I can’t remember my mother’s middle name. It is the third thing the sand took from me since sunrise. First, it was the smell of the pine trees back home. Then, it was the sound of my father’s laugh. Now, Mama’s name is just a hole in my head. If I don’t find that book, my whole family will just stop existing. Not just their bodies, but the fact that they ever breathed at all. That is why I am down here. That is why I let them bolt this brass eye into my skull. It is the only thing I have that does not forget.
Silas is right behind me. He is my partner, but he looks like a ghost. His skin is grey and his hands won’t stop shaking. He keeps touching his own face, making sure his nose and mouth are still where they belong. The desert above us does not just sit still. It eats. It reaches down into your mind and pulls out your life like it is pulling weeds.
“Roxie,” Silas whispered. His voice sounded like dry leaves rubbing together. “The walls. They are breathing.”
I pressed my hand against the tunnel side. It was not cold stone. It was warm. It felt like the flank of a horse that had been running too long. Under my palm, I felt a heavy, slow thud. One. Two. The whole maze had a heartbeat. My brass eye clicked. It whirred and spun, mapping the heat in the dark. The eye saw things my real eye could not. It saw the way the floor was wet with something that was not water. It looked like spit.
We walked deeper into the gut of the place. The air smelled like old copper and wet dirt. Every time I blinked, the hallway changed. I would look left, and there would be a path. I would look back, and there would be a solid wall of red meat-stone. It was like being inside a giant throat that was trying to decide when to swallow.
“Do you remember the sunflowers, Roxie?” Silas asked. His voice was smaller now.
“I remember,” I lied. I couldn’t remember them at all. I only remembered that I should remember. The fear was a cold weight in my stomach. It felt like I was being erased, one page at a time.
The brass eye clicked faster. Up ahead, the tunnel opened into a wide room. In the center sat a pile of white shapes. As we got closer, I saw what they were. They were teeth. Thousands of them. Some were small like a child’s, others were long and jagged. They were all piled up to make a desk. On top of that desk sat the Chronicle of Lost Horizons.
The book was thick and bound in skin that looked too much like mine. It held the names of every town the sand had buried. It held the stories of every person the desert had eaten. If I could just touch it, I could bring my mother back. I could remember the way the wind felt on the porch.
I stepped toward the teeth. The floor beneath me hummed.
“Roxie, wait,” Silas said.
I didn’t wait. I reached out. My fingers brushed the leather cover. It was soft and warm.
The heartbeat in the walls stopped.
The silence was worse than the thumping. It was the kind of quiet that happens right before a predator jumps. Then, the walls began to move. They didn’t just shift. They squeezed. The ceiling dropped a foot. The sides of the room pushed inward. I heard a wet, grinding sound. It was the sound of the teeth on the desk rubbing together.
“It’s a trap,” Silas screamed. He turned to run, but the door we came through was gone. There was only a pink, pulsing slit where the opening used to be. It looked like a wound closing up.
I grabbed the book. It was heavy, like it was filled with lead. The room shook. I fell to my knees as the floor tilted. A thick, clear liquid started to leak from the ceiling. It stung my skin. It smelled like stomach acid.
“Silas! Grab my hand!” I yelled.
I looked over at him. Silas wasn’t moving. He was staring at his own hands with wide, blank eyes.
“Who are you?” he asked. His voice was flat. There was no fear left in it. Just nothing.
The desert had taken the last of him. He didn’t even know his own name. He just stood there as the ceiling came down. The acid dripped onto his shoulder, smoking as it ate through his shirt, but he didn’t even flinch. He just watched it like it was happening to someone else.
The walls were only three feet apart now. I could feel the heat of the stone pressing against my back and my chest. My brass eye was spinning so fast it started to burn. It was screaming a warning in a language made of clicks.
I hugged the book to my chest. I felt the names inside it vibrating. I could feel the history of a thousand dead people trying to crawl into my brain. It hurt. It felt like needles being pushed into my temples. I saw faces I didn’t know. I saw a wedding in a town that didn’t exist anymore. I saw a man crying over a broken plow.
The walls groaned. They were going to crush me. I was going to be a stain on the floor, and Silas would be right there beside me, and neither of us would even know who we were when it happened.
I looked at Silas one last time. He looked back at me, and his eyes were like two empty holes.
“I’m Roxie,” I choked out. The air was getting thin. “I’m your sister.”
He didn’t blink. He just tilted his head.
I turned and shoved the book into a crack in the wall that looked like a vein. I pushed with everything I had. I didn’t care about the history anymore. I didn’t care about the towns or the dead people. I just wanted to breathe.
The book hit something soft inside the wall. The maze let out a sound like a dying bull. A long, wet shriek echoed through the tunnels. The walls suddenly pulled back. They shivered and groaned, retracting like a hand pulling away from a hot stove.
The floor split open.
We fell.
I hit the sand hard. I tasted salt and blood. When I opened my eyes, I was back on the surface. The sun was hot and mean above us. The hole we had fallen through was already gone. There was just flat, white sand in every direction.
I looked at the ground. The book was gone. The desert had swallowed it back down.
I looked at Silas. He was sitting a few feet away, digging his fingers into the sand. He looked at me, and for a second, I hoped. I hoped he would see me.
“It’s hot,” he said. He looked at his hands. “Do I know you, lady?”
My heart broke right then. It didn’t break like glass. It broke like an old, dry bone.
I reached up and touched my brass eye. It was still clicking. It was the only thing that remembered the way Silas used to smile. I stood up and offered him my hand. He took it, but he did it the way a stranger takes a hand to cross a muddy street.
I started walking. I didn’t know where we were going. I didn’t know the name of the town we came from. But I held his hand tight. I would tell him stories the whole way. I would make them up if I had to. I would give him new memories to replace the ones the sand had eaten.
Even if I was the only one left who knew they were lies.