“Yeah? What about a s
tairway?” I asked. The pale man shook his head again. “Or maybe an alley?”
He was finished with this conversation. “There is only one way in, an honorable death. And there is only one way out.”
“You mean I can be more dead than this?”
He smiled politely.
I tried again. “What’s that, exactly? An honorable death?”
“You face the labyrinth. It does what it will with you. You accept your fate.”
“And? What’s the one way out?”
He shrugged. “No one leaves unless we choose to let them leave.”
Great.
“Thanks, I guess.” What else was there to say?
“Good luck, dead man. May you fight in peace.”
I nodded. “Yeah, sure. I hope so.”
The strange Keeper, if that’s what he was, went back to guarding his post.
I stared down at the massive labyrinth, wondering once again what I’d gotten myself into and how I could possibly get myself out.
They shouldn’t call death passing on. They should call it leveling up.
Because the game only got harder once I lost. And I was more than a little worried it had only just begun.
I couldn’t put it off any longer. The only way to get through this whole labyrinth thing, like most other crappy things, was to just get through it.
I would have to find a path the hard way.
The Warrior’s Way, or whatever.
And fight in peace? What was that about?
My guard was up as I stumbled my way down a staircase cut out of rock. I moved deeper into the valley below, and the stairs widened into layers of steep cliffs, where green moss grew between the rocks, and ivy clung to the walls. When I reached the base of the walled stairwell, I found myself in an immense garden.
Not just a garden like the ones folks in Gatlin grew their tomatoes in, out behind their swamp coolers. A garden in the sense of the Garden of Eden—and not Gardens of Eden, the florist over on Main Street.
It looked like a dream. Because the colors were all wrong—they were too bright, and there were too many of them. As I moved closer, I realized where I was.
The labyrinth.
Rows of hedges tangled with so many flowering bushes that they made the gardens of Ravenwood look small and shabby in comparison.
The farther I walked, the less it seemed like walking and the more it felt like bushwhacking. I pulled branches out of my face and kicked my way through the waist-high brambles and brush. Root hog or die. That’s what Amma would have said. Keep trying.
It reminded me of the time I tried to walk home from Wader’s Creek when I was nine. I had been poking around in Amma’s craft room, which wasn’t a craft room at all. It was the room where she stored the supplies for her charms. She gave me a piece and a half of her mind, and I told her I was walking home. “I can find my own way”—that’s what I told her. But I didn’t find my way, or any way. Instead, I wandered deeper and deeper into the swamplands, spooked by the sound of gators’ tails thrashing in the water.
I didn’t know Amma was following me, until I dropped to my knees and started to cry. She stepped out into the moonlight, hands on her hips. “Guess you shoulda dropped some bread crumbs if you were plannin’ to run off.” She didn’t say anything else, just held out her hand.
“I would’ve found my way back,” I’d said.