We have gotten way better at killing Sirens.

  I don’t fear meeting another Siren. I do fear spending hours walking in circles.

  Eating the handful of glolives I had in my pocket speeds up my healing considerably. Out of curiosity, I tried using Life Siphon on the already dead Siren and on a glolive. Neither did anything. I run my hand over my calf. Not even a scar. That’s slightly disappointing. A few good scars wouldn’t be a bad thing.

  I lead us back out the way we came. I hold the chalk lightly to the wall to start making a line. It’s a more advanced version of the Right-Hand-Hedge-Maze trick.

  We encounter a rat. Baconated.

  I see some crawlers scoot into holes and cracks where the wall becomes the floor. They leave us alone when we’re moving.

  Turn. Chalk line. Intersection. Hall. Monotony. Rat. Charge. Chalk line. More hall.

  My best guess is it’s somewhere between a half hour and forty-five minutes later when we come to…

  The pool in the chamber again?

  I check the wall. There is no chalk line. It’s not the same place. I tuck the chalk in my pocket, hold the spear in fighting stance and step in.

  There’s the mangled corpse of the Siren. The hall entrance has the burn marks. This has to be the same place.

  “Sadie, any ideas?”

  “I was thinking it would be nice to see flowers again.”

  I turn to her. “I meant about how we keep coming back to the same room.”

  “Ah,” she says. “No.”

  I examine the mauled Siren. It’s the same one. What the living hell is happening?

  “I drew the line on the wall,” I say, heading to the corridor. “I mean, you saw that, right?”

  “You drew the line on the wall,” she agrees. Baco is busy lapping water by the Siren corpse.

  “Is something erasing the line? Are we being followed?”

  “Maybe the line isn’t long enough to go the whole distance we walked.”

  It’s an incredibly ridiculous idea, but she says it with such honest conviction that I can’t help but consider it. I look at the chalk. I look at Sadie. I do not understand magic, but I’ve learned enough about it to not question. Still, I do have to verify it.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  I go to the chamber wall and start drawing a zig zag line, up and down, up and down, as I step along the wall. Soon, I have fifteen feet of up and down scribbles. I go a bit further, stop, and find where I started drawing.

  I swear I started a few steps over from where the line ends.

  I go back to where I stopped drawing and now take the line over my big zig zag back to where I started. As I’m drawing, I’m watching at the zig zag getting shorter. It’s as if the chalk is only twenty meters long, like a piece of string. I draw some, some vanishes. I draw a quick smiley face, and with each stroke I lay, the line gets shorter. I stand back from the wall and study my limited length line drawing.

  “Well,” I say. “This is absolutely fascinating and utterly useless. How are we getting out?”

  “Maybe we go the other way this time?”

  It makes no sense. But neither does chalk that only draws a certain length line but lasts forever.

  By doing my drawing test, I sucked up all of the line that I left on the walls outside the chamber. But I know the direction we came from. We go back that way, this time intentionally retracing our steps.

  We make the first turn and we are in a cylindrical hall, almost perfectly round.

  We did not come from a cylindrical hall, almost perfectly round. We backtracked the way we came from and we aren’t anyplace we’ve been before. Even if I had that heads up display map, I’m not sure this place follows the rules of reality that I’ve grown up with.

  “Ever seen anything like this before?” I ask.

  “Nope. That one’s new to me,” she says.

  There are loads of stories about being in the labyrinth; that means there has to be ways out. After all, someone had to tell those stories. There is a solution. Might not be obvious or even logical, but there is a solution.

  A what point did a passage change? Could it be seen? Did it specifically happen when no one was looking? Without at least a shadow to some of these answers, exiting the labyrinth would end up being luck.

  I don’t believe in luck. I believe in research and answers.

  We get to a suitable test length of hallway, maybe fifty good paces from one corner to the other. If the passage ran east-west, the corner at each side went south. This is a length of hallway we have never been to. I know this because there’s a pattern of glowing moss on the wall in a pattern that looks like the ‘cool’ emoji - a smiley face wearing sunglasses. I would remember if we had seen that. We walk the length, turn the corner and I immediately turn and go back the way we came.

  Bingo.

  The hallway around the corner is NOT the hallway that we came from. There’s a big rock in the way that we would have had to skirt around.

  “You two stand at this corner. Don’t move. Keep looking up that way and this way.”

  “How are we supposed to do that if we don’t move?” Sadie asks.

  “You can move your head. But stay right here. I’m going up the hall to that corner and come back.”

  I run. I peer around the corner—a rough brown rock, and a puddle a short distance away. I duck back around the corner to Sadie. I poke my head slowly to where I looked. No change. It’s a rough brown rock and a puddle. I take more steps to Sadie.

  “Remember shuttle runs in gym? You run back and forth on the court, tagging the line and running back to the other side. You did this until some kid inevitably fell and shattered their tibia or something.”

  “Gym?”

  “Never mind.”

  I go back to the corner. No change. I go all the way back to Sadie, and all the way back to the test corner.

  Gray. Freaking. Rock.

  It’s not the same hall.

  I sprint back to Sadie, and back to the hall.

  I’m looking at an intersection that wasn’t there.

  This is how the labyrinth claimed its victims. It’s not static. Something, somehow makes escape impossible. I sprint back and forth. I count at least six different hallways that I can get to around the corner. Then they start to seem familiar. The passageways are repeating, but not in the same order.

  Back to Sadie, back around the corner. I have to figure which of the switchable hallways is the right one to choose.

  Probably not the one that has me standing at the entrance to what I can only call a Siren’s lair.