The room below was a bathroom, lined in tile, orange in the light of my glowstick but probably a pale easter-yellow. Chromium sink fixtures and a frosted-glass shower reflected fiery light back to me. In contrast to the other flooded chambers there was no mold, no algae, no water damage. It might have been flooded seconds before.

I didn’t pause to wonder about this, but kicked off through the open door, following the guide rope, which led onwards just like Niko had said.

I focused on my strokes, old swimming lessons coming back. This was a different sort of lane, of course: the floor brown carpet, plaster-of-paris above my head instead of the shimmering boundary of the air. And the wounded leg slowed me down: it hurt, every time I kicked. But I wasn’t worried, not yet. I had good lungs. I could swim for a while.

The rope turned a corner into a large unfurnished room with a half-dozen washers and dryers piled in a corner. I swam past them, mechanical, calm, following the rope through an open doorway opposite.

Through the door was what looked like a small porch or mud room. Boots and shoes tumbled weightless in the water. The rope stopped here, tied to a capped metal pipe. The opposite wall was a sliding glass patio door.

The airlock.

Through the glass it was dark. All I could see was my own red reflection holding the glowstick. Seeing myself floating there, a hit of adrenaline coursed through me. How much air was left in my lungs? More than half what I’d started with? Doubt flooded into me. This is crazy. I can’t do this. I forced the thought from my mind, replaced it with: Just hurry. Hurry and get it over with.

I slid the glass door open and forced myself into the black water beyond. The ground dropped off on the door’s other side, and there was no ceiling, either. Everything was dark.

As I swam past the threshold something changed.

The water cooled; the pressure and ambient sound in my ears shifted. I could see the vague outlines of another sliding door just ahead of me, but it seemed too as if I floated in a cavernous space, a space beyond measuring, the other door impossibly distant. Disoriented, I turned around to shut the one I’d come through—remembering they couldn’t both be open at once—and as I did another shock of change swept through me, crystallizing into something immense, yawning, terrorful. I remembered the spring Elder Niko had spoken of

this stream

deep at the roots of this place: a spring that split and split and split again, endless. I felt possibilities branching in the water around me, but even more in the waters inside me, in the part of me inside the waters. Branching, expanding, growing like mold in a petri dish but spilling out of the dish now, spreading through the lab into the walls, the world

A looking-glass held

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and it was as if I was the mold, the spring, an effervescent source spilling out into infinite variation, branches branching and branched again into an unfillable space, filling it. Boundless, multiplied. Multiplicious.

Slowed by dream-syrup, fighting awed stupor from these whispers of immensity, I turned my back on that powerful water at the center, pulled the glass door shut, staring numbly as it slid implacable down its track.

In the last second before the door clicked shut and my glowstick guttered out, I saw something reflected in the glass. There were people floating behind me.

They drifted in that immense and empty space, lit gangrenous orange by the light of my glowstick. Three of them. All with my body, my clothes. My face. Their wide-open eyes (my eyes) were fixed on me as they floated gently forward, converging.

Their grasping hands reached out for me, and then the door clicked shut, and everything went black.

I screamed, bubbles of precious oxygen exploding from my mouth. I yanked frantically on the door, but it wouldn’t budge. I clawed at it, slammed my fist against the glass. The darkness was absolute, thickened by the potent water into a solid, crushing thing. The door wouldn’t open and they were right behind me they were coming they were going to get me and

I twisted

wildly, pressed hands to the glass behind me, trying to guess their position, but it was hopeless. I couldn’t see. I’d squandered my air. Hands would close around my neck, my face, and I’d scream again one last time and drown, thrashing in pain and terror and darkness. Alone.

No.

Anger pierced through fear. Maybe I had issues and maybe I’d made mistakes, and maybe I even deserved this, to be strangled by my own soulless doppelgangers in a shitty basement apartment with delusions of grandeur. But I didn’t want to die, and being alone had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t going to let this happen to me just because dad would never be back to tuck me in, just because I’d never hear Niko’s laugh again and he wouldn’t be there next time to save my ass. None of that mattered. I was still here. I was still alive.

For now.

Think.

They’d been coming from three angles, two above and one below.

In the middle there’d been a gap.

Gripping my panic by the neck before it ran wild, snarling like a cornered animal, I put my feet against the glass door behind me and pushed off hard, as hard as I could. The pain in my wounded calf went white-hot but I barely noticed it. I shot straight forward, intent, threading the gap like a needle, right through the center of the things closing in.

I hoped.

Something brushed my leg. I kicked forward, pulled water with cupped hands and all the strength I had. Two fingertips bounced off my forehead, trailed through my hair, but I was moving too fast for them, I was through, I was past them. I’d fucking done it.

I surged forward, swimming hard, a savage rictus of victory splitting my face, and then with a crunch and flash of pain I slammed face-first into something hard and smooth. Glass. The door on the opposite side.

Seeing stars, tasting blood, I scrabbled for the handle, but I couldn’t find it. My hands slid off smooth glass in every direction. I smeared them across it frantically, up, down, side to side, kicking out with my feet, conscious every second of those things behind me, turning, drifting back towards me, closing in; of the air in my lungs, running low. Running out.

There: the handle. I pulled it sideways, and as the door slid open in its groove my glowstick came back on, the most glorious shade of orange you could possibly imagine.

I kicked forward into the other anteroom and pulled the door shut behind me, not looking back. There was no sign of the things, the Lookie-Loos, the echoes, whatever they were. I’d escaped them. My face throbbed with a sharp, spreading pain. But I had a bigger problem. In fact with lightheaded desperation I realized I was in deep, deep shit.

My air was almost gone.