Dead Girl Playing

Chapter 5: First Step Into Hell

POV: Willa

Nobody moved.

The open door breathed cold air into the bus and we all sat in it, passengers staring forward, staring at nothing, staring at the dark rectangle of the entrance like if you looked at it long enough it might change its mind and close.

Cael stood up first. Slowly. He scanned the aisle without urgency, the way someone reads a room before deciding how to enter it. Then he sat back down.

"We wait thirty seconds," he said quietly. "Then we move."

"Why thirty seconds?"

"Because that's how long it'll take for the system to decide we're not moving."

I looked at him. "The system."

"The game. Whatever runs this."

Fifteen seconds passed. I counted. At twenty the voice came back.

"Participants who do not exit the vehicle will be eliminated. This is your only warning."

Nobody spoke.

One man near the middle of the bus, thick-shouldered and somewhere in his forties, lifted his chin and stayed where he was. Deliberate. A refusal.

He was there, and then he wasn't.

No sound. No flash. No anything. Just an empty seat where a person had been, with his bag still on the floor beside it, with the indentation in the cushion still showing where he had sat.

The woman near the window next to his empty seat stood up so fast she knocked her knee on the seat back in front of her. She didn't make a sound about it. She was already moving toward the front.

Then everyone was moving.

The aisle filled with bodies, quiet and pressing, and I was caught in it before I had decided to stand, swept forward with the crowd, pushed toward the door by the weight of thirty people all making the same choice at the same time. Someone's elbow connected with my ribs. Someone else grabbed the seat back I was passing to steady themselves and pulled my arm with it. The door framed the dark outside and one by one people stepped off the bus and disappeared into it.

I stepped off.

The ground was wet. Stone, old and uneven, with moss growing thick between the cracks. My shoes slipped and I caught myself and looked up.

The castle was not like anything I had written.

I had written castles. Dark ones, crumbling ones, ones with histories that leaked into the walls and coloured the air around them. But those were words. Arrangements of letters that approximated the idea of a place. This was the place itself. Walls that had been standing for centuries and knew it. Towers that disappeared into a sky that had no moon and no stars, just a deep pressing darkness that reflected nothing back. The gate we had come through was iron and tall and ancient, and the sound it made when the wind moved through its bars was not a sound any person had designed or intended. It just was.

The cold was different here. Not winter cold. Old cold. The kind that lives inside stone and comes out at night to remind you that you are warm and temporary.

I kept walking because stopping felt worse.

The other passengers spread out in a loose cluster, most of them moving toward the main entrance, a set of wooden doors that stood open at the top of a short flight of stone steps. Nobody spoke. The woman who had been crying earlier walked with her arms wrapped around herself. The young woman with the bright eyes had her hands balled into fists at her sides.

Cael fell into step beside me without announcing it. I was aware of him the way you are aware of the only solid thing in a room that's moving.

"Don't walk at the back," he said.

"Why?"

"Because whatever wants us here doesn't want us all equally. It'll take the easiest first." He moved slightly to my left, not quite in front of me, not quite beside me. A positioning that blocked one angle without being obvious about it. "Stay near the centre of the group."

"Are you protecting me?"

"I'm observing where it's safest to be. You happen to be there."

I almost laughed. The kind of laugh that has nothing happy in it.

I forced myself forward. One foot. Then the other. Because that was the whole thing now. Because the space between stopping and moving was exactly the space where a person got erased from a seat, and I was not done yet. Not here. Not like this. Not before I had done something with the anger that was still burning in my chest underneath all the fear.

A scream split the night behind us.

High and short and cut off abruptly, the way sounds get cut when the thing making them is no longer there.

I spun around.

The back of the group had thinned. Three spaces where people had been. Just empty air and the sound of the gate swinging slowly on its hinges in the wind.

Nobody went back to look.

We knew better already. Half an hour in and we already knew better.

I turned back toward the entrance. The doors were closer now. Thick wood, dark with age, carved with shapes I didn't want to look at directly. Cael was just ahead of me. I pushed myself to match his pace.

Then I stopped.

I stopped because something in the shadows to the left of the entrance had moved. Not the wind. Not a passenger. Something that moved with intention, slow and liquid, like it had all the time that existed and was choosing, very deliberately, to use some of it on me.

It stepped out of the dark.

It was tall. Wrong in its proportions, too long in the arms, too angular in the shoulders. Its clothes looked old, like something from a century that dressed its dead finely. Its face was pale and still and structured like a face but not quite, like something that had learned to make itself look human and had gotten most of the details right.

Its eyes found mine.

The colour of them was not a colour that belonged in a living creature. They held me in place the way a physical grip would.

And then its lips pulled back.

And it smiled.

Not a human smile. Something older and wider and infinitely patient.

It smiled like it had already decided what I was for.