Death's Academy (20 page)

I glance over at Mal, and she shrugs. “I can’t think of anything better,” she says.

Brilliance smiles and turns back into the crack. We follow close behind her. She gingerly slides the two stones into position about a foot apart from each other. She gets to her knees, straps the boot onto her foot, takes a couple of steps back, and lets out a long breath.

“Here goes,” she whispers and strides forward.
Clunk!
The sharp noise echoes throughout the cavern. The unicorns jump to attention, looking one way and then another.

The first stone sails to the left side of the bridge. It collides forcefully with the unicorn’s skull, right
between its eyes.
Thunk!
The left guard drops to the floor. The unicorn on the right side flips his head around to see his compatriot collapse when the second stone strikes him directly in the temple.
Thwack!
He lets out a whinny that sounds like a cross between a seal bark and horse snort.

“Incredible,” I whisper.

Brilliance puts her hands on her hips in her typical superhero stance and smiles smugly. “Told you—”

A flash of white catches our eye. A third unicorn dashes for the door on the opposite side of the cavern.

“It’s trying to get away! A rock! Quick!” Brilliance yells.

I glance around at my feet for anything.

Phumpt!
A suction cup soars through the air with a long silver chain attached to the end of it. It smacks directly into the unicorns rear end. The unicorn cries out in surprise.

“Hurry! Help me!” Mal screams. She’s got both her hands wrapped around the hound retriever. I jump forward and grab it too. The chain goes taut and yanks us off our feet. We fly through the air. We crash face-first into the ground. The air bellows out of my lungs. Skidding across
the ground, I look up. We’re screaming toward the edge of the precipice.

“Let go!” I yell.

“Can’t!” Mal cries. “My hand is stuck.”

I look forward, and we’re nearly to the edge. I reach up and pull at the chain wrapped around Mal’s hand, but it’s caught around her wrist.

Thunk!

There’s a sharp pain in my side. I look up. Brilliance has kicked me in the ribs. The force of her kick skids us from going over the ledge and onto the center of the bridge. The chains tangle in the bridge’s iron beams.
Twang!
The line goes taut. The unicorn is hurtled backward.

I scurry to my knees and untangle Mal’s hand. We both wait for the unicorn to get back to his feet, but he lies motionless. Brilliance jogs around us with the iron boot still attached to her foot.
Clunk
,
clunk
,
clunk
. She cautiously approaches the unicorn. He lies spread eagle on the floor. Mal claps her hands together and beckons us forward.

She points down at the unicorn. His head is on top of a smooth boulder sticking out of the cavern floor. “Out like a light,” Brilliance says with a smile.

I rub my ribs. “Thanks for the kick. I think you cracked a rib, but thanks.”

“Sorry, it’s all I could think of,” she says and turns to Mal. “Great shot with the hound retriever.”

Mal nods while rubbing her wrist. “It’s all I could think of too.”

Brilliance picks up a stone the size of one of our skull ball skulls and extends it toward Mal.

“Do you mind putting this in your backpack?” she asks.

I screw up my face. “Why?”

“In case we run into another unicorn,” Mal says, taking the stone from Brilliance and stuffing it into her backpack.

A thick wooden door with smoothed bark stands a few feet from us. It has rusted metal hinges and a meaty iron handle. It takes all three of us to crack it open. I slide through the narrow gap and then do a double take. The room is brightly lit by hundreds of candles lining the walls. Each candle burns a different color. But that wasn’t what made me do a double take.

Hanging in a row twenty feet in front of me are two dozen rainbow-embellished donkey piñatas. Each donkey stares blindly back at me. Behind them is a sheer wall with a handleless door. High above the door are countless gears and wheels shaped and colored like lollipops.

“What the heck?” I mutter.

Brilliance and Mal push me from behind and squeeze past me. Both of them stare dumbfounded at the display before us.

“What is this?” Brilliance asks.

Mal takes a couple of steps forward, examining the piñatas and the gears above the door.

“Mal, what do you think this is?” I ask.

“It’s a riddle. Kind of a twisted security system. You have to hit the right piñata to open the door.”

“Hit it with what?” I ask.

“That,” Brilliance says, striding forward. She picks
up a wooden club and smacks it in her hand. “So, do we just do eeny, meeny, miny, moe?”

“I don’t think so,” Mal says, still staring up at the lollipop-shaped gears above the door.

“This actually might be fun,” Brilliance says, flipping the club in her hand. She skips forward and rears back, aiming for one of the donkey piñata’s heads.

I throw my hand up to stop her. “Brilliance, I don’t—”

Brilliance slashes the club at the donkey’s head.

“Stop!” Mal screams.

Brilliance pulls back at the last second, barely nicking the donkey’s nose. Boom!

A terrible explosion blows us backward. Hundreds of green and pink gumdrops blast out in every direction. The acid gumdrops hit the back wall, the ceiling, and ground all around us. One hurtles just past my left ear and burns a streak through my hair.

I push myself up, careful to not stick my hand in any oozing puddles of gumdrop acid. “Mal! Brilliance! You okay?”

“I guess,” Mal says with a groan.

Brilliance lets out a yelp and then swallows up her cry. I hopscotch around acid puddles to where she is sitting. She has thick strands of her singed blonde hair in each hand. “Are you alright?” I ask, looking her over for any burn marks.

“My beautiful hair,” she says and then a hushed sob croaks from her throat. She shakes her head, jumps to her feet, and sets her jaw. “I’m fine.”

The acid must have just missed her neck. The back
of her hair has been burned away into the shape of a skinny palm tree, bushy on top with a narrow trunk.

“Uh …,” I stammer. “It doesn’t look so—”

Mal shoots me a nasty glance and hushes me with a hiss. I clamp my mouth shut and pick up the club. “So how do we know which one we are supposed to hit?”

“Look,” Mal says, pointing at the gears above the door. “They are spinning and turning at different speeds.” A new piñata drops from the sky and bounces up like a desperado hitting the bottom of a hangman’s noose. The new piñata comes to rest in the space where the other one blew up.

Mal continues to examine the gears whirring and spinning above the door, and a smile grows across her face. “I know which one it is,” she whispers.

“Huh?” Brilliance asks.

“I know which piñata opens the door,” she says, tugging the club out of my hand. She walks over to a piñata hanging five donkeys to the left.

“How?” I ask.

“The gears above the door. I followed their motion. All the others are attached to a gear that drops another donkey. This is the only one that isn’t. So it must be the right one”

I study the gears for a moment but can’t make heads or tails. “How sure are you that’s the right one?”

“Pretty sure,” she says.

“Tell me in percentages. What are the chances that this thing is going to blow up in our face?”

“Hm … 23.9 percent,” she says and rolls her eyes. She lifts the club above her head and whacks the donkey.

I let out a mannish squeal and tuck my head. The donkey doesn’t explode, but it swings backward. A little trumpet shoots out from the donkey’s mouth and it blares out a victory song.

The handleless door behind the donkeys swings open.

“Let’s go,” Mal says with a smile.

We cross through the door and are met by a wide, winding staircase. We follow it down, descending deeper and deeper underground. The air turns more and more frigid with every step. We reach the bottom of the staircase and find ourselves in a perfectly round cavern. The underground room is humongous. The walls are marble smooth and the floor gleans like polished glass. Only sporadic torches crowning the top of the cavern light the room.

“Is the floor moving?” Brilliance asks, tilting her head forward.

We scurry forward. The polished floor ends and a clear pond begins. Teeming just underneath the water are thousands of shining fish, some glowing gold, some blue, others pink and green. They glide effortlessly through the water like gentle strokes of paint against a clear canvas.

I peer into the pond’s depths but can’t see a bottom. Poking only an inch over the surface of the water are the tips of wooden poles. Countless telephone poles extend down into the depths and peek just above the waterline as stepping-stones.

We follow the water’s edge until we reach the smooth cavern wall. It is impassable on that side; we try the other side but are greeted by the same predicament.

“The only way across is by jumping from pole to pole,” Brilliance says.

“Or by swimming,” I add, and glance at Brilliance. “It looks like it’s only a hundred or so feet across. Can you swim?”

She snorts. “Of course.”

“I don’t think we want to swim in that,” Mal says. “There’s got to be something more to this water.” She kneels down at the edge of the pool and pulls her backpack off her shoulder. She rifles through it and pulls out a granola bar.

My stomach growls. “Where did you get that?”

“I brought them for the trip. Now be quiet,” she says, breaking off a piece of the granola bar and tossing it into the water.

A gurgling, bubbling frenzy erupts where Mal has tossed the piece of granola. Hundreds of glowing fish rip and tear at the bar and at each other. Their wide mouths open to expose rows and rows of jagged teeth. As quickly as the storm started, it subsides, leaving not a speck of granola left and dozens of other fish maimed and headless.

I take three healthy steps backward. “I am not going out there,” I say. “I don’t care if my parents never come home. I don’t care if I never find out about the
Queen Suzanne
. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care!”

“We can make it if we just stay on the poles,” Brilliance says.

“You stay on the poles; you can write me a postcard when you get across,” I say.

“He hates the water,” Mal whispers.

“That’s not true. I hate what swims under the water and wants to eat me.
Big
difference.”

“So, if you get chosen to be a shark Death or a barracuda Death, what would you do then?” Brilliance asks with the corner of her mouth arching up. “You’d have to get in the water to make sure you collected your victim, right?”

“First off, it’s never gonna happen. Secondly, I would have a lot more tools at my disposal if I were assigned to sharks and barracudas.
And
I wouldn’t be hopping from one telephone pole to another hoping I don’t fall in with them, that’s for sure.”

“Stop being such a baby,” Brilliance says, taking a wide step out onto the top of a nearby wooden pole. She looks back at me over her shoulder. “See, easy as can be.” She takes another step and another. Within two blinks she is ten feet from shore.

My mouth goes dry, and for some reason I can’t stop my right leg from bouncing. Mal follows after Brilliance and within a few moments they are halfway across.

“Night, come on!” Mal yells. “We don’t have time for this.”

I squat down and take a seat on the wonderfully firm, secure ground. Just as my right leg begins to calm down, I hear the faint pattering of footsteps descending down the stairs behind me. My heart leaps into my throat.

I try to signal to Mal and Brilliance, but their backs are turned to me, their attention focused on balancing themselves on the poles. I flip back around and peer at
the mouth of the staircase. The footsteps are getting louder.

I take a deep breath and stride to the edge of the water. I extend my leg and hop onto the top of the closest pole. I step to the next one and then the next one, my eyes fixated on the circular footstools edging out of the surface of the water.

I am moving so fast that I catch up to Mal. Startled, she turns and looks at me. “Wow, you did it,” she says, smiling.

“Something’s coming down the stairs,” I whisper.

Mal’s eyes widen in fear, and she turns her focus back to moving forward.

All of a sudden, there’s a shriek in front of us. Brilliance is hopping madly from one pole to the next, nearly falling on several occasions. She dives forward and lands with a thud on the shore.

She flips over and calls, “The poles fall!”

“What?” I yell.

“Closer to the bank, the poles tip over as soon as you step on them. All of the ones I jumped on are gone,” she says and points in front of us. “You’ve gotta go around to the side! Mal, you go this way. Night, you go the other way. As soon as they start tipping, you’ve got to move fast!”

Mal goes one way and I the other. I make the mistake of looking below where my feet are standing. The fish are swarming right below me.