Free The Scholomance by R. Lee Smith Page B

concrete basement, after all, which had
inspired her Panic Room. Her own personal theory, when she bothered to think
about it at all, was that brain waves had to be a lot like the signal from a
cellular phone, because the same sorts of things were likely to hamper them:
long distances, great depths, and of course, layers of solid rock.
    Mara tapped her
piece of skull on the door, trying to think.
    Over the years,
she’d managed to improve her telepathic powers quite a bit. She no longer had
to look at the person she was trying to read, for example, although it still
helped her sense of focus. Her range of clarity, particularly for a mind she
knew very well, was about a mile. The Mindstorm reached much further,
inarticulately eating up her inner senses, but useless to her in any search.
    She had to try. There
were no other alternatives. She had to reach through the rock and snag someone.
She had to, or she’d be here forever.
    Mara tossed the
skull away and put her hands on the doors. Touching someone always helped,
particularly if she was doing something sneaky or difficult. As futile as this
whole exercise was apt to be, she had to at least say she’d made the attempt
and done it right, so she put her hands firmly on the door and aimed her mind
out like a searchlight.
    What she struck
in that next instant sent her leaping back in exactly the same skittish alarm
she’d always despised seeing in other people. Such a rabbity response, the sort
of thing that made someone…well, someone like her, want to validate it with a
good slap. Now she was doing it. She may have even let out a yelp of some sort.
In the perfect blackness of the little room, it would have been very easy to
lose her balance and smash her own head open on the stone floor, but luck alone
kept her upright. Upright and staring without sight into the living doors.
    The doors were
alive. They were alive and they were listening. It was not a person, it was a set
of doors. It was solid rock, the same as the floor or the ceiling or the walls
around her, but it was alive. Someone had made it be alive. Someone had poured
some kind of mind into it and brought it to life and given it a job. The door .
    ‘And this is how
you get out,’ Mara heard herself think. She shuddered, then bared her teeth in
the blackness because she hated the thought of cringing in front of a damned
door. Nothing had happened, after all. Nothing had changed. She could still die
here if she decided it was more fun to wring her hands and get all girly about
this. She was in the Scholomance, for God’s sake! There was bound to be worse
than this out there!
    “True,” Mara
whispered. Her voice sounded surprisingly firm, even as quiet as it was. It
helped her focus, helped her center. Ignoring the rapid beating of her heart,
Mara put one foot in front of the other, reached out her arms, and slowly
forced herself back before the living door.
    Its thoughts
were not human thoughts, but they were there, impregnating the dead stone with
awful, unnatural life. It did not see her standing before it, did not feel her
small hands on its cold body, and did not respond until she reached out and
gave it a queasy mental tap, and then, only by writhing psychically around
inside her mind.
    Alive. The doors
were alive. That huddle of miserable bones that used to be a human was wholly
dead, but the doors were alive.
    ‘Let me out,’
Mara thought at them.
    The doors
twisted in her mind, reacting to her command as a severed tentacle reacts to
little jolts of electricity, writhing and clutching at itself, but unaware of
her.
    Mara focused,
crushing her own unease to lock her mental hands around the dull intelligence
before her and squeeze. **Open up,** she thought at them, thought into them, drilling her will down deep where it would have to hear her.
    The doors
moaned, a terrible and silent groan that resounded in her every psychic pore. She
shuddered again, snarled again, and kept her hands where they