Kevin clicked his tongue. “Could we all stop quoting dead men before we become dead men?” He sounded annoyed by the poetry.
“And women!” Neela pointed out, way too cheerfully for the sentiment as she moved to the next frame. “‘For whatsoever from one place doth fall / Is with the tide unto an other brought: / For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.’”
Riot was crouched beside one of the tables, checking underneath, where the tables, like the items on them, had been secured to the floor. “Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.”
“Yeah?” Neela said, crouching down. “More piled books. The Shepheardes Calender, Complaints.”
“All Spenser.”
Neela moved on to the next one. “‘Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.’”
“Milton,” Riot said quickly. “Paradise Lost. Let me guess, the books beneath are titles like 1645 Poems and Samson Agonistes?”
“Yes and yes.”
“Shit.” Riot stood up and raced to the nearest framed quote, moving around the room quickly. “Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Tennyson, Shakespeare over here in this corner. All British poets.”
Persey immediately realized what he was implying. This room wasn’t meant for Mackenzie: it was meant for Riot.
“I wish a clock would start.” Mackenzie, always the whiner, stalked toward the nearest table. “Then maybe we’d know what we’re supposed to do.” She tried to pull the chair away from one of the tables to sit down, but it wouldn’t budge, so she slipped between it and the tabletop. “I’m tired of—”
The instant her designer jeans hit the damask cushion, the floor jolted.
The ground beneath Persey’s feet jerked sharply, causing her to grab hold of the nearest table to maintain her balance. Then, as she gripped the wooden tabletop by the sides, she had a strange sensation of vertigo, an out-of-body dizziness that made it appear as if the floor was tilting downward. It wasn’t until her feet began to slide against the concrete that she realized it wasn’t an optical illusion.
“The floor is moving,” Kevin said, stating the obvious. “That’s why everything is bolted down.”
Persey, Neela, and Riot were in the corner of the room farthest from the exit, while Mackenzie and Kevin were nearer the door, and while Persey’s side of the room was tilting downward, Kevin and Mackenzie’s corner was rising toward the ceiling, so that the floor at their end was blocking the door entirely.
“Neela!” Persey called, fighting to keep her balance as she sank down beneath the lower edge of the papered wall. Piles of books, the only thing in the room not securely fastened to the floor, toppled over and began sliding across the smooth wooden surface. “Get closer to Kevin and Mackenzie. See if we can even this out.”
Without a word, Neela edged her way toward the door, sidestepping a huge volume of Shakespeare. Persey followed her, slowly, waiting to feel the room equalize. For the first few steps, she was going uphill, fighting for balance on the steeply tilted floor, but as the shift in her and Neela’s weights changed the balance of the room, she felt the floor even out. Inertia slowed the books, scattering them about the room, and when Persey thought the ground had reached horizontal once more, she froze in place.
“You’re at the fulcrum,” Neela said. “The central balancing point between the weights on either—”
“We know what a fulcrum is!” Mackenzie snapped.
Persey stood with her knees bent, feet hip distance apart, as she tried to get a feel for the ground beneath her. She could sense the angles change as the floor moved like a Tilt-a-Whirl.
“Let me try something,” Kevin said. He inched his way around to the left, hugging the wall. Immediately, Persey felt the floor shift toward him, and she had to shuffle her feet to keep from falling.
“Okay,” Riot said, moving in the opposite direction to counter Kevin’s weight. “The whole floor is anchored at the center, and moves according to our weight distribution. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to open the door.”
BZZZZZ.
“Shit!” Four of them said it in unison, all but Neela, who merely sucked in a breath.
“Now what?” she squeaked.
Kevin pointed to the Union Jack. “Look at that.”
Shining through the thin fabric of the flag was a series of numbers. 263,550,198. Not a countdown, this time—it was too huge a number for that, plus it wasn’t moving—but the L-shaped symbol with a line through it signaled that this was a monetary sum in British pounds.
“Two hundred and sixty-three million, five hundred and fifty thousand, one hundred and ninety-eight pounds?” Mackenzie read. “What