She kept quiet. Buchu was probably better off not knowing.
As it was, the door was no great obstacle. She placed herself before the leftmost button, while Buchu, Rivers and Bala took the remaining three. At Rivers’ signal, they all pushed together.
Annie found her button to be stiff and awkward. Fortunately, it was just broad enough to get both her hands on and, after some grunting and straining, it slid back into the wall. Looking across, she saw that her companions had done the same. A series of grinding noises emanated from inside the barrier – she could imagine wheels turning and gears shifting as the unlocking mechanism was activated.
The door didn’t swing open at once as she’d expected. In fact, it didn’t swing at all; when Ferguson gave it a push, it fell inwards and landed with a crash, the scientist’s momentum causing her to stumble forwards through the new opening.
“Hey!” she called, voice rising in surprise. “Check this! We made us some progress!”
Following the rest of the team through the doorway, Annie saw what had gotten Ferguson so excited. A short, narrow chamber lay before them. It was modern in design, white-panelled and well-lit – a welcome change from the gloomy tunnels they’d spent most of the last couple of hours in. Annie felt her spirits lift at the sight, the leaden weight of Hisano’s loss lessening ever so slightly.
There were three openings in the opposite wall, leading to rectangular chambers of varying size. Above the openings, a short message was embossed in letters of gold. “Examination 3 this way”, read the first few words. There was more, but Annie wasn’t in the mood for translating. This was their way out – that was all she needed to know.
“Must be lifts taking us to the next level,” said Ferguson. “Let’s pile in before that thing comes back.” She entered the leftmost of the three – it was the largest, with enough space to take all eight of them at once.
Rivers raised a hand. “Wait a second. It looks like they’re giving us a choice. Let’s take a moment to-”
Snap!
The sharp report made Annie jump, but it took her several seconds to realise where it had come from. Her first thought was Krikili, and she whirled around, bracing herself for another attack. Then her brain registered the fact that the noise had come from ahead, not behind. Turning back in the direction of the openings, she saw that a transparent surface now covered the entrance to the lift that Ferguson had entered; a door which had slid into place, trapping the scientist inside.
“Ki!” Bala pushed her way past Annie and Rivers and flung herself bodily at the barrier.
The powerful woman bounced off, leaving no visible mark. On the other side, Ferguson was scrabbling around the edges of the door with her fingers, searching in vain for a weak spot where she could force it open.
Annie caught a brief glimpse of Ferguson’s face, eyes wide and mouth forming words which could not escape her prison.
Then she was gone. The lift dropped straight down and out of view, accelerating so rapidly that it seemed to vanish almost instantaneously, leaving an empty shaft in its wake. Bala, who had been pounding at the transparent door with her fists, overbalanced and might have fallen straight down the opening had Annie not sprang forward and dragged her back from the brink. She took a glance down the shaft – a vertical drop, stretching as far as the eye could see. Stomach churning, she turned away.
It’s okay, she thought. Ki’s still alive. We can follow her.
She had a strong suspicion, though, that the lifts wouldn’t all go to the same place.
“Into the next one, come on!” Brushing aside Rivers’ admonitions to be cautious, Annie stepped through the second doorway, leaving her left forearm hanging over the threshold. If these worked like Earth elevators, that should prevent the door from closing. A forlorn hope, maybe, but this was the only way forward, and they might not have much time before their pursuer returned.
And right on cue, she heard it. A long, slow scrape of metal on stone. A rapid series of clicks.
Krikili was back, and it wasn’t far behind them.
The rest of the group had all passed through the previous doorway, but now they stood transfixed by the sound, eyes searching the darkness behind them for signs of the creature.
“Move, move it, move!” cried Annie, her voice shrill and wavering as she tried to break the spell.
Her urgings had the desired effects. Rivers darted past her outstretched arm, calling for the others to do the same. Iris and Buchu soon followed.
This lift wasn’t as large as the previous one. It’s gonna be a tight squeeze, Annie realised, as she hugged the wall to let Bala past. Should make it though.
Her eyes tracked past Gypsy and Alice, the last two to enter. While the sounds of Krikili’s approach still resonated in the air, she could see neither the creature nor any sign of the black mist that came with it. A relief. She allowed herself to think ahead, wondering how they were supposed to make the lift move once they were all in it …
Then the door slammed shut on her forearm.
Annie let out a scream, yanking her arm back and dropping to her knees in the crowded lift. The transparent barrier had slid across the opening with such speed that she was half surprised her hand had not been severed.
Twin waves of pain and nausea hit her, far more potent than anything she’d ever experienced before. She was only dimly aware of voices shouting, of hands reaching to help her, of the lift dropping into free fall, leaving the last two members of their group behind.
Should have blocked the door with my bag, thought Annie, squeezing her eyes tightly shut and waiting for the hurt to fall to manageable levels. Blew it.
Her arm was starting to go numb below the elbow. She thought it might be broken.
Their team certainly was. Broken, smashed and shattered.
* * *
Gypsy had been on the point of entering the lift when the door had slammed shut in her face. Jumping back with a yelp, she’d watched as Annie and the rest had dropped out of sight.
In normal circumstances, this event might have locked her mind into one of its obsessive cycles of whys and what ifs, but so much had gone wrong in the past few hours that she was becoming inured to catastrophe. The continuing sounds of Krikili’s approach were a reminder that she couldn’t waste time with her internal struggles, at any rate. The external threat was far more pressing – not far from the entrance of this room now, if she was any judge.
“Into the last one!” Her mother took her by the arm and guided her to the third and final lift. It was by far the smallest, little more than cupboard-sized, but with just enough room for the two of them.
“We need to go in together,” said Gypsy. The possibility of one of them being locked out and left to Krikili’s devices didn’t bear thinking about. Whether the unlucky one was her or her mother made no difference – in Gypsy’s eyes, her life would be over either way.
Alice gave a quick count of three, and they stepped over the threshold together. Gypsy was braced for disaster, but the door stayed put, allowing the two of them into the cramped space of the lift.
They both cast fearful glances into the shining white room behind them. Gypsy’s heart jumped as she saw tendrils of black smoke wending and weaving through the entrance. Another minute and it would have had them, but now the lift would bear them safely away …
But it wasn’t moving. And the door was still open.
The smoke continued to billow into the room, and to Gypsy’s horror she could now make out a dark form in the doorway. Krikili. As she watched, the demon’s eyes lit up, white lights rotating, swirling inwards like captive souls drawn inexorably into crushing vortices.
“Behind you, Honey! What’s that?”
Alice grabbed Gypsy and forcibly spun her about to face the back of the lift. There was a control panel there – nine labelled buttons and an accompanying plaque filled with Matan text. Gypsy recognised the Matan word for “go” on the central button and pressed it with trembling fingers.
She tried it again with the same results. The lift stayed put, the door stayed open. They were totally exposed.
Gypsy’s gaze lurched back and forth between the encroaching cloud of darkness and the stubborn panel. The word on the central button was ka. That meant “go”, she was sure of it. Why weren’t they moving?
After a moment of staring blankly at the buttons, the thought that the accompanying plaque might contain instructions suddenly occurred to her. But Krikili had her under its spell – she couldn’t concentrate, the letters seeming to swim before her eyes, her attention shifting chaotically from point to point, taking in random words but grasping no meaning. In desperation, she punched the buttons with her fist, first the central one, then, with no clear plan in mind, the others.
“Come on,” she rasped, pounding harder. “Do something! Do something!”
“Don’t just press at random,” said Alice firmly. “You’ll break it. Here, let me try.” The elder Cumberland squeezed past her daughter, crouching slightly so that her eyes were level with the plaque. She wasn’t the best with the Matan script, but she began to work her way through it, slow and steady, a frown of concentration creasing her brow.
Gypsy turned. She was standing at the doorway, facing outwards. What had been a well-lit space barely a minute before was now little more than a cube of darkness. The smoky tendrils played along the threshold between room and elevator, almost playfully declining to enter. Of Krikili itself she could now see nothing, but the rough scrapes of its movement still reached her ears, terrifyingly close.
It’s playing with us, she realised. Killing us isn’t enough. It wants to do it theatrically.
This was still theatre, after all. There was an audience of viewers out there somewhere, though Gypsy had a hard time believing that they were real. Her universe had shrunk to encompass only herself, the darkness before her, and one solitary light – her mother, working patiently at her shoulder even now.
Had she stood alone, Gypsy would have been without all hope, but somewhere, lurking at the back of her mind, was a childhood belief she’d never let go of. As long as Mum’s here, nothing really bad can happen to me.
As the shadows shifted before her, that idea seemed naïve in the extreme. Any second now, steely claws would seize Gypsy and bear her away.
Snap!
Gypsy’s whole body jolted and she reflexively let out a cry … but the source of the sound was only the transparent door shutting an inch from her nose. A few stray wisps of Krikili’s darkness had been severed from the main cloud; they twisted and coiled about her body like living creatures, then abruptly dispersed.
“Got it closed,” muttered Alice, a slightest of tremors in her voice the only sign of tension. “That’s something. Now how do we move …?”
Gypsy felt light-headed – each breath took a colossal effort of will. She had no idea what the door was made of, but it seemed a flimsy barrier against the horror that lay beyond. The darkness had thickened now, becoming opaque and solid. No movement.
Might the creature have given up and gone away? Perhaps, by getting the door closed, they completed the second Examination. It was maddening not to be able to see more; visibility felt like it was no more than an inch. She leaned closer to the glass, eyes scanning for any variance in the black shroud. There was nothing there. Nothing …
A hand slammed against the barrier. Gypsy froze. She saw a trio of long grey fingers, each with three joints, connected to a circular palm. They worked their way back and forth before her horrified eyes, the fingers tracing little circles on the transparency at chest-level. The action left pale scratch marks behind – this was far from an indestructible barrier.
“Mum…”
“Hush. I need to concentrate.”
Above Gypsy’s head came two sharp impacts in quick succession. Looking up, she saw that Krikili had smashed a pair of its scythe-like appendages into the transparency. Their wicked points had penetrated the barrier, and, with a grinding and squealing that seemed to reverberate through to the innermost recesses of Gypsy’s brain, began to push their way further in. The hand, in the meantime, had increased the pace of its scratching; now there was circular patch of white, dead level with her heart, a weakened spot that might shatter before a solid blow.
And shatter it did. With no warning, Krikili’s other hand appeared, striking its target with uncanny accuracy and driving straight through into the lift.
Gypsy felt broken shards cut through her clothing and bite at her flesh. She felt spindly fingers closing about her body.
Then it was over.
Accelerating at a stunning rate, the lift began to move – neither up nor down, but backwards, in a straight line. Gypsy felt nothing more than a slight lurching in her stomach, when by all rights she should have been plastered against the door. A small, analytical part of her brain recognised this as an extension of the Matan’s anti-gravity technology.
The lack of a sensation of movement tricked her mind into perceiving the lift as stationary; it was the shaft they shot through that seemed to be in motion. The shaft, and Krikili, its many limbs stretched out towards her as it receded into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, fading like a bad dream.
X
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
– Helen Keller
Aside from her wife, it was the most beautiful sight to touch Kiaya Ferguson’s eyes since she had left Earth.
She stood in a broad, curving stretch of corridor, the stone walls faultlessly smooth to the touch. Surrounding her on all sides were glass prisms of all shapes and sizes, suspended from the ceiling on threads so thin as to be all but invisible; the little jewels seemed to float in the air, rotating slowly, swaying gently with a faint breeze. They caught and refracted the light from a series of small bulbs that had been strategically placed about the passage, painting Ferguson and all her surroundings with a shifting kaleidoscope of colour.
The prisms provided a treat for her ears as well, clinking softly together as they rotated, a steady, soothing tinkling, reminiscent of her piano’s higher notes. It triggered memories of her life aboard ship – how she’d love to be back there now! Or at least to have Jess here beside her.
But she was alone.
There was no sign of the other two elevator shafts nearby, nor had she expected there to be. Plainly, this had been a planned incident, executed at the behest of the unseen controllers of the Zakazashi. Their team had been deliberately split, and she’d drawn the short straw, separated from all her friends and cast adrift in this new labyrinth.
For labyrinth it plainly was. Beyond the comforting sights and sounds of the prisms she could see forks in the passage in both directions, making four possible routes out of this area. Each of them was poorly lit, sweeping away into darkness.
Ferguson felt certain that she would have to choose one of these paths to progress, but her philosophy had always been to leave no stone unturned, so she stepped back into the elevator for a quick check. As she had expected, the controls were dead; it wasn’t taking her anyplace else. Exiting once again, she glanced upwards and noticed that the ceiling was broken and crumbled around the area where the lift shaft cut through it. The contrast with the overall smoothness of the stonework was striking – she had the impression that the labyrinth had been created first, and the elevator added rather clumsily at a later date. Might the labyrinth have originally been designed for some other purpose?
It was an interesting question, but this wasn’t really the time to pursue it. Ferguson knew that she was going to have to leave this little haven and venture alone into the darkness. No friend to walk beside her, no torch to light her way.
She was afraid.
Gotta face facts - I’m liable to die here. Never make it back to Earth, never see Jess again, her smile. That smile …
Her hands rose as if of their own volition, fingers seeking out her crucifix. It wa
s still there, in its proper place above her heart.
Ferguson closed her eyes. Willed her body to relax.
The Lord calls us all back, sooner or later. If it’s my time now, then that’s just the way it’s gotta be.
She recalled her last night with Jess. Had she made the most of it?
Yes. Every note had been perfect. Every movement.
That thought propelled her forwards. She decided to take a methodical approach – at every junction, she’d select the leftmost path. That way, she should eventually cover every inch of the labyrinth.
And I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, in paths that they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I do, and I do not forsake them.
Moving at a steady, measured pace, Ferguson began her exploration.
* * *
“You’ve got a distal radius fracture – Smith’s fracture, to be more specific. The numbness and swelling are normal.”
“And the nausea?”
Iris adjusted her spectacles with a frown. “Brought on by shock and emotional distress, probably. This is your first ever broken bone, isn’t it? You’ll feel better once you become accustomed to the fact of your injury.”
“Uh-huh. Not sure I’m gonna have much time for learning to love my fracture.” Annie turned her attention to their surroundings. Their elevator had deposited them in a long, curving passage with forks at both ends. The passage itself was interesting, appearing to be overgrown with knee-high grass, a carpet of green blades broken only by the occasional sapling. She was reminded of Mahi Mata, where Vitana could have the flora grow to the precise specifications it desired, even underground with no nourishing sunlight.
While the Matan greenery had been real, the Gataran version was clearly artificial. Both the saplings and the grass were plastic to the touch, the latter attached to a series of mats that had been glued to the floor. Reaching down with her good arm, Annie had been able to feel the line between two of the mats and poke her fingers through to the stone beneath.
Amygdala Page 26
