She sucked in a breath noisily, sitting up and trying to scream.

Hands caught her. "Be careful, Commander Yaepanaya!"

Jaya saw the medic's concerned look, but a drone dropped in front of her vision, taking a quick scan of her.

"Minor radiation poisoning." It was Y's voice, and she followed it with her eyes, seeing that there was an endless stream of drones flying in neat lanes to and fro up above head height.

It was far more than normal. She glanced at the medic in confusion, and the man just shrugged. "Dr. Y is controlling the whole ship."

Urle had released the seals? The thought popped up immediately in her mind. Yet alarming as that was, it was not the greatest concern on her mind.

The medic gave her a shot, which stung slightly.

"I have . . . minor radiation poisoning?" she said. She looked at her arm, but her skin was intact and looked fine.

"Yes, ma'am. You seem to have fallen and hit your head when the ship was hit. One of the space hounds found you in a side hall. You got a bit of a dose, but don't worry - nothing too bad. You'll be fine."

That did not sound right. She looked at her hands, but they looked healthy.

From what she recalled, her skin itself should be sloughing off by now. She should not be awake, and that would be a mercy with how high a dose she had gotten . . .

"I remember . . . something much worse," she said.

"It was very alarming," the medic agreed. "But don't worry. With Dr. Y's help, we've got the ship stabilized, and you as well ma'am."

She glanced up at the drones again. "Where is Alexander Shaw?" she asked.

The medic paused, checking his HUD. "It does not seem we have located him yet. His office area was among those worst hit." He hesitated. "I'm afraid anyone down there is likely to have gotten a lethal dose of radiation, Commander."

"I was down there!" she protested.

The medic hesitated again, then nodded. "You also hit your head, Commander. You may be slightly confused."

She wanted to snap at him and start ordering him to search, but she just as quickly clamped down on her own emotional outburst.

This was not right, something terrible was happening here. Something was wrong.

She wondered for a brief moment if this was some sort of pre-death hallucination. But she did not believe that.

The medic told her that he'd be back to check on her later and that she should rest.

She lay back, looking to the right and left. There were others at this triage station, and none of them seemed very hurt.

She had consigned herself to death - a death of failure and pointlessness, but one she had accepted.

Yet, she was alive, hating her own cowardly relief at the thought.

She had not wanted to die. But this . . . this felt wrong.

Putting her arm over her eyes, she struggled to hold back the emotions that flooded over her.

----------------------------------------

Brooks awoke slowly, sitting up and looking around.

He was not in the control room of the . . . ship-room anymore, but he was in a stone hall that he did not even recognize.

His mind was still reeling, everything around him spinning. The last encounters with the Present Mind had not been this disorienting.

The information about . . . the Leviathan, and Terris, he could not dwell on it right now. It was not the time for such contemplation.

Nadian and Katherine were also slowly coming to. Brooks found himself annoyed at how frequently he'd simply woken up on the floor since coming into the enabling.

"Kell," he said.

"I am here," the being replied. Brooks looked over and saw him leaning against the wall.

"What happened?" Brooks asked.

"The ship returned to the station and we were ejected from it," Kell said. "You are fortunate to be alive."

From how much his body ached, Brooks had the feeling he had not been that fortunate; it felt like he had been literally ejected out of the room.

"Where are we?" Brooks asked next.

"I don't recognize this," Nadian said.

"We are not far from where we came down into the enabling," Kell said.

"Convenient," Kat said, skeptically.

"The Present Mind wishes us to leave," Kell replied simply. "We would be wise to do so. And quickly."

Brooks began to ask another question when a strange sound echoed down the tunnel. It did not sound mechanical, or even natural. It was a howl, echoing from a great distance.

"What the hell is that?" Kat asked, her voice a sharp whisper.

Kell spoke softly, but calmly. "It is what you might call a janitor. It is no danger to me, but to your kind . . ."

Nadian rose, grabbing Kat's arm and pulling her up. "We gotta move."

"Kell, can you stop it?" Brooks asked, scrambling to his feet.

"No," Kell said, turning on his heel. "Follow my mark."

He began to walk - and simply was gone. Brooks blinked. "Kell?" he called, starting to stumble along after Nadian.

There was a terrible scraping noise, and Brooks thought that the Janitor had caught up with them.

But instead, a gouge appeared in the wall, starting as a straight line, but then splitting and growing, branching off into strange directions.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

It only took a second or two to appear, each line flaring off into a point. All of which aimed in the same direction.

Brooks stared in surprise for a moment before realizing that this was Kell's "mark".

He began to run.

Nadian and Kat were picking up speed ahead of him, but Brooks had longer legs and more enhancements.

Air whipped through his hair as he ran, his arms pumping with his legs as he moved as fast as his feet could take him.

Nade and Kat disappeared, then; a new mark was inscribing itself on the wall, and Brooks followed it.

The space they ducked through was not even something that Brooks could see until he was close; what seemed a solid wall was instead, at the right angle, a passageway.

He went through, seeing that as the hall went further it broadened out into a . . . seemingly endless space.

Crashing into the wall, his shoulder flashed with pain, and he realized after a moment that he could not actually make sense of what he was seeing.

A new mark was appearing ahead of him, seemingly carved into the air itself.

As it spread, it seemed to spread into the entirety of empty space, and he felt a pain behind his eyes as he even tried to understand it.

He didn't have to understand it right this moment, though. All of it was pointing, unquestionably, straight ahead.

He ran. The hall around him stayed a narrow tract, and each time he stepped forward the infinity seemed to move with him, like a fog - perpetually ahead.

Another mark pointed him to the right, and he did not stop to question or try to understand, turning right.

He found himself now in a tunnel that he could understand; except it was moving, changing.

No, he realized - collapsing.

He kept running towards the edge. He would have to jump.

His toes skidded against the falling edge as he sprang forward.

He had gotten distance, but not enough.

Brooks's fingers scrabbled against the far edge, but his grip was poor. He clutched them in hard, trying to arrest his fall into the pit that was forming.

He stopped, barely clutching onto the last hint of a lip.

"It's changing shape!" he heard Nadian yell from ahead.

"Help!" Brooks grunted out. It came out too quiet, he knew, no one would hear him. If Nadian and Kat would even care enough to come back for him.

He slid slightly - or the floor edge shifted. It had stopped collapsing here, and he could not understand why, until he craned his head to look down.

He had hoped that the fall might be survivable. But instead what he saw was space itself turning from incomprehensibility into something new.

It was a tunnel, slowly forming deeper and deeper - now hundreds, if not thousands of meters out.

It stopped suddenly, from the glow a perfect circle of darkness appearing, growing.

It was space, he realized. The temple was reforming, opening to the void - to what end? To get rid of them?

Any moment, he knew, the air here would start to rush out. It would be enough, he felt, to make him lose his last grasp and fall - to fall literally forever, once he hit void. Truly bottomless.

The edges of the darkness were changing shape, turning to . . . arms? They were bizarrely, horribly organic-looking, growing out and in, curving, then fractaling into new shapes that seemed to shrink more with distance yet still did not recede. He felt a wave of dizziness, and in that moment he could perceive a slightly larger portion of it.

They were arms to receive.

My creators have come, the Present Mind had told him.

Something grabbed his hand, roughly pulling.

Brooks looked up. At Nadian.

"Don't give up on me now, Ian," the man said through his own clenched teeth, pulling - or trying, at least - to pull him up.

There was no good purchase for his boots on the stone, and he, too, was slipping towards the edge.

Brooks pulled himself with his arm that still held the edge, adding his own strength.

He came up, his grip poor until he had enough height to push. He came up then, both of them falling into a pile.

Brooks gasped for breath for a moment, looking at Nadian. "Thanks," he said.

Nade nodded, and Kat suddenly grabbed them both. "C'mon!"

"I thought I told you to go on without me!" Nade said, scrambling up.

"I wasn't going to let you go and be the hero by yourself!" she yelled back.

"Just run!" Brooks said.

He did not know if the Janitor was near. But something told him it must be.

A mark pointed them around the corner, and they turned it.

Then they saw men.

Brooks's first thought was that they looked spectacularly mundane to be the Janitor that Kell had warned them about.

It was an absurd thought, he realized almost as quickly, as they were all wearing high-quality battle armor, all had rifles in their hands, and were accompanied by a swarm of combat drones.

Kat, Nade, and Brooks all stopped, freezing before the men.

The last thing I'll do is pull a shocked face, Brooks thought.

"Captain Brooks, come with us," one of the men said. He stepped forward, lifting his faceplate.

Brooks recognized the man, but his mind took a moment to remember from where.

"Brecht?" he said aloud, in shock.

"You know him?" Nade asked, almost accusingly.

"There's no time for this," Brecht said. "We have a shuttle."

He began to move, and Brooks followed him. Was this some kind of hallucination? It seemed too convenient.

He looked around, for some sign from Kell that they were going astray. But he saw nothing.

It did not set him at ease - would Kell even bother stopping to help him?

He realized that he thought that Kell would. That emboldened him.

Half of the men with the mercenary team were not turning back. They were moving up, stopping and taking up positions.

"With your lives," Brecht said to them in passing.

"With our lives," one of the men, marked as their commander, replied.

They went down the hall and through another. Then, ahead, Brooks saw a ramp leading up.

They went up, bursting into a dizzyingly open space - the inside of the temple that they'd first entered into.

Behind him, he suddenly heard gunfire. He skidded to a stop, looking back.

Brecht grabbed his arm. "Don't stop!"

He dragged Brooks along, towards the shuttle.

More arms grabbed him, and Brooks looked to Brecht.

"What are they fighting?" he asked.

The gunfire had died down now.

No one answered him, but he was shoved into a bracing chair, and he strapped himself in.

There was another shuttle, he could see through a screen of the outside. The other men could escape still.

"Is Kell on here?"

"No," Brecht said.

"We can't leave him behind," Brooks said sharply. His next words came without thought. "You know what he is."

Brecht looked back at him, his face turned almost to a sneer of disgust. "I know. That is why I am not worried."

The shuttle lifted with a sharp upwards rise that slammed Brooks back into his seat. For a moment none of them could talk, the effect doubling as they jetted forward.

Their acceleration continued, making black creep in around his eyes. But after a minute of hard burning, it slackened.

"How do you know him?" Nadian asked him quietly.

". . . how do you know him?" Brooks echoed.

"He's the man I'm working for," Nadian replied, still watching Brooks. There was a slight fear on his face that Brooks could interpret in a dozen different ways.

"We encountered each other at Gohhi," Brooks said. "We had a mutual interest."

"Strong enough for him to come help you now?" Nadian asked. "He said your name. Not mine."

"Apparently so," Brooks replied.

He said nothing else, his eyes going to the screens. One of them was not simply showing a view of the outside. One of the men in the unit of unknown espatiers had turned it to something else.

It was showing the rear as they rocketed away, zooming in at intervals, though the detail was slowly being lost.

The other shuttle was still there, unmoving. Then, from the ramp behind them, a single figure emerged, running. He was barely visible, but he raised his arm, holding his rifle up as a salute.

Behind him, the screen suddenly started to pixelate and tear, as something emerged. The man disappeared, consumed by errors that grew across the screen.

One of the espatiers turned it off, the whole screen going black.