Much to my dismay, a second part to the solution didn’t immediately present itself. A minor miracle landing at my feet did wonders for kicking my motivation into gear. But after what felt like a solid hour of knocking, tapping and listening at walls, dejection was sinking back in.

I hastened back to my sleeping platform as the grating of metal on stone heralded the return of a warden. He passed my cell, exchanged a few sharp words with the prisoner on the other side, and returned with a terrified man stumbling against chains of light. They encased his hands, leaving no part of the appendage uncovered, and strung tight loops around his ankles. A third illumination, a choker-like collar, encircled his neck in piercing, fluctuating colours.

He met my eyes briefly as the warden walked him past.

With monochrome the property of the Ancients, the changing colours made more sense to me now. Several hours too late. I swallowed in my black leather garments, feeling suddenly very exposed. It didn’t speak well of my supposed peers that they’d laid claim to and outlawed whole segments of the rainbow. Had I been that arrogant in my previous cycles? It didn’t feel like me, but perhaps having Orange there to introduce me had started me off on a different foot.

How much of our personalities carried over from previous lives, I didn’t know. How much of me was new or pre-existing, to what extent my memories had made the difference, I couldn’t say. I might succeed in tracking down Orange, only for him to turn out to be unrecognisable.

Come to think of it, he had mentioned something about coming back different. Was there any of the past cycles left in there at all?

--I am what was lost and can be recovered,-- the Guide broke into my thoughts helpfully.

So that was a ‘maybe’.

“There’s nothing,” I told Ipoh, once the warden and his captive had gone. “No way to break through. Perhaps if there’s another row of cells on the opposite side of the wall, I could try for a transfer. But I didn’t get that impression, did you?”

“It’s one possibility,” my jailmate answered. “It’s also likely we won’t find what we want in the walls. As you say, we might need a way around the back. But the possibilities might be less obvious. Plenty more buried relics where that came from, after all. There’s also a high chance –”

He never finished the sentence. An ear-rendering crack split the air, accompanied by a series of thundering tremors as a thick beam of metal punched through the cell walls in blindingly fast succession. The series of impacts was so fast, it sounded like an ongoing crunch of several impacts stacking into each other, followed by a rain of rubble hitting the ground at volumes loud enough to burst eardrums.

But I barely noticed the pain, because of the dull silver shaft shaving perilously close to my stomach and everything below it. It was as high as my waist and half as wide, and it had torn through the walls like nothing. Though not the parts containing the network station.

The massive blade retracted in a blur of motion, impossibly fast for its size. I hadn’t had time to react. Somewhere nearby, through the ringing in my ears, I heard shouts.

“Or there’s that,” I heard the Servant saying. “That works too.”

I was hesitant to peer through the hole in case the blade came back. Ipoh did it for me.

He was an older man. Older than his voice made him sound. His short hair was turning grey, and he wore several layers of thick, multicoloured robes resembling those of the man in the station chamber. The church.

“Coming through,” he announced, and promptly got himself stuck in the gap. “Argh,” he groaned, batting at the edges. “Are you going to help, or just stand there?”

I hesitated a second more, then reached out to tug at his arm from a position to the side. It didn’t feel like I was making much of a difference. Skittish, my eyes darted about the place. Not unwarranted; another thunderous blast rocked the walls a moment later, sending hairline cracks splintering across the roof. My alarm ricocheted up another notch.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Go back,” I jittered, changing trajectory to push him the other way. “I can fit. And if we can get through the other walls –”

My attempts met with resistance. “Squeeze through five more of these?” He caught my expression and clarified. “I checked. And I counted. No.” With a rough grunt and heave, he stumbled the rest of the way through, a large tear opening in his robes as he did, leaving a trail of fabric flapping behind. “Besides,” he followed up, “that way is trouble. That prisoner back there was a sleeper agent. Is one. Not asleep anymore, though.”

He may as well have been speaking gibberish. “A what? Who? What?”

“Sleepers. Horrible things.” He saw my confusion and deflated somewhat with a sigh. “People installed in society to perform specific tasks under specific circumstances. Generally the type of tasks most people won’t agree to.”

My fingers seemed to have a case of the tremors. “You’re very calm about this,” I noted. It came out jittery; my teeth had the tremors too.

“In this case,” the Servant continued, barrelling on as if he hadn’t heard me, “it seems the trigger was you. And the instruction was to attack. Must be Green’s, the idiot. No one else would kill an Ancient. It just resets the rebirth process somewhere else where they can’t find them.”

“They can find them,” I argued, spotting too late the note of surprise in Ipoh’s reaction. Oh. I’d given away a secret.

He didn’t raise it for now, and my attention was taken by the new shouts and back-and-forth in the direction of the hole. Metal clashed on metal, against a third resounding bang.

“You’ll have noticed the number of bindings they had on him,” the Servant continued after a few seconds. “He must have been bleeding magic. They knew he was trouble; they just didn’t count on the magnitude. Also,” he added, “you put him there. Is it sinking in yet?”

“Yes,” I said, curter than I meant to. “What are those things –” I broke off as another one hit to the accompaniment of several screams, “– those things crashing through solid rock?”

“The worst part.” It seemed to shake him, more than the fairly likely prospect of imminent death. “Don’t worry about that for now. You need to be ready for that Station to open up.”

Guide?

--Resources will be withheld until a time of greater need.--

Are you insane? I thought at it angrily, and received no response. It was Ipoh and his annoyingly calm confidence affecting me, I rationalised. No one had a right to be so at ease in this situation.

“Okay,” I muttered aloud, though I struggled to keep my eyes on the relevant corner. The shouts had been joined by more – and worse, moans and whimpers – and the sounds of screaming metal only seemed to be getting more frequent. It didn’t help that the cracks in the roof were widening. A chunk the size of my head thunked from the ceiling into the floor opposite the bars of the gate. Not reassuring at all.

Despite myself, I peered through the gap and caught distant flashes of metal, before Ipoh yanked me back. “Don’t let him see you! There’s such a thing as pushing your luck too f – oh no.”

A different sort of crash – the sound of collapsing rocks and a muffled scream – added to the cacophony as one of the cell roofs collapsed. Ipoh met my eyes and took one deliberate step towards me before another metal shaft sheared through the wall of ours, the spot he’d just vacated and into the back of the cell.

Now he looked shaken.

“Now’s your chance,” he hissed at me as the blade retracted. His soft hands pushed at me from behind. “Hurry!”

The shaft had torn through an entire arm’s span of solid rock, ending not a hidden chamber, but more of the same. Still, I felt the charge of the station as soon as I stepped over it, the sensations taking hold even though I couldn’t see the source with my eyes. Still buried under a layer of stone. It didn’t matter as far as the functionality was concerned.

Many nodes danced before my eyes. As before, the vast majority were broken and dead. Several remained, and I reached for the first.

A hand gripped mine, as Ipoh crammed himself into the gap after me. It cut off the light, but I could see the nodes anyway through some strange quirk of function. “Where do you –”

“Anywhere. Just go!”

I curled my fingers around the closest node and pulled it towards my chest, expecting the wrenching sensation this time. I felt it pass through my hand into my companion’s, pulling him with me –

– and we stood somewhere else. A bright, peaceful building –

“Again,” Ipoh interrupted. “Don’t give them a trail to follow.”

There weren’t that many options available, I thought, but didn’t bother arguing. At this point, it was all much the same. With a wistful glance at the chamber, I followed instruction and chose a different node, sending us out again.

We landed somewhere dark and silent.

“Again,” said the Servant.

Another dark, quiet place.

“Again.”

“There’s no again,” I explained, my heart falling. My voice echoed back at me in the dark. “It’s a dead end.” The station wasn’t lighting up, even back the way we came. There was something off about the charge emanating from it, too. Not absent entirely, but diminished. “I think this station’s broken.”