4.45: Bait And Switch

“Run!” Hammond bellowed.

“What – ?”

“Everyone just run!”

He wasn’t grabbing at her mandibles, I noticed dimly as I made for the exit; he was holding a long rope of white webbing. Was he going to try to entangle her? Did he really think he could win that way?

Of course not. He wasn’t trying to win, was he? He was trying to buy us some time.

I hated running, hated leaving Hammond to face that thing alone, even though I knew it was the right decision. He wasn’t in any actual danger, of course; the safety protocols on the Pit wouldn’t allow anyone to get hurt during one of these competitions. For a treasure hunt, injury was simulated by paralysis, like for most things, but the paralysis was on a timer; each ‘injury’ only lasted fifteen minutes. That let injuries create a reasonable penalty without removing someone from the hunt permanently. Hammond was taking a fifteen minute time penalty to give the rest of us a chance to get to the bridge first, and me staying to fight by his side would have done nothing but give us both a penalty, leaving Peter and Saina to face the next trial with just each other. I knew that, strategically, running was absolutely the right thing to do, and staying would do nothing but hinder my own team.

I still hated doing it, though.

Peter, Saina and I bolted through the gap in webbing that marked the exit, out onto a broad, stony path lit by the bright midday sun. We marched down it for a few minutes, turned a corner around a high stone outcropping, and it was like the spider forest didn’t even exist any more.

By silent agreement, we stopped for a couple of minutes to catch our breath.

“That was horrible,” Saina gasped. “Whose idea was it to do a treasure hunt, again?”

“Peter,” I said. “Blame Peter.”

“Oh, shut up,” Peter said. “Does Hammond still have our map?”

“He shoved it into my arms before he decided to play the hero,” Saina said, pulling it out. “I hope we didn’t just give him full-blown arachnophobia. Literally anyone else wouldn’ve been a better option to stay behind.”

“Nobody else would’ve been strong enough,” I pointed out, leaning in to read the rhyme.

To see the treasure burning bright, you will require special sight,

So here among the flowers’ friends lies the first emerald lens.

Sit upon the pale throne built of old and ancient bones

And gaze through glasses tinted rose to see the lense’s home exposed.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess we’re looking for an emerald lens now. Whatever that is.”

The general gist wasn’t difficult to interpret. This puzzle would net us an artefact to help us find the treasure at the end. An emerald lens, apparently. And finding it would require finding rose-tinted glasses, an ancient bone throne, and the ‘flowers’ friends’. A bit of a scavenger hunt, but I’d take a scavenger hunt over the giant spiders anyway.

We kept to the path, which became steeper and more treacherous as we went, reminding me that, oh yeah, we were climbing a mountain. It was a full half an hour later, and I was beginnign to wonder if we’d missed a turning somehow or something, when the terrain finally changed. We clambered up over an outcropping of rock and found ourselves overlooking… a junkyard.

It wasn’t big. A pile of junk the size of a house, maybe. A few rusted-out carcasses of cars sagged under the weight of broken chairs and old refrigerators. A torn-open rubbish bag spilled books in an alphabet I couldn’t read down the side of a half-rotted desk. A life-sized plastic skeleton sat in one of the cars, a cowboy had perched jauntily on its skull. (Were they the ancient bones? The throne being the car seat? Maybe. It didn’t look too safe to try to squeeze in there, though.) The entire pile was overgrown; grass and vines and flowers grew over everything, as if the pile hadn’t been touched for years and nature was reclaiming it. My heart sank at the sight. We were supposed to find a pair of glasses and a bone chair in this?

The ‘flowers’ friends’ were, at least, easy. The place was swarming with bees.

“Anyone allergic to bees?” I asked.

“They’re not real,” Peter reminded me. “They don’t have actual bee venom. At worst, they’ll paralyse you a bit if you go barrelling into their hive or whatever.”

Then we noticed the biggest problem with this junk pile – the two people already picking through it. Robins, obviously; a tall guy and a skinny girl who I didn’t know. How did they beat us here? They must’ve either been luckier than us at the challenges, or were a whole lot faster at them than we were. Probably due to experience. Not a great sign.

Looked like they were down two teammates, though, and we were only down one, so that was something.

Peter and Saina started to head down to the junk heap, but I stopped them. “Can we just skip it?” I asked.

“What?”

“I mean, this isn’t like the spiders, where we had to go through a forest. It’s literally just a heap of junk. Do we need this lens? Maybe we can just… walk around it, and get to the bridge faster, and destroy it and have all the time we need to pick up as many artefacts as we want on the other side of the bridge.”

Peter shook his head and pointed to the far side of the junk heap. “Do you see the way forward?”

On the other side of the heap was a white cliff face. It was, like the heap, overgrown with flowers and vines and stuff’ if there was a path under all that stuff, it wasn’t obviois.

“My guess,” Peter said, “is that looking through the lens will reveal the path forward. Trying to skip this puzzle just means we risk getting lost.”

“Ugh,” I said. “Fine.”

We made our way towards the pile. The two Robins noticed us, gave wary nods of greeting, and made a point of staying out of our way. Good; they didn’t want a direct fight. Neither did we.

Peter and Saina got straight to work looking for the items we needed, but what can I say? I’m a rebel at heart. (A cheater, some might say, but I prefer to think of myself as a challenger of unnecessary boundaries.) There was a big white cliff on the opposite side, a complicated puzzle that would presumably show the safe way up the cliff, and me, a rock climber. If I could use my experience to find the way up without needing the lens, I could save us a lot of time.

As I approached the cliff, I saw that it didn’t look all that difficult – uneven, lumpy surface, lots of big platforms and cracks, plenty of handholds. Covered in plants, which wasn’t helpful (plants don’t make reliable handholds and their roots weaken the stone beneath), but you can’t have everything.

Then I got even closer, and my heart sank a little. The cliff was limestone. I should’ve guessed that from how it shone bright white in the sun; there aren’t many types of stone that shine white and nearly all of them are a total bitch to climb. Limestone wasn’t the worst, but it was a sharp, annoying, crumbly mess of unreliable handholds made of what was basically sandpaper.

Right at the bottom of the cliff was a series of easily scaleable ledges that seemed like a good place to start climbing. They were chaped kind of like a chair; a big, square, moss-covered ‘seat’ being about a metre high, and some higher bits on either side a bit like armrests. Even the stone behind the seat pulled out of the wall a little, like the back of a chair, mostly covered in decorative ivy but with plenty of exposed bits of stone, too. That should make for some good handholds to get me two or three metres high; a great start.

I clambered up onto the ledge and started to climb.

A couple of handholds up, I started to regret this plan. This cliff was difficult to climb and I’d feel like a total idiot if I fell in front of an audience. Anyway, if I was having difficulty, there ws no point in continuing; if it was hard for me, Peter and Saina wouldn’t be able to do it, and I wasn’t going to go ahead and cross and destroy the bridge without them. That would just leave me to face a whole bunch of trials alone while they took the long way round. Not helpful.

I’d already started, though, so I might as well see how viable the route was. I pulled myself higher and took another careful step up the cliff.

And a piece of stone gave way under my foot. I slipped and skinned my knee, cursing. The unexpected drop pulled a hand free, dragging a handful of loose limestone bits with it; I landed awkwardly back on the soft moss cushion on my starting platform.

I dropped the handful of limestone and inspected my hands for damage. A couple of scrapes, nothing serious. A white snow of limestone dust fell around me.

Limestone is a pretty soft stone. It’s the compressed shells and bones of tiny sea creatures from long, long ago, and it doesn’t take all that much force to crumble or separate those bits of bone again. If you didn’t have climbing equipment, it could be a real pain to –

Wait.

I stared at the limestone for a moment.

I looked down at the limestone ‘chair’ I was standing on.

I looked to my friends, picking through a big heap of random junk for anything that could be considered a ‘pale throne built of old and ancient bones’.

It couldn’t be, could it?

But why not? The poem had said nothing about finding what we needed in the junk heap It hadn’t mentioned the heap at all. We’d just all kind of assumed.

I sat on the throne. Now, if I could find the ‘glasses tinted rose’… well, they’d have to be in the junk heap, wouldn’t they? There weren’t any glasses lying around near the cliff. I sat back and skimmed the junk pile for something shiny and pink, but that was a nonstarter; among the vines and grass overgrowing it were flowers in all colours. Even if the glasses were just lying on the ground, I’d never pick them out like this.

Then I noticed that some of the flowers were roses.

About then, I started to get a suspicion that the answer to this riddle was going to be very, very stupid.

Okay, this shouldn’t actually be too hard. Look for roses near glass that I could see from my position on the ‘throne’. It only took me a moment to find it.

Down the bottom of the junk pile were several half-buried cars. One of them, the entire front half covered in old furniture and plants, was partly overgrown with rose bushes. The leaves cast reflections on the back windscreen in the bright sun, and it was positioned so that from my sitting place, I could see straight through the back windscreen and the front passenger side window, to a side mirror buried aunder layers of junk, concealed from almost any other angle.

And stuck to that side mirror was a translucent green disk.

The two Robins moved across my line of sight, too busy picking through rubbish to look at me. They’d probably watched the idiot try to climb the cliff without solving the puzzle and decided I wasn’t worth paying attention to. But if they looked up, and looked through the back of the car, the emerald lens would be directly in their line of sight. I needed to move fast.

Just walking up would be incredibly suspicious. I couldn’t just do that casually. Our two teams were making a point of avoiding each other, not wanting to start any physical fights; if I headed in their direction, they’d know there was a reason, and they’d look up...

Instead, I returned to my team, about a quarter of the way around the junk pile, and quickly explained the situation. “So we need to lure them away so that we can slip in and get it,” I concluded.

Saina nodded. “Peter, you’re the fastest among us, right?”

“Yes.”

“And Kayden, you’re great at getting attention and distracting people?”

“I am a born master at that.”

“Fantastic. Then I have a plan.”

It took less than fifteen seconds for her to explain the plan, and then we were on our way around the pile. We couldn’t waste any time; the Robins might look in the right direction and see the lens at any second. Peter hung back just a little as Saina and I came into the Robins’ sight. They both looked up warily, of course, to see if we were going to start something, but that wasn’t the plan. I gave them a little friendly wave and turned to the junk pile.

And quickly, while their eyes were still pointed in our general direction, Saina began casting her spell.

There really are quite a lot of butterflies with shiny green wings, and it’s quite difficult to make out specific shapes in long grass. Saina cast her illusion about halfway between us ad the Robins, maybe a little bit closer to the Robins, and I certainly couldn’t tell that it was a densely packed pile of green butterflies fluttering their wings a little. All I saw was something green and glimmering in the grass.

We bolted for it. So did the two Robins. Away from the car.

I tried my best to reach the fake emerald first, but I wasn’t fast enough. Honestly, I was glad. It meant I got to see the look on my tall, lanky opponent’s face as he dove into the grass and pushed his hands down and through something that wasn’t there.

It was an entertaining sequence of expressions that flitted across both of their faces, actually. Confusion. Suspicion. Then they looked at us, and there was confusion again, because what was the point of us making an illusion like that?

You could see the point where they realised that Peter wasn’t with us. They spun around, searching, but by then he’d flung open one of the back doors on the car, scrambled across the seats to the front, and was unwinding the front passenger window. They’d barely taken two steps toward him when his fingers closed around the emerald lens, and he pulled it free.

I braced myself to grab a Robin if they got angry and tried to attack Peter, but it wasn’t necessary. The pair weren’t idiots. Artefacts couldn’t be stolen in treasure hunts; once your team had it, it was your team’s. (This was to stop the climax at the end, the treasure hunt at the top of the mountain, from turning into a brawl.) The Robins had, presumably, reached the same conclusion as us, that the emerald lens was necessary to see the path ahead, meaning that they’d have to wait for us to leave and watch where we went. Attacking Peter was pointless; all paralysing him would do was stop both teams for fifteen minutes. (There might be some utility in that if they wanted time for their other abandoned teammates to catch up, but apparently they’d decided not to do that.) Similarly, attacking Saina or I was pointless, because Peter would just wait for us to ‘heal’. There was no advantage to them to fighting; they had to wait for us to leave, either way.

But we didn’t have to wait for them. We could disable them, if we wanted, and get a nice fifteen minute head start.

As soon as Peter had the lens, the two immediately backed away, making for the other side of the junk pile One of them grabbed a broken chair on the way, probably as a weapon.

“Are we going to…?” Saina asked, as Peter jogged over.

“I have no interest in getting caught up in a brawl,” Peter said. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go.”

I was relieved. I wouldn’t have fought, of course, Peter already knew that about me, but I was glad I didn’t have to watch them fight. Peter held up the lens to look through and took Saina’s hand. I took her other hand. And we followed him… right through the limestone cliff. Just into the wall. There must have been a tunnel hidden by an illusion or something.

I vaguely wondered how the puzzle would have worked for a team arriving after someone had already solved it. Like, if the Robins had found the emerald lens and moved on before we even got there, we’d be stuck, right? That didn’t sound like a fun or interesting competition, filling the game with random dead ends like that. There must be a way around it; maybe the path revealed itself automatically once the lens-user was through. Or maybe it was replaced by a different puzzle if that happened; once the artefact was gone it just became a normal barrier puzzle like the spider forest. I should look that up later, after the competition.

For now, we had to keep moving. The Robins would be on our heels. (Maybe we should have stayed to disable them after all.) If we could get to the bridge, get across the bridge, before they could…

The path up the mountain angled upwards, of course, on average, but it tended to rise and fall a lot. We crested one little rise and finally, there was the bridge, straight ahead. Yes! Wait. No. As it came into view, I realised that I’d drastically underestimated our opponents.

I’d assumed that the Robins had left two teammates behind, like we’d had to leave Hammond. I’d been wrong. Apparently, they’d split their team in two – half to mess about gathering artefacts or whatever, and half to move ahead, finding some fast path we’d missed, perhaps, or being able to pick what puzzles would be the fastest to clear in advance, or whatever. However they’d done it, the other half of the team had been sent ahead. And was crossing the bridge.

The bridge was a fairly rickety-looking wooden affair, about twenty feet long over a steep gorge. It didn’t look too hard to destroy. Apparently anticipating the possibility of it being destroyed while they were on it, Tessa (Theresa?) was waiting on our side while the final Robin, a boy with a magpie on his shoulder, made his way across. Tessa had some kind of ornately carved staff in her hands, probably an artefact. It looked heavy.

We broke into a run.

Peter tore ahead and ducked past Tessa, dashing onto the bridge before she could stop him. He ran to meet the boy already on the bridge while Tessa turned to deal with Saina and me, but we weren’t interested in her. We were interested in the fact that Peter was practically made of pipe cleaners and would need any help he could get if he didn’t just want to be tossed right off the side of the bridge.

Saina threw up her hands and cast. The boy on the bridge was immediately engulfed in a cloud of butterflies. I saw him stumble, shift sideways; maybe Saina could make him fall without Peter even having to engage him.

That wasn’t to be. Tessa stepped forward and swung her staff. Saina tried to duck, but she was distracted by casting; the wood slammed straight into the side of her head and she dropped like a stone. We didn’t have fifteen minutes to wait for her to recover; it was up to Peter and me, now. I leapt over Saina, ducked under Tessa’s staff (she didn’t even swing at me; she seemed frozen, staring at the fresh blood shining on the wood) and raced across the bridge to back Peter up.

I made it about five steps before I realised.

The fresh blood. The fresh blood on the wood.

There were safety charms in place. Injury was fake, and registered as temporary paralysis.

So why was there blood?

I spun around, nearly falling off the bridge, to look back at Saina. Saina, lying motionless on the ground, her dark hair fanned out and tangled. Saina, hair getting wetter by the moment, in the ever-widening pool of fresh blood collecting on the ground.

I screamed.