Each of the six walls was made of floor-to-ceiling glass, schools of bright fish swimming in the water behind them.
A massive aquarium.
Baby sharks swam among the smaller fish.
Ancient-looking anchors and chains hung down into the tanks from the ceilings. Rocks and chests and scattered coins sat at the bottom.
All of the light came from bulbs within the aquarium itself. The only part of the walls that wasn’t glass was the door through which we’d entered. Fish swam freely behind the glass above and at the sides of the door—except that the tanks were divided into six, with a glass partition between each tank.
The timer clock was fixed to the back of the door, as before.
Beneath my feet, the floor was covered in blue tiles. A hexagonal wooden prism occupied the middle of the room—almost exactly the same as the last one, except the inlaid sections of lighter wood had a different pattern. This time, the inlaid sections were six horizontal bands around the box, each about the height of my hand.
Everyone stood transfixed.
Panic spiralled through me. I didn’t expect anything like this. What were we meant to do here? Was it just the box, or did the aquarium form part of the puzzle?
“Shouldn’t we make some kind of start?” Kara walked up to a glass wall and tapped it. She pushed the hood back, the lights inside the aquarium catching the pretty curves of her face as her hair fell around her shoulders.
Cormack’s weasel’s piss scowl turned to open-mouthed wonder as he turned and looked across at Kara. She seemed instantly uncomfortable as she became aware of his eyes on her.
“Haven’t noticed her before, huh, Cormack?” Richard winked. “Too busy looking at the sunbaking beauties, huh?”
Cormack corrected his expression. “What are you talking about, you mad thing? Anyway, forget it. We need to make a start, just like the girl said.”
“I have a name. It’s Kara.” Kara raised her eyebrows to make her point.
“Kara.” Cormack lifted his chin in a nod. “I’ll remember that.”
Richard made a derisive snort. “What you need to remember is that this is a competition.”
“Everything in life is a competition,” Cormack retorted. He stormed away to the wall opposite Kara, cupping his hands to peer inside the glass.
Richard made his way to another wall of the aquarium, whistling and sounding unhurried, but I already knew him well enough to know that it was an act.
Louelle stood by herself in the one spot, as though absorbing clues by osmosis. Saul merely looked lost.
I rushed to the hexagon box. The box had been the puzzle in the last challenge. Maybe the aquarium was just a distraction.
Putting my ear to the wooden surface, I listened.
No ticking.
No sound.
I went around the box, listening and knocking.
Nothing.
The box didn’t sound hollow inside. It seemed solid.
Saul ventured across, watching but not offering help.
Moving back, I studied the surfaces of the box. There were tiny engravings in the middle of each horizontal band of wood. “Look, Saul.” I touched a finger to a symbol on one of the six sides of the box. “You can only just see it. It’s a—”
“Fish,” finished Saul looking over my shoulder, holding his glasses out from the bridge of his nose to see the symbol better. “We need some better light in here. That aquarium is blinding me. Yeah, looks like a fish.”
Trying to shield my eyes, I stepped around the box. “Okay, so six symbols of fish,” I said quickly. “Scattered around these six bands. Is it some kind of code?”
“I’d say so,” said Saul. “I run a puzzle toy business. It’s a hobby—I don’t make much money from it.” His tone turned defensive as he added, “My wife and kids think it’s weird.”
“It’s not weird,” I said. “Any idea what this is?”
“My guess would be that the symbols have to match up.”
I stared at him blankly. “Okay, Saul, but how?”
“Seems too easy, but you’d just”—he grasped hold of the first band—“and twist it.”
Miraculously, the band of wood spun around, and he matched the top fish with a second fish. A smile cracked his face. Seeming to be on a mission now, he spun the third, fourth, fifth and sixth bands around.
Now we had a matching vertical line of fishes.
The hexagonal box was like a giant combination lock—like the metal, barrel-shaped lock that I used for my bicycle, in which I had to turn the sections of numbers around to match my number code.