Silent Symmetry (The Embodied trilogy) (12 page)

“Check this out,” I said to Cruz, who was looking out the window.

He came over and crouched down beside me.

“What language is this?” I asked him.

“Well, it sure ain’t freakin’ Puerto Rican.”

Smartass. I don’t know if it was the stress that was affecting us or what, but he was suddenly kind of charming. He flashed a sexy smile at me and I looked away, back at the book.
I turned the page.

“Oh. Wow.”

This left-hand page was filled with the same strange writing, but the right-hand one showed a picture. A full-page illustration of a minotaur. Or The Minotaur (I think there was only one). Roaring with rage, covered in blood, the half-man/half-bull creature was devouring a young woman – literally holding her like a rack of lamb and sinking his teeth into her side. Behind them in the cave or hall or whatever it was, about a dozen other young men and women were cowering and watching in horror. It was gross but somehow incredibly beautiful. I mean, the way it was drawn or painted was like no picture I’d ever seen before. Something about the colors, the brushstrokes... I didn’t know much about art, but it was fascinating.

Cru
z was staring at it, wide-eyed. “Madre de Dios,” he exhaled after a few seconds.

I grabbed my phone and took a photo of the page, then of the page next to it filled with the strange capital letters. I flipped some more of the pages. Was it even paper, I wondered? A new full-page picture. The same wow factor. This one showed a young warrior plunging a huge sword into the heart of the Minotaur while a woman in white robes looked on fearfully.

I had a flash. “It’s Greek!”

Cruz just shrugged.

“The Minotaur was a Greek mythological being.”

“Yeah, a pretty bad-ass one from what I can see.”

“And he was trapped in a labyrinth and eventually killed by a prince or something who found his way out because his girlfriend brought a ball of yarn with her that they had unrolled on the way in.”

“That’s one crazy tale,” said Cruz, standing up.

“Yeah – I used to have a book with these stories in.”

“Whatever happened to Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs?”

I ignored him, entranced by the picture.

“Alright, Kari, can we go now? Can we just go back to your place and make out or something? There’s nothing here.”

I looked at the young man slaying the Minotaur. His face... what was it about his face? And then it struck me like a tsunami. It was one of those moments – and now I know how to recognize them – when your lizard brain realizes before your conscious brain that your life is about to change forever. Because the man in the picture was Noon. Undoubtedly. One hundred percent.

My mouth went dry.

“L... Look...” I stammered.

He sighed and bent down to where I was pointing. But he
wasn’t really paying attention.

“What is it
? Some dude with a sword is – ”

And then he saw
Noon too and just stopped speaking, mouth open.

“Holy
...”

I tried to take a photo but my hand was shaking. Cruz held on
to my wrist to keep it steady while I pressed the shutter button. I zoomed in on the face on my phone. What did it mean?

Cruz wiped the sweat from the palms of his hands onto
his jeans and stood up again.

“Put the book back, Kari,” he pleaded, trying to sound calm, but failing.

“We can’t go now. This is incredible.”

I flipped through the rest of the book. There were other images of mythological beasts – a many-headed hydra, a lion with wings, a centaur, the deadly Medusa.

This last picture grabbed my attention and a whole bunch of thoughts tumbled through my mind in a matter of seconds. The story came back to me from my own book – the goddess Aphrodite was jealous because Medusa and her sisters were stunningly beautiful, so she gave them snakes for hair and made them so ugly that any man who looked at them would be turned to stone. The picture was as lurid as the one of the Minotaur. The sisters were cowering in a corner, transformed and furious, with Aphrodite looming over them.

“Alright, this is way too whacked-out,” said Cruz, and I instantl
y knew why.

In the picture Aphrodite looked exactly like Aranara.

Who the hell were these... people?

I took another photo with my phone while Cruz shifted nervously from foot to foot. He had
managed to get over his claustrophobia to crawl through the tunnel, but I guess this was weirding him out way too much.

“I need to get out of here,” he said gravely.

I kissed him on the cheek and replaced the book on the shelf.

“Two more minutes? Please?”

He looked at me, eyes darting from side to side. “Sure. But don’t ask me to look at no more of those creepy books.”

“Thanks,” I said, and kissed him again.

He left the room and I picked a smaller book off a different shelf. This one was written in Latin and seemed old, but not as old as the large Greek one. The cover was leather too, but the pages felt like paper. Fragile, but still paper. And on the pages were ancient-looking graphs and scientific diagrams. I pulled out the book next to it. This one was old, but newer than the others. And I could tell that it was written in French. Something about the revolution. Were any of these books even in English? I started scanning the spines then Cruz called me from the entry way.

“Come here!”

I put the books back on the shelves and went to see what he wanted. He was crouched down, looking through the keyhole of the door opposite the living room door.

“It’s locked,” he said. “But check this out.”

He moved away from the lock so I could see through it. These old buildings have thick doors, so the view through the keyhole was kinda restricted. But what I could see was a room unlike any of the others. It was huge. I don’t know if it was an illusion, but I don’t think there was even a ceiling. I mean, it seemed to be a room twice as high as the other rooms in the building. The walls were white, the floor was tiled, and it stretched far away to the right.

It was empty except for one feature. A gray
... something. I could see an inclined surface made of dark metal at the right-hand side of my view. It sloped upward and disappeared. It had a corner or an edge where another inclined surface joined the first one.

Then I saw someone.

I recoiled instinctively.

“What?” said Cruz. “What’s up?”

I put my hand on his lips to shush him.

“There’s someone in there,” I whispered in his ear.

“Fu... okay, we gotta get outta here!”

He moved toward the front door, but I pulled him back.

“Wait!” I hissed. “We can’t just run out – we have to put the grille back or they’ll know we were here.”

“The what?”

“The grille. The grating that you unscrewed from the entrance to the tunnel.”

As what I was saying started to make sense to him I could see that he didn’t want to go back there. His eyes were searching for an alternative. He must have been worried that the person in the locked room would emerge into the apartment hallway while we were fixing the grille and we’d have to
go back through the tunnel.

A loud noise came from inside the locked room. I couldn’t wait any longer. I grabbed his sleeve and
pulled him quickly back down the long hallway, trying to tread as quietly as possible.

All those rooms with their sparse symmetry. The book with the picture
s of Noon and Aranara. And the oversized, locked room with the metal whatever-it-was inside. This place was beyond creepy and I couldn’t wait to get out.

We reached the dining room. The grille was lying on the floor with the screws scattered around. Cruz bent down and fitted it back over the opening. I looked behind us, straining to hear if someone was coming. The grille fell out with a clatter.

“Cruz!” I exclaimed

“My bad,” he groaned.

“What are you doing?”

“The screws need to go in from the inside.”

I put my hands on my hips. What were the options?

“Okay, so you go in first again,” I suggested. “Then I’ll back my way in and tighten the screws. I’ll
crawl down the slope backward and be able to turn around at the bottom.”

His lips tightened. “I’m not going back in there.”

I felt like slapping him and telling him to snap out of it.

He looked ashamed. “I just can’t do it
...”

There was another noise at the front of the apartment.

I relented. “Then you’d better hope that you can get out the front door before whoever that is leaves that room.”

“Alright.”

He hesitated.

“What now?” I asked, exasperated.

“It’s just... well, I didn’t think about it before, but...”

“What?” I almost yelled out in impatience.

“It makes no sense in the first place for a grille to be screwed in from the inside.”

I was
trying to compute, but my nerves were messing with my brain.

He went on. “When you make a duct or tunnel or whatever, you fit the
... the grille on from inside the room, not inside the tunnel, or you’d have to crawl out along it.”

He was right. So the tunnel wasn’t made by the occupants of the
Temple of Truth apartment. There was another sound at the front of the apartment. This one was unmistakable. It was a door opening. Not the front door, but the locked one leading to the oversized room. And then there were footsteps.

“Come on!” I whispered, the desperation almost making my voice inaudible.

I bent down and picked up the screws and grille. Cruz started backing away.

“What are you doing?” I demanded, now thoroughly scared.

He was shaking his head. “I have to try to sneak out the front door.”

“Come on, I’ll help you through the tunnel – you’ll be okay.”

“It’s not the tunnel. I left the hammer in the living room.”

“What?!!!”

“For real. I put it down next to the couch when you were showing me that book.”

More footsteps. Getting closer. Another door opening.

No choice. Time to stop thinking and act.

“Okay, go
!” I said, and crawled backward into the tunnel holding the grille and screws. Our eyes met for a millisecond that felt like an hour, then he disappeared from view.

I tried to stay calm as I turned the first screw. My palms were so sweaty that I had to grip the screwdriver super tight. Okay, one done. I didn’t need to screw them all the way in. In fact I realized that I only needed to put in the top two screws for the grille to stay in place. Thank you for coming through when I really needed you, brain!

Before backing down the slope, I strained my ears to see if I could hear anything. I don’t know whether it would have been worse if I had done, but all was silent in the apartment.

I started to shuffle backward. After a minute I felt the slope level out. I just managed to turn around at the corner, and before long I was back in my kitchen.

Then what? I couldn’t call or text Cruz. What if he was hiding somewhere in that apartment and his phone gave him away? I was hoping against hope that he’d made it out okay.

The minutes crawled by like
a video loading when you’ve only got one bar. I sat on the kitchen floor with my phone in my hand, staring at Flash’s empty, unused food bowl.

Finally, it rang. I saw Cruz’s name pop up on the caller ID before the ringtone started and answered it feverishly.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m walking down the stairs,” he answered breathlessly. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

I ran to the front door and flung it open. I rushed out and ran toward the stairwell door. Cruz came through it just as I got there, the hammer at his side.

I fell into his arms. “I’m so happy you’re okay!”

He hugged me tight and kissed my hair. I don’t think I’d ever felt so relieved as at that moment, with my head on his chest and his muscular arms around me.

After a few
seconds I pulled away. “Come back inside and tell me what happened.”

“Sure, but there’s just one thing.”

“What?” I enquired, worried again.

“I’ve
really
gotta pee.”

I laughed and gave him a playful punch on the chest. A minute later I was opening two cans of soda, perched on the kitchen counter
waiting breathlessly for Cruz to tell me how he’d gotten out of that apartment. He walked in, looking about a million times more chill.

“Thanks,” he said, grabbing one of the cans and gulping it down.

“So??!!!”

“Alright, so this is how it went down. I crept along the corridor and heard the front door closing. Was it someone leaving or someone coming in? I stopped and waited. Nothing. So I kept going. There was no one in the entry way and the living room door was still open.”