“Sarah, honey, this has got to get practical really fast.”

“It is practical,” she said. “Doctors use these maps to figure out where an injury is…”

“Like…”

And then she saw it. Her eyes literally welled with joy.

“That’s it!” she cried.

She pointed.

“Here. See this?”

She jabbed her finger at a missing tile in the subway map, a small hole in the mural.

“So what? It’s old.”

“No. This isn’t an accident. This is what doctors do. This means something.”

We heard a hiss and Miles pulled us back. His shoulder slammed against the back wall, just as another blade swung past.

“What, Sarah?”

“If someone got hurt, here-” She pointed to the gap in the mural. “If this nerve got severed… you’d have a specific injury… I need to think…”

“NO TIME!”

“… C5, C6, C7…”

“Come on, Sarah…”

“… roots… then trunks… then divisions…”

“Come on.”

“… splits to the median nerve and crosses…”

“COME ON”

“… you’d lose sensation in… in…”

She was squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head.

Miles pressed himself flat against the back wall and yelled, “Why do I have to be so fucking fat?”

The next blade would pin us all.

She cried: “He’d go numb in the lateral three-and-one-half fingers of his right hand!”

She bolted across the room toward the homunculus.

I heard the rumbling of the next machine. There was a flash of silver. Behind me the blade came free, split the subway or the brachial plexus or whatever the fuck it was and tore at me. I jumped. The blade flew toward Sarah. It would split her in half.

“SARAH!”

She dove to the floor and slammed her fingers toward the demon. The noise was unbearable. I hit the wall, saw flashes of light, and moaned and rolled over onto my side to see her reach the demon and press the shiny tiles of his outer four fingers. They sank inward with a click and she screamed or laughed and rolled to her side as the blade ripped past.

It disappeared into the wall and a tremendous clamping sound rang out. It didn’t come back out. All down the room the blades swung on their paths into the walls and didn’t come out again. The noise decreased with each return, until one or two last blades disappeared and it was totally, unnaturally silent. There was only the smell of rank gasoline and the total absence of thought in my head-perfect stillness.

At the far end of the room, the door had slid open.

I felt a joy surging inside me.

Sarah was on her feet. She was okay. She was smiling at me and tears were streaming down her face. She put her hand on my cheeks and I realized I was crying too. I grabbed her and hugged her tighter than I’ve ever hugged anyone, and I just kept saying Oh my God, Oh my God in her ear, over and over. Then I felt the crushing hug of Miles around us.

“You did it!” he cried to Sarah. “My God you fucking did it! What did you do?”

Sarah beamed. “It’s just science.” She pointed at the brachial plexus. “It’s a map of the nerves in someone’s arm. This missing tile, here, it’s intentional, like someone severed the nerve. I just had to figure out where a person would go numb if you cut that specific nerve.”

“Oh,” Miles said. “I knew that.”

Sarah was smiling and we ran toward the door. “Let’s get out of this room,” she said, laughing. She took off, Miles behind her, me last.

And that’s when the bad thought came into my head, so quickly that I didn’t even see it at first. It was just a sensation. We ran toward the door.

I felt the thought unpacking itself. I became aware of it, of what it was trying to tell me. I couldn’t verbalize fast enough. Sarah was at the door, running through it. Miles was on her heels, his momentum vast. I couldn’t get the words out fast enough, but my arm just shot forward and grabbed at them.

Why hadn’t I seen it sooner? It was so obvious. Three rooms. Three puzzles. The first one logic: the two kings. A lawyer’s puzzle. The second: the Ship of Theseus. A philosopher’s riddle. The third, the homunculus-only for a neurologist could that puzzle exist. Three of us-a lawyer, a philosopher, a neurosurgeon.

Oh God, they were just waiting for us.

My hand closed over a shirt, and with the strength that only terror can give you, I pulled back and Miles came with me as Sarah disappeared through the door.

I fell backward and Miles came down, half on top of me, crushing the wind out of me.

A second later, I heard Sarah scream.

36

I pushed Miles off me and ran to the edge of the door. I expected to see Sarah, to figure out some way to help her. But what I saw instead was a hole in the floor, and a giant trapdoor hanging down. And below that, emptiness. Just a vast hole that sloped down at a steep angle into nothing. The false floor was long. She would have made it several feet into the room before it collapsed below her and sent her spiraling down.

I tried to see down into the hole. I got on my hands and knees and let myself hang over it. Cool, earthy air hit my face. But I couldn’t see more than a few feet. The chute just disappeared into blackness.

I felt my world start to unravel. There was a gnawing sensation in my brain that made me want to start shaking my head like a wandering lunatic. I shouted Sarah into the hole. My voice echoed down and back again and mocked me. But nothing real came back. No call for help. Not her soft voice, calling my name. I yelled again. Nothing.

That’s when I felt Miles’s hand on my shoulder.

“Jeremy.”

I was hanging too deep into the hole, holding on with my hands and trying to see something, anything. Miles pulled me back.

“You’re gonna fall,” he said.

The room was tiny. Just big enough to get the three of us to the middle, on our way to a door at the far end, before the trap sprung. There were candles burning in holders on the walls, the room flickering between shadows and light.

Miles asked how I realized it was a trap. I told him about the puzzles, the way each one was designed for one of us. Like they wanted us to solve them.

Miles shook his head. It was a gesture I’d seen before: a mix of surprise and admiration for the V &D and their tricks-except that this time, there was less surprise, less admiration, crowded out by something I’d never seen in Miles’s face before: defeat. He looked defeated.

“It was a test,” he said. His eyes were sad. “A final warning. If we were smart enough to get it, we were smart enough to turn around and honor our deal. And if not…” He looked at the trapdoor. “Then they’d have to handle us another way.”

I stepped toward Miles.

“What are you saying?”

“Jeremy…”

“What are you saying?”

“You know what I mean.”

He said this surprisingly gently.

“You don’t know that,” I told him.

“Think about it.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“Remember Chance? Remember Sammy Klein?”

“Shut up.”

“We didn’t listen. We went back on our deal.”

“Shut up.”

“They even gave us a last chance. She didn’t-”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“She didn’t see it.”

I went for him. All I felt was rage. I wanted to tear him to pieces-stupid fucking know-it-all. He grabbed my arms and twisted me around. He overpowered me and forced me down.

“Jeremy, stop. Stop. This isn’t going to help anything.”

“We have to go get her.”

“We can’t.”

“We have to. We have to save her.”

“How? How, Jeremy? How could we save her?”

“We go after her.”

We both looked at the hole in the middle of that flickering room. The hole was impossibly dark. Inestimably deep. I tried to imagine what was at the bottom. Given the deviousness, the ghoulishness of what we’d seen so far, the possibilities seemed limitless. Would we fall at breakneck speed into a pit of random spikes, where a dozen skeletons were already impaled? Or maybe we’d land in a pit of half-starved dogs, creeping toward us, snarling, mangy fur glowing faintly with moonlight. Would they throw in a sword and shield to reflect the stars and add some excitement?