Chapter 44 Nina

Chapter 44

?Nina

The room flickers into darkness.

Nina blinks in the black that suddenly envelops her.

She isn't in the center of the room anymore. She tried her hardest. She stayed in the ash until the pain, like white-hot blindness, overcame her and she scrambled back onto the raised platform and rested.

The temperature readout has continued, unseen by her.

She stayed out there until it hit fifty-six. Her knees, hands, shins, and feet are mottled red and white, the pain excruciating.

She did her best but she could stay there no longer. She knows the key is in the center of the room but she hasn't covered enough of it yet. Her only hope is that the room will reach a certain temperature and then reset to forty once more. Though how long that might take and if she will stay conscious for that long, she does not know.

And now the room is in darkness.

Perhaps this is the end of the game, she muses, her breathing coming in slow deep pulls. Perhaps she will just be left in darkness. Across the space there comes a low hydraulic sound and then on her burnt legs the cool whisper of a breeze.

Nina looks up.

She tries to focus her eyes across the dark room, in the direction she entered. There's something different. She can't tell if it's a mirage brought on by her various, now severe injuries, or if it's real. But the darkness seems to lift ever so slightly at the other side of the room.

Nina stumbles up to standing and gently bends to hover a hand over the ash-covered floor. It reached as high as seventy-seven Celsius the last time she checked the screen.

She can still feel the radiating heat of it. She lowers her hand closer to its surface; it's hot, unbearably hot. She listens in the silence and thinks she can make out the distant sound of an alarm blaring.

Perhaps this is it, perhaps this is her being saved. But no one is here.

She might have only one shot.

Her mind weighs the choices and without missing a beat she flies across the burning-hot floor in great stumbling fluttering strides, plowing toward the open door that leads back up the stairs, her rasping breath tearing at her throat.