Free Building Blocks by Cynthia Voigt Page B

how many openings into the room there had been, but then he remembered that probably like a man lost in the woods he had been going in circles and circles, getting nowhere, without any sense of direction—
    â€œStop it!” he told himself. His voice echoed strangely. He had always moved to the right, there was nothing to do with direction in here. It was just recognition. But his memory was crowded withundistinguishable shapes, all of them black and rocky—he couldn’t recognize anything.
    And the light was getting yellower, and that meant it was giving out, and he’d better find his opening, fast.
    Brann’s heart beat and his legs shook, partly with the effort required not to break into a run. His hands shook with fear. He gulped for air.
    He made himself sit down, crouching with his knees up against his chest, his back against the rough wall. He counted to ten, then twenty. He said the alphabet backwards. He shone the light on his feet, to keep from seeing the stone underground room around him, just a few short feet, really, from the earth’s surface—if only he could find it.
    He had a couple of cuts on the heel of his right foot. He licked his fingers and wiped the blood off, then licked the blood off his own fingers.
    His mind raced around the room banging up against the walls, trying to remember something, anything that would help. His body wanted to move the same way. What was he going to do? He had to do something; you couldn’t just sit there and wait.
    Because he was trapped—trapped in this circularcave and he’d be really stupid to try any tunnel he wasn’t sure of, because he could crawl deeper away until he died. Of hunger. Of exhaustion. And he’d thought there was some terrific special reason for him to have traveled back in time. Well, maybe this was it, and maybe later a later Brann would come and find his bones. . . . Except that couldn’t be, because he was the later Brann. So he was trapped in a time circle, and he’d never even be able to warn that later Brann because he’d never get out, and the later Brann would never know until now, when he was trapped in the cave. That was fate with a vengeance.
    Brann sat shaking, his teeth chattering, his unseeing eyes fixed on his ten toes coming out from his feet in two tidy rows. He felt like his brain was cracking in half. He had never thought about how you could go crazy from being afraid. He’d heard of it, of course, but those were just ghost stories. But he had to stop thinking or he would go crazy, he had to stop being afraid, or being this much afraid. But he couldn’t.
    All right, he said to himself, his chest so tight he had to push it out every time he wanted to take a breath, so what. It’s fate. And you had to grab fate if you were worth anything. That’s the hard truth, hesaid to himself, you hear? If you have to grab fate then you grab it, like Arthur grabbed Excalibur to take the sword out of the stone. Because he must have grabbed Excalibur the same way, at the end, to throw it back into the water, the hilt hard and heavy in his hand, and both of them were fate.
    The band around Brann’s chest tightened and he started to cry—sniveling like a baby, whimpering, he thought in a back corner of his brain. And he couldn’t stop, because after all he couldn’t grab onto his fate. He pulled up his T-shirt to wipe his nose on, furious at himself.
    â€œOh God, what am I going to do?” he wondered, and heard his own terrified voice.
    Another voice called his name: “Brann? Brann?”
    Stupid chicken, Brann said to himself, sucking in air to clear his nose, rubbing the back of his left hand across his eyes to hide the marks of tears. If he’d only thought, Kevin was outside and he wasn’t very far in—he’d panicked. He felt like a jerk, a real jerk. He hoped nothing showed.
    â€œIn here,” he said. “Can you see the