She froze, holding her breath, as the spikes whizzed past. From the distance, it looked as if they’d all been shot at once, but as they struck the wall, they did so with a distinct rhythm. One-two. Three-four.
Persey started moving again, wondering why the spikes had been so poorly aimed, when she saw another set of green dots streaking toward them. Closer this time.
“Move!” Persey cried, tugging on Neela’s arm. They stumbled together, Persey’s eyes fixed on the wooden beam beneath her feet, which was now sagging so close to the spikes on the ground that she could see their gleamingly sharp tips. Neela’s balanced wavered, but she regained her footing, following closely behind Persey. They just cleared the spikes that went racing by Neela so closely that if her hair had been blown backward in the nonexistent breeze one of the spikes would have soared right through it.
Once again, they hit the wall with the same, distinct rhythm: one-two, three-four.
“Hurry up!” Mackenzie screamed. “What if those spikes get shot at us, huh? We can’t even see.”
Not that Persey needed Mackenzie’s reminder to keep moving. After the last near miss, she didn’t so much as pause after the spikes hit. She and Neela kept moving forward as quickly as they could safely manage, but they were far enough away that when the third blast was unleashed, they struck the wall harmlessly behind Neela. One-two, three-four.
Persey could see the other side now as they began to climb upward on the sagging plank. She just had to deposit Neela safely, then do this four more times. Easy, right? The spikes seemed to be meant as an incentive to keep moving more than anything. If it was the same on the way back, then she had this one—
“Get down!” Riot shouted. “Now!”
“What?” Persey turned her head. Riot, who couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, was waving his arm wildly over his head as if to get her attention. Why would they stop now, when the spike blasts were just driving them toward the far side?
“GET. DOWN,” he repeated.
Before she could even process how she and Neela were supposed to “get down” on an unstable piece of wood hardly a foot wide, she saw the danger. Tiny little green points of light on the far wall. At least fifty of them, all in a row.
She tugged at Neela’s hand while she flattened herself on the wooden plank. “What’s happening?” Neela cried, awkwardly groping for the beam with her free hand. Persey wrapped her arm around Neela’s head, pushing it down onto the wood as she tucked her own face into Neela’s cascading hair. A row of spikes the width of the entire room flew above them, followed by another identical wave, striking the wall one after another, one-two.
Without Riot’s warning, both she and Neela would now be pincushions.
“Holy fajita!” Neela cried. Even in the face of death, curse words escaped her.
“Hey!” Riot called. “You guys okay?”
“How did you know?” Persey unwrapped strands of Neela’s curls from her night-vision goggles as she sat upright.
“The rhythm,” Riot explained, sounding relieved that they were still alive. “It’s an Elizabethan rhyme scheme. ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.”
The library call numbers. Now they made sense.
“I just assumed the GG part would be cataclysmic,” he continued. “Was I right?”
So right.
“Get to the other side before it starts again,” Kevin instructed, as if Persey or Neela needed to be told. They were almost all the way across before the rhyme scheme of lethal projectiles began again. One-two, three-four. One-two, three-four. One-two, three-four. ONE-TWO.
They made it safely to the other side before the final couplet, and Persey positioned Neela with her back to the wall, safely out of harm’s way. “Stay here.”
“I will do so until you return,” Neela said. She sounded out of breath. “And try to relocate my heart from the unfortunate migration it has made to my throat. Ha-ha.”
Persey made it halfway back before she had to hit the deck to avoid another volley. The spikes were striking the wall in the same place as previous rounds, bouncing off each other and clanking down to the spike-lined floor, which meant Persey also had to keep an eye on the ricochets, but she made it back to the group safely, this time taking Mackenzie’s hand. Not for girl solidarity or because she thought the guys would be chivalrous, but because she couldn’t stand listening to her whine anymore.