And down they went, Arthur moving more quickly yet still falling behind thanks to his shorter legs and gait, but he’d be damned if he was going to ask them to slow down—though when he glanced back at the motion-sensor lights winking out one by one as they trekked further and beyond, temptation called.

  It made perfect sense why Mina set such a pace. Arthur would’ve done the same in her place, maybe even faster. What the hell is happening to us?

  Fragments of memory played across the swallowing black corridor—Mark buying the crew lunch; Joyce helping to file his axes; Erin coaching him in the sims—clipped, they were hardly memories at all but hail on a tin roof.

  And at the center was an impression of a man he couldn’t believe was dead. He wouldn’t, the wound his father left him was already too great to bear another.

  Each door they passed seemed to draw the same fear from Mina, she nearly broke the key pad on this door as she tried to get to the circuitry beneath. Snake stepped in to make an assessment but as had been the case with the previous doors, it refused to give way.

  Mina moved on without waiting, leaving Snake to wrestle the panel back into place.

  “I don’t think you have to worry about it,” Arthur said.

  Snake pressed his palms together like a book, opened them, then shook his hands.

  “Me too,” Arthur admitted, “but I don’t know what else we’re supposed to do.”

  Snake raked a hand through his hair, then nodded down the hall, a curious tension pulling at his features.

  Ahead, Mina rounded a corner, and by the sound of her stomping feet, had suddenly picked up her pace. Arthur shared a look with Snake then hurried to catch up.

  It wasn’t long before Arthur saw what had pulled her forward. A pale ball of light glowed ahead, resolving into the window of a door. It was hardly an illuminating presence, but in the dark corridor it was like the sun in not but negative space—or the bulb of an angler fish…

  Arthur drew up at the thought, but it truly was just a window.

  Mina paused, peering through the glass. Snake joined her. Arthur watched from below—the window sat two feet higher than he could see through, and he’d be damned—

  “It’s too foggy. I can’t make anything out,” Mina said.

  A rusty whine followed as Snake turned a wheel at the center of the wall, and the circular hatch creaked open.

  The three of them shared a silence, surveying the room from the threshold. Transplanted pilot chairs and furniture carved from machinery were arranged in the center of the room at least a meter from the wall, laced together by the same violet vines they’d seen on the trellises—only without the trellises for guidance they’d overgrown the room like a ventricular carpet.

  Strange gray wallpaper coated the walls, eerie beneath the forlorn lamp hanging from the ceiling, but as Arthur stepped inside, and drew closer, he realized it wasn’t wallpaper at all.

  “It’s—I think it’s…” he looked to Mina.

  “It’s his handwriting,” she said.

  What he’d taken for a severe looping pattern was a careful cursive script, though scattered sections diverged into frantic pockets, scrawled with haste, and layering over themselves without regard for what came before, or underneath.

  Too hot, too fast. Regulate.

  Integration is bilateral.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  Get a head.

  Other lines were more poetic, and some were even philosophical, but their eyes were drawn to the wall opposite the door where sketches of mecks sprawled across every inch, colors overlapping in bold layers. The most striking were several stylized after Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

  Smaller sketches were crammed between these—many with human faces drawn on them. Arthur reached toward it, but before his hand touched the wall a scream tore through the still air.

  Arthur stumbled backward, and turned toward the corridor, expecting something to be waiting for him, but there was nothing. With the floor lights along the dark path snuffed out, it seemed like a predator's cave, and he imagined eyes blinking open in the dark.

  Then a second scream knifed through him from beyond.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said, stepping closer to the corridor despite his fear, “we should—”

  Snake bore into the tunnel before Arthur could finish his sentence. The floor lights flickered alive as they chased him. Arthur’s chest clenched—no matter how slow he was, he couldn’t stay behind.

  He pushed himself up then halted at the door when he realized Mina hadn’t moved. She stood by a desk, staring at a pile of junk laid atop it. Whatever had caused the scream suddenly seemed easier than facing the look on her face. He approached slowly.

  “Mina?”

  The junk was tangled in the same vines as the floor. Not wanting to say her name again, Arthur crouched, trying to see if she’d seen something underneath. He leaned down only to find two human legs neatly arranged in a chair tucked on the other side.

  Arthur was the one to scream this time, scrambling back onto the vines.

  “It’s a person,” Arthur gasped, wondering how he’d ever mistaken it for junk.

  Amid scattered books and gizmos, a man slumped over the table as if fallen asleep at an exam. Vines draped him like a blanket, his face turned away. Neither hid the gray skin and the bones beneath.

  Mina leaned in close to the body.

  “Is it…is it him?” Arthur asked.

  “Who else could it be?” Her tone was flat, almost cold.

  She meticulously broke apart the vines, and started inspecting the items on the desk. She paused only to lift a dilapidated book, inspected it for a heartbeat, then thrust it toward Arthur.

  “Here.”

  He grabbed it without thinking. The book felt soft in places, brittle in others. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s got your name on it.”

  Arthur looked down. Though smeared, his name was etched in one corner. He opened it, finding more words scrawled in Daiko’s script.

  “Do right, fear nothing,” Mina said the words as he read them.

  Arthur looked up. Their eyes met—and he couldn’t tell if she was hurt, angry, or something colder still.

  “Maybe they were his last words,” she said, turning back to her father’s corpse. Arthur thought she was searching for something, but then she shuddered, turned away, and crossed to the center of the room.

  He regarded the book while Mina spun in a slow circle, she seemed to be cataloging the wall of images. Daiko Hitori—Asparia’s Dragon—was dead. No…

  Arthur looked at the book in his hands. Why me? Why would he leave me this?

  Then he remembered the scream from earlier, and thought of Snake rushing to investigate. Arthur stiffened, mouth parting—but he snapped it shut. What was he supposed to say? Hey, now that we found your dead dad, can we go?

  He shook his head. He wanted to console her, to share his concern for the others, but he couldn’t find words. He was barely holding himself together.

  He was spared further indecision by brightening in the hallway as something approached. Arthur stared into the darkness, but could see nothing but rolling light. In just a moment it was barreling into the room, banking across the walls where unseen lights flickered alive as it passed in a chaotic swirl. Then, just below the steady glow of the hanging lamp, there appeared something strange—a fracture of light, a tear in reality—accompanied by the sound of crumpling paper.

  Arthur blinked, disoriented—then found himself standing between it and Mina. What the hell was he going to do against light? However, the light simply spoke, and all but one word was clear.

  “Come.”

  That voice. Familiar. Impossible.

  Mina and Arthur locked eyes, disbelief mirrored in both. The geist tumbled back down the corridor, its cape of light dragging after it.

  Arthur’s eyes drifted toward the corpse.

  “That was—” but he cut off as Mina bolted through the door, just like Snake. Distantly Arthur was frustrated, but now wasn’t the time for that. He gathered his strength for a dead run, then hesitated, catching something familiar along the wall near the desk, half-hidden by the vines.

  He tore his crutch free from the vines, ignoring how different it felt, then jammed it under his arm, and lurched for the hangar. Hope lent his limbs speed—yet truth pounded after him.

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