The next door was about twenty minutes down the hall. Same plain wood. Same two torches.
 
“On three,” I said.
 
Agnes looked at me.
 
“On actual three,” I said, and this time I meant it. One, two, three. I kicked. The door swung open nice and easy, like it had been waiting for us.
 
This room was bright. Glowing stones sat in little lanterns all along the walls, the expensive kind that never burn out. Agnes didn't even need to throw her torch. We just stood in the doorway and squinted.
 
In the middle of the room was a stone table. A big one. Way bigger than a table needs to be. Two grown men could've laid down on it side by side and still had room for a sandwich. Along the left wall was a second, normal-sized table, and that one was a disaster.
 
We waited in the doorway a while. Nothing clicked. Nothing hissed. No smoke. I let out a breath and went in.
 
I put my hand on the big stone table. It was cold. Not cave cold. Cold like a coin you left outside all winter. I took my hand back and wiped it on my pants without really knowing why.
 
Agnes was already at the messy table. Tools all over it, and all over the floor under it. Little knives. Tweezers. Hooks. A saw so small it looked like a toy. Agnes picked up one of the knives and turned it over in the light.
 
“Scalpel,” she said. “A good one. Better than mine.”
 
There were papers, too. Hundreds of them. On the table, under the table, stuck to the bottom of a jar. Drawings, mostly. Really good drawings. A person with the skin peeled back so you could see the muscles. A dog, same thing. A wolf. Something with too many legs that I didn't recognize and didn't want to.
 
I started gathering them into a pile.
 
“Somebody left in a hurry,” I said.
 
“How can you tell?”
 
I held up a mug. There was something dried and black at the bottom of it. “Nobody leaves their tea.”
 
Agnes almost smiled. Then she looked around the room again, at the knives and the drawings and that big cold table, and the smile went away.
 
“What scares an alchemist?” she said.
 
I didn't have an answer for that. I thought about it while I stacked the papers, and I didn't love any of the answers I came up with. A dragon, maybe. A really mad king. Something that was still down here somewhere, in a room we hadn't opened yet.
 
I shoved that thought in the back of my head and kept stacking.
 
Near the bottom of the pile was a drawing of a man lying on his back. There was something drawn inside him. Long and thick, curled up from his throat down into his belly, like a rope somebody had coiled up in there. Little arrows pointed at it from all sides, with notes in that curly writing.
 
I looked at it for a second. Then I put it on the pile with the dog and the wolf, because I'm a swordsman and not a doctor, and I didn't want to think about rope.
 
Agnes was looking over my shoulder. She didn't say anything. She just watched it go into the pile.
 
It all went into the sack. The papers. The knives, wrapped up in a rag so they wouldn't poke through. The tweezers. The tiny saw. I tried the big stone table, just to see, but it didn't fit, and Agnes said if I tried again she was going to leave without me.
 
So we left, and it was just the two tables standing there with nothing on them.
 
Out in the hallway, we kept walking. And walking.
 
The doors had stopped. No more torches either. Just red bricks and purple mist and the sound of our boots. Mine went step, squish, step, squish. At least that meant the loop was over. It also meant I had no idea where we were going.
 
I didn't talk much. I was tired. My feet hurt. My head still hurt from the ground hitting it. Agnes was quiet behind me, and I figured she was tired too, so I let her be.
 
After a long time, I stopped.
 
“Okay,” I said. “Break time. Five minutes. I think my boot is eating my sock.”
 
Nobody answered.
 
I turned around.
 
The hallway behind me was empty. Bricks. Mist. The faint glow of my torch, and nothing else.
 
“Agnes?”
 
Nothing.
 
“Agnes, this isn't funny. If you're behind me again I'm going to scream, and you know how that sounds.”
 
Nothing. Not a footstep. Not a laugh.
 
When was the last time I'd heard her? I tried to remember. Her boots behind me. Her breathing. Her asking me to please stop humming. I couldn't remember. I'd been staring at the floor and feeling sorry for myself, and I'd just assumed she was back there, because she always is.
 
She didn't make a sound. She was just gone.
 
My face got hot. My hands got cold. Going forward hadn't found me anything but more hallway. If she was anywhere, she was somewhere back the way we came.
 
I turned around and ran.