Lightspeed Magazine - October 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  “Just remember to have some respect.” Bloodaxe laughed. “So your dad works with computers, huh? He one of those old farts that wants to bring back the ‘good old days’? My granddad told me stories. Did you know there were these things called ‘cell phones’? Communication device you could carry around in your pocket, and anybody could talk to you at any moment of the day no matter where you were. What idiot wants a thing in their pocket that lets their boyfriend talk to you whenever he wants, no matter where you are?”

  Doom Maiden rolled her eyes. “An idiot with a boyfriend. Something you don’t know anything about.”

  Bloodaxe chuckled. “I’m just picky.”

  “How come you don’t have the latest, greatest gear?” I asked, turning back to Domino’s apparently loaded parents. “You were so excited about my stupid ten-foot pole.”

  “My allowance is like fifty loot bucks a month. Just because Dad has a good job doesn’t mean they give me much to spend. I blew all my savings on my ’fact.”

  “How do they feel about you crawling?” I asked.

  “My dad thinks I’ll piss myself in my first dungeon and give it up.”

  Bloodaxe laughed loudly enough to make my ears ring. “You’re not so bad, kid. I really hate the thrilljunkie delvers. All kit and no brains to use it.” He looked around the table. “Who do I have to threaten for a drink around here?”

  “Get it yourself, you oaf,” Doom Maiden snarled. They sounded kind of like how couples talked, I thought, but that probably couldn’t be the case given their cracks about boyfriends earlier. I couldn’t figure out their status—maybe she was just into him, preferences be damned? What she saw in a troller, I wasn’t sure about. Bloodaxe’s metamorphosis was nearly complete—his skin was four times as thick as before, covered in gross moles and gnarls, and he sported a mouth full of tusks and fangs. I couldn’t imagine kissing a mouth like that.

  But who knew what girls liked? Sure as hell not me.

  Bloodaxe grumbled and left for the bar.

  “I’m Cindy,” said the girl troller once he had left. I’d almost forgotten they were there; they had been so quiet before. “This is Sam. We’re new, too.”

  “Does it, you know, hurt?” Domino asked. “To go through the treatments?”

  Doom Maiden and I exchanged a glance of “can you believe this guy?” But Cindy was chill about it.

  “Yes. My whole body is stretching out, so I’m sore, like, all the time. I grew ten centimeters this month. It’ll be worth it when it’s over. I’ll be able to handle any threat, and it’s better than hoping I live long enough to develop a d-space talent.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “No offense. I went through a transformation of my own getting fit and that was enough for me.”

  “Oh.” Doom Maiden raised an eyebrow. “You said your brother called you names, but you seem pretty slim now.”

  I shifted in my seat and looked away. I wasn’t used to being around other people and I kept sharing stuff that I didn’t want to share. “After Rash died, my mom fell apart. My dad died in an incursion when we were little, and Rash’s death just … broke her, I guess. She cried all the time. I couldn’t take it anymore.” I finished my beer in one long gulp. Maybe it was the beer that made me talk so much? Or maybe I was just lonely. “I took walks around the city for hours, every night. Anyway. Now I’m not so fat.”

  “Good for you, man,” Domino said. “My mom believes it’s good to take tragedy and spin something positive out of it.”

  “You know, your brother might not actually be de—” Doom Maiden began to say, but Domino waved her off, to his credit. Maybe his enthusiasm was something I needed.

  I felt like I owed him in return, and I knew Domino wanted one thing more than anything else. The Speakeasy hadn’t been so bad. Maybe I could handle a wild, untamed anomaly.

  “How much time before you have to be home tonight?” I asked him, mostly to change the subject.

  “I’ve got a few hours, why?”

  “Let’s take a run at the Cavern of the Screaming Eye.”

  “Right now?” I couldn’t help it—I grinned, too. I was tired of all the talking. Maybe it was time to hit something and not feel bad about it afterwards.

  “Right now, before I lose my courage.”

  Bloodaxe returned to the table as we stood up. “You two leaving already?” Domino explained where we were headed. “We’ll tag along. It’ll be a good experience for my young protégés. Doom Maiden, you in?”

  She nodded. “If it’s okay with you guys.”

  “Sure. Let’s party up,” I said. It made me feel better to know we would have some experienced crawlers on hand.

  • • • •

  I was the last one of us off the Yellow Line bus. I’d already lost my nerve again.

  “The entrance is just a block away,” Domino said. “Oh, man, I can’t wait to get inside and kick butt.”

  “Maybe we should come back in the morning,” I said. “I should read up on what the ’zines have to say. My brother always researched his runs.”

  Bloodaxe placed his massive hand my shoulder and guided me forward, step by step, with a grip that said it wasn’t worth arguing. “Gotta relax, dude. The Cavern’s an easy one. Nobody’s ever died in there.”

  Doom Maiden had a timer in her hand. It was pretty flash, crusted with all kinds of fake gems, totally out of character with her armor. “What’s the duration for this place?”

  “The Guide says forty-two minutes,” Domino removed something from his pack, a weird little white mask with a black mask painted around the eyes. He adjusted some straps and placed it over his face. It made him look ridiculous, but also kind of chill.

  “Okay, I’m ready to go now—hey, what’s so funny?” He slid the mask up over his head.

  “Nothing,” I said, smothering my grin. “What else does the guide say?”

  “The reason I picked this one is I think my mask will get us past some of the defenses. There are these cave tunnels, filled with these things, uh, big eyes, I guess, that watch over sections like guard dogs. If they see you, they start screaming, which hurts like hell and then you’re de-synced from the dungeon,” Domino said.

  Bloodaxe flipped through a pocket guide and read a few pages before smirking. “Your whole body’s covered in purple spots for a week after de-sync. That’s not so bad. I went blind for a week after bouncing hard outta level two once.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said, but I wondered what my Mom would say if she found me covered in head-to-toe hickeys?

  Better not think about it. I had to do this. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I liked these people and I didn’t want to them to know how zero-swank I was in real life.

  “Bloodaxe and I are going to hang back at the entrance unless you guys get into trouble,” Doom Maiden said.

  The troller nodded. “We’ll help only if you really need it. Purple welts aren’t going to do anything for my complexion right now.”

  “I’m not very good at sneaking,” Sam, the young troller boy, said. The guy was terrible at conversational segues, but I kind of liked him more for it. Everyone else was witty and fast on the feet.

  Bloodaxe shrugged. “You gotta learn. This’ll be good practice for you.”

  Sam didn’t look happy with that, but what could he do? I’d watched Cindy and Sam on the bus ride, and I was pretty sure that they actually were a couple. I figured they had decided to take the troller artifact transformation together. I wasn’t sure whose idea had it been, though. Probably Cindy’s? They were from the poorer West Barrio, which explained why they had agreed to sell BodyMods Inc. twenty percent of their loot proceeds. I’d always thought it was a raw deal, but I couldn’t judge them for it. We all did what we had to do.

  “Ready?” Domino asked. Everyone nodded.

  The Cavern entrance was in the far back stall of the women’s restroom in a Java Palace franchise. The JPs had popped up around the city like caffeinated zits lately, buyin
g up cheap disused property in manifestation zones. That made them popular crawler hangouts, but this one was null excitement. Experienced teams probably wouldn’t be caught dead near a Cavern instance.

  The barista didn’t look up from her newspaper when we walked in carrying our packs of gear. She pointed to the sign-in sheet and MAC disclaimer forms. “Sign in first.”

  We wasted a few minutes filling out the paperwork and then Doom Maiden went in first to make sure nobody was using the toilets. She signaled that the coast was clear.

  This anomaly’s entrance manifested a fiery rock embedded in the floor. A slitted ember iris stared, unblinking, from below. Totally creepy, but not enough to stop me now.

  Domino and I went in first, then Sam and Cindy followed. Bloodaxe and Doom Maiden followed a second later, and when they appeared in the damp, dimly lit cavern of the dungeonspace, they were laughing like one of them had just told a really funny joke.

  Somehow I just knew they had been making fun of me. The trollers and Domino brought something to the crawl, but I didn’t have any training or talents. I was in moderately decent shape, but still flabby in the middle. The only thing I had going for me was all the stories my brother had told me of his dungeonspace adventures. Every dungeon was a little different, even within the different established variants, so that information was of limited use. I was this team’s dead weight.

  Too late to back out now. I took a deep breath and had a close look at the dungeonspace around us. We’d appeared in a ten-meter-wide space carved out of rough-hewn rock. Light seemed to be coming from somewhere, just a little bit of it, but as much as I looked around, I couldn’t find a source. Physics was notoriously weird in d-space. The light was coming from everywhere, I realized, like darkness just wasn’t totally dark here.

  The floor slanted downward slightly, almost aiming us towards the passageway that curved away from the room. We couldn’t see very far down it, the light fading fast in the distance. The air smelled like a moldy basement, and the only sound beyond our own breathing and shuffling was a persistent drip of water.

  “Kind of anticlimactic—” Domino began. Something shifted along the wall. I was startled by how fast Sam moved at it, swinging with a meaty fist. The beast was the size of a large rat: slimy, four-legged, with a torso made mostly of an enormous eyeball. The iris swiveled in our direction, fixing on Sam, who was now closest to it. A tiny little mouth opened and let out an ear-shattering scream, answered by faint screaming further within the cavern.

  Sam managed a weak “oh shit” before evaporating. I hadn’t taken a single step. Cindy, on the other hand, had already crossed the space between the entrance and where Sam was attacked. The little d-space beast whole-body blinked, seeming as surprised as Sam when he vanished. With an open-palmed slap against the cavern wall, the troller girl reduced the creature to a vitreous jelly sludge.

  “Good reflexes, Cindy,” Bloodaxe called out. “I’d better go console poor Sam,” and he popped out of d-space.

  Doom Maiden grinned. “Sixty seconds in and you’ve only lost a quarter of your party. Not bad.”

  “I didn’t have time to react,” I mumbled.

  “I barely saw that thing before Sam was toast,” Domino said, sounding shaken. “They’re too quick. Not sure what we’re going to do. I can probably sneak past them with my mask, but the rest of you won’t make it.”

  “We might as well try,” Cindy said with a shrug. She had a slight smile; I guessed she was really going to rub it in with Sam that she lasted longer than him. I hoped he wouldn’t take it too hard; he’d saved the rest of us from a similar fate by taking the first sonic blast.

  A quick scouting mission by Domino revealed the path ahead crawling with a dozen of the eye screamers. Basic stealth wasn’t going to cut it.

  “Let’s review what we know,” I suggested. “They have to see us, and they have to scream, right? A silence artifact would be useful, if we had one.”

  “Maybe we can try blinding them somehow,” Domino suggested. “But I don’t have any smoke bombs and the cave floor is pretty uneven. I wouldn’t want to fall down in there.”

  “Can we splat them before they scream?” Cindy asked.

  I frowned, shook my head. “We need to get the drop on them a dozen times. You’re fast, but not that fast. What if there’s a group of them together?”

  She had the right idea. I took a burlap sack out of my pack, standard delver gear. “Here’s something. Domino, activate your mask, and instead of just sneaking past, you pick up each one of the little bastards and shove them in this bag. Repeat until we’re clear.”

  “Not bad,” Cindy said.

  “Yeah, that could work. Let’s give it a try.” Domino slid the mask over his face again and vanished.

  Cindy and I waited while Domino advanced down the passage, his footsteps fading away with distance.

  “Sorry about your brother,” Cindy said after a minute. “Even if he was a jerk, I bet it’s been hard to lose him.”

  I stared off into the dimly lit passage, hoping Dom would get back soon. “Can I ask what the story is with you and Sam? Are you guys … together?”

  She laughed. “Sam told me he loved me in the fourth grade.”

  “The feeling’s not mutual?”

  She looked away. “It’s complicated.”

  I dropped the subject, and was thankful to whatever demon gods ruled over this d-space that Domino reappeared with a squirming, squeaking bag.

  “I think that’s all of them,” he said. He handed the bag to Doom Maiden. She took it reluctantly, holding it away at arm’s length.

  “Onward then?” I asked.

  “Good luck, kiddos.” Doom Maiden fixed me with that odd stare of hers. “That was a good play, Ivan. Most people would have tried the attack route and fail.”

  I did the best I could with a compliment and ignored it. “Okay, no time to waste. Let’s move forward.”

  We traveled through the screamer passage into a junction with three branching passages. We quickly agreed to split up and scout each path.

  About halfway down my tunnel, I realized that the dim light I had been navigating by was nearly gone. I felt colder, too.

  “Shit,” I said under my breath.

  “A voice? Do I hear a voice?” something answered up ahead.

  “Who’s there?” I called out.

  “‘Who’s there?’ it asks. I could ask the same of the voice, and so I do. Who are you?”

  Everyone knew the stories about what could happen if you told a dungeon native your real name. So I did the stupid thing again. “Rash,” I said.

  “Rash? Back again? You sound unwell. Still troubled? No matter. Come into the darkness. It’s safe here for now. The guardian yet sleeps, but I sense more intruders in this space. I will watch their struggle soon, but first I favor conversation.”

  The voice knew my brother? He had been here? He’d never mentioned the Caverns to me that I could remember.

  I took a step into the darkness. The voice continued.

  “I’ve missed our talks,” the voice said. It had a soothing quality, but not unnaturally so. It was like a grandmother; old, wise. I wasn’t afraid of it.

  “Uh … remind me what we talked about last time.”

  “Hah. I am supposed to be the forgetful one, child. The nature of things. Mysteries within mysteries. The solution to the ultimate puzzle.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I remember now,” I lied.

  The voice chuckled, and its tone took a harder edge. “No, no. I hear it now. Not him. Someone close, though. The brother, perhaps?”

  “He told you about me?”

  “Ahh, yes. I am observant, am I not? Rash spoke of you. You do not resemble the picture he painted with his words, however.” Something sniffed. “Unseasoned, you are. But there is potential …”

  Then a sound of distant footsteps approaching.

  “Shame. I would have liked to learn more about you, but I care not for additional company.” And
the darkness lifted, leaving me standing before a great stone door carved with an enormous eyeball.

  I flinched, feeling silly immediately. It didn’t scream. I examined the door for buttons or keyholes.

  “My passage was a bust. Just nests of more eye screamers,” Domino said. He flickered into view beside me. “Did I hear you talking to someone a minute ago?”

  I frowned, shook my head. I wasn’t ready to tell anyone what I’d experienced. “Just myself—”

  I touched the door. It was cool and hard. I gave it a push. It didn’t budge.

  “This looks promising. I’ll get Cindy,” Domino said and disappeared. I continued to put the door through the standard paces while I waited. A moment later, Domino returned with Cindy in tow.

  “Standard impassible?” Cindy asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I tried asking it a riddle, knocking, and searched for hidden buttons. There’s no lock to pick that I can see.”

  Cindy cracked her knuckles. “Did you try brute force?”

  “I was waiting for the brute,” I said. “Have at it.”

  Cindy threw herself against the door hard enough that it practically winded me. The door budged a few centimeters.

  “This whole space has to be designed,” Domino said thoughtfully.

  I groaned. “You’re one of those?”

  Domino rubbed his face where the mask had left faint lines along the edges. “It’s not such a crazy idea. Something has to be responsible for the dungeons. This one seems planned out. What, do you think this door happened naturally?”

  I leaned in close to the door, put my ear against the crack. “I’m not worried about the door as much as I am about what’s behind it. Listen.”

  I could make out heavy, slow breathing beyond the door. Domino pressed his eye against it, staggered back and waved me forward. I peeked inside.

  I saw the largest dungeonbeast I could imagine. I mean, I’d never seen one before, but this had to be the biggest. The room on the other side of the door was a vast cavern, so big it was like a skyscraper laid on its side. It was barely large enough for the bulk of the beast. At first, I thought it resembled a snake, but as I stared, the body resolved as a thing composed of enormous, muscle-rippled arms with hands at both ends. The hands clasped together, forming a long chain. Coils and coils of folded, bent arms wove in loops on the cavern floor. Resting atop the coils was a hand that served as the head. A mouth of horrible teeth bisected the palm and blood-red eyeballs tipped each long, bony finger.