I slammed into the door like a battering ram—shoulder first, feeling the grind of the bone against wood, smearing the grain with scabbed blood. It slammed open, for the lock binding it hadn’t been tight, and hit the wall hard enough to shatter the small glass window. Bits of powdered, glinting shards tumbled to the ground as I staggered through the opening, desperately seeking my gaze upward for the sun.

It wasn’t there. I saw ceiling, patterned white tiles, and a sizzling, grey-blue light, trapped in a glass globe. The room was bigger than any of the others I’d seen trying to get out of this damned madhouse, and piled high with strange machines and flickering readouts. To my left, there was a circular area where the floor turned to glass, scorch marks around its edges and cordoned off by thick red rope. A laboratory. No surprise to find it here, I supposed, for they had to do their dirty work of resurrecting long-forgotten nightmares somewhere.

But it wasn’t what I needed. The monster—the Dreamwalker, the foremost issue that I feared—that had been created on Valorian’s private ship, the dark deep waters of the ocean a barrier that it’d managed to tear through. I didn’t know where in the city I was, but I could be pretty sure I wasn’t out on the ocean. Even standing on the pier as it swayed back and forth made me nauseous.

I paced towards that perfect circle. An ancient, bulky camera was set up on a tripod, pointing towards its heart, and bundles of cable wound towards it like snakes. This was the heart of the laboratory, everything else merely a hanger-on. In worse handwriting than my own, someone had scrawled a list of incomprehensible equations on the wall, symbols and functions blurring together. Spiky graphs were pinned next to a circular diagram describing the constellations, a host of fanciful animals spiraling in around true north.

The rope bent easily at my touch. A symbolic barrier, infused with the authority of Valorian and Serhoeyen and Arcadia, rather than any real force. Maybe I should have feared them, but, even with what I’d just seen of Valorian, I couldn’t muster up the energy. I shoved it aside, and stepped onto the glass. It creaked dangerously at my weight, and I looked down to see that I hadn’t cracked it.

Down…down…and down…

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It was a pit. A mine. Sunk deep into the ground, reaching all the way to the Abyss. I squinted, trying to see if it hit bottom—was it a trick of the light, or was there a glimmer of orange at the bottom, a beacon of flame as a signal? At once I was hit with an attack of vertigo, as if I were standing next to Chesnes or another of his ilk. Below me was a mile or more of empty space, and who knew if I would ever hit bottom?

The Abyss—more accurately, Abyssopelagia, as it’d been long ago named—was the dark underside of the Outscape, its roots stretching deep into the earth. But no one went there who could help it, and no one who emerged, emerged sane. It might have been a city beneath the city, the original Outscape before the sea rose and the buildings rose with it. It could have been the only way through to a city of dreams and real sunlight. Or, as Valorian and Jabberwock with him had clearly believed, it was a gravesite for forgotten nightmares, a primal subconscious to which everything returned eventually.

“So what did you do?” I said aloud. My voice stirred a few layers of dust up into eddies. “How did you do it? How did you delve into the Abyss and come back intact? No, not just that. How did you dive into the Abyss and come back with something else?”

No answer. I’d hardly expected one.

The laboratory boasted answers, I was sure of it. But how much time did I have to search? And what could I find, anyway, in my half-dead state? And, I reminded myself, how much time did I dare spend here with Robin in danger? This entire mess was my fault and my failings—I couldn’t take advantage of it before I’d corrected those wrongs, and that meant getting out.

I hesitated, all the same. I wouldn’t find my way in here again, and I couldn’t leave their operation fully unknown-

Distant shouting, and the thump of nameless nightmares’ boots on the floor. Hell. I didn’t have long. There was a book lying open on one of the nearby tables, colored tabs separating out a dozen different pages. I slammed it shut, with just time to read the name on the cover before slamming it shut and tucking it under my arm: Rada Riestern, the explorer and researcher. Notes of hers, missing from the archives.

I couldn’t recount the path I took through Jabberwock’s building, the ways in which I had to double back or the corners I hid behind as nightmares marched by. It all became the hall of mirrors, an endless maze through which the only choice was to keep moving forward. I might have fallen asleep on my feet once or twice, snapping my head back up with a jerk every time it happened. But—an hour later, maybe more—I pushed through a rain-soaked door and out onto a road, the sky gray and wrinkled above me, wind brushing at my air.

I staggered. Nearly collapsed. No. Not yet. I might have made it outside, but I wasn’t safe.