by Dan Krokos
Behind me, the wheels groan against the track.
I spin around to see the cart reversing. Like it was programmed to return the second it delivered us.
Rhys takes a few running steps after it, then skids to a stop, shaking his head.
“That’s not good,” he says.
They look at me like I knew it was going to happen.
“Not my fault,” I say, though it kind of is, since I got into the cart first.
“We keep moving,” Peter says.
“Well, we can’t exactly go back,” Rhys replies. “I don’t like it.”
“Me neither,” Peter says.
I let my weapons dangle at my sides. “We’re close. Rhys is right, there’s nowhere else to go.”
We stand there for a moment, in the near-dark and silence. I think we’re waiting for one of us to come up with a better idea. Finally I turn away and walk deeper into the tunnel, toward the bright light.
“Technically, we could go back,” Rhys calls after me. Then he mutters, “There’s nothing good about this place.” Almost like a plea. Rhys is unnerved, which unnerves me. If Noah were here, he’d call Rhys something derogatory, even though he’d be feeling the same sense of wrongness we all do. Call it our training keeping us on edge, but I know it’s just regular old human fear, the darker kind that comes when you don’t understand.
Two seconds later, their footsteps start after me.
We walk for ten minutes, and the light gets brighter and brighter.
“Be ready,” Rhys whispers beside me. I hear Peter pull the hammer back on his revolver.
We spread out over the last fifty feet, then leave the tunnel behind for a huge underground chamber.
Huge doesn’t begin to describe it. Think stadium-size, complete with an enormous dome roof you can’t see with just one glance. Lights dot the ceiling in a grid pattern too bright to look at. Tunnels like the one we came through are built around the circumference, right into the rock, like the tunnels people use to get to their seats in a stadium. Only triple the amount. At first glance, there seems to be a hundred, some of them stacked three high, a grid of openings that now remind me less of stadium tunnels and more of drawers in a morgue.
Each tunnel has a label that sends a chill from the base of my spine to the top of my head. They say things like CHICAGO and LOS ANGELES and AUSTIN and TAMPA and MIAMI and BUFFALO and CHEYENNE and SEATTLE.
Cities. All the cities in America I could name, and some I couldn’t, like TWIN FALLS.
None of this is the weird part.
In the center of the cavern is a flat black circle the size of a small lake. I walk toward it slowly. The black surface reflects no light, so I can’t tell what it is. It seems to be something, not a hole in the ground. But not liquid, either. Just…black.
I step closer.
“Let me go first,” Peter says behind me.
My mind shows me Noah charging into the darkness of the lab. I am done letting anyone else go first. “No, wait.”
My eyes go to the tunnels again. So many paths, all stemming from this central hub like spokes on a wheel. I slide Beacon onto my back, feel the click as it adheres to my armor, but keep the silver revolver in my grasp.
“Anyone have a good feeling about this?” Rhys says.
It’s so quiet I can hear the blood in my ears. I can’t take my eyes off the lake. I am staring into the abyss, literally. Instinct is screaming at me to run, but I press on. Noah would have, and I’m sure Nina did.
I approach the lake slowly, waiting for a change or a ripple, a reflection, but it doesn’t alter. Soon I’m kneeling at the edge. My eyes begin to ache, but I don’t look away.
“What are you doing?” Peter says. He grabs my arm, but I reach forward with the other one and touch the black.
Nothing happens. My hand disappears to the wrist, but I feel nothing, literally nothing, like my hand has been disconnected. The black isn’t a liquid; it’s not anything. I pull my hand out and feeling returns as I do, first my wrist, then palm, then fingers, then fingertips.
“Not a dead end,” Rhys says. He’s staring into the lake with unfocused eyes, like it has him caught in a trance.
“Might as well be,” Peter says. “It’s not like we’re going to jump in.” He pulls me up and I let him, thinking, We’re probably going to jump in, and you know that. We came all this way. He grabs my hand and inspects it—the armor is fine. The smaller scales on my fingers are intact and flawless.
Rhys kneels for a closer look. “We can’t make it back on foot. No food or water.”
“Are there any carts in the tunnels?” Peter says, casting his gaze over the floor-level openings. Some of the tunnel entrances are lit and smooth and feel finished, while some are shadowed and craggy, like open mouths waiting to chew us up.
“It would take hours to search each one,” I say, flexing my hand. It felt odd in the black, but not wrong. Just…missing. “This is our path. Nina came here, I know it.”
“You can’t be sure,” Rhys says.
“Nina was supposed to gather something called the eyeless,” I go on, ignoring him. “Sequel told me. If Nina came here, I don’t see where else she could go.”
“Down one of the tunnels, maybe,” Peter says. “You don’t know.”
“You’ll be able to track me,” I say, tapping the small pack lashed to my waist.
“Track you when you fall to your death? We don’t know what’s down there.”
“I’m going to jump in,” I say.
He’s eyeing me now, and I can guess why. “Do you really want to, or is something else telling you to do that?”
Rhys squints at Peter, not sure exactly what he means—but I know. “Wait,” Rhys says, pointing at the ground. “There.” I follow his finger six feet to the left, to a collection of small footprints in the light dust. The scaled bottoms of Nina’s feet are clear. She was here, at this very spot.
“What do you think now?” I ask Peter.
“That she definitely came here. But is that proof she jumped in? Not exactly. And answer my question. Why do you want to jump so badly?”
“I don’t, but why would all these tunnels connect to here?” I admit my desire to go through might seem a bit suspicious, but I believe it’s the right direction, and I think deep down he does too.
All I know for certain is that the lake is something we don’t understand. It’s not natural. And I prefer my enemies of the flesh and blood variety.
“Are you really willing to do this?” Rhys says. “I am if you are.”
I nod. “It’s that or we take a chance down a tunnel. We’re wasting time.” I turn to Peter. “Make a decision. Please.”
Peter shakes his head. “I don’t know. None of this seems real.”
So I settle it. I do what Noah did for me.
I bend my knees and leap into the black.
I wake up in a room.
I’m on my back, heart thrumming. Above me, a single yellow bulb is so dim the filaments are visible. My stomach churns. I roll onto my hands and knees, open my mouth. Fire rushes up my throat and spews from my lips into a black puddle between my hands. The black stuff coming out of my mouth terrifies me. I’m dying. If you’re puking black sludge, you’re dying.
I’m surrounded by three walls of rough gray rock and one wall of vertical iron bars. The bars are orange and brown with surface rust.
Not a room, a cell.
Somehow my suit is gone, gloves too. The floor tilts under me, and I close my eyes to wait for the sensation to pass, but it doesn’t.
I remember everything before my leap of faith, which means someone stole my armor and dressed me in these ragged cloth garments that barely cover my legs and chest. The shirt is sleeveless, with a tight collar around my throat. Basically a burlap bag with a hole cut for my head. The shorts are rough scratchy fibers poorly sewn together. The thought of someone undressing and dressing me while I was unconscious sends a violent shiver across my shoulders.
&nb
sp; I remember leaping over the emptiness. Peter’s cry and Rhys’s gasp. Then nothingness. It was only a second ago.
I spit leftover black goop from my mouth, run my tongue over my teeth. The rock floor is so cold it’s sucking my body heat. I sit on my butt to keep as little skin contact as possible. Behind me, something bounces off the floor. I spin around, rising to my feet with my hands up, ready to tear its eyes out. It was just a pebble that came loose from the wall. It rolls toward a wooden bucket in the corner that is just outside the reach of the feeble light. I let out a miserable half-crying sound and squeeze my eyes shut, nearly falling back on my butt. A single tear escapes onto my cheek.
Under the ball of my right foot is a crease, a line that bisects the floor of the cell. I feel a vibration through it. I go down on my hands and knees again, next to the sludge that I threw up, and put my ear to the cold, smooth rock. I hear a rushing noise…liquid. Water gurgling under the floor, maybe.
I’ve always wondered if my experiences made me better prepared for anything. I liked to think I was more capable than your average girl, and not just physically. But I don’t think I am. I’m two seconds away from tucking myself into a ball and crying myself back to sleep. Seconds ago I was jumping into the lake, and now I’m here, dressed in different clothing, a prisoner for the second time in less than twelve hours.
I crawl to the bucket. It’s filled with water. The wooden lip is too thick to drink from, so I cup some of the water in my palm and lift it to my mouth. It’s cool and clear, exactly how water should be. I slurp a few more handfuls until the foul taste in my mouth weakens. The drink calms me a little, which isn’t the best thing, because then I can think. Jumping against Peter’s wishes has made me a captive of…well, who really knows. My money is on the creators.
If Peter and Rhys followed me, they probably share the same fate. My fault. I had to jump in like some kind of don’t-give-a-shit badass.
I want to go to the bars and call out to them, in the hopes that they’re stuck in a nearby cell, but I’m afraid. Afraid Peter and Rhys won’t answer. Afraid they will.
But I say something out loud anyway, just to hear my own voice. “I’m all alone.”
“No you’re not,” a voice says behind me.
I whirl around, hands balled into fists.
Noah stands in the opposite corner of my cell.
I’m dead.
Some of the confusion drains away, leaving me empty but less afraid. I may be dead, but you can’t hurt the dead.
“You’re not dead,” Noah says. “At least, I’m pretty sure you’re not. Yeah, no. You’re not. I’d know.” His eyes glitter black, little shards of onyx. They fit right in with this place. The black scales of his suit hide where his wound should be. However he got here, we obviously didn’t come the same way.
That leaves one other possibility.
He seems to know what I’m going to ask before I ask it. “I’m not a different version of me, either,” he says. “Remember the peanut butter?”
“Yes. So where am I?”
He shrugs. He wears his armor, but no weapons.
“No clue,” he says. “Not anywhere I’d like to hang out, but who would?”
I laugh. It bursts from my mouth painfully and echoes off the cramped stone walls. “Then what are you doing here?”
“This is going to sound crazy,” he says with a smile, and I laugh again. I can’t believe it’s him. He looks so real. His smile, the dimple that sometimes appears in his right cheek. Tears are streaming down my face.
“Try me,” I say.
“Everything is fuzzy right now.” He crinkles his nose. “But there’s something I’m supposed to remember, something I didn’t know before, but I do now. That sounds crazy.”
“Kind of.”
I step closer, entering the haze of light, and so does he. The light casts V-shaped shadows under his eyes. I reach out, slowly, and touch his neck with my fingertips. I peel the black scales off his neck.
And feel his flesh underneath.
His unmarred flesh. Whole. Uncut.
And impossible.
“This isn’t real.” I close my eyes.
When he speaks, his breath touches my cheeks. “It’s real in your mind. I feel you the same way. I can’t explain it.”
“Can you hear my thoughts?”
He shakes his head. “Only when you want me to. Can you hear mine?”
I shake my head back. The secret of my short past is safe.
He puts a finger under my chin and tilts it up. Rubs his thumb across my lower lip. I taste the salt of my tears. I can see him, feel him, smell him. My knees shake.
“But you died,” I whisper.
“In a way,” he replies, then leans forward and presses his lips against mine.
The lightbulb flickers, buzzing. My eyes snap open and my hands are raised in front of me, curled, as if I was hugging someone and now they’re gone.
Noah’s gone.
“Where are you?” I whisper, not expecting an answer.
“Here.”
Noah’s voice. In my head, but like he’s talking right next to me.
I can only manage one thought—How?
“I don’t know.”
“Come back. Let me see you.” I don’t want to be alone. I feel his phantom kiss on my lips still. I don’t know why I kissed him back. It felt terribly wrong and terribly right at the same time.
“If my voice in your head is a little strange, guess how it feels for me.”
I spin around. Noah is leaning with both shoulders against the wall, arms folded. A cocky, careless pose. So Noah.
“And you’re not really here.…”
“I thought that part was obvious by now,” he says. He’s pretending like we didn’t just kiss, which is fine with me.
“Are you okay?” Such a stupid question. I regret it even as my lips form the words.
He blinks rapidly. “Not really. But I’m managing. You know I always do. Something hurts, though.” He taps his head with the heel of his hand. “I’m supposed to be doing something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Give me more than thirty seconds.”
It really is him.
“So where the hell are we?”
“It looks like a prison cell.” He smiles. He doesn’t smirk.
For a second I think everything might be okay. If this isn’t a dream, or hell, and Noah really is here…well, I’m not alone. Even if he’s just in my head.
“It’s you. Really,” I say, unable to keep the tears out of my voice.
He nods grimly, frowning. In life, he only frowned when he was trying to show he was telling the truth. He pats himself on the chest and legs, making sure he’s all there. “Is this how you remember me?”
A chill covers me when I realize that being imprisoned holds a greater danger than boredom—my memory shots are out of reach. I’ll be okay for a while, but I can’t expect to be going home anytime soon. Even if I manage to survive in here a day or two, it’ll all be for nothing if I can’t keep my memories. Soon I’ll be clueless, confused, without an identity.
“I don’t have any shots,” I say, mostly to myself. “You don’t happen to have any, do you?” It’s a half joke.
Noah pats where his pockets would be if he had any. “Fresh out. But don’t worry about that yet. Worry about—”
The floor begins to vibrate through the bottoms of my freezing feet. A mechanical buzz that almost tickles. More pebbles tumble down the walls.
And the floor begins to split apart at the seam.
Slowly, the two sides of the floor retract into the walls. In the middle, a black gulf grows wider, and I see that I was right—there is water under the floor. Black water. As black as the lake I jumped through, but broken with vibrations from the moving floor. It reflects the yellow light of the bulb above.
“Move!” Noah shouts.
My feet are on either side, slowly pulling me into a split. I push off with my rig
ht foot and step onto Noah’s half. It takes me that long to realize that, yeah, the cell is about to dump me into the black water. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
“Do something!” Noah says, grabbing my shoulder.
It’s not just me in here; it’s Noah. I lunge for the bars and try to stick my feet through them, but the floor outside the cell is covered in tiny spikes I don’t see until they cut me. Hot blood slicks the balls of my feet.
The gulf takes up a third of the floor now; I won’t have a place to stand much longer.
“Do something, Mir.”
I stop being a slow idiot and plant my foot on the remaining meter of floor, then kick the door where it’s most discolored at the hinges. My foot leaves a smear of blood on the rusted bars. Hot pain lances up to my knee, which happens when you kick solid iron. I kick twice more, leaving thicker smears, blood oozing freely from my cut foot.
“C’mon, Miranda! Kick!” Noah stands off to the side. He claps his hands. “DO IT!”
I kick again and again, until the door is out of reach and my toes are numb. My foot aches, the cut burns. The bars thrum in their frame. I grab the bars to gain a little more reach, then awkwardly kick the door a final time. The wrong part of my foot connects; my ankle twists painfully and I cry out.
“Again!”
“I can’t.”
“Shut up. Again.”
I scream and leap onto the door as my footing disappears, grabbing both bars and planting my feet vertically to either side. I pull with everything in me, arms shaking, shoulders burning, back aching as I hover over the water.
“Don’t you dare give up!” Noah says.
My legs are throbbing hot and red, and my head is about to burst. The hinges groan like the rest of me, but do not budge. My whole body is on fire.
I’m holding on to the cage like a monkey. My arms shake, yet I hold fast. The floor is gone now, the black water waiting to swallow me whole. I cling to the cage with my knees, not wanting to put my throbbing feet back on the spikes. I tremble from top to bottom, and the door rattles quietly in its frame. If I could only rest for a moment, take a deep breath, I could hold on longer.
