It was another thirty minutes or so of walking before we started hearing the skittering.

Karvek was the first to notice, and we were forced to stop, straining our ears to hear the chittering she swore had been right above us. Sofi and Ildat had talked to her by themselves while we waited further down the tunnel. After a quick hushed conversation, we continued down the tunnel.

It wasn’t long after that we started hearing it ourselves, the sounds of the clattering os something on stone again and again.

“What is it?” I whispered, hand tightening around my pistol.

Ahead of me, Ildat eyed the ceiling, drawing a broad cleaver from within his coat. “Asthryx. A swarm of them,” He responded in short clipped sentences. “Best to hope they don’t come down here.”

“And if they do?”

“We hope coming back doesn’t take too long. Quiet.”

Well that wasn’t very encouraging. I kept my mouth shut as the sound of chittering continued, growing louder as the moments passed by. We had stopped, all the others perfectly still.

A shrill screech came from above, either loud enough that it passed right through solid stone or there was a tunnel nearby connecting us. The chittering stopped, and up at the front Karvek took a nervous step back.

The clack of boot on rock was like a sledgehammer taken to it, the sound echoing all through the tunnel. Karvek’s face turned pale as she froze. Up above, the silence continued.

I wasn’t sure how long passed with nothing happening and us still. After a while I started keeping track in my head.

…..Eight hundred and forty-seven, eight hundred and forty-eight, eight hundred and forty-nine.

Suddenly a clatter up above of something skittering across the stone. I about jumped out of my skin, pistol drawn out of my coat.

The others had weapons out as well, turning to face either direction down the tunnel as the skittering grew louder and louder.

My sweaty hands struggled to maintain a grip on the pistol grip, moving to the back with Helvor, who had something that looked like a combination between a halberd and a rifle. The blue light of the lanterns easily covered a hundred feet.

The skittering was beginning to fade now, and no sign of anything coming from our side of the tunnel. I looked the other way, hoping the others were still there.

They were, and nothing else was. Still, none of us stopped watching both sides of the tunnel. Not till the skittering had long vanished off the edge of our hearing.

***

There was another hushed and whispered conversation between Ildat, Sofi, and Karvek right after the skittering stopped. About forty feet down, the rest of us waited me, Helvor, and Molk.

“Is she usually like this?” I muttered to Helvor, inclining my head towards Karvek. He shrugged in response.

“I don’t spend a lot of time around her, even when Sofi had us preparing. She mostly handled things in the tunnels. Molk?”

Molk grunted. “I’m not gonna condemn someone for getting nerves. Not down here. She’s a steady hand most of the time. Laverck’s her usual confidant as well, so that’s weighing on her. If she hadn’t cracked first, I don’t think any of us can say we wouldn’t have eventually made some mistake.”

Well, I couldn’t disagree with that really.

“Besides, I don’t like the idea of you spreading dissension among our ranks,” He finished. That did rankle.

“I was just asking a question,” I protested, trying to keep my voice down so the other three wouldn’t hear. “I’ve got no frame of reference for..any of this really. Surely someone here has died and come back with no memories of anything, right?”

“Don’t know, haven’t died at all,” Molk gave me an appraising look. “Your reputation doesn’t help in that regard.”

I chuckled. “Well with that we go back to having no frame of reference for what I was like.”

“I do know someone who came back with no memories,” Helvor interjected, grabbing both of our attention.

“Really? First time I’ve heard you mention it Helvor,” Molk responded, sounding a little surprised. The two of them were close? I’d have never guessed.

Then again I’d spent all of…four, five hours with them? I needed to find a watch.

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“Before the hotel. On the streets. Bottom level. Cops from a precinct, I think it was the fifth, were chasing a bounty through the housing down below. Things were getting crazy. He’d gone through a bunch of them. They didn’t care who got in the way, they just wanted the reward.”

I frowned. So this place did have law enforcement, although from what he described, they just sounded like another set of bounty hunters.

“They eventually decided to trap him, he was a blood mage of some kind. Got power out of his kills. So they herded a bunch of us from the streets into the building. Kept a few of their own guarding us to make it look good. He came in to get his fill, and they blew the building up. Tried to bury him and the rest of us. Probably hoped it would kill him and keep him in place long enough to collect. The only problem is whoever set them up was a moron. It blew a hole in the floor when it collapsed the building.”

Molk inhaled sharply. “Right into the void?”

“Yep,” Helvor replied, then seeing my confused expression, explained. “Bottom most layer, you only go there if you can’t afford rent anywhere. But there’s just a thin layer of rock and concrete. That goes, there’s nothing holding you from plummeting into whatever lurks there.”

“Fuck.” I’d experienced what it was like to spend only a few seconds in what was just darkness. Could that even compare to what Helvor was talking about? “How many people fell?”

“Ninety, maybe a hundred total. Mostly people from the street, the blood mage, even some of the precinct cops. Probably department rivals of whoever set the entire thing up. I survived, barely. I got lucky.” Helvor rolled up his sleeve, revealing a meaty slab of an arm but also a healed wound, round, black, and at least an inch thick. “Piece of rebar punctured my arm. Didn’t weigh as much back then, so it held me up. Refused to have it healed up by magic.”

“Did anyone else survive?” Molk asked, completely engrossed.

Helvor grinned humourlessly. “Police came first. Their bounty went out into the void, no body, no proof, so they just left. A couple of other people got lucky. But, someone came, offering money. His partner was one of the ones who had fallen in. Wanted someone to see if they had survived. I didn’t volunteer, but I know who did. They found someone, torn in half. Lower body sent to the Void, upper half clinging just barely, death grip on the rubble. They dragged them up, wasn’t the partner. So he brought the body over to where the injured were healing, including me. We waited for them to come back, must have been hours. Eventually, the body started to reform, and they woke up.”

“And then? You said they had no memories right?” This could be the key, to figuring out exactly what was going on. Why I had a serial killer in my head who I supposedly was.

“No memories, but not like you,” Helvor replied and my heart sank. “She…she didn’t do anything. I’m not sure she was even aware she was alive. She didn’t move, she didn’t talk, and she barely breathed. She didn’t eat. She didn’t even look at you. Oh her eyes would point your way, but nothing was behind them. No one was sure what had happened. Someone theorized that when she went into the void it ripped everything out of her it could. Memories. Personality. Soul. Nothing left but a husk.”

No easy answers. I should have guessed. “Did anything happen to her?”

“Well, we tried to care for her for a few days. I’ll not pretend it was altruism. My arm was still healing, my friend was pretty desperate as well, we were hoping she’d come back so we could get something for saving her life. But someone else who was there must have started spreading the story. Went out to try and negotiate for something, anything to eat, came back to the part of the alleys we had staked out as our own. The friend was nailed to the wall, and she was gone. You can ask him for the rest of the story when he comes back. If he comes back.”

“Laverck?” Yeah, if it was him, I doubted he would be eager to talk to me.

“Yeah, Laverck.”

“What about Laverck?” Ildat asked, maybe a few inches from my ear.

I moved to the side reflexively, smacking the side of my head against the stone wall of the tunnel.

“For…for fuck’s sake, would you learn about personal space?!” I screamed at him, feeling the side of my head. Wet. I was bleeding. “This is the second head injury you’ve given me today!”

“Just talking stories Ildat,” Helvor replied causally as I continued to curse at Ildat with every word I thought was an insult and a few others.

“Well, we’re to get going in a second,” he replied, backing out of easy-grabbing distance as I stumbled to my feet. “Sofi wants to leave before anything else starts scurrying around here. Indigo, just see Sofi, she’ll fix you up.”

***

After another ten minutes, we passed through the tunnel into a third chamber, one that looked exactly like the first one we had left.

No abandoned supplies, no dead Laverck, no pile of blood. Outside of those missing details, it was exactly the same as before.

“We didn’t go in a circle, did we?” I asked Helvor, who shook his head.

“No. Miners standardize the hubs. The way the dome is shaped means we don’t need supports,” He hit the side of the tunnel as if that would demonstrate it. Nothing shifted but considering it was all solid stone, it wasn’t that impressive. And I had no idea if architecturally he was right or not.

“We are on the right path,” Sofi assured me. “This should be the last hub before the elevator access. I wanted to rest one last time before attempting this, but if Asthryx is on the move through the tunnels, it is best to keep going.”

“Can’t argue with that. They aren’t ant-faced people are they?” I was thinking of my earlier encounter back in the apartment. Sofi shook her head.

“No, Asthryx are barely sapient outside a few of them and tend to be on many legs. You must be talking about the Ant Hill Mob.”

She had half-finished that name when another little burst of information went off inside my head. Wacky Races, a show first produced in the year 1968 by Hanna-Barbara for CBS-. That did not mean it wasn’t annoying.

“Someone is playing jokes on me, I swear,” I muttered, getting a strange look from everyone in sight. “It’s the name of something on earth. From a kid’s show. Except they were little people, not actual ant-people.”

“Maybe they were inspired by it?” Ildat asked, keeping his distance. Possibly because of the number of threats I’d thrown his way after bashing my head.

“There aren’t ant-people on ear- you know what never mind.” I cut myself off, remembering the other earth that Ildat’s acquaintance claimed to be from. Alternate earths? Or were my little info dumps just fake? They certainly felt artificial. “Let’s just say it’s a lot of luck to have those names in common.

“Great luck indeed,” A voice I recognized said from one of the tunnels. The Night Manager. “I would say for us and not for them though.”