Akarnae

  “Right,” Jordan agreed. “What we need is around here somewhere…”

  As Jordan thumbed through the collection of books on the shelf closest to them, Alex turned to Bear and said, “I’m still not sure why you had to make sure Connor and Mel didn’t follow you back?”

  “Because where we’re going is secret,” Bear replied.

  “But they said they knew where the Archives are.”

  Jordan snorted while he continued looking through the books. “Everyone knows where the Archives are. They’re the most non-secret secret ever.”

  Non-secret secret? There was definitely something wrong with his grammar but she let it go. “What’s the problem, then? Why couldn’t they come?”

  “You’ll see,” Bear said.

  Before she could object, Jordan interrupted. “Now pay attention because you’ll need to remember this for next time.”

  He pointed at the book he’d located on the shelf and Alex read the title out loud. “The Encyclopedia of Current Events? That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “How can current events be written in an encyclopedia? They’d be out-dated by the time it was published!”

  Jordan ignored her and said, “Pull out the book.”

  She looked at it with mistrust. “This isn’t going to be one of those totally clichéd pull-out-the-book-and-a-trapdoor-will-appear deals, is it?”

  Jordan rolled his eyes. “Just pull out the book already.”

  Alex reached for it, her muscles tense and ready to react. She clasped her hand around the spine and took a deep breath, quickly yanking the book off the shelf.

  Nothing happened.

  Jordan and Bear burst out laughing.

  “It’s not funny!” she told them. She couldn’t keep the corners of her mouth from twitching though, and she easily gave into her own laughter.

  “All right, all right,” she said, trying to regain her dignity. She looked at the book in her hands and flicked through the pages. “Now, seriously, how do we—” Before she could finish her question, the floor disappeared under her feet, leaving her to slide down a chute in complete darkness.

  “JORDAAAAN!” she screamed as she slid faster and faster. “BEAAAAAR!”

  Echoing laughter drifted down from above, along with a faint “Wheeeeeeee!”

  Before she could scream at them again, the slide began to level out and she slowly came to a stop in a well-lit room. There was a flaming torch mounted on the wall beside a sealed wooden door, but otherwise the chamber was empty.

  Alex’s head was spinning but she didn’t want to get trampled by her friends, so she quickly got to her feet and steadied herself against the nearest wall. A moment later the still-laughing Jordan slid into view, and Alex didn’t hesitate before hitting him with the heavy encyclopedia she was still holding. He only laughed harder, and when she went to attack him again, he reached out and trapped her hands. It was only then that she realised he was holding a book too. She squinted at the cover, making out the title: The Encyclopedia of Current Events.

  “What—?”

  “Wheeeeeeee!”

  Bear came sliding down the chute, effectively interrupting her question. Jordan quickly stumbled to his feet to make way for their friend.

  “What a ride!” Bear said, and he laughed as he took in Alex’s harried expression.

  “You could have warned me!” she said to them.

  “You’d already guessed about the ‘clichéd trapdoor’,” Jordan said, repeating her words with a smirk. “What was the point in warning you when you’d already figured it all out?”

  Alex chose to ignore him and turned her attention to Bear just as he was getting to his feet. She noticed that he was also carrying an encyclopedia.

  “What’s with the books?” she asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Jordan said, waving the tome in his hands. “The Encyclopedia is the ticket down here.”

  “But why are there now three of them?”

  “It’s also the ticket out of here,” Bear answered. “We each need our own because the books activate a single-use Bubbledoor that goes from this level back up again.”

  Alex’s mouth opened in an ‘O’ shape before her curiosity took over once again. “But there was only one copy on the shelf. Where did your copies come from?”

  Both boys looked at each other and shrugged.

  “No idea,” Bear said. “That’s just the library for you.”

  Alex didn’t bother to point out that his reasoning made absolutely no sense. It was hardly the craziest thing she’d heard since arriving in Medora.

  “Let’s go see these Archives, yeah?” Jordan said, walking over to the sealed wooden door and motioning for Alex to come closer. “Open your book to page seventy-four and press it against the door.”

  Alex did as he instructed and waited for the door to open. As the seconds ticked by, she wondered why it was taking so long. Maybe she’d opened the wrong page? She double-checked and tried again.

  Still nothing. No movement. No noise. No indication whatsoever that the door was preparing to open.

  Alex looked up to see a purple-faced Jordan who, at that moment, finally released the laughter that he’d been holding in. Bear quickly joined him. They’d tricked her—again.

  “What did you expect to happen?” Jordan asked once his laughter died down.

  She kept her tone flat when she answered, “I expected the door to open, obviously.”

  “Did you think to try knocking?”

  Alex wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not. She didn’t want to fall for another prank, but before she even had the chance to decide what to do, Bear reached around her and rapped his knuckles three times on the wooden surface. The latch clicked softly and the door opened wide enough for her to see into the room beyond.

  “Wow.”

  In all honesty, the room itself wasn’t that impressive. It was just like stepping into a computer lab, with independent cubicles and comfortable-looking chairs facing touch-screen panels. The space was large, but certainly not as large as the entire level of the Tower they were under.

  The reason Alex was so shocked was due to the number of people in the room. She took in the faces—most of them adults—and asked the obvious question: “If this place is so secret, how do so many people know about it?”

  “Like Jordan said before, ‘secret’ is a bit of an overstatement,” Bear said. “We’re not really sure what the secret is—whether it’s how to get down here, or the fact that there’s a here to get down to. Either way, most people know about the Archives, and if they don’t, it’s a good bet that someone they know can tell them.”

  “It just seems weird that the librarian acted so strangely about the ‘legend’ of the library if everyone knows about it,” Alex murmured.

  “Truth is, not many people know about the entrance we took, as far as I’m aware,” Jordan said. “That’s another reason we wanted to get rid of Connor and Mel—just in case they didn’t actually know. It’s not something we’re supposed to share, strictly speaking.”

  Alex looked around the room in confusion. “Then how did all these people get in here?”

  “There are other entrances to the Archives all around Medora,” Bear said, “but they’re access points only. Bubbledoors transport people directly here from wherever they start. But, like us, they can only ever get back out the way they came in.”

  “Very few people would know that the Archives are actually a part of Akarnae’s library,” Jordan said. “Any other students who have used the entrance we took would most likely believe the encyclopedia acts just like the other access points. But we know differently—we’re still underneath the Tower.”

  “How do you know?” Alex asked.

  “We’ll show you later,” Bear promised.

  “Come on,” Jordan said, stopping her from questioning them further. “Let’s get this search for your disappearing stranger out of the way.”

  Alex dutifully listened as Bear explained how t
o use the touch-screen panels, and after making sure she understood what she was doing, he and Jordan took off to give her some quiet research time. Once they were gone, she brought up a page listing Akarnae’s yearbooks from the past fifteen years and touched the ‘search’ tab. She then eased back into her seat and waited for the new screen to open.

  She almost fell out of her chair when the results appeared. Not only were past students listed, but so was everything else about them, including their relatives, friends, neighbours—everything. Each individual’s entire history was listed and available for public perusal. There was just too much information for her to look through, so she found the task bar and typed in ‘Aven’, hoping to refine her search. The page loaded instantly:

  There are 0 matching results. Similar listings include:

  1. Avette

  2. Aeina

  3. Arianne

  4. Astella

  The list continued down the page, but there was no listing for Aven. Alex returned back to the yearbooks and sighed as she took in the overwhelming amount of data that she would have to sift through in order to find the mysterious stranger.

  Better get started, she thought to herself as she opened up a random year, because it’s going to be a long night.

  “You’ve been here long enough, Bookworm. It’s time for some fun.”

  Alex looked up at Jordan and Bear’s expectant faces and said, “But I haven’t found anything yet!”

  “That’s too bad,” Jordan said, without much sympathy. “But you can come back tomorrow. It’s almost curfew and there’s more for you to see before we leave.”

  Alex consented without further arguing. They’d given up their night for her, after all. And their dinner.

  “Now, in the future when you come down here, to get out again you just have to go back into the room with the slide, open the encyclopedia to the last page, and press your hand to the paper,” Bear explained. “You’ll see a door appear in the wall and when you go through it you’ll find a Bubbledoor that’ll take you straight back to where you first picked up the encyclopedia—which will also disappear during transport, by the way.”

  “Why are you telling me and not showing me?”

  “Because we’re not leaving that way,” Jordan answered with an excited gleam in his eyes.

  She rose from her seat and stretched the kinks out of her back. “How are we getting out of here, then?”

  “Keep up and you’ll see soon enough.” That was all Jordan said before he spun on his heel and walked away, jerking his chin as an indication that she should follow.

  She glanced at Bear and he winked before heading in Jordan’s footsteps.

  Alex trailed after them, shaking her head. Boys.

  The Archives had cleared out significantly of people in the hours that she’d been researching, but there were still a few stragglers lingering around. Because of this, Alex wasn’t completely surprised when Jordan and Bear led her towards a corner at the back of the room that was out of sight.

  “Have a seat here and we’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” Bear said.

  The moment Alex’s backside touched the ground, she was airborne. It was a completely unexpected sensation, especially since she was moving upwards, and at an incredibly fast speed.

  Alex gasped and glanced down to find that she was still sitting on the floor, but only a square metre of it which was acting as her express elevator—‘express’ being the key word.

  She didn’t even have time to scream before she slammed into the ceiling.

  Fifteen

  I’m dead, Alex thought. Squashed like a cockroach. What a way to go.

  Only, she wasn’t squashed. And she wasn’t moving upwards anymore, either.

  Alex opened her eyes—not even sure when she’d closed them—and carefully looked around. She was sitting on the floor still, but the Archive terminals were nowhere in sight.

  She realised that she must be on another level of the library, and she hurried to move off the ground in case her friends came up after her. The instant she moved aside, the square metre of elevator floor vanished into thin air and Bear was propelled into view.

  He grinned at her.

  She glared at him.

  Then the floor disappeared again, causing Bear to scramble quickly to the side.

  “That is such a safety hazard,” Alex mumbled as Jordan appeared on his own carpet square.

  “Nothing to it,” Jordan said, standing and brushing off invisible dirt.

  “Feel free to tell me the next time something like that’s about to happen,” Alex said pointedly.

  Jordan and Bear looked at each other and chorused: “That would’ve ruined the surprise!”

  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, “Another secret level, 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 there unsafe exits?

  “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?”

  The boys exchanged glances and Jordan said, “Trust me, you’re better off not knowing. Just steer well clear of any red squares.”

  Seeing that Jordan wasn’t going to explain, Alex sneaked a glance at Bear. He mimed a quick action with his hands coming together before snapping his fingers out and mouthing a single word: ‘BOOM’.

  Jordan hadn’t seen their interaction, but he must have noticed the panicked look on Alex’s face because he hurried to reassure her. “It’s fine, Alex. We’ve done this hundreds of times.”

  She looked at the red squares dotted across the room and simply said, “You’re crazy.”

  “It’s a piece of cake,” Jordan promised. “You’ll love it.”

  “Yeah,” Bear agreed. “And besides, the red squares aren’t the problem. The real challenge is that all the squares change colour.”

  Alex gaped at the boys before turning her attention back to the floor. Sure enough, within a few seconds a number of the squares changed colours. They pulsed for three warning beats before the change took place. One red square became grey, while another red square turned to wood. A black square turned red, while a blue square turned black. There was no sequence or order to the colour changes—they were completely random. And there didn’t seem to be a set time, either. Some of the squares changed within seconds; others weren’t changing at all.