I’VE STOPPED SHIVERING. That’s a bad sign. My body’s beginning to go numb with cold and frostbite. My limbs move lethargically, as if swimming through soup. And still I climb—from one poor soul to the next.
The wall stretches away above me—a vertical cliff. I have no safety harness and no spotter waiting below. The ice is almost perfectly smooth and one wrong step would certainly spell my end.
The silver light that illuminated this cavern is slowly fading until only the wall I’m climbing resonates with a soft glow. It feels as if I’m climbing into a void. I grip frozen hands with my frozen fingers and continue to haul myself up. Five metres. Ten. Twenty.
Then the hand I’m holding snaps off.
I tumble into darkness.
I close my eyes. I don’t scream—my breath is a fog in my throat—but my fingers claw at the icy wall as if unwilling to give up. But there’s no purchase to be found. Here I go—the next sorry victim of this icy hall. Icy wind whistles by me. My icy fingers are burned raw by the friction of the ice.
So close. I was so close.
My plummet abruptly ends, but I’m not dead. Instead, I hear a pop and my left shoulder screams in its socket. My watch scrapes a burning trail over my wrist and halfway up my hand.
I look up. Somehow, in my flailing descent, I managed to get my watch caught between a pair of feet frozen close together. As if from a long way off, I remember Willow beside me on a rickety wooden bridge. I won’t let you fall.
I find my footing and pry my arm from between the feet. My arm is dislocated and dangles useless at my side, but I continue my ragged climb. The frozen limbs seem more plentiful here, and I scale them like a steep staircase.
Every breath is a needle in my chest. I can feel hypothermia settling on my lungs. I barely notice my wet clothing now—but there it is! I can see the top.
At the summit, I laugh. The laugh is long and defeated. It saps the adrenaline from my veins and the will from my body. Before it’s finished, the laugh transforms into a wet cough.
All right labyrinth. What’s next?
The answer’s almost a relief. It’s a slide. The world around me is dark, save for the sheer drop behind me and an icy chute ahead. After that labourious climb, my reward is a futile race to the bottom.
I sit on the edge of the slide, remembering a ramp that I built up to my grandparents’ rooftop and the snowbank that I jumped into afterwards. I push myself off, because it almost doesn’t matter what awaits me below.