Hunger woke me, finally rising to the top of my list of needs.

Getting back on top of the cylinder had been a problem of broken physics. We couldn’t just climb back up, because there was nothing heavy enough to grip. Maybe a master climber could have started from the bottom of a giant tube of carpet and made his way to the top, but even for Niko climbing had only ever been a fleeting hobby.

I’d managed to pull myself up to the top of the rope on the last of my shredded muscles and shove my arms into the gap between the bed and the floor, dangling by my armpits. Niko, farther up, worked out a plan. I wasn’t too coherent, but I gather he’d carefully scoped out a route from one piece of furniture to the next, and then, in what would have been the most viral parkour video ever if YouTube had been invented yet, leapt from one to the other, pushing off each one as his weight lifted it off the ground, till gasping, he scrabbled up to the top of the tube.

From there it was simply a matter of detaching the chandelier net from its anchor point at the base of the hallway floating above us.

I never would have thought of this. But Niko figured all those glass baubles together ought to weigh more than we did. That the chandelier-web, part of the Confusion, should follow its own gravitational rules, not the ones that dragged us downwards. Like a cloth thrown over a crystal ball, the detached net would wrap around the curvature of the bedroom tube, with both of us inside but not heavy enough to pull it free. We’d be able to crawl back around to the top, ants between the cloth and the glass.

It worked. There must have been some complicated gymnastics up there, and I’m fuzzy on how he got the net loose—maybe he had his own serrated knife—but it worked. Back on top, the net of glass now a glittering ceiling over the bedroom furniture like the world’s most fabulous couch fort, I thought nothing in the world had ever felt so good as lying on my back on a floor, every muscle gloriously unclenched.

Wedged in between two dressers, so as not to roll off the edge, we slept. His idea.

When we woke we ate power bars from Niko’s pack: my own had gotten lost somewhere in the fight, probably sliding off the curve and down into the darkness below. I had no idea where to go from here—although it seemed like there were only two options, one way down the tube or the other—but Niko had found a better option while he’d been scrambling around up top. Directly under the invisible anchor point of the densest part of the web, the chandelier itself, was a trapdoor. It opened downward with a creak when you pushed on it, releasing fold-up stairs like the ones that sometimes climb into attics. The stairs descended some fifteen feet to a cement floor bisecting the cylinder. Its upper half was a domed tunnel, vanishing into the distance in either direction. Bare bulbs hung from the roof every fifty feet or so, leaking dim puddles of yellow-orange glow. Water ran down the center in a foot-deep trench, fast enough to gurgle.

Niko thought we should head upstream, follow the water to its source. Too worn down to argue, I agreed.

Keeping to the level ground on either side of the trench, we started trudging.

We moved slowly. Niko had cleaned up the cut in my lower leg as best he could, surprisingly tender, bandaging it with some socks from a dresser drawer and a tight-wrapped bungee cord from his pack. But it hurt, a lot. I hobbled more than walked, had to stop for frequent breaks, or lean on him for support. He helped me without comment, when I needed it.

I couldn’t help notice, especially up close to him like that: he seemed to have all his fingers.

Unsaid things festered between us.

The tunnel had no perceptible slope, but the water in the trench ran fast, rushing eagerly ahead. The path curved gently left, then gently right. We walked for what felt like a long time.

Gradually, the perfect curve of the ceiling began to straighten. The ceiling got flatter, the top of the wall’s curve more sharp, until it squared off entirely. At the same time the tunnel gradually shrunk back to house-sized dimensions. Presently we were walking down a rectangular hall of concrete, like some forgotten subbasement in a shuttered factory. It felt like we were back “inside” again. The sensation of being inside a pipe suspended over empty space had slowly receded, and now we felt once again embedded in earth.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

There were no side doors, no other trapdoors up. There were no decisions to make. We just walked. Other than an occasional grunt or word of coordination, we didn’t talk. I sometimes saw him looking at me, out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t look back. A small part of me wanted to ask a million questions. Another part didn’t want the answers. There was a tautness between us, a strain, like a handshake stripped down to bone and gristle, rubbing, raw. I realized maybe it had been there a long time, underneath everything we’d each wrapped around it.

Mostly we were just too tired for talking.

Up ahead, the tunnel opened into a larger room. After a few more minutes of trudging we reached it.

It was a vaulted brick antechamber, maybe thirty feet across and hexagonal, with tunnels coming in from all six sides. Each seemed identical to the one we’d entered from. Water flooded the sunken floor of the room and ran out the trenches in the center of each tunnel.

In the middle of the room, under the water, was a rounded concrete pillar with a large metal hatchway topped with a wheel, like something you’d see on a submarine.

I knew before checking that the hatch would have a keyhole.

Once we confirmed it did, we were strangely hesitant, as if we’d lost our momentum. We perched on the lip of a tunnel, dangling our feet in the water, using the excuse that we needed a rest.

There was so much I should be asking him, so much I should be saying, but I couldn’t find a way to start.

Well. I had pretended nothing was wrong for such a long time. Maybe another few minutes wouldn’t hurt.

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

The rippling sounds of the water were peaceful, and I didn’t want to break the silence. But someone had to.

“So.” The sound bounced off the vaulted brick above us. I coughed. “We’ve come all this way. We going through, or what?”

The words seemed to shake him out of a daze, and he perked up, flashing a huge grin. “Hell yeah! Let’s do it. Let’s go home.”

We waded over to the hatchway. The wheel and lock were just under the surface of the water. I pulled the key from my pocket and slipped it into the lock, and it went in smoothly. I spun it through a full turn till it made a tiny chunk, then turned the wheel. After spinning it around, something gave, and we found we could swing the circular hatch open along one hinged side.

We held our glowsticks underwater near the opening. The hatch opened into an ordinary-looking but flooded room beneath us with a yellow-tiled floor. Chrome and porcelain rippled up at us. We realized after a moment it was a flooded bathroom.

“The other guys are probably doing the same thing on their side,” Niko said hopefully. “Maybe we’ll swim through at exactly the same time, go past each other.”

“You really think we’re still in sync? After everything that’s happened? Our doubles just defeated their own evil Niko with exactly the same strategy and ended up here at precisely the same time as us?”

He shrugged lightly. “Might as well believe that. Because if we don’t, and, uh, there’s no way back... that would kind of suck.”

“We don’t even know if this goes anywhere,” I said. “For all we know, there’s a mile of flooded tunnel down there before it mirrors back to our world, if it ever does. You know what would suck more? Drowning.”

“No, look,” he said with a sudden grin, thrusting his light deeper into the circular opening. “There’s a guide rope.”

I squinted, trying to make the wavering underwater shapes resolve. Tied to something just under the hatchway, a light fixture, maybe, was a climbing rope, the same kind we’d tied our Grapple Buddies to. It stretched down in a taut line out of sight, towards the hidden wall of the room beneath us.

Niko reach down to tug on it; it seemed firm. “A hundred feet, at most,” he said. “Probably way less. Just follow the rope.” He pulled off his shirt and started emptying his pockets.

“What are you doing?” I asked, strangely unsettled.

“No time like the present,” he said. “Might as well get it over with. Come on in, the water’s fine.”

Something was wrong again. The dark circle of the submerged porthole was ominously black. Unknown. This was happening way too fast. “I don’t know. Shit. What if something happens down there? What if one of us gets stuck, or needs help? We could fucking drown.” My mind was racing. It felt like riding a bike that kept slipping gears, nothing quite fitting together, accelerating down a hill with less and less control, no way to stop it.

“Let’s just do it,” Niko said brightly. “I mean, the sooner we go through, the sooner we’ll be home.”

“How did you even know this was here?” My throat tightened. His eyes widened. “No. I can’t do this again. Why won’t any of you be honest with me? Stop it. I know. I know. You’re not... you’re not really...”

Somewhere far below us, something groaned, low, immense.