by Tom Pollock
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I should have told you. But you were perfect and we had to move fast, which means we needed to intimidate her fast, and I think your face scared her even more than mine did.”
My face, I think. My fear. I feel my heart slamming in my chest where it’s pressed to Bel’s. If all we need in order to frighten 57 into submission is for me to be terrified, we’re all set.
Bel eases me from her shoulder and looks me in the eyes, her fingers tacky in my hair.
“I can keep my end of the bargain, little bro.”
“You’re only eight minutes older,” I say. But I can’t help but think of the self-inflicted gash on her shoulder. Sometimes it seems like she must have learned so much in those 480 seconds that I’ll never catch up. I’ll never be able to predict or understand her. All I can do is trust her. She’s my axiom.
Bel drapes first me and then herself in LED bandoliers. Nothing visible changes when we flick the switches, but I know I’m now a walking cloud of UV light, baffling to cameras.
“Ready?” she asks.
“No.”
“Okay, then.”
She turns the key in the closet door, and it’s so silent that for a moment I think it hasn’t worked. But then the cupboard collapses inwards, and the wedge of darkness opens up, the steel staircase spiralling up to meet us. I think about what Bel said, about 57 not wanting to call the cops. They could have locked us out, I’m sure of it. They didn’t, because they want us here. They’re inviting us in. I swallow back the acid taste that’s starting to flood my mouth.
Stop it. You’re being paranoid.
Am I? Well, of course I am. This is me, but am I being unreasonably paranoid?
I guess in the final analysis it doesn’t matter. Whether they want us there or not, down there’s where we have to go. My sister’s feet clank on the metal steps like war drums.
She holds out a bloody hand and I take it, and after that the next step is easier, and somehow I match her rhythm as we descend into the dark.
Recursion: 5 Days Ago
“Loyalty and payback are all very well, Peter.” Rita’s tone was as gentle and brittle as a snowflake. “But they’re personal motives, not institutional ones, and our firm usually wouldn’t indulge them.” But then, only a handful of seconds later, talking about my father, she said:
“He scares us too.”
And she might have been lying, she might have faked the fervour in her eyes, modulated the tremble in her voice, but I didn’t think so. And deep down some part of me I was barely conscious of took note.
A spy agency doesn’t seek revenge, doesn’t get jealous . . .
. . . but it can be frightened, and that’s something.
NOW
“This way,” I tell Bel as I study the scrap of bandage in my hand. The blue Biro sequence of Ls and Rs is still just about legible against the blood-stiffened fabric.
We hurry through the tunnels, marvelling at each second we go un-captured, un-shot, un-killed. Each breath gives us the courage to believe in just one more.
The maze is as unpleasant as it was five days ago, the light from the fluorescent tubes bolted to the ceiling as harsh as bleach against my eyes, the choking dust rising off the bricks, the ceiling that feels like it’s poised to collapse on my head out of sheer spite, but at least now I’m not stumbling. Now, afraid as I am, I move with purpose.
Between brief whispers of reassurance to each other, the only sounds are our hurried footsteps, the pant of our breath, and the occasional crunch as Bel swings her twelve-pound hammer into another security camera.
“Little casual, aren’t they?” Bel’s tone is impatient. She can’t wait, I think, awed. Her skin is so like mine, the same freckle-spattered shade, but underneath it she’s so different. Every particle of her is seething for a fight.
“Why haven’t they come for us yet?” she demands.
“I think they’re afraid.” Maybe I’m imagining it, but I can feel the fear of this place, chiming with mine. Is that another side effect of Mum’s tampering? My bones hum: forks tuned to the key of absolutely bricking it.
“Of what? There are only two of us.”
“Yeah, that’s what’s scaring them.”
She looks at me questioningly, but it seems obvious to me. 57’s instincts for paranoia and second-guessing are all too familiar to me, like a cul-de-sac-riddled neighbourhood that would be disorienting if you hadn’t grown up walking its streets.
“They’re spies, not soldiers. For them, there’s always a conspiracy, always another bluff to call. I don’t think it would occur to them that two seventeen-year-old kids would even consider attacking the UK’s most secret spy agency head-on.”
And when I put it like that, who could blame them?
“Besides,” I add, skipping out of the way of the glittering shower as Bel crushes another camera, “they’re watchers by profession and you’re busy putting their eyes out. There’s a blind spot in the middle of their maze now. They don’t know what might be lurking in it, and they don’t want to get murdered rushing in to find out. They’re stalling, waiting for us to tip our hand.”
Bel turns to look at me, impressed, and I glow.
“Check you out,” she says. “Doctor of Fear.”
“I like the way you say that.”
“Oh?”
“Like it’s a superpower, rather than the product of living seventeen years with various nervous bowel conditions.”
She shrugs. “Any reason it can’t be both?”
I smile shyly, but all I say is, “Left here.”
This time Bel shoots an uncertain look at the directions scrawled on the bandage. By now she’s noticed we aren’t following them.
And this is the way it has to be. If we charge straight at them, they’ll massacre us. We have a tiny window, a handful of minutes’ grace as they hesitate, trying to work out what we’re up to. They’ll be understandably wary of the redheaded hurricane of bloodlust merrily jogging beside me. That’s our opening, and we have to use it.
Crunch . . .
One last camera. One last crunch and snow of pulverised glass.
“That’s enough,” I say. It had better be. The four minutes we’ve been down here feel like months. The eighty or so millilitres of sweat I’ve squeezed out feel like an ocean. My shirt feels laminated to my back.
“Finally,” Bel breathes out hard.
“Remember the deal,” I say.
“I’ll keep up my end, if you keep yours.” She looks at me as if appraising me for the first time.
“You know, Pete, you might have that doctorate in fear, but I’m learning fast.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because—and this isn’t something people notice about you right away—you’re pretty scary.”
Her palms are still red, her sweat keeping it from drying. Slowly, deliberately, she smears it over my forehead and my cheeks. My gorge rises. It smells like real blood to me.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Still not in any way, no.”
“Then go.”
Away from Bel, I’m suddenly awash with fear. I feel crippled, like someone’s slashed my hamstring with a razor. I mutter directions to myself like prayers, trying to invert the code, to retrace my steps, pawing my way along the wall. “We went right so go left,” and . . . “We went left so go . . . Shit, I can’t.”
What if I forget a turn? They all look the same. If I go wrong just once, how will I ever get back?
“OW!” I forget myself and my voice echoes loudly. I look down. There’s blood on my hand; a needle-thin shard glitters in my palm, picked up from a ledge on the bricks. I squint upwards at a demolished camera, and my pulse eases.
Well, duh, Pete. That’s how.
I follow the trail of shattered glass back to our starting point, and from there the instructions on the bandage lead me to the huge metal door. In front of it, a single camera peers down from the ceiling. I stand, blinking in its gaze.
“Please,” I mouth exaggeratedly to the camera. “Help me.”
Nothing happens. The seconds stretch out like a water drop. I remind myself of what they know, what they’ve actually seen. Today: an undifferentiated ball of light from the LEDs, meaningless static; over the past week: a trail of corpses left by my sister. They know she’s unstable and dangerous. They know what she was to me, but they can’t be sure what she is to me now.
“Please,” I mouth. “She’s coming back.”
Come on, boys, come out and save me.
With a grinding whir, the door starts to move.
They emerge with weapons lowered, calming hand gestures, soothing words, trusting expressions: traps I’m learning to recognise.
I hope they can’t say the same.
I spin on my heel. Their shouts don’t quite drown out the sound of safety switches clicking off.
Recursion: 5 Days Ago
I followed Rita’s green silk-clad back through the tunnels, squinting in the glare of the strip lights. Left, right, right, left again. I was trying to scrawl the turnings on my bandaged hand, but I was falling behind. I had visions of her vanishing into a side tunnel, her laughter echoing behind her, leaving me to trace frantic circles on my own, until I dashed my head off the walls in frustration.
A maze, I remember thinking. There’s a theorem about mazes. Dr. A taught it to me. “Learn this,” he’d said, “and you’ll never be lost.” But no matter how I’d grasped after the details, they’d slipped away from me like snowflakes on the breeze. I couldn’t remember them then,
. . . but I can remember them now.
It’s Euler, I recall from somewhere buried deep. It’s Euler.
NOW
Reassuring words become orders to stop, become threats to shoot, become gunshots.
BANG!
The sound alone, confined in the tunnel, almost knocks me down. The wall snorts out splinters and dust millimetres from my calf. I stagger and catch myself, my palms grazed hot and puffy against the bricks. I lurch around the corner.
“Cease fire!” I hear barked, and “Alive!” And now the only sounds are my ragged breath and the syncopated thump of the boots pursuing me.
Screaming inwardly, I flee, hurling myself blindly through junctions almost at random, barely seeing the trail of crushed camera lenses. My mouth tastes like puke and metal. The tunnels warp the echoes and I have no idea how close behind my pursuers are. Each time I slow to take a corner, I feel them almost grab me, but somehow I stay ahead.
It’s a harum-scarum flight, ricocheting off the walls. My breath is corrosive in my lungs and my legs have turned to lead, yet somehow they keep pumping and somehow the ground keeps flowing away under my feet.
Catch me if you can, boys! I’m more afraid than anyone you’ve ever chased! That’s gotta be worth at least a couple of miles per hour.
But wait, was that . . . ? Listen, I try to order myself. Listen! But the drumming of my feet and the blood in my veins is too loud. I wrestle with the lizard that’s taken up the driver’s seat in my brain, try to ease his clawed foot off the accelerator so I can hear . . .
Yes. I’m sure of it. The boots behind me are slowing. Not much, but I can just hear their rhythm falter, the uncertainty in their steps.
A vicious glee swells in my chest.
You’re lost! I exult. You know the safe paths through your maze, the right ways in and out, but you never bothered to learn all the wrong ones. You’re off the map.
In the long run it wouldn’t matter, of course. No doubt they’re geared up with GPS trackers and are maintaining open radio links to base. No doubt that even without their precious cameras, HQ is watching them as a cluster of glowing green dots on an electronic map and could talk them home again—
—given enough time.
I hear shouts, then screams, then gunfire drowning the voices out. I lurch, feeling every shot like a heart attack, and I fight not to whirl around and run back and help Bel, but I don’t. I have to trust her. She’s my axiom.
The cry boils up from the tunnel in a series of echoes: “Where did she come from?”
Where monsters always come from, I think, and, chest heaving, I retch noisily onto the floor. I wipe my face and stagger on. Out of a maze.
I picture her, slipping out of a passageway, striking so quickly the enemy doesn’t even know they’ve been hit before she disappears. I picture them whirling in circles, yelling into their radios for help. I picture their controller sitting before screens full of static, headphones full of screams, blind and helpless and mute, watching his green dots, one by one, go still.
The boots begin running again. Some of them recede, growing fainter and fainter in headlong flight, but two, no, three sets of them are closing on me. Fast. I hear instructions, bitten off whispers between rasping breaths: “Rabbit” and a word that chills me: “Hostage.”
So I run again, leading them away, and they chase me like the rabbit they named me for; but I’m not a rabbit, not any longer . . .
A brief cry, and three sets of boots become two. I don’t want it to, but this feels good, it feels right. I never knew how I’d ached for this until I felt it. Every shadow is sharp, every echo crisp. I can’t keep a vicious grin off my face.
. . . Wolves hunt in packs.
When I stop running, I collapse immediately.
The muscles in my legs and arms feel pulped. My lungs heave in my chest, almost too exhausted to draw in air. If any agents managed to slip past Bel, I’m done for. It feels like an unknowable age since I last heard pursuing feet, but it’s probably only been two minutes.
The bricks against which I slump are remarkably comfortable. Honestly, I’m sure it’s fine. I’m sure she got them all. If I could just have a little nap right . . . Keep your fucking eyes open, Blankman! Yes, Sarge!
Stupefied, I stare at the ceiling for four, five, six seconds before dragging myself upright. I look around me. I’m in a square brick chamber. Four brick exits; all pristine, untouched by hammer or bullets or blood; all identical. I have no idea which is north, south, east or west. I’ve run myself ragged and directionless.
I’m lost in the maze.
I feel the first stirrings of panic and try to tamp it down.
It’s okay, I tell myself, willing myself to believe. It’s Euler.
I grope in my pocket and for one cataclysmic moment I think I’ve dropped the bloody things. But then a fold in the fabric of my trousers gives way and I pull the slim box out. Ten slender white cylinders glow in the dim light. My fingers shake as I take one out and roll it around in my hand. The crayon leaves a waxy residue on my skin.
Euler, I repeat to myself, willing my stampeding heart to slow. Euler.
Euler, shockingly, didn’t conceive his theorem to help neurologically engineered teenagers crack mazes protecting top secret government facilities. He was studying networks: webs of connected points. Lucky for me, any maze can be reduced to a network. All that matters are the places where you choose, left or right. Onwards or back. The length of the pathways between those junctures, their twists and turns and switchbacks, are irrelevant. A maze is just a series of choices, like a life.
Euler’s theorem proves that any point in the maze can be reached, from any other point, without a map, in a finite time as long as you never, ever repeat a path.
I set the point of my crayon against the wall, take a deep, jagged breath, and start walking.
The maze feels infinite, but that’s what mazes are for: they play upon your ape’s intuition of distance, fool you with folding, until your despair overcomes you. Mazes are designed to make you panic. All I have to do is no
t give in.
I know, right? Ha.
I rehearse Euler’s arguments to myself aloud, keeping myself company while I walk. My voice sounds tinny and unconvincing in the tunnel, the panicky bit of me scoffs at it: You’re lost, you’re fucked. Accept it and you can rest. Don’t you want to rest? Aren’t you tired?
I lick sweat off my top lip, make small bargains with myself, and break them: Ten more steps, then you can stop. Okay, twenty. Okay, thirty.
The voice turns nasty: You’re wrong, you’ve miscalculated, you’ve abandoned Bel, you left her there to die. Her corpse is all that’s waiting for you. The walls are closing in, squeezing my vision, squeezing my heart. Swearing and sweating, I mutter to myself, “One: get moving.”
And keep moving.
Defeating my own nature is a strategy of millimetres—ten to a centimetre; seven hundred and sixty to a stride; one million, six hundred and four thousand, three hundred and forty-four to a mile. Keep walking and don’t stop. Whatever you do, don’t stop.
To begin with I take random turnings, then rarely at first, but then more and more often, I run across loops: turnings where a virgin wall gives way to a shaky line of gleaming white wax. A sign I’ve been here before. I recognise these traps and am heartened by them. All you have to do is make sure you never, ever repeat a path. I am exhausting the maze. I am brute-forcing it. The maze is recycling itself because it is not infinite. Its power has limits and I am reaching them. The crayon in a death grip in my fist. I steer towards new, unmarked paths.
Keep walking.
She’s dead.
Just keep walking.
“Pete!”
“Bel!” I look sharply to my right, and there she is, at the far end of a tunnel. Relief threatens to burst my heart. I break into a run towards her, but I stumble over something soft and look down. There are three of them, unmoving. Two have necks at unnatural angles. The third is oozing slowly out onto the floor.
