The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)(87)
Is this whole twisted game just a reminder—an incessant reminder—to put family first?
Is that all I am?
Jameson had said, right from the beginning, that I was special. I hadn’t realized until now how badly I’d wanted to believe that he was right, that I wasn’t invisible, wasn’t wallpaper. I wanted to believe that Tobias Hawthorne had seen something in me that had told him I could do this, that I could handle the stares and the limelight, the responsibility, the riddles, the threats—all of it. I wanted to matter.
I didn’t want to be the glass ballerina or the knife. I wanted to prove, at least to myself, that I was something.
Jameson may have been done with the game, but I wanted to win.
CHAPTER 81
Top of the clock
Meet me at high
Tell the late day hello
Wish the morning good-bye
A twist and a flip
What do you see?
Take them two at a time
And come find me
I sat on the steps, staring at the words, then worked through the rhyme line by line, turning the piece of stained glass over in my hands. Top of the clock. I pictured a clock’s face in my head. What’s at the top?
“Twelve.” I rolled that over in my mind. The number at the top of a clock is twelve. Like dominos, that set off a chain reaction in my mind. Meet me at high…
High what?
“Noon.” That was a guess, but the next two lines seemed to confirm it. Noon happened in the middle of the day, when you said good-bye to the morning and hello to what came after.
I moved on to the second half of the riddle… and I got nothing.
A twist and a flip
What do you see?
Take them two at a time
And come find me
I focused on the stained glass. Was I supposed to twist it? Flip it? Did we need to assemble all of the pieces somehow?
“You look like you swallowed a squirrel.” Xander plopped down on the stairs next to me.
I definitely did not look like I’d swallowed a squirrel, but I was guessing that was Xander’s way of asking if I was okay, so I let it go. “Your brothers don’t want anything to do with me,” I said quietly.
“I guess my kind gesture of sending you all to the Black Wood together exploded.” Xander made a face. “To be fair, most of my gestures end up exploding.”
That startled a laugh out of me. I tilted the step in his direction. “The game’s not over,” I told him. He read the inscription. “I found it last night, after the Black Wood.” I held up the stained glass. “What do you make of this?”
“Now, where,” Xander said thoughtfully, “have I seen something that looks like that?”
CHAPTER 82
I hadn’t been back in the Great Room since the reading of the will. Its stained-glass window was tall—eight feet high to only three feet wide—and the lowest point was even with the top of my head. The design was simple and geometric. In the topmost corners were two octagons, the exact size, shade, color, and cut as the one in my hand.
I craned my neck to get a better look. A twist and a flip…
“What do you think?” Xander asked me.
I cocked my head to the side. “I think we’re going to need a ladder.”
Perched high on the ladder, with Xander holding it down below, I pressed my hand against one of the stained-glass octagons. At first, nothing happened, but when I pushed on the left side, the octagon rotated—seventy degrees, and then something stopped it.
Does that qualify as a twist?
I turned the second octagon. Pressing left and right didn’t do anything, but pushing at the bottom did. The glass flipped a hundred and eighty degrees and then some, before locking into place.
I made my way back down to Xander, who was holding the ladder, unsure what I’d accomplished. “A twist and a flip,” I recited. “What do you see?”
We stepped back, taking in the wide view. Sun shone through the window, causing diffused colored lights to appear on the Great Room Floor. The two panels I’d turned, in contrast, cast purple beams. Eventually, those beams crossed.
What do you see?
Xander squatted at the spot where the beams of light met on the floor. “Nothing.” He tested the floorboard. “I was expecting it to pop out, or to give…”
I went back to the riddle. What do you see? I saw the light. I saw the beams crossing.… When that didn’t go anywhere, I went farther back in the poem—all the way to the top.
“Noon,” I remembered. “The first half of the riddle described noon.” The gears in my brain turned faster. “The angle of the beams must depend at least a little on the angle of the sun. Maybe the twist and the flip only show you what you need to see at noon?”
Xander chewed on that for a second. “We could wait,” he said. “Or…” He dragged out the word. “We could cheat.”
We spread out, testing the surrounding floorboards. It wasn’t that long until noon. The angles couldn’t change that much. I tapped the heel of my hand against board after board. Secure. Secure. Secure.
“Find anything?” Xander asked me.
Secure. Secure. Loose. The board beneath my hand wasn’t wiggling, but it had more give than the others. “Xander—over here!”