She might have remembered the bag from her dreams, but the modifications had been her own. Tools, weapons, those all appeared in her dreams. Here a naked hand gripped a spear, there an arm wrapped in heavy fabric swung a hammer. She knew how to sew her own clothes from another set of memories, small hands that moved with deft quickness, but those hands had been killed like all the others.
In a way, modifying the backpack like she had was a comfort. So much of what she knew, or felt like she knew, came from flashes of insight and memories of hands and bodies that were never, could never be hers. To have something that was her own, truly her own, left her with the feeling that she was more than a culmination of a set of memories, doomed to die like so many others.
Dismissing those thoughts as distractions, Victoria placed the helmet on her head and methodically tied the straps tight. It sat as comfortable as anything else now that she added a layer of padding to the inside. Whatever status the four-armed creature held, its helmet was certainly stronger than the ones the lesser varieties wore. Despite repeated strikes to the head, the visor had yet to shatter.
She winced as a loose tile shifted underfoot, sending a shock through her bruised ribs. Compared to the number of them she killed, very few of the green-eyes managed to even lay a hand on her. Even then, the injuries mounted as minor bruises and scrapes stacked one on another.
Whatever happened, Victoria knew she had to get somewhere safe. If not, the alternative was to end up as the dream of some future soul who found herself condemned to wander these same halls. She owed it to them, at least, whoever “they” were.
The only thing that drove her on was the steadily rising temperature of the air. Even after killing the four-armed green-eye, Victoria found an open elevator shaft. The lift cage had been smashed, but most of the rungs of the ladder inside remained. She followed that up two stories until the rungs vanished, at which point she found herself out of energy and slept.
Something about the floor where she ended up felt familiar. She could not have explained when or where, as the details in her mind grew more and more hazy, but Victoria knew she had walked through these same halls more times than she could count.
As she made her way down the long passage, Victoria felt a mounting anxiety, one different from the lingering fear of attack. A thin sheen of sweat broke out on her forehead, quickly disappearing into the green-eye fabric lining her helmet. Out of reflex, Victoria raised her baton in one hand, stopped to kneel just long enough to draw one of the daggers from its sheath at her calf. Her movements slowed, becoming more guarded with every step away from the elevator shaft.
After passing a series of locked doors, Victoria found herself in front of a massive double door with an unsettling, vibrant mosaic. It felt familiar, even if she could not place the exact pattern. The dominant color was a sandy bronze, but here and there blues, greens, reds, and a whole host of others colors turned and danced in a pattern that threatened to trap her attention for hours.
She reached out a hand and touched the massive doors, finding them warm to the touch, even compared to the hot, close air around her. Victoria hesitated. Every memory of this massive door was the same. Whenever she dreamed about opening this door, oblivion followed.
Despite that, the doors were the only way to go. She lost count of rooms after two hundred or so, but remembered every floor. This one, with its warm door to death, was the seventeenth story in whatever sort of facility she had been born into. Her shell, left so long ago, was on the third of those seventeen floors.
With reservation, and indeed feeling the first real flash of fear since awakening, she put her hand on the door and pushed. Nothing happened, and so she grasped one of the projections and pulled. Again the door stayed shut. She shoved harder and it remained stuck.
She stared at it for a moment, then moved away. A wider perspective offered nothing more, and so she once again came close to it. She remembered nothing about the door other than its presence and the feeling of fear she associated with it, but that was just as well. She had no choice but to trust her alien memories, but she felt she had become too reliant on them and it was a strange comfort to have nothing to rely on but her own faculties.
Victoria reached out and touched the door again, and one of the swirls in the pattern shifted slightly. She pushed on that spot again, and the swirl shifted further, rotating as though it were on a pivot somewhere deep inside the massive door. She pressed her face close to the warm metal and saw that it was not flat after all, but a series of dozens of layers. With some experimentation, she found that nearly all of the pieces of the pattern—each layer made of a different color and section—were mobile.
The door was not stuck, she realized; it was locked.
She moved one piece, and then another, testing out the mechanism. With no clues nearby, her only guide was the pattern itself, which was frustratingly complex and made worse by the irregular pieces. Here a part of the pattern moved by itself, but on the other side of the door, a piece of the same color moved seven other pieces, each scattered about the door in different colors.
After an hour, she had figured out the pattern of the mechanism itself, but was no closer to actually unlocking it. That took the better part of another hour, but when the final piece slid into place, the pattern became rather simple. What had been a swirl of colors and fractals was reduced to six small circles, one in each primary color.
She tried the door again, and found it still locked. Sure she had solved it, Victoria tried to move one of the small segments again. It refused to slide or turn; like the door, it was now locked in place. Each of the circles was connected to the one opposite it by a line in the pattern, resulting in a sort of starburst effect. She stared, knowing the answer was there in front of her if she could only figure it out.
Victoria tried moving various pieces again, but none of the colored circles would rotate. Feeling like she was running out of ideas, she traced the new pattern with her fingertips, looking for something she had missed. As she brushed across the lines connecting the circles to one another, it all became clear—that line, in fact all of the lines between the circles, was not a part of the pattern at all, but a hollow trench.
Each of the circles slid along the line, though not without some difficulty. Victoria suspected that whatever parts they were moving inside the door were neither simple nor fragile. It took a great deal of effort, but she finally moved one of the circles halfway to the center, where it stopped. Now, the entire center piece rotated freely and it was only a matter of minutes before she had used it to rearrange the circles in order from red to purple.
When the final circle slid into place, the pair of doors emitted a single loud click. Victoria pushed on the center, where the two doors came together. Three colored circles lay on either side of her hands, testament to more than two hours of tedious puzzle-solving work. She pushed gently on the doors; they moved with just a little pressure and light spilled through the crack between them.
Despite her drive to push onward, she stopped reflexively as the sudden brightness lashed at her vision. She stepped away, shielding her eyes with one arm, but left the doors open a crack. Momentarily blinded, her hands went instinctively to the baton that now hung from her waist. She raised it defensively, but nothing came at her. No sound aside from her own surprised breathing and rapid pulse reached her ears.
Victoria grit her teeth and pushed the door open the rest of the way, squinting against the painful brightness. Sheer force of will, and a paranoid streak born from dozens of ambushes, kept her eyes open a crack. If something waited for her on the other side, she needed to be ready to face it, and that meant dealing with the brightness before going in.
It took only a moment, but the area around her quickly faded into darkness as her eyes adjusted to the painful illumination. The room beyond was huge, filled with sand. A hot wind blew the fine dust into her face, irritating her eyes even more than the light itself had done.
She opened the doors al
l the way and stood just outside them, waiting another minute for her eyes to adjust. Finally convinced that her sight in the bright room would get no better, she stepped fully through the doors, which slowly shut behind her as if on some automatic impulse.
With a click, the lock reengaged.
***
The lights overhead made her sweat, but Victoria was glad for the dry air. After uncountable hours in the cold and damp, followed by still more hours in air that was not only damp but hot as well, it was a welcome relief. She considered stopping to rest, the sand-filled room was certainly comfortable enough that she finally felt she could sleep for good.
That feeling shattered when, at the far end of the room, a second door, even larger than the one she just went through, opened a crack. A bolt of terror shot through her and she dropped the backpack from her shoulders.
Victoria did not get more than four steps into the sand when the door at the far end slammed open, giving shape to the formless anxiety that had lingered over her since opening the puzzle door. What strode through had to be one of the green-eyes, the black suit and glossy helmet made that clear enough. This one was more massive than any of the others, easily three meters tall, and with four long arms.
It bellowed and the sand under her feet shuddered. With its arms splayed out as they were, it looked every bit the living nightmare she knew it had to be.
On the short list of things that saved her life in the next moments right then was the fact that she came into the room ready for a fight. Her reflexes and weapons were already primed when the four-armed creature bounded across the sand. In its wake, it kicked up great clouds of dust that shrouded its movements. Three steps into its charge, it crossed all four arms and drew four swords.
Had her weapons still been in their scabbards, Victoria would have died right then. She did not have time to react to the monster's charge, parry its attack, get out of the way, and draw her own weapons. As it was, her instinctive parries gave her an extra half-second to avoid the incoming blades. She slipped around the first one, a thrust from an upper arm. She caught the follow up cut from the opposite lower arm with one dagger, twisted, and narrowly avoided a cut from the second of the monster's upper arms. The fourth arm recoiled for a thrust and she danced around it, allowing it to make the attack, then deflecting the blade when it came at her.
That put her close enough to strike out at the monster's flank with her own dagger. She drove the dagger into what she hoped was its ribs and slammed her baton into its belly. The creature recoiled, wrenching the dagger out of her grip.
Victoria refused to let it open up the distance between them. It was so much larger than she was—and it carried longer weapons—that to let it dictate where and how they fought was suicide. She learned that on her first day, fighting the giants. Instead, she stepped forward and plucked her second dagger from its sheath, pressing the advantage her counterattack had given her.
It roared, spinning in place to face her again. One lower arm snapped around, trying to drive the pommel of its sword into her head. She turned and slammed her baton into its arm to stop the attack. Before it could react, she drove her dagger in with a hard thrust just behind its wrist. It pulled back, but she wrenched the blade out of its arm. The limb spasmed and twitched, trailing a stream of bright red blood.
The creature pivoted further, bringing an upper arm into play with a powerful downward cut even as the other upper arm swept around in a wide circle to deliver a cut from the other direction. She saw, for a moment, no sign of the unwounded lower arm.
Victoria lunged forward, inside the monster's reach. One arm snapped up and cracked the baton across the knuckles of one upper hand. She stepped with one foot, contorted her body to the side, and thrust her dagger through the palm of the other upper arm.
The creature lashed out, kicking her in the ribs with a leg snap she had not seen coming. She sailed through the air, landing three meters away from the monster and sliding another meter in the loose sand.
Her head was fuzzy. Between dehydration, lack of food, lack of sleep, and the sheer damnable stress of it all, her body felt ready to give up right then. Her muscles screamed at her to stay where she was as fatigue descended on her like a blanket.
Give up, urged her muscles, weakened beyond continuing.
The monster took another step.
Adrenaline broke through her temporary daze as she realized that she was still not far enough away from the creature to be safe. It took a step and brought its remaining undamaged hand up to strike. The arm she first stabbed seemed to have gone limp by the monster's side; it had also dropped the sword from that hand. The others, one with broken knuckles and the other with a bloody palm, seemed to still be usable, but the creature was clearly holding them back in favor of the undamaged hand.
The voice in her head spoke not in words but with an overwhelming surge of emotion.
DEFEND.
LIVE.
She rose, unsteady for a moment as her heart hammered in her chest. In those moments, the urge in her mind coalesced into real words. Fight, the voice of countless memories urged. Fight or die.
She charged forward, waiting for the moment at which the creature would fully commit to its own attack. That moment came when it made a thrust with its undamaged hand. She deflected the thrust with her dagger and snapped the baton overhead. The heavy rod caught the wrist of the creature's upper arm—the same hand whose knuckles she had broken moments before. It dropped the sword, which clattered against her helmet before it hit the ground. In that moment, she disengaged her dagger from the thing's sword, made another step, and drove the dagger upward into the space between the two shoulder joints on that side.
It roared in pain and tried to take the step that would bring its other arms into position where it could strike with them. Victoria had no intention of letting that happen and slammed her baton into the thing's knee. It went down on one leg and, at the same moment, attacked with its other upper arm. The wounded palm was slick with blood and weakened by injury. When she intercepted its sword with her dagger, the movement twisted the weapon free.
With her dagger, she finished the arc that disarmed the creature's remaining upper arm, trying to stop the follow-up back swing from the one arm she had not been able to hurt yet. It was too close to her, moving too fast, and she missed the parry. The creature's long blade sliced into her ribs, shredding the fabric there.
Victoria brought her baton down against the thing's faceplate, hoping it shared the same weakness the others had displayed. It did, and the black plastic shattered beneath her stroke. It stared out of the helmet with three bright green eyes that shone against the oily white skin of its face. At that moment, she had no idea if its sword cut all the way through to her skin or not, but she snapped her dagger up and thrust it through the thing's face, right between all three eyes.
It howled and scrabbled at her with the one arm that still worked properly and the one with the bloody palm. The third, with the broken wrist and fingers, it treated like a flail and slammed it into her head. That blow knocked her sideways and she tripped amid the thing's flailing limbs and hit the ground hard.
Her vision swam and a sharp pain in her hand told her she lost the baton in her fall. It lay a meter or so away in the sand, strap torn. She ignored it; her attention was on the monster in front of her. It struggled to its feet on shaking legs as it screeched and screamed incoherent curses at her.
“Fight or die.” That idea, the first words she had said in days, echoed in her brain, urging just a little more out of her tired, fatigued body.
The creature took a step, then a second, before Victoria came to her own feet. She lurched into motion, batting the first of its wildly flailing limbs aside. The second came at her straight. She grabbed it, stepped to the side, and drove the heel of her hand into its elbow, snapping its last undamaged arm backward.
Another lunge brought her into reach of its body. She stepped around its legs, put a foot behind them, grabb
ed a shoulder, and heaved the massive creature to the ground. It hit the sand and she was on top of it in a flash, tearing her daggers out of its ribs and face. In one violent frenzy of movement, she drove both of them into its neck, and withdrew them. Her next movement plunged one back into its neck. She jerked it violently to the side, tearing the tough muscle there. The other one she drove into its chest, where a flash of memory told her its heart resided.
It continued to flail, beating on her back and head with its arms as she twisted the knife in its heart. With the other, she made the monster pay for every strike on her back with another violent thrust against the dense hard bone of its skull. Little by little as the painful seconds ticked by, timed only by the blood rushing in her ears, the monster slowed. Eventually, it stopped moving altogether.
She stood, finally aware of the stinging pain in her side, the ache in her ribs and back, and the throb in her head.
Victoria swiped at a tickle on her side and her hand came away glistening with blood. Her head swam and her knees sagged. Whatever she was going to do, she had to work fast. If she were attacked right now, she knew she would not survive another fight.
For just a moment, the universe stopped caring and her vision went black anyway.
***
Victoria knew several things.
First, she knew the four-armed monster was dead. She killed enough of them to know what death looked like and to appreciate the difference between it and being stunned or knocked unconscious. If its inaction did not convince her, the gaping hole where its throat and face had been certainly did the job. Its blood soaked the sand, turning it black.
Second, she knew she finally achieved some measure of safety. The big door with its complex lock had sealed behind her as she stepped into this place. If the other green-eyes could open that door, they would have done so already.
Third, and perhaps finally, she knew her own blood soaked the sand under her back. Sand stuck to her when she sat up and ground into her wounds.
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