Free About the Dark by helenrena Page B

probably her body bumping against the wooden
counter as she dived across it, trying to grab me. I felt the air
swishing around me from her violent movement. I ducked. Then, with
my legs still bent at the knees, I tiptoed away from the counter
and kept on going until I bumped into the wall because the single
most important thing in this game was to not get lost in the
room.
    Sure, we’d spent here all our lives. We knew
every scratch on the floor, every bump on the walls. We knew the
number of steps between the counter and the closest wall (ten of
mine and seven of Fox’s), and yet every time I went blind, I felt
disoriented. Every. Single. Time. It was like the darkness around
me kept on churning and shifting, and the ten steps to the wall
turned into fifteen or twenty or infinity when I couldn’t find the
damn thing at all.
    As for the others, they must have felt just
as lost, maybe even more. Over the years, I had of course caught on
their strategies of playing the blind man’s bluff. Fox, for
example, would usually stay by the counter, our mandatory starting
point, and try to calculate where I was, judging by who knew what.
The sounds I made? My previous behaviors? Demi, on the contrary,
would demand I say something often, then stomp as fast she dared in
the direction of my voice. And Sin…well, Sin unfortunately liked to
improvise and experiment. And yet, even with all these schemes in
the air, they’d seldom captured me.
    “Ever!” Demi barked. “Are you going to say
something or what?”
    “I’m right here,” I said and hugged the wall.
“Wherever here is.”
    At once there was a thud, which must have
been Demi hopping onto the counter. In her haste to reach me, she’d
clearly decided not to bother with walking around it. I listened
for the sound of her jumping down, but all was quiet. Why was Demi
just sitting there? That’s when I heard a very familiar polyester
rustling.
    “Sin,” she called out in the next moment,
“don’t take off your blindfolds until I say so.”
    “What?” he asked.
    But Fox got it. “Oh, that’s why I never hear
your dress, Ev. I hope you won’t get cold. And hey, while we’re on
the topic: Sinna, be kind and don’t grope my girlfriend if you
catch her.”
    Demi jumped down, and I heard her stampeding
toward me. I hastened to bring the picture of the wall I was
hugging before my mental eye. Yes, there were three stacks of books
along it, the biggest one being my bed. I leaned forward. Then,
keeping my left hand on the wall and my right one in front of me to
feel for the books, I traipsed ahead.
    Crash . It sounded as if two bodies
collided, and I paused, worried that it was Fox who’d gotten hurt.
Or Sinna.
    “What the hell?” groaned Fox’s voice from
somewhere close to the floor. “Okay, Dem, you can’t dash about like
this. You’ll kill us all.”
    “Sorry,” Demi muttered, her tone strained
because she must have knocked the wind out of herself too.
    I resumed my walk.
    What troubled me the most was that I had no
idea where Sin was. Had he walked away from the counter? When he’d
talked to Demi the last time, his voice had sounded like he’d still
been there, but where was he now? What if he’d managed to find my
wall?
    Fox began humming some wild tune; up and down
it went, and the downs sometimes ended with muted grunts because he
seemed to still be in pain.
    Demi let out a hissing sigh. “Fox, could you
friggin’ please shut up? I’m trying to hear Ever.”
    “Yeah, right,” Fox said. “So you could smash
into my groin again. I don’t think so.” He went on with his
humming, and Demi must have decided to change the way she hunted
me: she started sniffing, trying to pick up my scent. Which was
beyond ridiculous—this room had been full of books for a very, very
long time—it reeked of books.
    Fox stopped humming. “You do know, Dem, that
this place is basically airtight, right? And we won’t get any fresh
oxygen, not until our guards come