ABSENT FEELING by Blake Pierce

Author:Blake Pierce [Pierce, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

Amber Young’s eyes narrowed as she worked on the puzzle box, trying to find an answer, moving quickly, not daring to hesitate even for a moment.

The puzzle box was meant to be almost impossible, but Amber was determined to find the right answers. She wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t slow down. Her fingers moved quickly, shuffling the pieces around, trying to find the right combination. She had always loved puzzles, the way that every piece fit together perfectly to create something beautiful. This box was no exception, and she was going to find a way in. She had to.

Amber bent her petite frame over the cube as she worked on it, her dark slacks stretching with the movement. She pushed her glasses up high on her button nose. Her blonde braid swung into her field of vision and she flicked it back out of the way so that she could concentrate. She had rolled up the sleeves of her cream sweater to work, determined to get this right.

She could feel the pressure building up in her, every second that ticked past only making the tension in her muscles feel greater. Amber could feel her fingers fumbling with that tension, slowing her down when she needed to move fast, making it harder to get the pieces of the puzzle to move in the right way.

There was some comfort in knowing that she’d already gotten part of it right: a series of levers whose pattern seemed to match that of a sine wave. That had lit up a second section, forming a maze that it seemed she had to guide a marker through without touching the lines. Amber was doing her best to achieve that now, her eyes flicking back and forth between the pattern on the box and the marker. It was a delicate process, and she could feel her fingers almost cramping with the effort, but she was determined to get it right. One slip and she would have to go back to the start.

There was no time for that. No time for anything now except to succeed.

More seconds were slipping away. Amber was running out of time. The stakes here were high, but she couldn’t let that distract her. She had to focus, to keep her mind sharp and clear. She couldn’t let her attention drift to anything beyond the puzzle, couldn’t think about what it would mean to succeed, or to fail.

Amber got the marker through the maze and allowed herself a brief breath before moving on to start work on another face of the cube. This was a moving tiles puzzle, reconstructing a design that Amber quickly realized was a copy of the Mappa Mundi, the famous medieval map of the known world. That meant that she had to recall as much as she could of that medieval design, then try to shuffle the tiles, trying to get them to produce the correct design. One false move, one misjudgment about how to move the tiles, and she could lose precious, irreplaceable time on this.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.