No Escape by Julie Moffett
Chapter Nineteen
Slash
I thought about Lexi and how their team would do as the gamemaster led us up the right-side staircase and down the end of the hall past our bedrooms. I reminded myself that being separated on to different teams was the right decision. She was the smartest woman I’d ever met. I had full confidence that if anyone could lead the team to success, it was Lexi.
On the other hand, my amazing wife also had a little black cloud of trouble that followed her around like a favorite pet. That worried me. But I put that aside for now to focus on the task at hand.
The gamemaster stopped in front of a large, wood-paneled door with a keypad mounted on the wall. He turned to type a code on the panel. I slightly shifted my position to try to catch a glimpse of the code, but he effectively blocked the view, and the door swung open. He invited us to enter, so one by one, everyone filed in.
I waited until last to go in. Brando’s eyes met mine as I walked past, but that didn’t stop me from glancing at the keypad. One brief look told me everything I needed to know. Standard security cipher lock. Not top-of-the-line. Given some time, I could bypass it. Clearly, the purpose of this keypad was merely to serve as an effective lock to keep guests from peeking into a room ahead of a challenge.
Brando followed me in and left the door open behind us. I did a quick sweep of the room. Medium-size, with a high ceiling and no windows. Only one obvious exit, the one we’d just entered.
What was in the room, however, was most curious. Sitting directly in the center was an enormous bronze statue of a bull, dwarfing everyone. Brando guided us so that we were facing the right side of the bull. The statue had been placed on a raised dais with two steps leading up to the platform. Everyone stood in awe, looking at the bull. I remained near the door, leaning back against the wall and watching the gamemaster carefully. He seemed very confident and in control. However, in my experience, such individuals were occasionally betrayed by their confidence and unintentionally gave away more than they intended.
“This challenge is quite straightforward,” Brando said. “All you must do is remove the gold ring from the bull’s nose and use it to exit the room.”
Several of the team began chattering excitedly and wandered toward the head, pointing at a large golden ring that had been placed through the nose of the bull statue and pulled tight with several interlocking ropes. I adjusted my position so that I could better see the bull’s head. After a quick glance at the ring, I kept my eyes on Brando.
“You will have two hours to complete the challenge and exit,” he continued. “When I leave, closing the door, the clock over the exit door will illuminate with a two-hour countdown. This will help you keep track of the time and coordinate your actions in an effective manner. If you have not exited by the allotted two hours, I will return and will retrieve you. Good luck, or in bocca al lupo, as we say in Italian.”
He gave a short bow and then headed for the door, his gaze meeting mine one more time, acknowledging my scrutiny without betraying any secrets, before the door shut behind him. As soon as he was gone, the clock started counting down.
Everyone started throwing out ideas. Gio and Stefan immediately mounted the platform to take a closer look at the ring. I stayed where I was, taking in the big picture, compartmentalizing what we were up against with this challenge.
Since I currently viewed the bull from the side, I could see its dominant feature was a heavy leather harness that wrapped around its chest and was secured by a rope that ran along the side of its head, attaching to the harness with a massive, complex knot.
I walked around to the front of the bull. The large gold ring sat directly in its snout, set into the statue amid flaring nostrils. The ring’s diameter appeared to be the span of a man’s large hand, and it was as thick as a finger. Looped through and around the gold ring were three ropes of different thicknesses. The thinnest rope ran from where it attached to the harness on both sides and was looped twice through the ring. The huge knot sat directly at the point where the rope attached to the harness on either side. My gaze flicked back to the ring. The two loops on the ring for the harness’s rope were at the three and nine o’clock positions.
Interesting.
The fattest rope appeared to be about one inch in diameter and dropped from the ceiling, running through the top of the ring, directly next to the bull’s nose. It did not make an additional loop before returning to the ceiling. The ends of that rope were secured in the ceiling at least ten feet above the head of the bull by separate heavy metal collars that were bolted into the ceiling. Through the bottom of the ring, there was a medium-size rope about three-quarters of an inch across. This rope looped through the ring, and both ends ran through a hole in a four-foot-high wooden hitching post. The two ends were knotted on the far side with a complicated set of knots and rings.
Stefan, who had been examining the hitching post, threw me a glance over his shoulder. “Looks like we have to remove all those ropes in order to free the gold ring.”
“We’ll have to do more than that,” Stefan’s girlfriend, Alessa, corrected him. “Because as far as I can see, in addition to the ropes holding the ring tightly in place, it’s also still inside the bull’s nose. How are we going to free the ring from his nose even if we unravel the knots and remove the rope?”
It was a good question. “I presume there’s a latch or some mechanism on the ring that’ll permit us to separate it and remove it from the bull’s nose once we loosen the ropes,” I said. “But first things first.”
“How are we going to loosen all the ropes? Vittoria asked. “One of those ropes is attached to the ceiling. We don’t have anything to cut it and, unless I’m missing something, I don’t see any ladders in here.” She looked around the room as if to confirm that statement. “In fact, there isn’t anything else in this room but this enorme bull.”
That was my cue to get things going.
I pushed off the wall. “There’s a way to solve this puzzle, we just have to find it. In fact, the best puzzles usually seem impossible until you know the secret. Our job is to find that secret. So, let’s start by going over this room and the bull very carefully. The time spent evaluating this puzzle will be well spent. Gio and Stefan, let’s get a closer look at that bull and the ring. The rest of you, check the platform, the walls, the doors, and the floor. Every inch of this space needs to be examined.”
I climbed the platform and stood next to my two brothers and my mother, who had also decided to join us on the platform. Everyone else stayed below, looking around.
“This is not bronze,” my mother said to me in Italian. “It’s wood. But it’s solid wood and seems quite thick.”
I touched the side, realizing she was right. I mobilized my brothers, and we tried to lift or move the bull. It didn’t budge, clearly well anchored.
I turned my attention to the leather harness that encased the bull’s shoulder and wrapped around its belly. The straps were thick and attached to each other with rivets. I tried to pry off a rivet without success. There were no obvious buckles or way to remove the harness short of cutting it off. Gio started methodically checking the rivets, looking for one that might be loose, and I left him to it.
Vittoria had started examining the knot on the back of a hitching post at the front of the bull. “This is odd,” she said. “After passing through the hole in the hitching post, one end of this rope stops within a ring that’s approximately the same size as the hole in the hitching post. The other end is embedded in this long, thin piece of wood. There’s no way the ring can fit through that hole, so it must be the piece of wood that has to be freed to pass through the hole.”
“Agreed. Keep working that angle,” I said. Mama joined Vittoria. I liked seeing her and Vittoria working together. I hoped to see the same level of comfort with her and Lexi.
Turning my attention back to the task at hand, I decided to take the bull by the ring—literally. I reached up and grabbed it, pulling hard, but it would neither rotate nor move. It was pulled so tightly against the upper part of the nose by the ropes, I was unable to budge it at all. I knew it couldn’t have been that easy, but it had to be eliminated as a possibility. Just the same, I checked every inch of the wood around the bull’s nose and the ring itself in case there was a way to snap the ring or pull it from the nose, but I found nothing. That meant any unlocking mechanism on the ring would be hidden beneath that tight band of ropes holding it against the top of the bull’s nose.
I glanced around and saw Alessa carefully examining the walls of the room, looking for any hidden opening that might provide a ladder or a hidden compartment that might contain a cutting tool.
She reached the exit door and took a step back. “There’s no doorknob here,” she called out in her clipped British accent. “How did our gamemaster get out of here?”
“The door was left open when we entered,” I said. “He didn’t use a doorknob to get out.”
Nonetheless, I joined Alessa at the door. As she’d stated, there was no doorknob. I bent down to get a closer look. Instead of a doorknob, the door had a round indentation in the center that appeared to be the exact size of the large gold ring currently sitting in the bull’s nose.
Her head bumped mine as she tried to get a better look at the indentation. “There appears to be a smaller indentation here right in the center of the circle,” she said, tracing her finger over the tiny circle.
It was so faint I hadn’t noticed it until she pointed it out. That circular area was about the size of a large fingertip or a thumb. I straightened, noticing a keypad like the one on the outside the door to the left of the indentation on the wall.
“How do we get out of here?” Alessa asked.
I looked between the keypad, the door, and the brass ring still firmly attached to the bull’s nose. “I think to open the door we’ll have to place the gold ring in the large indentation and either press the smaller circle and/or enter a code into the keypad. Perhaps in a particular order.”
“If we can ever get the ring out of the bull’s nose,” Stefan called out. “It’s not looking promising.”
I studied the keypad more closely. “Did anyone happen to see the code our gamemaster used to get into the room?”
No one responded, not that I’d expected them to. But I’d noticed Brando had taken extra care to conceal the code from me, so it must mean something.
“I don’t remember the code, but I seem to recall that he hit the keypad only three or four times,” my mom said. “I’m sorry I didn’t see more.”
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I presume we can’t get out until we complete the challenge anyway.” Just for the heck of it, I tried several combinations, to no avail.
“Hey, I could use some help here,” Gio said, wrestling with the knots on the harness.
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
I instructed Alessa to keep examining the walls and floor and to go ahead and begin trying random codes on the keypad. On my way back to help Gio, I stopped to check on my mother’s and Vittoria’s progress at the hitching post. Vittoria was sitting on the floor with ropes in her lap, trying to untangle them, while my mother pulled at them gently.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
My mom sighed, tucking a strand of her dark hair behind her ear. “Unfortunately, we’re worse off than when we started. It is a complete mess now. We’re attempting to backtrack to the original position and try something else.”
I patted her on the shoulder. “Keep at it.”
I did a quick time check, noticing that twenty minutes had already passed. I heard a grunt and looked up just in time to see Stefan hoist Gio onto the back of the bull. Gio began checking the harness and all the connections from his new angle. Stefan began a closer exploration of the underneath side of the bull.
“See anything, Gio?” I called up to him.
“Nothing,” Gio said. “The harness from up here looks the same as below, and there’s no apparent way to remove it. There’s nothing else up here except the rope that runs up to the ceiling.”
“Can you reach the ceiling?” Stefan asked, poking his head out from beneath the bull.
“Hell, no. Even if I stood on the bull’s head, the ceiling is well over a meter above my head. But I’ll see if I can pull the rope free from here.”
Gio grabbed the rope and yanked on it. He gave it several hard tugs, but nothing happened. It appeared to be firmly attached to the ceiling.
“Perhaps you could shimmy up the rope and see if there is a way to disconnect it?” I suggested. “I presume you’ve done that once or twice during training in the special forces.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” my mother scolded me, but before she’d even finished her sentence, Gio had shimmied up the rope until he’d reached the ceiling. Holding on with his legs and one hand, he inspected the rope attachment points carefully.
“The ropes are very well anchored,” he called out. He tried to push, pull, twist, and slide the end of the rope in its bracket with his free hand, without success.
“Check the bolts,” I said.
“I already did, but there are no weaknesses, and they’re too tight to twist off without a wrench.” He tugged on the second rope but still no luck. “This thing is anchored tightly.”
Defeated, he slid down the rope to the bull’s head, careful to avoid the horns. He made his way to the back and then slid off, making the small jump to the platform. “I just don’t see how we can release either end of that rope, short of cutting it down.”
Gio and I walked around to the front of the bull to look at the head and golden ring again. The ring was set in the wood of the bull’s nose about halfway up its nostrils. Much of the snout was hidden by the ring and the ropes.
“I already pulled on the ring,” I said. “The ropes hold it tightly in place. I suspect it won’t budge or rotate until we loosen those ropes.”
“Maybe the eyes have a secret compartment with a collapsible knife?” Gio suggested, half joking.
It was a stretch, but I was open to all possibilities at this point. “Can you reach them?”
“If you give me a bit of a boost. Be careful not to skewer me on the horns.”
I cupped my hands, and he put one foot in them as I lifted him up. He reached carefully between the horns and pushed on the glass eyes, but nothing happened.
“That’s not good,” Gio said as I lowered him down. “This seems like an impossible task.”
“It’s not impossible,” I said. “We just have to consider our options.”
“What options?”
“We have to solve at least one of the knots on the harness to loosen the rope around the ring. Maybe that will give us enough ability to slide the ring around and find a hidden mechanism that will allow the ring to separate. I don’t see any other options. Let’s do that first and then worry about how to remove the ceiling rope and the ring later.”
A quick glance indicated that Stefan had begun attacking the knot on the right side of the bull’s harness. Gio and I went to help him. I compared the knots on both sides of the harness and quickly recognized they were different, but similar in complexity. I left Gio and Stefan to work on the left side while I went to work on the knot on the other side.
Each rope passed through a small but solid iron ring on the harness and formed an enormous knot the size and shape of a volleyball. It was tied in such a way that the end of the rope wasn’t showing. I studied it for a moment. The rope wrapped around itself again and again until the surface was pebbled with extremely tight rope loops. There was a definite pattern to each knot, but it didn’t offer any immediate insight as how to untie it.
No way to know unless I tried to unravel it.
I attacked the knot, listening with amusement as Stefan and Gio alternately cursed and praised the knot’s genius.
“How’s it going?” I called out after a few minutes.
“Pazzo. It’s insane. How did they do this?”
“They designed it by computer,” I replied, certain I was right. I’d read enough scientific articles by physicists and mathematicians who specialized in creating and untying incredibly complex theoretical knots. But how did Brando expect us to unravel such a complex knot in two hours without a computer?
“Great, a computer-generated Gordian knot,” Stefan added in frustration.
“What’s a Gordian knot?” Gio asked.
“It’s one of the few things I remember from my Greek mythology course in college. It comes from an ancient Greek tale of a knot created by the peasant Gordius, who wanted to thank Zeus for making him a king. I don’t remember how or why Zeus made him a king, but he did. In gratitude, Gordius dedicated his most prized possessions, an ox and cart, to Zeus. In the center of the town he now ruled, Gordius tied his ox to a post with a highly intricate knot, eventually dubbed the Gordian knot. An oracle then foretold that whoever untied the knot would rule Asia. For years, no one was able to untie the knot. Then Alexander the Great conquered the area, heard of the oracle, and decided to attempt it.”
“Did he untie the knot?” my mother asked, still working on the knots at the hitching post with Vittoria.
“No,” Stefan said. “He tried, but to his great frustration, he never could. So, instead, he sliced the knot with his sword, freeing the bull, which somehow was still alive, I guess. He then went on to conquer much of Asia.”
Vittoria stood up, rubbing her back. “Perhaps that’s a message that we should be looking for a way to cut the knot instead of trying to untie it.”
“Hand me a sword, darling, and I’m all about the slicing,” Gio said to her, holding up a hand as if he were wielding a sword. “I’m more of an action guy than a thinking guy anyway. I leave all that deep thinking to Romeo.”
I rolled my eyes, but Alessa came up behind me to study my knot. “Perhaps Vittoria is right, and the legend is a clue that we should look for another solution.”
“If you have one, I’m all ears,” I said.
“I don’t. But I’ll keep thinking.”
I studied the knot again. However it was created, the rope had to have an end. Another fact was that end must be near the surface, just cleverly tucked away and hidden. We just had to find it to unravel it.
“Look for the end of the rope,” I instructed everyone. “It has to be near the surface.”
“Easier said than done,” Stefan said with a grunt. “These knots are so tightly wound and compressed, there isn’t much surface to pull. Even when we do get purchase, it doesn’t budge.”
He was right. We needed something sharp and strong to pry the strands apart. But what? I stepped away from the bull and surveyed the room again.
My mother and Vittoria had made decent progress with the ropes at the hitching post. The end with the piece of wood was now at the end of a foot-long piece of rope as they were gradually figuring out the multitude of steps that need to be taken. I glanced at the bull again, and my eyes locked onto the horns. Those would be sharp and strong. Perhaps we could break one off. I wasn’t sure if that was allowed, but I didn’t see any other options.
I climbed back onto the platform. “Gio, Stefan. Give me a boost onto the bull. I have an idea.”
My brothers boosted me up, and I moved carefully to the head. I examined the horns, determining the amount of force I’d need to break one off. I pulled on one of them, and to my surprise, it twisted easily. It took me two seconds to determine the horns were only screwed on. I gritted my teeth, annoyed at myself for not thinking of this before.
“The horns were only screwed on,” I said. “Here, catch them.”
I dropped both horns down to Gio and Stefan. Everyone started chattering excitedly, the anticipation of a breakthrough palpable. “Use the tip to pry at different spots at the knots, looking for the weak spot,” I instructed my brothers.
I used the harness to hop down, and Gio tossed me one of the horns. I immediately used it to start attacking the knot on the other side of the bull’s harness.
“It’s working!” Stefan cried out.
I came over to investigate as he pried with the horn, separating the coils of the rope. Stefan and I helped him pull, and while the knot gave a little, it did not unravel and eventually refused to budge further.
“Damn,” Stefan said, using the horn to poke at a different spot. I joined him with the other horn, stabbing the horn into the knot in a different location to release more of the tension. After a couple of minutes, we were able to push parts of the knot farther apart. At last, we were able to unthread the end, giving us about six inches of rope free from the knot.
“Progress,” Gio shouted, pumping his fist in the air.
I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic. I’d already calculated the time we’d need to unravel this entire thing, and it wasn’t enough. We continued the process, but after another ten minutes we’d only unraveled about eighteen inches. The knot was stubbornly refusing to give up its secrets easily, and we were running out of time. I glanced at the clock, noting forty-five minutes remained. We had to solve the mystery of the knots quickly or there wouldn’t be time to solve the rest of the puzzle.
“We’re almost done here,” my mother said. “Romeo, come take a look.”
I handed off my horn to Gio and went to see what they’d done. To my astonishment, they’d nearly solved their knot.
“How did you do it?” I asked.
“Alessa and Vittoria are quite adept with their hands, and we were fortunately able to solve the pattern of this knot.” She stretched her arms over her head, rolling her neck. “I estimate we should be finished in a few minutes. How are things going with your knots?”
“Not so well, Mama. At this pace, I’m not sure we’ll finish in time.”
She patted my shoulder like she always did when I was frustrated. “Always look to the solution, tesorino, not the problem.”
Alessa, who was sitting on her knees, her arms wrapped in ropes, untangled her legs and stood. “Seriously, this doesn’t make sense. They can’t expect us to solve all these problems in the allotted time. No wonder no one has ever completed these challenges. There must be some other, easier solution we’re overlooking. What could it be?”
I’d long ago come to that conclusion, but my mother’s words had struck a chord. Maybe the challenges and knots were a distraction, and the answer was far more obvious.
Start at the solution.
Getting out of the room with the brass ring.
“Finito!” Vittoria suddenly shouted, startling me from my thoughts. She’d somehow pulled the rope free. “We did it!”
Everyone gathered around to look. The women had successfully pulled one end of the rope through the hole in the hitching post. I quickly took the loose end and threaded it through the ring. There was just enough room for the piece of wood to pass through once, and then again to remove the second loop and free the rope from the ring.
“Yes!” Stefan said, planting a kiss on Alessa’s lips. “You ladies are amazing.”
I agreed, as this was real progress.
“Gio and Stefan, I need you to keep working on the big rope,” I said. “We don’t have much time. Mama, stay and help me here. Vittoria and Alessa, start searching the room again and see what we might have missed. There must be something. Look everywhere.”
Now that at least one rope had been loosened, I returned to the nose ring. Without the lower rope anchoring it in place, I was able to wiggle it a bit. In fact, I could now lift the bottom of the ring up toward the ceiling a few centimeters. When I did it, I felt a slight catch. I lowered and raised the ring again, but this time I didn’t feel the catch. I tried several more times without success.
“Can you rotate the ring now?” my mother asked.
“I’m trying,” I said.
I studied the ring for a moment and tried pulling it while the ring was positioned downward. Nothing. I lifted it up again, this time agonizingly slowly until I felt that slight catch again and froze. After a moment, I tried to rotate it while it was in that position, and it finally moved.
I let out a small breath, the muscles in my arms and shoulders screaming. I carefully rotated the ring, rewarded with the appearance of a small gap that had previously been hidden beneath the wood of the nose. I felt the gap, looking for a release mechanism or way to unscrew the ring from the nose, but other than the slight gap, there was no way to release, break, or remove the ring.
I released the ring and shook out my arms. “I’ve got bad news. There is no release mechanism on the ring. It’s solid.”
My mother looked at me in surprise. “Then how do we get it off the bull’s nose? Even removing all the ropes won’t free it from the nose. That doesn’t make sense.”
I didn’t have an answer, but no other solution presented itself. I reached up and felt all along the brass ring again, stopping on the slight gap. I rotated the ring until the gap was where the rope from the ceiling passed through the loop. I tried to push it through, but the rope was too fat to fit through the gap. I tried to force it, but it was clear after a minute that it wouldn’t fit no matter how hard I pushed.
I looked up and down the rope to see if there were any places where the rope was thinner, but it all looked the same thickness. Still, I continued to rotate the ring until it was adjacent to where the rope that was attached to the Gordian knot on the right side. As I’d hoped, that rope was thin enough to pass through the gap. But it wouldn’t go easily, because the second loop through the ring was on the other side.
The rope was pulled so tight, there wasn’t quite enough slack to fit through the crack. I retrieved one of the horns and began prying apart the strands of the rope until I was able to fit some of the strands individually through the gap. Eventually, I was able to remove the rest of the rope from that side. With one side free, I had plenty of slack to rotate the ring to the other side, repeat the process, and drop the rope from the ring.
Like Alexander the Great, we’d succeeded in freeing the rope without having to solve the Gordian knot. Yet.
“You did it!” Alessa shouted, and everyone came around to congratulate me.
“It only means we have two out of three ropes off the ring,” I said. “But at least we can stop trying to unravel the Gordian knots. The ceiling rope remains and, of course, the wood of the bull’s nose holding it in place. I felt the wood between the ring and the nose, and it’s incredibly strong. Even using the horn to hack at it, I don’t think we’d be able to break through.”
“So, what do we do?” Gio asked. He had his arm around Vittoria, and she rested her dark head on his shoulder.
I thought for a moment. “Let’s review the remaining problems and visualize a solution. Mama, tell me what you see as the problems.”
She looked at me and then the ring still encased in the bull’s nose. “Step one. We must remove the rope from the ceiling in order to free the ring completely of all ropes. Step two. Figure out how to remove the ring from the bull’s nose. Step three. Once we free the ring, we place it in large indentation in the door and either press the small circle or enter a code on the keypad that we don’t know yet. And we must do all of that in eighteen minutes. Did I miss anything?”
As far as I could tell, she hadn’t. But something had started to bother me, which meant that during her recap, something had stirred inside my head. A potential answer or solution, I hoped.
But how long would it take before it surfaced into my brain as an action?
There wasn’t a minute to waste. “Gio, get up on the bull again and take another look at the ceiling bolts. Stefan, you help him. Mama, you and Vittoria check to see if there is anything we can do with the hitching post now that it’s free of the rope. Perhaps that is why we needed to free the rope instead and freeing the ring was a distraction. Then go over the platform and the walls looking for any anomaly that we might have missed. Alessa, take another look at the door. Everyone, be quick, because we don’t have much time.
“What are you going to do?” Stefan asked.
“Play to my strengths,” I said, heading toward the keypad. A gut feeling suddenly told me the answer was at the door, and I never ignored my gut feelings.
I studied the keypad for a several minutes. It was a simple black keypad with blue backlight. The keypad display was digital, which meant no worn-out keypads where you could determine the password by simply looking at which keys had been pushed the most. A blue backlight was more convenient in the dark and harder for interlopers to look over your shoulder, through binoculars, or via other electronic means to see you punch in a code. But how did that figure into this challenge?
The keypad was important, but how? It meant we’d need a code to get out, and I hadn’t seen a series of numbers or letters on anything.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noted Alessa peering intently at the indentation where the brass ring would go if we ever figured out how to remove it from the bull’s nose. “Find something?” I asked her.
“Not yet, but I’m convinced that, as with the knot, the solution may not be the obvious one. Subtlety seems key to this challenge. Perhaps all we need is a combination to unlock the door. Maybe the combination is inscribed on the gold ring, and we don’t have to remove the ring, just like you didn’t have to untie the Gordian knots completely.”
It was an interesting theory, even though I wasn’t sure how you could misinterpret Brando’s clear instructions—remove the gold ring from the bull’s nose. Additionally, I’d already looked at and felt every inch of that ring with my fingers, and other than the small gap, I hadn’t seen or felt an engraving of any kind.
But it didn’t hurt to have confirmation of that.
Fired up by her train of thought, Alessa raced over to the bull and asked Gio for a boost. He gave her one so she could examine the golden ring up close. Like I had, she studied the ring carefully, looking on the outside and inside of the ring and rotating it so she could see all parts of the ring…and found nothing. No way to break it, no way to remove it from the bull’s nose, and no secret code.
Nothing.
Disappointment showed on her face as Gio lowered her down. I realized I was not the only one who would take this failure personally.
“I thought I was on to something,” she said dejectedly. “It just felt right.”
I agreed with her. It had felt right.
I turned and studied the door again. The answer had to be right in front of me. What was it?
“This small circular indentation bothers me,” I murmured. “I can’t figure out its true purpose. Every piece in a puzzle has a purpose, so what could this be?”
Alessa bent down closely, peering at the indentation. “I thought maybe we would push it once we put the big ring here.” Her finger ran around the large indentation. “But it doesn’t look like you can push it. Other than being a smaller version of the large ring, I don’t know what it’s here for.”
My brain exploded with the answer. “Alessa, that’s it!”
“What’s it?”
I strode over to the bull. Leaning up, I reached my hand over the large gold ring and shoved it all the way to the back left nostril of the bull. I wiggled my hand and fingers around, looking for a crevice or anything, but felt nothing.
“Hey, Romeo, what’s going on?” Gio asked. I ignored him for the moment, but the entire team instantly surrounded me, convinced I was on to something.
I shoved my hand into the bull’s right nostril. Approximately three inches back, in a slight hollow that wouldn’t be visible to anyone looking into the nose, I felt a small, round metal object. I flipped it out of the hollow and dragged it out of the bull’s nose. With a smile, I turned and presented it to Alessa.
“Your ring, madame,” I said. “Thanks to your train of thought, we found it.”
“There was another ring in the bull’s nose?” Stefan asked, his expression incredulous.
“There is.” I knew how competitive my brother could be, so I decided to jab at him a bit. “Thanks to Alessa, we figured it out. You’d better up your game, Stefan.”
Alessa grinned at me and then raised an eyebrow at Stefan. “Guess I won this one, babe. Don’t worry, there’ll be more puzzles for you to prove yourself.”
Stefan shook his head, but he smiled, and I could tell she’d impressed him.
“Just a minute.” Vittoria threw up her hands. “I don’t understand. There were two rings this entire time?”
“There were two rings,” I confirmed, suddenly acutely aware of the time. “The roped ring was just a distraction. Alessa, is there anything engraved on the ring? A code or some numbers, perhaps?”
She turned the ring over in her hand and peered closely at the inside of the ring. “Yes. The number 395. Let’s try it, but we have to hurry.”
We all headed to the door. Alessa inserted the ring into the small indentation, where it fit perfectly. A distinct click sounded, and the keypad lit up.
“It worked!” Alessa gasped.
I quickly typed in 395. The keypad flashed once, and the door silently swung open. There was a moment of disbelief before everyone started shouting and cheering. Alessa was mobbed as everyone filed out, jostling and slapping each other on the back. Carefully, I reached down and took the small ring from the door, the last to leave the room.
As I stepped into the hallway, I looked back over my shoulder thoughtfully. There were lessons I needed to learn from this experience if we were going to be successful for the rest of them. Besides trusting my instincts, I needed to fully trust my team, because, as they’d just shown, they were more than capable.
My mother gave me a proud pat on the shoulder as I walked past and fell into step next to Alessa. I handed her the ring. “You present it to the gamemaster. You earned it.”
As I said those words, Brando appeared in the hallway. “How very delightful. You’re all here. If you’ll provide me with the ring, I’ll trade you for this golden disc to certify that you’ve completed the challenge.”
Alessa beamed as she handed Brando the ring. He inspected it and presented her with the gold disc. “Congratulations! You’ve successfully solved your first challenge. Please accept our invitation to lunch, followed by another challenge this afternoon.”
“Please tell me the next one will be easier,” Vittoria pleaded, and everyone laughed.
Brando gave her a smile. “Oh, I assure you, they’re all easy…if you know the secret. Now, please follow me.”