'Is it really up there?'
Every breath Mai Mingle desperately sucked in felt like inhaling wet cement. No matter how hard she tried, the air refused to enter her body.
She'd lost count of how many floors she had run since they were trapped. A raging fire seemed to have ignited in her lungs, and what little air she managed to force down only made the blaze burn hotter and more painfully.
Mai Mingle refused to consider whether this was because she had climbed too many stairs, or because her mouth and nose, the very things she used to breathe, were slowly turning into a mirror.
"How much longer?"
Suo Beihua was panting so hard that every word came out as a sharp hiss, making her sound more like a snake than a person. "Is—is it up there?"
After leading them for so long and narrowly escaping several attacks, Mai Mingle found it hard to say those three words: "I don't know."
'Have we already passed it? What if my guess is wrong?'
