Page 29 of Caldar
Nothing.
She opened the top and sniffed. It smelled sweet, like maple syrup. She checked the label again.
Consume me. Not apply to injury. What kind of strange test was this? To see if she followed vague orders? Or was too proud to accept a beverage when she was dying of thirst?
She needed to get to Caldar before the hounds did, but she wouldn’t get there if she fell over from dehydration.
She definitely wouldn’t get to him if she guzzled down poison like a sucker.
“Screw it. If it’s poison, it’ll have to fight the poison already in me,” Sonia said, and drank the contents of the bottle.
It was sweet and thick with the sticky consistency of cough syrup. Sonia sputtered, her eyes watering as she forced herself to swallow. At least it was cold.
She emptied the bottle and waited for stomach cramps or some clue that she made the wrong choice.
Nothing.
No. There was something. Her head felt clear. That sluggish, feverish feeling eased. She was tired and sore and still thirsty and just generally miserable, but a little less miserable.
Okay. She didn’t know what to think about the random bottle of not-poison. Leaving it for her to find was almost kind.
Totally suspicious.
* * *
Slight problem.There was a moat.
Sonia stared at the expanse of water. Even if she wasn’t down an arm and feeling feverish, she couldn’t swim. She never learned before the invasion, and public swimming pools weren’t a priority after. She went to the shore once and waded knee-deep. That was as far as she went.
On top of that, she couldn’t even trust the water to be water. It might be acid.
The liquid in the moat was crystal clear, allowing Sonia to see the stones scattered under the water and right down to the pebble-covered bottom. There were no insects or fish in the water, not even moss growing on the stones.
Sonia fished out the keycard from the jacket pocket and dipped a corner into the moat.
The water bubbled and fizzed.
That definitely wasn’t water.
Sonia retraced her steps back to the last juncture and went in the opposite direction. The hedges twisted and turned but ultimately brought her back to the same ditch.
Well, shit.
“There has to be a solution,” she told herself. “Dr. Mysterious wants you to find Caldar. If they wanted you dead, you’d be dead. They want to toy with you because they’re a sick fucker, so there has to be a way to get across.”
Sonia felt tempted to go back and try to find another path. It was a maze. There had to be a way around this, but rustling the hedges reminded her that she wasn’t alone in the maze.
Symbols were etched in the ground in front of the moat. Sonia worried at a symbol with the toe of her shoe. The glyph lit with an internal light, and a stone rose from the water.
Sonia stepped back, surprised. The stone sank back under the water.
“Okay, this is a puzzle. I suck at puzzles.”
If she was feeling less stressed and more clear-headed, she might have been able to work out a pattern, but that wouldn’t happen today. There were three symbols on the ground, which meant a limited amount of combinations to try. She’d solve it with brute force.
Sonia pressed the symbols one after the other, starting with the left. One, two, three.
Stones rose and sank, almost as soon as she stopped pressing the glyph. The stones were spaced just far enough apart that she could cross the moat if she jumped carefully.
