One of the negative effects of her mind being clearer and sharper now was that the memories, for they were clearly memories now and not dim dreams, were as real to her mind and body as her own experiences were.
Victoria sat up, fighting her protesting joints. Stretches superimposed themselves over her vision. These were not memories, but instructions. She followed the motions, feeling the physical fatigue draining away until her body felt like her mind did—whole again.
She carefully unwrapped the strips of cloth wound around her chest. Her stitches held, and her side seemed to be healing well enough. Residue from the green-eye blood remained, dried into a brown film that coated the wound and her stitches. The wound ached, but the sharp pain of the injury itself was gone.
Something told her that wounds needed to breathe to heal properly, and so she left the bandage off a while longer. She did, however, gather up the strips of fabric and pile them with her shirt-turned-pillow where it still lay on the floor next to her.
With the renewed strength that came from sleep, Victoria returned to the sealed door at the back end of the monster's lair. It still bore the marks from where she struck it with her sword's pommel. Her sleep-refreshed mind also picked out a series of scratches and marks on the wall around it so deep and complete that she at first thought the damage to be just another part of the wall.
Other doors she had been able to lever open with her baton, but the crevasse between this door and the wall was much too thin for that. She briefly considered using the sword taken from the monster, but discarded that idea. She did not want to damage the blade like that. Three others remained, and perhaps she could try one of them. Those, she was not keeping, and so Victoria did not care very much if one broke.
Unless one of the green-eyes had somehow opened the door with its complex color lock, Victoria knew everything in the sandy arena was the same as it had been before she slept. A few minutes of work and she unblocked the door, returning in moments with the most damaged of its swords.
She wedged the damaged sword between the door and the frame, hammering it into place by hitting the pommel with her baton until it would go no deeper. Experimentally, she pushed on it, trying to use the huge weapon as a lever. It groaned, though she was not sure if that was the sound of the weapon or of the door, but gave little other indication of anything happening.
Victoria strained, bracing her feet on what remained of a large table. The metal creaked, and then the sword's blade shattered into a dozen crystalline pieces. The shards hit the tile with a musical chorus of tinkling noises as Victoria herself fell backward into the wall.
Her side screamed and she sat there for a moment as her head swam, but the sensation cleared as soon as it arrived. Angrily, she tossed the sword's broken grip away from her and simply sat there with her back against the cool tile.
Victoria seemed to be trapped there. Either she missed something in the room or she missed another way out, another way to go that did not lead to the arena of sand and heat. The only other option was that she was truly trapped and would wander the halls until she, too, succumbed to any of the many horrors that had taken the lives she remembered being.
If she could not escape, then she would be just another voice in the mind of the next one to wake up in this abominable place. If there was to be anyone after her, she thought.
She frowned and rose to her feet. This part of the monster's lair was covered in a thin layer of dirt, and she took a moment to dust off her pants before doing anything else. She spared the broken sword pieces little more than an annoyed glare as she stepped over the crystalline shards.
If she could not find an exit, then she would make one. If nothing presented itself in a few hours, she would return to the twisting maze of passages and look for another way forward. Victoria knew there were places she had not visited in this life, places where her memories ran thin. Perhaps the answer to escape waited for her there.
If that did not appear inside of another five days, then she would come back here and beat down the door, no matter how long it took.
She returned to the arena again, taking a wide path around the corpse of the monster. It already crawled with flies. She never stayed in one place long enough to notice them before, and any other corpses she left behind quickly disappeared, but here they descended in a thick black cloud.
Her eyes landed on the puzzle door. It remained the only other exit from the sandy arena and she nodded in its direction. She had no desire to go back there, but the alternative was to try and break down a door that the unbelievably strong, four-armed monster could not open. She saw little option.
Carefully, Victoria dragged all of her possessions out onto the sand. She knew, simply from standing in the stuff, that the grit would get everywhere, but something about the arena's warmth calmed her. The heat eased the ache from her wounds as well, something the dank, cool labyrinth could not do. That alone was reason enough to risk a little sand in her clothes.
She sat for some time, simply thinking. She had a decent mental map of the areas of the labyrinth through which she had traveled. The green eyes moved around, and she knew she had not encountered all of them, but that was no concern.
What concerned her was how to escape the damnable place altogether. That alone would be enough of a challenge. The smaller four-armed green eye, the one that actually conversed with her, said they were all locked away down there together. If it was even remotely as intelligent as it seemed, it would have tried to escape.
Yet, it remained. Victoria wondered if the “singer” referred to in the inscription was the same creature that spoke to her. If so, perhaps it remained in the labyrinth in the hopes that it could free the four-armed monster.
“If that was true, why didn't it solve the puzzle door itself?” she wondered aloud. Speaking the words, instead of thinking them, gave the ideas a quality that was uniquely hers. Even her own memories melded with those of past lives, but anything she said aloud would only ever be in her voice.
“Was it telling the truth? Did the big one really stop listening to it?”
Victoria grimaced. She had no answers, no plan, but she also had no other options. She remembered where she had been, that was easy enough. Many of the floors she passed had doors she either ignored or did not explore at the time. That produced a glimmer of hope.
Three things quashed that hope almost immediately. First, her mind returned to the thought of the talking green-eye. If escape was possible at all, it should have done so long ago unless it had some reason for staying. She could think of several reasons for it to stay. Those ranged from practical concerns—that there might be no food outside the labyrinth, or that something worse than the four-armed beast lurked out there—to the less practical or even downright disturbing, such as the possibility that the talking green eye stayed around for no reason other than to torment her and her predecessors.
The second and third reasons were much more immediate, as far as Victoria was concerned. Even in her memories, much of the facility remained unexplored. It would take a long time to search everywhere, which ran directly into the third problem—food.
Her stomach growled as she thought about how much time she would likely spend searching for an exit. Her supply of rat meat was, for the moment, gone. More to the point, it had never been enough in the first place. Now, after sleeping properly, her body saw fit to remind her exactly how hungry she was.
Whatever else she did, she had to go hunting again. She dressed quickly, trying to press the cleanest sections of the bandage against her wound. She was rapidly running out of water as well and could not afford to wash her side again.
That settled that problem. First, she needed water. It could hardly be called a plan, but a list of needs was better than what she had when she woke up. Fortunately, her water bags seemed to be durable enough to be reused. When full, only one of them leaked.
She left the door to the dead monster's lair open. If she ever had to come back this way, at least no
w it would have a chance to air out.
The lock on the puzzle door on the inside of the arena was similar to the lock on the outside, but the pattern inverted itself in strange places. However, now that she had opened the other side once already, Victoria found this side of the door an easy challenge.
Moments after it opened, it started to swing shut on its own and, in a flash of inspiration, she set her backpack in the way. The door might have been heavy, but it was well balanced and the pack stopped it from closing all the way.
Victoria crossed the arena and retrieved yet another of the monster's swords. She carried it to the puzzle door and wedged it into the hinges.
Now, with the way permanently open, she went back into the dark corridors of the labyrinth. She heard the scamper of green-eyes as they moved around the halls, but never saw any of them. These higher levels were less damaged and some rooms even showed no signs of green eye activity at all. If not for the presence of the talker and the titanic four-armed monster, she would have assumed the exit lay downward instead.
The hallways seemed to wind back upon themselves the further she went, and even going down a level and coming up in different places did not seem to help. Nothing on the arena's floor opened to any higher level. She ran across more than one locked door, but they refused to open to any tool she had. Victoria did her best to memorize their locations and went on. If nothing proved useful, she would press on by dismantling every door in her way.
***
Pallasophia met her troops for the first time outside the final seal. Glaukos deployed them early that morning, long before messaging her about the deployment schedule. She supposed it was his little act of rebellion, protesting against her going down personally.
The Facility Director let it slide. After all, he only succeeded in sparing her the time needed to oversee the team as they cut through the sealed outer door. Most of those doors were simply locked, if so unassuming a term could accurately describe the sort of locks that used arm-thick bars of steel to anchor the door into the rock wall.
Further in, “locked” gave way to “sealed,” but even those were easy for the team's equipment to penetrate. This last one was much thicker, originally intended to be the very failsafe that it turned out to be. When she arrived, the team had been at it for nearly an hour.
To get through the last door, the extraction force had to cut through the doors themselves, their locking bolts, and a pile of steel and stone debris that had been welded into a solid mass overtop of it all. Even with multiple cutting torches, it was not an easy job. That was probably a good thing—the Ten Thousand only knew how much blood would be on the floor if the mastigas could have gotten through easily.
Upon seeing how quickly the team progressed, she remarked to herself, “Glaukos must have picked a more exceptional team than I thought.” Now, standing in front of them as they worked, she saw how correct that assessment actually was.
“Status?” she asked.
None of them questioned her sudden arrival. “Everything is ready for the final seal, Lochagos.”
She nodded. “Thank you, Lochias. Proceed.”
He nodded and issued several sharp commands. The team flanking the pile of rubble that covered the final door dispersed, save one. A man bearing the blue stripe of a Second Lord on his black uniform sleeve remained behind, affixing a series of wires to a network of small, gray blobs.
Pallasophia watched him work. He, Second Lord Dekaneas Stavros, had been the one who rigged the explosives that originally sealed not only this door but all of the elevator shafts and stairwells. Now, it was time to undo all his work from years before.
She was not surprised when she saw his name on the personnel list Glaukos forwarded. Ordinarily, the use of high explosives inside the facility would have been prohibited, but she had complete faith in Stavros's ability to neither kill them all nor bring the facility down on their heads.
The soldiers took cover in the next room out. Stavros emerged a moment later, carrying a detonator and trailing a length of wire. “At your command, Lochagos.”
Pallasophia nodded. “You may proceed, Dekaneas.”
He nodded and went through the short sequence that activated the detonator. With the small device unlocked, it projected a series of holographic controls. He double- and triple-checked the settings before finally tapping lightly on the “Detonate” button.
The detonation consisted of two explosions. The first was a low-pitched concussive blast designed to shatter the solid mass of debris. The second, coming a split second later, obliterated the fragments with a cloud of thermobaric dust.
“Clear,” Stavros said after a moment. “Permission to examine the blast site?”
Pallasophia nodded, and the man re-entered the room. After a moment, he called back, “all clear!”
Pallasophia waved the team forward.
“Plasma torches standing by, at your command, Lochagos,” Lochias Photeos, the man who had been in command of the squad until Pallasophia's arrival, said.
“You operated admirably without me, Lochias. Please continue.”
“As you say,” he replied, then turned to the four soldiers carrying the cutting torches. “You heard the Second Lord. Get this door open!”
They moved quickly, operating in a well-trained pattern. First they cut a series of holes near the top, into which they inserted metal rods to act as grab handles. As the team moved around the door, the other soldiers, at Photeos's discretion, took hold of the impromptu handles.
When the door fell free, it did so against the shoulders of eight soldiers who gently lowered it to the floor. Without knowing what was on the other side of the doors, letting them fall was not a good idea. More importantly, even the best the cutting team could do would not always ensure the door fell the proper direction.
The stench that assailed their noses as the doors fell was unbearable. The scent of burning metal given off by the plasma torches kept most of it at bay while they cut through the door, but with it out of the way, the full array of odors made it to their noses.
More than one of the soldiers doubled over, retching or threatening to. Pallasophia herself felt nausea threaten to tear her insides apart, but she fought it down. She was in charge, after all, and it would not do to have their commander fall to her knees simply because the room stank.
“This must be where the elite lived,” Photeos said. His voice sounded like it came through gritted teeth, but with his helmet in place, it was impossible to tell.
“It is,” Pallasophia confirmed. She knew that much from watching recording after recording of it emerging from the other end of the room.
She stepped into the room, steeling herself against the smell. With an iron grip on her nerves, she surveyed the area. It was supposed to have been a work room where personnel could study the records from the fights in the arena. One of the two rooms directly outside had been a hospital suite and shower for their subjects, but now it was full of rubble. The corners of her mouth turned down at the sight of so much waste. No lives had been lost in this sport, for that she was thankful. Those working here had been able to evacuate before the elite made it to the arena.
Pallasophia picked up a the hilt and first dozen centimeters of a broken sword. Glittering pieces of steel covered the floor, debris she initially though had come from the door itself. Now, she recognized the glint of polished steel. Another lay on the other side of the room, discarded. The other two were nowhere to be seen.
She examined the damage to the blade, and turned to look at what remained of the door frame. It had been heavily scratched and dented, and the spot between was badly mangled. The sword clearly came out of the exchange worse.
“Did the elite do that?” Photeos asked.
Pallasophia shook her head. “It only had four swords. It would not destroy one simply to try and escape. I suspect the dents in the door's surface came from it, but I cannot be sure.”
“Then who?”
“Number One Hun
dred,” Pallasophia replied. “After she killed the elite, she stayed in this room for thirty-six hours before coming back out and returning to the facility labyrinth.
“I see,” Photeos said. He took the sword from Pallasophia and examined it. With one hand on what remained of the blade and the other on the grip, he tried and failed to bend it either direction. Placing the broken end on the floor, he pushed on it again with both hands and one booted foot. With a grunt, he managed to kink what remained by a few degrees. He panted. “And she did that by herself?”
“So it would seem.”
“With respect, Second Lord, what did Hexarch Tritogenes make down here?”
Pallasophia was silent for a moment, then, “we made what we set out to make, Third Lord. Nothing less.”
“Lochagos Pallasophia,” a female voice called from the far end of the room. “I think you need to come look at this. Stavros, too.”
Pallasophia approached, with Stavros the explosives tech right behind her. The woman who had spoken gestured to a series of images on the wall. They were crude, but detailed enough for Pallasophia to recognize them.
“Lochagos?”
Pallasophia stared at the drawings, pacing up and down the line of them, mouthing numbers at she went.
Stavros came a moment later, checking settings again on his holographic tablet. “Eleni, you asked fo...”
Pallasophia interrupted him. Her voice was quiet. “This is a record of every kill the elite made.”
Stavros finally looked at the wall himself, staring at it in mute fascination.
“You're the expert, Stavros, do you know anything about this?” Eleni, the woman who first noticed the pictographs, asked.
Stavros shook his head hard. “I have never seen anything like this or even heard that they were capable of such artwork. This.... this needs to go into the archives. No, this needs to be examined by every mastigas expert in the binary! This isn't just idle scratching, either, this is a journal. It kept a journal! Do you know what this means, Second Lord?”
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