“We can’t go back.”

I turn at the sound of Razi’s voice. “No, you can’t. Seems like the Preservation isn’t as amazing as you thought it was, huh?”

He glanced down, ashamed. That’s not the reaction I was expecting, but it’s pretty damn fitting. I wait for Diane to chime in with anything, but from the faraway look in her eye, she’s barely even here right now. Probably worrying about what’s coming next–I know I would be.

“See you two soon-ish.”

I tap the robot with my foot as I walk by. Pearl silently huffs when I don’t repurpose it, but the thing needs to be there for the story. It all falls apart if the bot didn’t get overwhelmed by the elementals after killing Diane and Razi. I’m still reluctant to call them or Call our allies, but that doesn’t matter.

Because the second I get back to the resort, I’ll have two willing hostages. And a speaker under my thumb who definitely doesn’t want the truth getting out. It’s almost too perfect. Which is why I’ve gotta stay suspicious.

I lean against the railing and take one last glance back at Diane and Razi. They’re whispering about something, and Razi flinches away like I caught him doing something bad. Diane just smiles and waves.

Whatever. I’ve got more important things to deal with than whatever they’re planning. My awareness latches onto the relocation coins with me as the target, and I lean over the edge to get a good look at the seemingly infinite depths. Of course I can’t see much of anything thanks to the mask, but from what I remember, I wouldn’t see much of anything anyway.

Well, no time like the present.

I vault the railing and feel gravity… struggle. One second the buff keeps me airborne, like there’s salt way down at the bottom of the endless abyss, and the next my stomach lurches as I drop about a foot. Then the salt catches me again and the cycle continues.

“Some kind of moving floor?” I muse as I close my eyes and focus on falling. The sensation of being caught disappears from the cycle, and I plummet.

It takes all of ten seconds for my awareness to be a mostly empty bubble. Salt growths on the side of the hole appear every now and again, but they disappear just as quickly. I adjust myself so the force blows my shirt into my body instead of up into my face, and focus wholly on my awareness so I don’t slam into wherever the ground ends up being.

Something shudders.

Eyes. Tens of thousands of eyes.

They roll in hollow sockets, then snap to all focus directly on me. For a moment, I feel like I’m drowning in their attention. Then everything turns wet. My breaths come short and desperate for a split second, but Ursula’s mask from so many days ago keeps the wetness from getting into my lungs.

I drag my fingers through the empty air, fully expecting to feel the resistance of water. But they move through it like normal, muggy air. It’s wrong. It all feels wrong. The eyes glare at me from everywhere. I can’t escape it.

Metal groans. Salt cracks. Desperation and confusion knife into my brain from the same connection that the thorns did. Fleur’s panicking. Pearl shudders and takes a step back.

The krarig’s waking up. Right now. And the only thing holding it back is the salt in the hearts.

“Shit!” I hiss and rip the mask off my face. Only the light of the salt clusters hits my eyes, and the rest is just empty metal. I grit my teeth and focus on however far down the ground is as I send the mask into my inventory, then use the salt buff to pull myself down.

A great force grabs me, and the air begins to scream by. Stutters still happen half of the time, but with the acceleration, they don’t feel as weird. I squeeze my eyes shut as salt stings them to hell and back, holding the buff in my mind as the ground must be getting inevitably closer.

“Gambler!” March cries directly into my ears. “There’s another Preservation signal on the horizon! It’s really far, but approaching super fast!”

“Responding to the krarig actually waking up. Damn it.” I flip around so I can open my eyes and stare at all the eyes. My mind tells me they’re not real. Just manifestations of the krarig being acutely aware of me. “Did Call have anything to do with this?”

“Um… not… exactly. It’s mostly Mercenary with a little bit of me and Fleur. The dumpceratops was a little too strong. So we kind of magical mini-nuked it.”

Mini… nuke. I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. “Well, this means all this is a wash. We getting out of here right now?”

March hums high and long. Somehow, I know that means ‘no’. “Fleur is keeping the krarig at bay for now. We have about two hours before it folds in on itself and all its insides disappear. That’s when we get out of here.”

Two hours. At least we’ve got a hard time limit now, so I don’t have to keep wondering when everything’s going to shit. March keeps talking in my ear about the fight with the dumpceratops, but ever since she said ‘magical mini nuke’, I can’t imagine anything but a smoking crater where the monster once was.

I pull my arms close to my sides and angle myself downwards, putting all thoughts about anything else out of my mind. Nothing else matters but surviving. We can pull out and abandon the mission at any time. But… that’ll consign Fleur to death. Actually, now that the krarig’s waking up, isn’t she completely screwed?

“Architect… is there anything we can do for Fleur?”

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“Maybe? I can try to recreate the conditions that let her live in an offshore platform a few miles from the resort. The problem with that is somehow getting her–and enough of the salt–there.”

I nod to myself confidently. “Do that. I’ll make sure everything else works out.”

“Gambler, there’s a good chance she won’t be able to survive without some apocalyptic stuff involved. It’s what made her into… her, after all.” March reminds me.

“I’ve got that covered, too. You just focus on making somewhere big enough for everything.”

Static assaults my ears. I wince and raise my hands to cover them, but since the sound’s coming from the earbuds, it does absolutely nothing.

“Architect?! Can you hear me?” I yell over the sound. Crackling that almost sounds like voices barely makes it through, but they fade out in moments. Leaving me with a horrible sound that, too, fades away the deeper I go.

“Shelby!” Pearl calls as the static dies out. “The salt’s completely blocking the comms, so I can talk again for a little bit!”

A smile creeps across my lips at the sound of her voice. “Missed your sweet sounds, Pearl. Can you feel the bottom of this thing?”

She blows a raspberry and flicks her hand at me. “Easily. You have about ten seconds to slow your fall. Plenty of warning!”

I roll my eyes and focus on the buff, cutting the momentum of my fall instantly. Once more I thank whatever made the buff for spitting in the face of momentum and physics, then stare down into the blackness as I slowly fall chunk by chunk.

“What the hell’s down here?”

“A lot of molten salt and grease.” Pearl happily responds. “It feels like a big sea of the stuff down there. Don’t fall in!”

Don’t really need the advice, but the warning is appreciated. I let the buff fall ever so slightly until I feel something under me with my awareness, even though there’s still no light touching it. Almost makes it seem like putting on the mask would help me see better. So I do.

Just like before, the scenery spreads out in a strange black outlined world. Two liquids a dozen feet under my slowly churn along, lazily flowing in the same direction at different speeds. I turn my head in the direction they’re going, but wherever the final destination is, I can’t see it in my awareness.

“It feels like we’re standing above the ocean.” I note as I step over a flow of molten salt, keeping myself suspended in the air as I follow the flow. “Wonder where the hell this is in relation to everything else in the krarig.”

“If I had to guess… I’d call it the stomach. Because of all the entrances and exits. Oh, wait, human stomachs only have one entrance and exit. So, um, it’s more like…”

As she trails off in thought, I’m left wondering what she means by multiple entrances and exits. I narrow my eyes, for all the good it does, and try to feel how the molten salt and grease are flowing. Sure enough, what initially felt like one solid flow turns out to be a bunch of currents all going in relatively similar directions. Some of them peter out quickly, simply disappearing before my eyes, but most of them carry on.

I pick a random one and follow it to completion. It only takes half a minute, and then I have to pick another. That one also disappears relatively quickly. Since following them to their ends looks like it’s a complete dead end, I decide to try and follow one in reverse this time.

With a few kicks, I rise up high enough to afford a few mistakes. Then I choose a random current and follow it backwards. Salt and grease flow in twain for nearly ten minutes upstream. Neither of them give up, both seemingly fighting for supremacy the entire time, and the silence of the strange currently slowly gives way to a quiet roar.

It takes another few minutes of following the sound to find the source. A waterfall, just like the one in the huge room, cascades grease into the slurry below. Huge chunks of partially molten salt fall down it like icebergs, completely broken down by the violent current under the waterfall and melted by the strange, wet heat. I step around to keep afloat as I watch the waterfall for a few long seconds.

“Where the hell is it flowing from?”

Pearl shrugs. “I don’t know, sorry.”

“Nah, it was a rhetorical question. Don’t worry.” I turn back to face the currents. “We must’ve missed something important. Or this isn’t actually important, and my skill pointed us away from it at the very start.”

“Ooh, maybe this is where you would’ve ended up if you jumped down one of those pipes in the dumptruck room!” Pearl eagerly offers. “Just a lot weirder!”

“Could be. Doesn’t change the fact that I have no idea if there’s anything worth wasting time on down here.” I stick my hands in my pockets and wrack my brain for any puzzles we didn’t have the answers to. Only the shit the client left for us stands out, but there’s no obvious connection here. “Pearl, if you extend your awareness to its absolute maximum, can you tell me if you see anything even slightly interesting?”

“I already did that. Nothing interesting to note yet.” She leans back and laces her fingers together. “Oh, wait. There’s something falling down the waterfall that isn’t pure salt. It… feels like there’s a shard of that elemental’s power in there. Be careful.”

I stand a little straighter and focus on the waterfall. “Point me to it.”

Pearl points unhelpfully up. “You should be able to feel it too when it gets in your range. Have a shield ready.”

“Good call.”

A shield coin flicks into my palm, and I wait impatiently for whatever Pearl felt coming. It takes… way longer than I expect it to. Dozens of seconds tick by, and with every one, a growing sense of unease filters into my gut. There’s no way in hell I missed it. Right?

Bright, molten light crashes into my awareness. My hand flicks the coin at it before my brain reacts, and a rectangle of power appears under the brightness in the dark of my awareness. I reach up to wipe my eyes, only to feel the cool stone mask that covers my face.

“Holy hell, that’s bright.” I chuckle as I jump up to the object. “Is it blindingly bright for you?”

“Definitely. I think it’s bright enough that you can take off the mask. Oh, um, be a little careful. Fleur might be really desperate to live, so we don’t know what she’ll do.”

I know that. But I’m also curious as hell. My feet pass from thin air to the surface of my shield, and I tear the mask from my face to get a good look at wherever the–

Are you kidding me. There’s… there’s no goddamn way.

“What the hell Fleur.” I shake my head in disbelief as I stare down at the message etched in salt. And the thing encased in the huge, melting block. “You had contingencies, too?”

“Hello, Gambler. I hope this reaches you. I have been hiding this from you since I first sensed you. At first, I did not question why. Now, I both apologize and beg for your help.” Her message reads, and I glance down at the next line as it melts in the strange air. “Please. I do not want to die. Whatever you need me to do–I will do it. I will worship at your feet like a god. I will help you take over the world. I’m so… scared.”

Inside of the melting salt, under all the flowery words begging me for help, is a safe.