We kept moving, but nothing else was the same. I led, Niko following behind holding the rope wound around my neck. He’d cut the duct tape from my ankles so I could walk, but tied a blindfold made from a damp shirt tight around my face. “Little handicap,” he said, “case you decide to run off.” I cringed as he clapped me playfully on the back. “Don’t worry. If you’re good, I’ll tell you when you’re about to walk into a pit.”

Like a bitter parody of the exploring I’d done with my Niko, a million years ago, we searched. At intersections he’d describe each hallway, and casually discuss which way to go, as if we were equals. As if he hadn’t threatened to kill me and worse. Other than a preference for moving toward anything weird or different, he seemed content to let me choose the direction. He fastidiously marked the wall, tracing our path—“If we’re doing it on this side, they’re doing it on theirs, too”—and on the whole seemed downright cheerful. For a while he whistled something I finally placed as the theme to one of our favorite shows. Just the second bar, over and over again.

Like he’d forgotten the rest.

I made little plans for how to get away.

None of them seemed very plausible.

From his descriptions, I gathered we were passing through a maze of identical drab halls. The carpet underfoot was sometimes dry, sometimes thick with something like dead mulch that made me stumble, and often slick with slime and mold. We must have been only slightly above the water table, if such a concept made sense down here. Probably it didn’t. Sometimes we’d go up dry stairs to a soaked hall at the top, or along a downward slant that went from squelchy to dusty. We were near water, anyway, moving through histories of past inundation. Niko described walls streaked with damage from it, paint browned and peeling. Once he found some mushrooms growing from a split baseboard, and stopped to eat them. I could hear him chewing, a slimy sound. The smell as they mixed with his saliva was of pond scum and rotting dirt. He offered me one, but I declined, and he seemed unsurprised. He said they’d keep you alive but weren’t especially satisfying. I tried not to hear menace in that.

There were few side rooms here, but he’d open the door to each we passed and check it. Bedroom-sized rooms, he told me, all of them empty except for a small drain in the center of each floor.

It was hard to keep my balance, blindfolded and arms bound behind me, and I stumbled a lot. The adrenaline from earlier had worn off, leaving behind a dozen throbbing aches and a deep exhaustion. How long had I been down here? I couldn’t come up with a number, but my body knew the answer: too long.

Worse, I felt abysmally alone. To feel like the last person in the universe that cares for you is not only gone, but twisted into a thing that loathes you with active and pulsing hate is utterly miserable. Worse was wondering if that hate had been there all along, buried under the surface, and I’d just never noticed it.

At the next intersection I tripped on a rough patch of carpet and collapsed, smacking my chin against the ground. It hurt, and I started crying. Sobbing, actually. I’d never felt more useless, pathetic. Niko told me to shut up, and I tried to pull myself together. He sighed, and suggested we take a rest. Sniffling, I agreed.

He sat me up against a wall. I clenched and unclenched my tingling hands; from the elbows down everything was numb. After a while the tears stopped.

I wanted to sleep but I couldn’t bear waking back up to this. I wanted him to untie me, unwind the rope from my neck, let me go. I wanted to get away from him, or better yet for none of this to ever have happened at all. I wanted to be dreaming of something other than hallways, and him.

I could have none of these things. But he hadn’t gagged me. I could still talk. And maybe talking together, like we’d done so much, I could find a way to reach him.

So I asked him about the things he’d seen, and he told me.

He spoke of rooms where the carpet was worn, could be ripped up to reveal floorboards underneath. He spoke of ripping up those floorboards to find more floorboards, of excavating down ten feet with no sign the boards ever stopped. He spoke of caged metal ladders climbing up through vast, dark, empty spaces, rung after rung through nothing but void.

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He spoke of more connection points between paired dimensions, useless to him since he couldn’t find his way to the surface of any—and all tangled down there, he said again. The connections always had some kind of airtight seal. Steam-filled wood saunas with a door at each end; lobbies with revolving entryways; a shower, but vertically stretched, thirty feet of bathroom tile with frosted glass doors at the top and bottom, and climbing its steel fixtures, faucets and knobs sticking out at random from the walls, climbing it all the way to the top in absolute darkness. Because that was another universal feature of the connections, apparently. Your light, whatever its origin, would go out in the space between, like my flashlight in the fridge. He’d taken a burning two-by-four into one and as soon as the door shut behind him the flames simply stopped, not even glowing embers left behind.

Sometimes there were furnished rooms, he said, that you could almost imagine were part of a regular house. Out the door you could pretend there was a kitchen, maybe, with bacon frying and morning light slanting through the window, or a porch with a cool breeze. He said these rooms were the most dangerous of all, if you liked staying sane.

He spoke of catwalks over voids, of flooded libraries swimming with illegible books, of a maze of closet the size of a city block, endless cramped turns ducking under dusty coat hangers. He spoke of vast caves made entirely of stairs: walls, floor and ceiling expanding and contracting in carpeted, ninety-degree edges. More than a decade later, the first time I saw a blocky cavern descending into shadow in Minecraft, I had to shut the game down, right then, turn on the lights, walk away. It looked exactly how I’d imagined Niko’s stair-edged pits.

Finally, he trailed off, and we steeped together in the thick quiet for a time. I was trying to think what I could say to keep him talking, but he broke the silence first.

“You would have gone wild for some of that shit, man. Wish you could have been there.” His voice was wistful. “All our crazy, stupid theories. We were wrong about everything. But it was more fun being wrong together.”

I licked my lips. Maybe this was my chance.

“Yeah. Hell yeah,” I started. “Jesus, man, I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you.” Isn’t the phrase “I can only imagine?” some part of my brain whispered. I shook it off. “I mean, I don’t know what I’d have done, if it were me. Alone down here.” I took a breath, extemporizing. “You’ve... done things to survive, and I mean who could blame you? Who’s to say when push comes to shove what’s right or wrong when survival’s at stake?”

He didn’t make a sound, and I couldn’t see his face through the blindfold. But I sensed a tide shifting. I’d said something wrong. My chance was slipping away.

“You don’t have to do this to me.” I hadn’t meant to say it and not with such pitiful desperation, but now I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t stop babbling. “We’re friends. You’re my friend. We’re only going to survive by working together. You don’t have to keep me tied up like this. I want the same thing you want. To get out, get the fuck out of here—”

“Friends,” he said, voice dangerously quiet. “Is that what we were? Back in the day?”

My chest was tight. “Yeah. I thought so. Weren’t we?”

I heard a scratching sound. A dog itching itself. I couldn’t see but had a clear image: he was scratching the hair behind his ear, head tilted, half-turned down. Something he always did right before explaining something he didn’t think he should have to explain.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think, Ry.” His voice was still calm. “About our friendship. About us.” I jerked suddenly: he’d rested his fist on the top of my shoe. “Why we ended up down here.”

I was losing him, or had already lost him, but I didn’t know how or why or what I could say to reverse it. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, lifting the fist and letting it fall gently back on my sneaker. “I think maybe there was more going on than I really appreciated at the time. For. Example.” He punctuated each word with a slightly harder bap on my foot. “We only found this place because of you. Remember? Because you found it, underneath your bed.”

“Okay,” I said, “but—”

“And that only happened,” he said, hitting my foot harder, “because we were both living in that house. And why was I in that house, friend? Why did I end up moving in?”

“You just said it. We were friends.” But something ugly was burrowing up; I shoved it down. “I mean maybe it’s my fault you were there, sure, but I didn’t mean to... I mean I couldn’t have known... you needed a room, and so—”

“I needed a room, and you wanted to help me out. Is that it?” This time he punched my foot, hard: it ached through the shoe. “Why me, Ryan? Why. Specifically. Me.”

“We were friends,” I said again, like a mantra that could save us. I was cringing back, eyes clenched shut behind the blindfold.

“That’s not it,” he said, but then I sensed him stiffen, twist his head away. He switched on the flashlight and dim light filtered through the blindfold. He seemed to be pointing it down the hallway, back the way we had come.

“What is it?”

“Shut up. Did you hear anything?”

I shook my head, vague distant relief mingling with fresher fear. “No.”

Silence. It seemed to expand in my head, like those disposable earplugs. Eating up all the empty space.

Finally he turned back toward me. “I think something’s following us.”