by Scott Sigler
It isn’t long before we see bones.
The carnage begins with a few skeletons. At first I think Bishop and the others overreacted when they told us how bad it was in their area.
Then it gets worse.
The archways gape open, the stone doors neatly out of the way in their wall slots. We can see into the poorly lit rooms that we pass by, see the horrors left by the Grownups.
We had bones outside our coffin room, evidence of an intense battle, but it was nothing like this. Here, room after room is littered with death. Some of the dead are skeletons, some are withered corpses of dried flesh. Everywhere we look, it seems, skulls grin back at us.
Many of the bodies wear the clothes they had on when they died. These Grownups did not dress like us. They all wear a one-piece outfit that is both pants and shirt together. The outfits are in different colors: orange, yellow, blue, red, some greens, and, once in a while, purple. Dark stains dot the fabric. Judging from the fact that those stains are darkest where an arm or a leg is missing, I realize most are from long-dried blood.
Some rooms have tangled bodies stacked so deep I can’t even guess how many lives the twisted limbs once represented. Other rooms don’t have full skeletons at all, only teetering piles of bones—arms and legs, severed before or after death, thrown together haphazardly like children’s toys.
One room makes me stop and stare, because there is nothing but skulls. They are neatly stacked into a shape I recognize—the same squat, stepped pyramids that were carved into my coffin.
The Grownups turned death into art.
I look at Aramovsky, wondering what he thinks of his angry gods now. The skulls frighten him, but also excite him. He finds all of this fascinating.
As we walk, as we look through open doors, things get worse: skeletons hanging from the ceiling by metal rings around their wrists and ankles; a room with nothing but the bones of a hundred left arms arranged in pinwheels of overlapped hands; a room where skeletons sit in chairs, facing each other, held in permanent poses by stiff, curling wires.
El-Saffani continues to walk ahead of us, but the twins don’t seem as brave anymore. They’re scared, just like me, just like Bishop, just like the rest of our group. I think we’re all waiting for the skeletons to move, to laugh, to rise up and come after us.
After a while, I try to stop myself from looking into the rooms full of mangled people, but every time I fail. I notice a pattern: a few of the shriveled dead still have dried skin on their faces. On those corpses, I can sometimes make out forehead symbols.
And every symbol I see, every last one, is an empty circle.
My symbol.
I stand closer to Bishop, close enough that I keep bumping against him as we walk. So many dead. So many bones—broken, blackened, shattered, sawed and chopped.
Why did the Grownups do this to each other?
Up ahead, the twins hesitate at an intersection. We catch up to them and I see why they stopped. My stomach flutters at the sight: two neat rows of footprints going both left and right.
“Bishop,” I say, pointing to the tracks, “did you cross over your own path on the way here?”
He scratches his cheek. A little of the dried gray dust flakes away. I shiver as I realize the dust covering the circle-stars is basically the same stuff as the dead bodies we’ve passed by.
“Yeah, I guess,” he says. “We turned around a few times. Maybe we walked the same halls more than once.”
Is he lost? Did we waste precious time coming here?
“Bishop, focus,” I say. “We need to find the haunted room. You said it had three pedestals and a ladder, remember?”
I’m hoping those details will jog his memory, but as he again scans the footprints and the hall, I don’t see a flicker of recognition.
He leans into an archway, looks around, leans back out. He seems confused.
“It’s close to here,” he says. “I’m pretty sure.”
Gaston steps forward.
“I know where the room is.”
He speaks quietly, as if he’s afraid that simple statement will somehow anger Bishop. Gaston’s eyes keep flicking toward Bishop’s bone-club. Maybe Gaston realizes—like I did—that we’re far away from the others, that Bishop and the circle-stars could find a way to make him vanish and no one would ever know.
Bishop stares down at the smaller boy. I brace myself for yet another argument.
This time, however, there isn’t one. Bishop sighs and nods.
“I really don’t remember,” he says. “Gaston should take over.”
Gaston lets out a held breath, sags as the tension leaves him.
“You got us most of the way, Bishop,” he says. For once, he’s not poking fun. I could be wrong, but I think he’s trying to make Bishop feel better about getting lost.
Gaston examines the footprints, thinking. He points down the dim hall that leads right.
“At the corner up there, we turn left. At the end of that hall we turn right.” He looks at me, speaks quietly. “On the way there, you’ll see four archways. I wouldn’t look in the third one if I were you.” He shifts his gaze to Aramovsky. “Both of you…just don’t look.”
I see Bishop shudder. The twins stare at the ground. Visca and Bawden drift close to each other, so close their shoulders touch, as if the memory of what they saw drives them to seek comfort.
Whatever waits in that room, it must be beyond anything we have seen so far. How it could be worse, I can’t imagine.
Bishop nods. “Gaston is right. I remember what’s in there. You don’t want to see it. El-Saffani, lead the way.”
The twins head down the hall. We follow. We turn left.
Bishop is giving orders now? Maybe he does want to take over. I’ll need to be careful and pay attention to everything he does.
We pass four archway doors. At the third one, I think of following Gaston’s advice and keeping my eyes straight ahead. No, I don’t have the luxury of ignoring things. I am the leader: I need to know everything that we face.
I look in.
There are shriveled-up bodies, but they are much smaller than those of the Grownups.
Smaller than us.
Smaller than the ones we saw in the coffins with the torn lids.
So tiny, I easily could hold them with one arm.
Babies.
Hundreds of little corpses dangle from the ceiling, so thick I almost can’t see the ceiling itself. They hang from chains that end in metal hooks slid through their rib cages. Cracked, dry skin has peeled away from their bodies, showing the bones beneath. Clumps of fallen flesh cover the floor like some horrid scattering of snow.
Seeing this makes my body rebel, makes me want to vomit. My stomach churns. I put a hand on my knee, try to catch my breath. This is wrong, so wrong.
How could people do something so evil?
“Told you,” Gaston says. “Next time I tell you something, Em, maybe you should listen.”
I nod slowly. Maybe I should.
He takes my hand and pulls me away. There is something about this boy that makes me know I can rely on him, no matter what. In that way, he reminds me of Latu.
We make the final right-hand turn. Not far ahead, the hallway ends in a white wall with a small plaque: a palm print embedded in a rectangle of dark glassy material. On the floor below it is a square of smooth, black metal.
Bishop points at the square.
“That’s the door,” he says.
I had assumed it would be stone, like every other door in this place. Unless that melted metal we saw earlier was a door, but we have no way of knowing for sure.
The handprint in the plaque, there is a golden symbol in it: the jagged circle. The same symbol that is on the foreheads of Gaston, Spingate and Beckett.
Gaston walks to the plaque. Strides to it, more accurately. He presses his palm to the handprint. The black door in the floor hums, then rises up on a hidden hinge, revealing a narrow tube leading down. A ladder runs its l
ength, vanishing into deep shadow.
He crosses his arms. His smile is so smug it could make Aramovsky’s look humble by comparison. The time for being quiet and modest is apparently over: Gaston is back to normal.
“That’s how it goes,” he says. “It opens for me. Some people are more important than others, it seems.”
El-Saffani talks, the boy first this time, then the girl.
“Bishop tried it—”
“—then we tried—”
“—but it didn’t work for us.”
Bishop is glowering, waiting for us to finish. He doesn’t like the fact that Gaston can do something he can’t.
“What about Beckett?” I ask. “Did he try?”
Gaston nods. “It didn’t work for him, either.”
I thought perhaps the door recognized symbols, somehow, but if Beckett can’t open it, it’s not about the symbols alone. Is it something particular to Gaston? Or, maybe, particular to only certain people?
“I want to try,” I say.
Gaston again puts his hand to the print. The door closes. He gives a deep, comical bow and steps aside.
I press my hand into the depression, feel the cool material against my skin. Nothing happens.
Gaston holds the back of his hand to his forehead, pretends to be faint.
“Oh dear, our fearless leader is denied! Whatever will become of us now?”
He is so strange. We just saw butchered babies, hundreds of dead people—maybe thousands—and he’s making jokes? I want to shake some sense into him. But perhaps jokes are his way of dealing with this. It’s certainly better than how I reacted, which was to almost throw up.
Aramovsky walks to the plaque. He presses his hand to the glass.
The door hums: it opens.
Bishop laughs and shakes his bone-club. “Ha! I guess Gaston isn’t so special after all!”
Gaston’s face shifts from happy smile to glaring scowl. When he smiles, he is cute; when he looks like this, so hateful and furious, he is ugly both inside and out.
Aramovsky breathes out a sigh of delight. “The door opens for me because I am chosen. I knew it.” He looks at Gaston with an expression of deep respect, of acceptance. “As are you, Gaston. You are also chosen. I apologize if I offended you earlier, my brother.”
Gaston snarls. I would have never guessed something like this was so important to him.
I brought Aramovsky so he wouldn’t talk to the others while I was gone, so his words wouldn’t create more problems—now he has gained some kind of stature. I wonder if I will ever make the right choices.
The ladder waits for us. I want to get the bracelet and get away from this slaughterhouse, but I don’t want to rush things and make even more mistakes.
“Bishop, you said this room is haunted?”
He nods. His jaw muscles twitch. He will go down there with me, but he doesn’t try to pretend he’s not scared.
“You didn’t see ghosts or something,” I say. “Right?”
Bishop shrugs. I turn to Gaston.
“Well, Gaston? Ghosts?”
The small boy swallows. He’s no longer in a joking mood.
“The room is…weird,” he says. “It’s small and dark. You feel heavier, like an invisible hand is squeezing you, trying to make you sit. Our legs got tired fast. And we both felt like…like something was watching us. I wanted to get out of there. To be honest, Em, I don’t want to go back down.”
He’s asking without asking if he can stay up here. I would love to let him do that, but he’s the smartest of us.
“I need that big brain of yours,” I say. I tousle his black hair, trying to make light of the situation. “What if there are things down there that won’t work for anyone but you? Maybe there’s something you and Bishop didn’t see, something like the hidden panels in the archways.”
“Those things would work for me as well,” Aramovsky says. “Or perhaps we’ll find things that only work for me.”
He’s right. Besides, if I leave him up here with the circle-stars, who knows what he’ll tell them. I’m afraid of Bishop because he is big and strong. He could hurt me. I’m afraid of Aramovsky, too, but I’m not sure why.
“I’ll go first,” I say. “Then Bishop, then Gaston, then Aramovsky, then El-Saffani.”
The twins step forward in unison and start down the ladder before I can even say a word to the contrary. Maybe they’re just as afraid as I am, but if so they hide it well. Or maybe they are actually brave, like Latu was.
I look at Bawden and Visca.
“You two guard the door, okay?”
The two gray-faced people nod.
I start down the ladder.
THIRTY-ONE
I hold the spear in one hand, use my other to grip the ladder rungs as I descend.
It’s easy at first, but it quickly gets harder the farther I go down. I understand what Gaston was saying about something pushing him: I feel heavier, like I’m progressively carrying more and more weight.
It hits me how clean this tube is. Other than some footprints on the uppermost rungs, probably from when Gaston and Bishop first came down, there is no dust at all. Has the door above me always been closed?
I reach the bottom. The circular floor is strange. Like the black door, it’s metal, a grate of some kind. I can see through it to a black, curving surface below. The curve seems to slope up equally in all directions, becoming curved walls that join together to make a curved ceiling.
Before, we were inside a cylinder. Now, we are inside a ball.
My eyes adjust to the darkness.
I see the body Gaston told us about, a long bit of light gray that stands out from the shadows. It is chest-down on the metal-grate floor, arms spread wide. The skin-taut skull is facing us, greeting us with an eternal smile. A once-white body suit drapes thin ribs, hides arm and leg bones. Splotches of different colors—faded red, yellow, grayish black—stain the fabric. The biggest stain is in the middle of the back, where the spear must have dug deep, ending that person’s life.
I see the “shackle” Gaston described. Yes, it is exactly like the one the scarred monster aimed at my face. It is on the corpse’s right wrist. The rod connected to the bracelet points out, parallel to the metal-grate floor.
A few steps past the corpse, I see the three pedestals Gaston described. Unlike the other pedestals we’ve seen so far, these are unbroken. In full light, they would be white; right now they are a pale shade of gray. Gold symbols line the round stems. Their flat, square tops sit empty. If we could figure out what is supposed to be on top of those pedestals, I think that would connect a few more dots of the puzzle that is this place.
I take a few steps: my feet feel like they are weighed down by thick stones.
“Gaston, why are we heavier?”
He starts to talk, then stops. That frustrated look comes over his face again.
“I think it’s similar to how we didn’t fall from the ceiling, but”—he looks at Aramovsky—“I really don’t want to argue with you about that right now.”
Aramovsky actually bows. “Of course not, my chosen brother. Please, continue.”
Gaston sighs and shakes his head. Maybe he liked the confrontational Aramovsky better than the friendly version.
“Anyway, it’s like my brain is trying to tell me why we feel heavier, but it doesn’t know where that information is kept. So many things are still…blanked out.”
That phrase, blanked out—it’s his version of the sludge-brain sensation I defined as muddy. Gaston’s word feels more accurate.
I look at the body. So gross. My stomach feels queasy again. I’ve seen worse things, far worse, but knowing this person was speared in the back makes me wonder if the same thing could happen to me.
I need to focus: what we came for is lying right there.
“I’ll get the bracelet,” I say.
Gaston kneels next to the body. “No, let me. The look on your face makes me think you might throw up. And if there�
�s one thing nastier than a corpse, it’s a corpse covered in puke.”
I’m more than happy to let him do it. I don’t want to even look at another dead body, let alone touch one.
Gaston tries to move the bracelet. The stained fabric has dried to it—he has to give it a little bit of a tug before the fabric pulls free with a crackling sound.
“Eww, gross,” he says. He gently slides the bracelet off the skeletal arm. He stands, starts to offer the prize to me, then stops and holds it close to his face.
“Uh-oh,” he says. “This can’t be a good thing.”
He points at the base of the long rod. The white jewel there is cracked in several places. A few small pieces of it are missing.
I reach out a fingertip, feel the broken lines.
“When the monster pointed his bracelet at me, the jewel glowed,” I say.
Everyone looks at the device in Gaston’s hand. We don’t know how it works, but it is obvious to all of us that this jewel is never going to glow again.
Aramovsky sighs.
“Brilliant work, Savage,” he says. “You dragged us all this way and what do we get for it? Nothing. Instead of going after Bello, we did this. She’s probably dead by now. Maybe we could have saved her if we’d acted quicker, but now it’s likely too late.”
He didn’t want to go after her in the first place. He wanted to abandon her to the monsters to please his “gods.” Why is he changing his story? Is he trying to make me look bad again?
Bishop is staring at me. His eyes narrow. He wanted to try to rescue Bello, but I wouldn’t let him. Now I understand—Aramovsky’s words weren’t meant to make me look bad, they were meant to remind Bishop that coming here was my choice.
Aramovsky is trying to turn Bishop against me. Not that doing so will take much effort, I suppose: Bishop was right, and I was wrong.
I wasted precious time. I split up the group for nothing. If I don’t fix this, they’ll replace me as leader. I can’t let that happen. I have to admit it to myself; I want to be the leader. I am the one who makes decisions. I know I’ve made mistakes, but I don’t trust anyone else to do a better job than I can. If we’re going to stay alive, if we’re going to make it out of this awful place, if we’re going to survive the monsters, I know our best chance is if I stay in charge.