“No, wait!” Niko shouted down at me. “The key! Do you have the key?”

I looked up, blade held against the rope. “What?”

“To get back to your side.” His voice was strangely distant, swallowed up by the empty space. Maybe I was losing more blood than I realized. “Our side, I mean. The right side. The doorway’s close. It has to be. But you need to get the key.”

Front pocket, right side.

Below me, Elder Niko still swayed at the end of his rope, eyes closed. Motionless. I didn’t think I could have killed him, but I must have knocked him out.

Or he wants you to think you did, anyway.

I still held the knife against the rope. Loose white innards strained free from the cut I’d started, escaping the tension of the deadweight below.

But the cut was still shallow, tentative.

Uncommitted.

I nudged the knife closed, shoved it into my belt.

“Hurry,” Niko hissed above me.

“Thanks,” I muttered. “Helpful.”

I started down.

I climbed fast, muscles trembling. The silence unsettled, now that no one was talking or scrambling or trying to kill anyone. It felt like the surrounding darkness was a blanket, muffling, infinitely thick. Things felt dangerously unreal. A video game. A dream. I shook my head, fighting mental fog. Tried to feel the pain in my leg. Let it be an anchor to keep me from floating away.

I got to the end of my rope and realized I had a problem. When I’d looped it around the bed I hadn’t bothered to even out the two sides. And now, at the end of mine, I was still a few body lengths above Niko. I couldn’t reach him. His side had happened to be the longer one, and the only way down to him now would be climbing the last few feet on the other end of the rope. His end.

Which meant detaching myself from mine.

With one hand I scrabbled pitifully at the knot, but untying it was hopeless for half-a-dozen reasons, my weight on it not the least. There was only one way to get off my rope onto his.

Below me, Elder Niko let out a gormless groan, head lolling to one side. But his eyes stayed closed.

A strange clarity had descended on me, the disconnected panic that comes from piling bad decisions on bad decisions, realizing you’ve gone too far but no longer able to stop. Shifting my grip to Niko’s rope, I flipped open the knife again, and before indecision could paralyze me, I cut through my own rope, just above the knot at my waist.

It was done. His rope creaked as it took my weight. I tried not to hear it. Tucking the knife into my belt, I lowered myself the last few feet to Elder Niko’s body.

He was still splayed out, spread-eagled, face up, eyes closed. Blood and spittle drooled from the corner of his mouth.

His fingers twitched in gentle spasms, the last motions of a dying insect.

We were surrounded by darkness. The faint streetlights miles below, the pools of desk lights and floor lamps above, bookended but did not penetrate the dark we swam together in.

Gripping the rope with one numbing fist, I reached out with my other hand, fingers brushing the edge of his pocket. He groaned again, flopped his head sideways.

I pushed my fingers inside, feeling for the key.

There.

I pulled it free, slowly, gripping tight as the tines tugged the lining of his pocket, caught on its edge. I focused all my attention on not dropping it, not letting it tumble down into oblivion; on pulling my hand slowly, deliberately out of his pocket.

Which is why I didn’t notice his eyes had opened. Not until his hand closed around my wrist.

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“The fuck,” he muttered, lids heavy, speech slurred, “you doing down there?”

His grip on me was weak, but I felt the gathering awareness in him, like a coiling viper. His face was smeared with blood, and more had rushed to his head as he dangled, making his face look misshapen, swollen. One of his pupils had dilated all the way open, and a blood vessel in the eye had burst, a spidery red blotch reaching tendrils through the white. He looked monstrous.

“I came back for you,” he muttered, eyelids fluttering closed. “That’s how... I got lost. Wanted to save you from... that asshole.” He blinked, coughed. “That fucking old man. Whoever he was.”

I let him rant. Delusional.

But I saw him then with a sudden chill clarity. I understood he was only monstrous because of what I’d done to him. And I’d only done it because of what he’d done to me.

We were our own vortex, circling, wanting to converge but never meeting in the middle. Dragging each other down, deeper and deeper and deeper.

“I’m sorry,” I said, gently pulling free of his grip, sliding the key carefully into my pocket. He scrabbled at my waist with his other hand, pathetic, as if trying to get a grip on my belt to pull himself up. “Sorry for dragging you down here. You deserved better. Someone better than me to... to guide you. And you can hurt me, hunt me, kill me as many times as you want but it’ll never change that. Never take it back.” I took a deep breath. “But I can’t let you do it any more. You don’t deserve to die, but...” My eyes flicked up, then back to his. “Neither does he.”

He smiled, blood spilling from the corner of his mouth, and as it dribbled away something changed. Like the light had shifted, popped a shadow into a shape. Like noticing the gorilla in the crowd.

The confusion in his eyes had been a lie. They were perfectly clear.

“Too bad,” he said, “no one gets what they deserve.”

He had the knife in his hand. My belt. He’d slipped it off my belt while I was babbling.

I swung sideways as he lunged it at my face, and it nicked my ear. There was no grogginess in him, no disorientation. I’d just seen what I’d wanted to see, one last time. I’d never really seen him at all.

My muscles tensed to fling myself back up the rope, but without the knife I’d never make it. Never be free of him. Certainty flushed through me. This had to end. This had to be the last time.

He lunged again and I grabbed his wrist, wrenching it backwards, trying to pull the knife free. He snarled and reached for me with his other hand but I twisted away. We swayed and twirled at the end of the rope, the rope I was no longer tied to, clinging instead with one desperate, trembling hand. I felt fibers snapping as the cut I’d started above us frayed, grew larger. One way or another this was about to end.

He stabbed at my face again and I swung to the side, just enough for his hand to brush past me, so I bit down on it as hard as I could. He swore as I ground down harder, feeling flesh give, tasting blood. Sensing his grip loosen, I snatched the knife, his expression of shock burned into my vision even as I turned away, already climbing. Maybe I’d never done that before, in all the times he’d attacked me. Maybe I’d never fought back.

I climbed, knife clenched between my teeth. For a fleeting moment, and maybe for the first time in my life, I felt like a badass.

But I’d bought myself only seconds and not enough. I’d pushed well past the limit of my endurance. I barely had the strength to pull myself up. I’d put a few body lengths between us, but he could swallow that lead in seconds. I was a wounded rabbit limping from a wolf.

Below me something screamed and I realized it was him; a terrible scream, rage and pain and loneliness and betrayal etched onto air. He started up the rope after me.

“Get. Back. Here.” He growled. “Get the fuck. Back down here. I’m not finished. With you.”

Bloodstained rage twisted his face. He was gaining. He was going to end me.

And then a dictionary clobbered him in the face.

I looked up, shocked, at a triumphant Niko shaking a fist down at us. “Leave him the fuck alone, dickweed!”

He’d clambered up on the tilted side of the bookshelf, another heavy hardback already in his hand. He hefted it, gaged the distance, and flung.

It curved as the cylinder’s gravity tugged it around, hyperbolic, and went wide, whipping underneath us and then back up toward the floor. Any harder and he’d have launched it into a miniature orbit. But he had already grabbed another book.

Below me, his elder was shaking off the blow.

I climbed.

Niko kept throwing books, and some collided with my pursuer, enough to throw him off balance, to buy me more seconds. I needed every one. I was fading fast, and so was the rope. Muscles tore and fibers snapped. My vision shrunk to a wavering tunnel, only my hands and the rope visible in the deepening blackness.

I climbed.

I climbed with some reserve of strength I’d never guessed I had.

I reached the notch in the rope and climbed a few feet past it, spit the knife into my hand, and started sawing.

“Faster,” someone was muttering, maybe me, “faster.”

The Niko below flung himself up the rope. He’d almost reached me.

A crushing inevitability pressed into me, from tingling arms to kicking feet. Someone had already won. Someone would live. The clock would run out and we’d find out who.

Faster.

Fibers twisted, stretched, broke free.

A copy of Dhalgren arced smoothly by my head.

Guttural noises just beneath me. It was too late. He was here.

And then the rope split.

He was at my feet. He flung himself at them when he heard the tear of the rope giving way, but had nothing to push off, no momentum to save him. He scrambled frantic as the rope went weightless in his hands, a finger brushing my shoe, and for an instant it was as if the cylinder above was toying with him, uncertain whether to hold him with its gravity. Whether he had become enough a part of this place that its attraction should compel him, too.

Then he fell.

Within a second he’d plunged past the range of our lights, swallowed by blackness. Only then, after losing sight of him, did he scream, and there was no fear in it at all. Just rage.

But it was a tiny sound, lost in vanishing darkness, fading fast and not repeated.

He was gone.