people know about. It’s how we realised the Archives are part of the library itself, otherwise there wouldn’t be a way to get in here. Pretty clever, really.”

Jordan was nodding in agreement. “We found the entrance in our first year, completely by mistake. It was a busy day in the Archives and there was a queue of people lining up to access the TCD panels. So we walked over to the corner to get out of the way and sat down to wait.”

“I still remember the look on Jordan’s face when he flew into the air,” Bear said, smiling at the memory. “Absolutely priceless.”

“Of course, Bear followed straight after me,” Jordan added. “Even with the forewarning, he was still green-faced when he crashed into me.”

“Crashed into you?” Alex winced. “That sounds painful.”

“I hadn’t moved off the entry square since I was a bit, uh… dazed by the experience,” Jordan said. “So, really it was me who crashed into him, since the floor disappeared with me still on it. Luckily there wasn’t far to fall because the squares move so fast. It was more of a smack in the face than a crash, but whatever.”

Hearing his words, Alex was glad she’d thought to move off the square before it had disappeared under her. Rather than linger on what might have happened, she spun around and squinted into the darkened room. “There’s nothing in here.”

The only light source came from two flaming torches, one on a bracket near where they were standing and another on the other side of the room. Both flames were bright enough to illuminate most of the large space, but there wasn’t anything to see.

“Are you sure?” Bear asked.

She looked around again, squinting into the firelight. But nope, still nothing. The only thing that was even slightly out of place in the room was the carpeted floor. It was patterned into different coloured squares, each about the same size as the express elevator floor.

Alex felt her stomach tighten with unease as she looked down. She was standing on a wooden square, which was odd since the rest of the floor was carpeted. No, that wasn’t quite right, she realised. A number of the squares around the room were also wooden, including the ones that Jordan and Bear both stood on. In fact, all the squares directly beside the area they’d entered from were wooden, along with a few others splattered across the floor at random intervals.

“We call this the hopscotch room,” Jordan said. “We come here when we’re bored.”

“Hopscotch?”

He nodded. “It took us a long time to figure out how the room works and how to get across it—”

Bear mumbled something into his hand that sounded suspiciously like, “Without serious injury,” and Alex glanced at him sharply.

“—but we managed to work it out,” Jordan continued loudly, ignoring Bear’s interruption. “We had to, since the only safe exit is over there and there’s no other way out.” He pointed to the flaming torch on the other side of the room.

Alex gulped. It was a lot further away than she’d originally thought. And she didn’t even want to know why he had used the word ‘safe’ before ‘exit’. Were thereunsafeexits?

“What’s with the floor?” she asked.

“Wooden spaces are safe,” Jordan explained, tapping his foot on the floor he was standing on. “Grey carpet takes off upwards into the air and vanishes within five seconds.”

Alex realised that they’d all arrived on the grey-coloured carpet, which explained why the floor had vanished before the next person’s arrival.

“Blue carpet is okay to stand on if you have no other choice,” Jordan continued, “but your body goes numb if you stay there for too long. Black carpet isn’t actually carpet at all—it’s just empty space, so avoid those squares.”

“What happens if you fall down one of them?” she asked.

Jordan just looked at her. “Don’t.”

Bear noticed her expression and said, “We dropped a torch down one once. It just kept going and going until we couldn’t see the light anymore.”

“Right,” she said, feeling slightly ill. “Avoid the black squares. Got it.”

They nodded at her.

She looked at the floor again and realised that there was one colour left. “What about the red carpet?”

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