CHAPTER 21
Web of the Psychotic Spider

Down in the chiming chamber, Nick had grown more and more determined to throw off his shackles. So much of his life had been a game of follow the leader. During his living days he had followed friends and trends, never sticking his neck out to do anything on his own. Then, when he first arrived in Everlost, he had followed Allie, because she was the one with momentum. She had always been the one with a goal, and a plan to reach it, however misguided it might be. His time in a pickle barrel had certainly changed his perspective on things. During all that time, he could do nothing but wait for rescue to come from the outside. Nothing was worse than that limp, lonely feeling that he had no power over his own fate—and yet here he was again, strung up like a side of beef, just waiting for someone else to help him.

So many of the kids chimed beside him had grown to accept this. Lief, with his weird post-traumatic bliss, was a constant reminder to Nick that he, too, might someday just leave his will behind, and grow as passive as a plant, waiting for time to do whatever time does to Afterlights. The thought frightened him—it made him anxious, and that anxiety spurred him on to action.

“I’m finding a way out of here,” he announced to any of the other chimed kids who cared to listen.

“Ah, shut up,” said the high-strung kid. “Nobody wants to hear it.”

A few others echoed their halfhearted agreement.

“You new chimers just complain, complain, complain,” said some kid from deep in the middle of the chiming chamber—perhaps a kid who had been there for many years, and had lost anything resembling hope.

“I’m not complaining,” Nick announced, and he realized that, for once, he wasn’t. “I’m doing something about it.” Then he began to bend at the waist and swing his arms, making himself move like a pendulum.

Lief smiled at him. “Looks like fun,” he said, and he joined Nick, until they were both swinging together, bounding off of all the other kids around them—kids who were not at all pleased to be jostled out of their semivegetative state. Grumbles of “Stop it!” and “Leave us alone,” began to echo around the chamber, but Nick would not be deterred.

He couldn’t quite swing to the door, and even if he could, it was locked from the outside, so that was out of the question, and there were so many kids, he couldn’t build up the momentum to swing free, like a true pendulum. In the end, he wound up accidentally locking elbows with Lief as he swung past him, and they spun around each other, like an upside-down square dance. Their ropes tangled, and they ended up pressed to one another like dance partners.

The high-strung kid laughed. “Serves you right!” he said. “Now you’ll be stuck like that!”