Dyeawan, panicked, grabs for her wheels and begins whirling herself back toward the corridor. She stops midturn, remembering the locked door beyond the rough ride over those spikes. Surely they can’t really mean to drown her here in this dark place. It’s still a test. Perhaps she can retreat and use the remnants of her tender to force the door open or otherwise disable the lock.

No, that can’t be the test. They wouldn’t have created such an elaborate chamber just to have her unlock a door. Tahei could unlock a hundred doors, and no one was leaving puzzles at his bedside.

The rowboat.

By the time seawater is blasting through the grates full-force and from every direction, Dyeawan has wheeled herself beside the tilted ramshackle-looking vessel in the middle of the chamber. She’s reaching down to untie the cords encircling her folded legs when a new thought halts her anxious hands.

She looks up at the chamber ceiling. There are no openings there, not even more grates. Inside the rowboat she’d rise to meet solid stone, and if the water didn’t cease filling the chamber, the small wooden vessel and she would be crushed against the ceiling with no other way out. And even if she managed to steer the boat to one of the grates set in the walls before the water rose above them, she has no way of opening the grates.

It didn’t make any sense.

Unless.

Dyeawan forgets about untying herself from her wheels. Instead, with the water already swirling around her waist, she angles herself up against the small vessel’s port. She leans over the tilted side of the rowboat and takes hold of the large, rusted ring on the opposite side. She’s thankful the deceptive strength in her arms hasn’t abandoned her totally. Dyeawan is able to capsize the rowboat and pull the inside of its hull over her. She takes hold of both its rusted oar rings for support, gripping them tightly and pulling the rowboat as deeply around her as possible.

The weight of her wheels and axles helps keep them both anchored to the cobbled floor. Inside the rowboat, the water is up to her chest, but there it stops, even as the chamber continues to fill and the upended bottom of the rowboat slowly becomes completely submerged. Dyeawan can breathe, for now, but she knows every hole in a boat fills eventually.

Dyeawan knows there is a way out of all this. She knows that’s the entire point of this room, to find that way out. That’s the test.

The water around her is dancing in the faint amber light cast by the torches on the walls. Dyeawan stares at that light, thinking, recalling every detail of the chamber, the corridor, the antechamber, even the locked door. None of those perfectly rendered pictures in her mind yield a solution, or even another piece of the puzzle.