The antechamber door shut behind Adah, thankfully for the last time. With any luck, she’d be back in the open air before too long, enjoying a few moments of solitude as the first competitor to turn in Locke’s final gift.
Adah had faith in her theory about the difficulty of Locke’s riddles and that their shift toward an abstract answer would trip Ciel’s posse up. She and Ren had good odds of dodging today’s penalty, but she’d already ditched that noncommittal approach to the show. Anything less than a win was a loss, and even a win was only the first step in Adah’s conquest of this show.
If she had the power of sabotage and an exemption from the next challenge at her disposal, Adah could ramp her aggression up in ways that would catch both Ciel and the viewers off guard.
But as with every plan, she had to proceed one step at a time. There would be no victory if she couldn’t solve Locke’s final riddle fast enough.
“I wish I could say I made the last one easy so you could all get out of those dark pipes,” Locke’s voice played over the loudspeaker once more, “but that wouldn’t be a very exciting finale. I’m interested to see how you approach this one. Here we go: It’s something precious, yet impossible to hold in your hand. Maybe that’s why those who lose it have such a hard time finding it again. But thanks to human magic, we see it more than now and then. Good luck everyone!”
Adah smiled as the door to the main pipe slid open. Her prediction had proved correct—the final riddle was the most abstract yet. Locke had even said this last gift wasn’t anything you could hold in your hand. It was something intangible.
Of course, that couldn’t be true. Every riddle had its trick, and the key to solving this one was to find an object that could represent the idea Locke was expressing through it. Or, perhaps this was an object capable of turning the intangible into something you could see and hold.
In the end, the same rules applied as every other round. The item in question had to be contained within these tunnels. It had to be something common and cheap enough that the crew could procure seven copies of it. It had to be something you could find in the dark and carry out of the tunnel with you. And finally—the rule that lent itself best to this riddle’s trick—the item had to act as a reasonable gift from Locke.
Except in this case, it wasn’t the item that was Locke’s gift but the idea behind it.
Something precious that one person might give another, but that they couldn’t hand over to you, couldn’t wrap up with a bow.
Adah rattled off ideas in her head as she crawled through her tunnel.
An experience. A laugh. A smile. Happiness. Excitement.
A romance was about more than presents. Thinking plainly, dates were the bread and butter of a relationship. Even between friends, it was what you did when you hung out together that served as the foundation of your bond. It was about what you felt in that moment and what feelings stayed with you after.
Those who lose it have a hard time finding it again.
A bond was difficult to replace, but that didn’t seem right. Calling a bond a gift was a bit of a stretch, even in the context of a riddle. And what object would even represent that? A friendship bracelet? No, that was too wishy-washy. In this challenge, you would feel certain that you found right object once you solved the riddle.
With human magic, we see it more than now and then.
Seeing it again… Like a memory.
If the beginning of a riddle established the lock, then the last line could serve as the key.
It was possible that one of the ideas Adah had listed off to herself earlier was the real answer to the riddle, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was finding the right object. Whether Locke’s gift was a smile or the feeling of happiness or something else entirely, all of those options could be “seen again” thanks to a memory.
And with the right tool, you could literally see them again.
During her search for the perfume bottle, Adah had come across an object that had stumped her no matter how much she ran her fingers over it. It was a rectangular block a little larger than her hand, with strange contours and ridges that had seemed random at the time. Now that she had an inkling of what Locke’s last gift might be, she could start to pin an identity to that strange shape. She just needed to find it again to confirm her suspicions.
Adah’s lack of a light source made tracking her position along the length of her tunnel difficult, but she had no trouble remembering which objects she’d found on the left side of the tunnel versus the right. That little rectangle had definitely been on the left side and, even if she couldn’t say how far into the tunnel it was, she knew she hadn’t found it at the beginning.
She crawled a few paces forward before searching the left half of the pipe as thoroughly as possible. As with the teddy bear and perfume bottle, once she knew what general shape and texture she was looking for, Adah could make rapid progress down the pipe. She even went all-in on her assumptions and tossed any irrelevant objects against the pipe’s right wall. If she failed to find what she was looking for on her first pass through, she’d wind up with a lot less clutter to sift through on her second pass. With the way the point totals stood, she had to bet everything on this guess.
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In the end, she never had to worry about a second pass.
She gasped as her fingers wrapped around that rectangular shape. After her struggle to find the perfume bottle, the complete darkness of this tunnel had taken on a sinister aura. If she’d gotten stuck in here long enough, she might have started to believe the void was reaching out with black hands, like those of her scythe, to snatch away whatever object she was searching for. She was so relieved to find her objective so quickly that she almost forgot to inspect it.
Adah felt around the object, looking for one hint in particular that would erase all her doubts. She found what was she looking for along one of the thin sides of the block: a tiny, domed bump that clicked when she pressed it.
This was an outdated version, but some people might consider that chic. It served the purposes of the challenge well, though. These disposal versions were cheap and surprisingly sturdy.
What could capture a memory? A smile? The joy of being with someone dear to you?
A camera. A little invention of human magic.
Adah wouldn’t have realized it before she’d gotten to know him better, but Locke was a sentimental guy. He was a good guy. A proper magical boy.
He had lost all his friends, and with them he had lost something terribly difficult to find again.
Adah had seen it on his face and heard it in his voice when they'd met before his award ceremony. All light had left him. Despite all the fans he still had and all that he had accomplished up until that point, he had been drowning in darkness. Had he looked at photos of him and his teammates to find a spark of light during that time? Had that helped him find his way or, at least, kept him going?
The most esoteric of his riddles may have been the one that meant the most. He had wanted to communicate something—to share a feeling or get it off his chest.
Just saying it outright wasn’t good enough. Could he express it in such a way that someone who traced their fingers along the shape of his sentence could feel what he had felt? Could he show them something they couldn’t see?
Adah crawled toward the entrance of the tunnel. Her knees crashed down on one knick-knack after another, but she ignored the pain. She scattered aside all the clutter each time she reached out her hands, trying to clear a path to the outside. She wouldn’t stop until she slammed headfirst into the antechamber door.
She wanted to be the first out on this final round. She wanted to win.
She wanted to show Locke that she’d solved his riddle. That it hadn’t taken her very long at all. That she understood.
It was her hand that bumped into the door before her head. A second later, the panel slid open. That was the sign she’d found the correct item—now she just needed to be the first to have done so.
Once she crawled through the antechamber and out of the tunnel, the light of the set blinded her as it had the past two rounds. She couldn’t see if she had won, but in a moment she’d hear about it.
This round, it was Locke’s voice that spoke over the loudspeaker.
“Looks like I should’ve made it harder,” he said. “Heartbreak’s solved it already.”
As her eyes adjusted to the light, Adah squinted up at Locke. She couldn’t make out all the details of his face, but one thing was for sure—he was smiling at her.
Then, she heard a familiar noise from beside her. Another antechamber door had slid open.
Ren emerged from her tunnel, squinting and shielding her eyes the same way Adah had. While Locke announced her second place finish, she spun around until she discovered Adah was the only competitor who had beaten her.
She gave Adah a grin of her own and said, “Another good guess.”
“Let’s see if it was good enough,” Adah said.
With the current standings, Adah had gained ten points for a total of nineteen and Ren eight points for a total of eighteen. Felt and Iyswell both sat at fourteen, leaving Adah’s first place position at risk if either of them finished third in this round. So, she and Ren watched the entrances of the remaining five tunnels in silence.
Let anyone—anyone—but Felt or Iyswell show their face next.
Unlike last week, Adah must not have used up her tiny pool of luck earlier in this challenge. The next pipe to open was the one directly next to Ren’s. Out came Tiella, her eyes already squeezed tight in anticipation of the blinding studio lights.
That settled it.
This challenge belonged to Adah. It was a win—a proper win at that, with first place in both the final round and the standings as a whole.
At this point, the challenge was simply a battle between Zoe and Pirouette for today’s penalty. Adah paid no attention to who emerged from their tunnel next; she was too busy relishing the feeling of victory. It wasn’t until the buzzer blared to signal the end of the challenge that her mind returned to the present.
“A nail-biter from start to finish!” Arthur announced over the loudspeaker. “Our top three finishers all stayed within one point of another. That must be a testament to the quality of your riddles, Locke.”
“Or the quality of these magical girls,” Locke said as Arthur passed the microphone over to him. “It was really fun watching you all compete so seriously. It made me glad I decided to stop by. With that, I guess now’s the time to congratulate today’s winner?”
“Indeed,” Arthur agreed. “Let’s tally up those points and see who today’s riddlemaster truly was!”
For the viewers, some flashy graphic would probably pop onto the screen, but for Adah and the rest of the cast, Arthur’s tally amounted to him reading the scorecard aloud.
Adah
19 (+10)
Ren
18 (+8)
Iyswell
18 (+4)
Tiella
14 (+6)
Felt
14 (+0)
Zoe
7 (+2)
Pirouette
3 (+1)