Not that we had a way to reach it. Why would anyone put a doorway halfway up a wall to begin with?

I tapped Ipoh on the shoulder to get his attention. The Servant had paused, fixated on the hunters. The fourth and apparently final member had appeared now, in lighter armour than the first two. She didn’t carry a staff, instead wielding a bulky bandolier, strapped across her chest. I spotted the flash of metal.

If metal was as expensive as Ipoh had made it out to be, this group wasn’t cheap. My heart sank further.

Ipoh still hadn’t moved. I began to worry the hunters would see his head poking out and tapped on his shoulder again. “Ipoh.”

He came back to life in a shudder of grumpiness. “Don’t interrupt,” he snapped. “Now I need to start again.”

He’d just been staring at the hunters as far as I could tell. I ignored him and directed his attention to the second door. “Though I can’t see a way up.”

“Hmm.” Then he frowned, and spun around to face the cube throne. The frown deepened.

The hunters spoke sharply to one another in the language I’d heard in the city. It was a choppy tongue; all stops, hard clicking consonants and starts, yet somehow delivered in rapid-fire.

The female staff-wielder raised a hand and gestured to the left and right.

“Heavy hitters,” Ipoh murmured at my shoulder. He looked more worried than he had before. “Don’t let them see you. Those belong to Blue’s elite forces. He nodded towards the woman with the bandolier. “Magician. She’s probably their tracker. Also highly dangerous. They’ll be following our movements, which makes them predictable. One will go left, the other towards the centre. Watch.”

I watched as the group did exactly that. The two stavists stayed together and walked to the left, with the magician heading straight. The sleeper stayed back at the entrance, blocking our retreat.

Ipoh whispered at me again. “How’s your arm strength?”

I thought of the grove cliff. “Not great.”

“Unfortunate.” He picked up a freestanding cube at his feet, about the size of a fist, hefted it experimentally, then ducked out from behind the larger cube wall and lobbed it to the right. Their left; the same direction the stavists had taken.

It landed with a loud clatter echoing through the chamber.

Both the stavists snapped to alertness, while the prisoner and magician started. The latter tensed alert, watching in the direction of the sound. Then, carefully – much more than her companions – she began to move towards it. The prisoner stayed behind, shivering even in the comfortable temperature.

“Storms,” Ipoh swore. “I’ll have to take him out. You stay here. He didn’t trigger until he saw you last time. Once he’s down, make your break.”

I frowned. Against a team of three experienced warriors and whatever the sleeper was, we had light manipulation and a poor man’s distraction. It wasn’t enough.

And yet the professionals were moving towards the clatter. As the Servant crept out behind their backs, shadows shifted in the opposite direction as if cast by a pair of silently moving fugitives. Even to me, it looked convincing.

Light manipulation not so bad, after all.

The three converged on Ipoh’s ruse, approaching from different directions. The prisoner stared after them, a poor choice for sentry, Ipoh circled wide on quiet feet, summoning another of the miniature suns on the other side. The sleeper’s eyes were drawn to it as a moth to a flame. He clearly wasn’t cut out for this.

The Servant picked up a fist-sized cube and dashed in close, poised to inflict a knockout blow. I looked away, waiting for the sound of the impact.

It didn’t come.

I peered back over my hiding spot to see Ipoh’s other arm covering the man’s mouth, retracting the arm holding the cube. He wore an expression of pity. He spoke a few words into the sleeper’s ear in the staccato language, then sent him walking – slowly – in the direction of the female staff-wielder. He looked directly at me and waved me over.

Keeping low amongst the boxy terrain, I hurried over and into the passage. I couldn’t believe that had worked.

“Hurry,” whispered the older man, as we backtracked. “We only have moments before they pick up the trail.”

“They’re going to catch up to us, and there are four of them,” I protested. “Why didn’t you knock out the sleeper?”

Ipoh sighed, wiping a hand across his brow. “Because he’s not here to hurt us,” he replied. “And he’s suffered enough. I didn’t have the heart. I told him not to look at you, and he wouldn’t have to endure it again.”

I glanced at him curiously, but Ipoh didn’t seem interested in elaborating.

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I was about to press the matter when a series of piercing screams echoed from the cavern behind us. It belonged to the magician, the one who’d been giving the staff-wielders their orders.

Ipoh stumbled to a halt, staring back down the passage.

I followed suit, incredulously. “You’re going back?”

“That’s one of Blue’s elite,” he said, as if that explained anything. The screams continued, intensifying. “Their transport. The others wouldn’t attack their way home. Which means –”

“The sleeper?”

“Or worse. I was watching him. He didn’t see you.”

The screams weren’t stopping, only intensifying. Different, less pained shouts had joined them, as the staff-wielders yelled to each other across the room.

“They’re under attack,” Ipoh relayed, head tilted to catch the words better. “Something about… insects.”

“Then we need to run. Come on!” There was an intersection coming up ahead, I knew. We’d passed it on the way in. How I knew this, when the paths had all blended together in a haze of passages well before I’d been this tired, could only be Cartography at work.

We caught up to the intersection and I turned left, Ipoh hesitating only a second before joining me. The turning added itself to a mental map in my head, letting me know exactly where we were in relation to the cube chamber. The particular haze shrouding that part of my mind had lifted, apparently, leaving me with knowledge it hadn’t had before. Now that I had it, it was simply there, much like how I could tell the difference between temperatures on my skin.

“I don’t like this,” Ipoh huffed next to me, as one of the hunters stopped barking orders and started screaming along with the first. The first had almost stopped, degenerating into animalistic whimpering, and the hunter easily drowned her out. Distant footsteps and shouts signalled the second hunter and the prisoner were in the process of abandoning the room and following us out of the chamber.

My legs burned with exhaustion, the dry air frying the insides of my overworked lungs. I’d slowed from a sprint to an exhausted jog, only able to keep up with Ipoh this long thanks to Balance making it easier to navigate the cubes underfoot.

“Can’t keep up,” I gasped. I thought the Servant would come back with a disparaging piece of tough love, but instead he slowed, motioned for me to rest, and backtracked until he was positioned between me and pursuit.

“Sit behind that outcrop,” he directed, facing back along the hallway. “The sleeper will see me before he sees you. And the striker I might be able to deal with, as long as it’s one on one.”

Ipoh against a much younger, heavily-armed and armoured warrior? I struggled to believe it. But my body wasn’t giving me much of a choice.

I sat in the shadow of the chair sized cubes, breathing in deep and trying to hurry my body through the process of recovery. The harder I tried, the more unnatural my breaths felt, until I worried I was making it worse by thinking about it.

Between abusing my body and the sleep deprivation, I was starting to see things. The surface of the cube was no longer flat and smooth, but uneven. Ripples darted across the surface in front of my eyes; smaller cubes rising and falling within the context of the larger object. With the distant screams of the second hunter ringing in my ears, I felt a lurch in my stomach and scrambled away, hands and boots scrabbling for purchase and hitting more metal in the process.

It moved under me.

“It’s the cubes!” I squawked, failing to keep my voice down.

Ipoh’s concentration broke, and he glanced down at the metal, his lights flaring into greater brightness.

The baby cubes were moving more now, and more vigorously the closer they were to the chamber. I saw Ipoh connect the dots at about the same time as I did, and, in subjective slow motion, I watched just long enough to see him turn and sprint towards me before doing the same myself. All thoughts of strategy fled as we pelted along the current path.

Behind us, far closer than I liked, I heard the sleeper scream.

Another fork opened up, and I knew which end turned us closer to the cube chamber. Anywhere but there. “Right!” I yelled, lunging that way. I didn’t wait to see if Ipoh followed, but a second later I heard his panting behind me.

--Upgrades available for selection,-- the Guide informed me, its words cutting clear through the panic driving most other thoughts from my mind. I’d never been more glad to hear it. --Will you accept?--

“Yes, I accept!” I screamed, stumbling over an unexpected cube that writhed under my boot.

An answering yell from the distance - the last of the hunters - informed me I’d been heard.

--Your first option is - --

“Razors!” Ipoh called out next to me, abandoning stealth. He was already overtaking me despite stumbling more often. “That’s where we are. Not the Drift. The blood-blasted Razors!”

“What?”

“That’s why it’s so empty! Forget what I said earlier. We need another promise. Now!”

“I promise - argh!” A cube shifted so hard it liquified under my foot and nearly sent me flying. I clamped my mouth shut in case the compulsion counted interruptions, and willed the universe to cancel the first attempt to let me try again.

--Your first option is Sprinting,-- informed the Guide, smoothly interjecting itself into my second try. --This upgrade will improve your endurance and speed while moving quickly.--

“Next!”

--You may alternatively - --

A shout and loud, humming crackle sounded behind us as the last stavist rounded the corner into our passage. Last because I could no longer hear the cries of the prisoner. He hadn’t lasted nearly as long as the others. A bright flare - brighter than daylight - lit the length of the passage from the hunter’s staff. For a split second, I could see far ahead to where it ended in a T-junction, more cubes embedded in the walls. The sound of an explosive impact crashed behind us.

Ipoh shouted something back in the staccato language, and the hunter yelled an answering response. Ipoh called back again and grabbed my wrist, pulling me onward.

I forced myself to stay upright somehow, pushing back the urgent nausea from running too hard, too long.

--You may select Analysis. This upgrade will improve your ability to derive insights from the unknown.--

It sounded like Ipoh’s magic, I thought to myself wryly, only to realise I’d somehow figured it out subconsciously in my head. Perversely, I found myself grinning in spite of the two independent sources of death closing in.

--Your third option is Magnetism. This upgrade will allow you to generate simple magnetic fields in close range. Please make your selection.--

I knew magnetism, I thought dimly. Another blinding flash detonated through the passage and made spots dance in front of my eyes. One of the things my existing framework accounted for. I knew it affected metal, and could attract or repel. Even as my lungs begged me to choose Sprinting, I knew there was only one real choice.

Magnetism it was.