“This doesn’t make any sense,” Zer-Dasht said, his webbed hands running along the stone cutting them off from their only exit out of the tunnel. “We would have heard something like this being moved or falling.”

“I don’t understand it either. What are we supposed to do?” Lus asked as he shivered the cool, humid air. The sense of oppressive darkness was returning now that they didn’t have a way out.

“Let’s turn out. I’m sure we’ll find something on our way.”

“Something we missed the first two times?”

“Shut up,” Dasht bit at Lus as he once again took the lead in walking back down the tunnel to where the other dead end waited.

As they went, Lus was extra careful in his surveying of the tunnel walls and ceiling in hopes of finding a secondary means out but with no luck. Two times he thought he saw something in his peripheral vision, but as usual in the mine, there was no hint of life other than the Runners. Whatever the secret of this mine was, it seemed discovering it wouldn’t be quite as easy as he originally anticipated.

“Is it me, or does it feel like we’re walking uphill now?” Zer-Dasht asked after several minutes of only the echo of their footsteps.

Lusac scrunched his eyebrows, paying extra close attention to his feet. “No. It does. But this should be descending from what I remember. The dead end was lower than where we started.”

“And I’m pretty sure we should have reached it by now,” Dasht confirmed.

They kept walking, neither saying anything more as they considered the implications. Lusac’s mind ran rampant with worries. Was the tunnel system literally shifting around them as they walked? Where were the others? Would they ever find an escape?

Some sense of relief filled Lus as they approached a faint light at the end of the shaft, and they soon stepped back into the sunbathed lake room. It was empty, however, which didn’t bode well for the rest of the team.

Zer-Dasht was on his comms in an instant. “Nippy, Wsr, come in. Quniwel, are you there?”

No response.

The Nemarian tried again with the same results. Lus took a turn as well, just in case Dasht’s unit was malfunctioning, but his pleas were also met with silence.

“We’ll wait here,” Dasht declared. “Once they realize the comms don’t work, they’ll come back.”

Lus disliked how unconfident he sounded in saying it, but he agreed that waiting was really their only option unless they wanted to risk getting trapped in the other tunnels as well.

“So how do you think the tunnels are moving? They do it so quietly,” Lusac mentioned as he settled onto the floor.

Zer-Dasht scoffed as he sat down next to Lus. “What in Suns’ names are you going on about? The tunnel didn’t move, Lus. We just accidentally turned around. That stone face we met the second time was the same one as the first time.”

“I’m pretty sure I would remember doing something like turning,” Lus said with less conviction. Dasht’s explanation made a lot more sense except for the blip in both their memories.

The Nemarian shrugged. “It probably happened when I thought I saw something. Remember how the lantern reflected strangely?”

Lus nodded thoughtfully. He couldn’t distinctly remember turning during that, but he supposed it might have been possible. “Yeah. I guess that’s it. Still weird though.”

Dasht playfully punched his shoulder. “That month-long vacation did you in. What happened to the fearless Human who faced down a baby wranntil without even a blaster two months ago?”

“You’re right,” Lusac laughed. “Quniwel was so jumpy when we came in, I guess part of it rubbed off.” He was being silly with all these conspiracies about moving tunnels. These were plain old mine shafts, nothing more.

“Blast that man. Who decided it was him who should come on this assignment?” Dasht complained.

“Captain probably didn’t want to be without his main pilot for such a long time. I mean, would you rather be on the Argo with Yonnex-Quniwel at the helm?” Lus smiled.

Dasht shook his head. “Let’s just hope this is the last time we have to go so far out of our way to get one of these artifacts. Personally, I’m ready to get back to our usual jobs instead of all this traveling around for useless puzzle pieces.”

“Only four more to go,” Lusac reminded him. He glanced around the broken equipment surrounding them. This might be his only chance. “I’m going to mess with some of this machinery while we wait.”

Maybe they would give him a hint as to what secret the mine was hiding, something he was starting to think they would need if they were ever going to complete this mission.

“Don’t break anything,” Dasht warned him.

“I think we’re a little past that.” Lus stood up and went to the nearest piece of mostly intact equipment. He carefully removed the covering of the inner circuitry and stared at a mess of half frayed wires. A lot of the Argo’s systems were Nemarian in design, but they were nothing like this.

Lusac plucked at the largest cord, which was blue in color and found that it had fallen away from one of its connections. Using the industrial grade all-in cutter from his pack on its lowest setting, he managed to fuse the end to where he thought it might go.

Apparently that was all that was missing since the machine lit up and began beeping at him. Dasht jumped up and glared at him.

“What are you doing, Lus?” the Nemarian asked to cover for his obvious startlement.

“I told you I was going to mess around. And look, I sort of fixed it,” Lus said, gesturing to the flashing lights.

“Well, turn it off. It’s loud.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s annoying,” Dasht countered.

“Fine, fine,” Lus said with raised hands. The easiest way would be to remove the blue wire, but he was worried that if he did that, he’d never be able to turn it on again, so instead he searched for a control panel. He located a set of dials and buttons, but the markings had long since faded away, leaving Lusac to guess as to what they did. He pressed the first of the buttons, and gears started to grind with a very unhealthy sound.

“Not that,” he murmured as he hit the button again to turn off that setting. He tried the other buttons, but none of them did anything of note. He moved onto the dials, but they also did nothing about the beeping.

“What’s taking you so long? Just undo what you did to turn it on,” Dasht said.

“I just wanted to see if I could shut it off from the control panel instead,” Lus explained. As he stepped away from the paneling, that same sensation of something lightly crawling on his skin returned, brushing along his upper arm. He shivered but made no mention of the strange occurrence to his companion.

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

“Are you expecting us to need whatever this thing is?” The Nemarian gestured broadly to the equipment which didn’t have any outward signs of what its purpose might be.

“It’s just fun to mess with.” Lus returned to the wiring and blinked several times. “Uh, that’s a problem.”

“What?” Zer-Dasht’s voice was extremely annoyed at this point.

“I don’t see the wire I used to turn it on.” Lus dug around in the cords to be sure, but there was no sign of the blue wire. “But that doesn’t make sense. Wires don’t just disappear.”

“No, they don’t,” Dasht agreed as he came to stand next to Lus. “Here, let me look.” He pushed Lusac out of the way.

“It’s a dark blue wire,” he informed the Nemarian. “I’m telling you, it’s not there. I checked.”

The Nemarian dug his orange webbed fingers into the mess of cords, but he too was unsuccessful in locating it. “You must have gotten the color wrong.”

“I know what color it was, Dasht,” Lus argued, squaring his shoulders with the Nemarian. Who put Zer-Dasht in charge anyway?

“Forgive me if I don’t trust those weak Human eyes, Loser.” The Nemarian balled his fists.

“Don’t call me that,” Lusac stared into Dasht’s black eyes, his own hands forming into fists.

“Enough,” a new voice shouted, startling both of them. They turned to discover an ornery Nippy walking towards them. “What’s going on here?”

“Lus turned this stupid machine on, and now he can’t turn it off,” Dasht explained, his posture still tense.

Nippy’s green eyes turned to Lusac, one eyebrow raised.

“The wire I used went missing. Dasht looked too. There’s no sign of the blue cord I need,” Lusac defended himself.

“You mean that blue wire?” Nippy asked. The Nemarian and Human both looked back to the circuitry to discover a thick, bright blue wire crossing on top of all the others, just where Lus had last seen it when he connected it. Maybe he was going insane.

“I-I,” Lus started but didn’t bother finishing. He grabbed the cord and pulled hard, ripping the entire wire out and shutting the machine off for good.

“Now that that’s settled, who wants to explain why you two are up here already? It’s been hardly ten minutes since we set off. I highly doubt you were able to explore that entire tunnel in that time.” Nippy’s voice reminded Lus of his principal back during his school days when he and his friends were caught slacking off.

“Ten minutes? Nippy what are you talking about? It’s been well over an hour since we last saw you,” Dasht replied.

Now it was Nippy who seemed to be losing his mind.

“There’s no way. I only made it a little way down that tunnel before I ran into a cliff, and I didn’t want to go down and lose all comm connection, so I came back to call everyone back,” the Kremel explained. “It’s been twenty minutes tops.”

Lus shook his head and showed the second-in-command his watch. It marked the time as being nearly an hour and a half past when the team split up.

Nippy chewed his bottom lip, one of the many distinctly Human gestures he picked up from being raised by adopted Human parents. “We should call Wsr and Quniwel back. Something strange is going on here, and I want the team together until we figure it out.”

“We tried contacting both you and them when we got back, but there was no answer. We only found a dead end in our shaft,” Dasht explained.

“But we somehow turned out without realizing on our way back,” Lus mentioned. “You know, I remember my mom talking about carbon monoxide, a really dangerous gas that can be released in mines. It’s odorless and invisible, and one of the symptoms is confusion. We might all be experiencing the effects of that.”

Even Dasht looked concerned. “Maybe we should get out of here for a little bit and get some real air to clear our heads before we come back to search for them.”

“No,” Nippy said sharply. “We’re not leaving without them, especially if we are dealing with carbon monoxide. They could die while we’re up there clearing our lungs.”

“We could all die if we don’t,” Dasht pushed back.

Instead of responding, Nippy spun to the side while reaching for his blaster. Upon realizing what he’d done, he returned to facing Lus and Zer-Dasht with a sigh. “Blast this gas. I keep thinking I’m seeing something in the corner of my vision.”

“If we are going to look for them, we should go soon. The more time we spend in here, the worse our symptoms will be,” Lusac pointed out.

Nippy and Dasht agreed, and the three set off down the left-hand tunnel where their other two companions had gone.

This tunnel felt remarkably similar to the one Lus and Zer-Dasht explored, with the same ribboned reds running through the stone on the walls and a similar steepness to their descent. Every few minutes Nippy tried to reach Wsr or Yonnex-Quniwel on the comm, but there was never any response. After a while, they came to the same smooth stone face exactly like what Dasht and Lus faced, but this one had been broken through, likely by Wsr with the hand drill, and on the other side stretched more of the same tunnel.

“Huh. Why would they block off the rest of the mine?” Dasht wondered aloud.

“Perhaps this is the source of the gas. The original miners might have stuck a block in to keep it from spreading to the rest of the facility,” Nippy said.

“And when Wsr cracked, she unknowingly released the poison,” Lus theorized.

“Most likely. But if they’re both in there, that doesn’t bode well for their chances of still being alive,” Nippy admitted.

“We have a few minutes of back up air. We should use some of that while we look around,” Lus suggested.

All three dug through their ladened backpacks to retrieve the masks that held only twenty minutes of air at its highest setting. Nippy had them set it to only a third of the volume to prolong its use during their exploration. The Kremel led the way into the new section of the mine, his shadow casting long, eerie shadows as he crossed the threshold. Lus went next, followed by Dasht.

They walked only a few yards before discovering that this tunnel was full of many branching paths and offshoots, creating a maze.

“Suns, they’d already have a tough time getting out of here even without carbon monoxide poisoning,” Dasht said.

“We should split up,” Nippy said, earning surprised looks from the other two. “We need to cover as much ground as possible. But I want to be sure we all make it out still. Set a timer on your watch to last for twenty minutes. After that, meet back here.”

Lus and Dasht both begrudgingly agreed as they did as their commander suggested. Nippy then directed Lus to search the right hand paths, Dasht the left hand, and took the center most path for himself.

Without any companions, Lusac was finally able to turn his lantern light up to a reasonable setting so he had the maximum amount of sight as he explored. The tunnels lost even more of their neatness in the side passages, and more than once he nearly tripped over the unlevel ground.

The first two branches he explored led to dead ends, making them easy to eliminate after only five minutes of searching. The next one, however, widened and had a multitude of its own offshoots that he might have to wander through, though he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to remember his path if he did.

The stone was even more red than before, the color a dark and deep shade of crimson unlike any kind of rock Lusac had seen naturally occur in nature before. He supposed that the coloring could be from whatever mineral the Nemarians were extracting before they had to shut down.

Now that he was alone, it was getting hard to keep his head straight. At least once every two minutes he saw a flash of something in his peripheral vision, and occasionally those glimpses of nothing were accompanied by the feeling of a breeze that he knew couldn’t be blowing.

Even knowing the cause, it was hard to not let the nerve get to him, especially without Nippy or Zer-Dasht there to remind him that it was nothing.

About fifteen minutes after he’d separated from Nippy and Dasht, Lus caught sight of something in the corner of his vision, but this one seemed different. More real. He turned to look and discovered two beady black eyes staring at him, most of the orange scales hidden behind a wall.

“Yonnex-Quniwel?” he asked, keeping his free hand up in a soft gesture. The guy was probably a wreck when dealing with his previous anxieties and now the carbon monoxide poisoning.

The quivering Nemarian stepped out of the shadows, allowing Lus to see all of him as he stood shaking in the corridor.

“It’s going to be alright. Where’s Wsr?”

“Dead.”

“D-dead? How?” Wsr was supposed to be invincible. Lusac couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea.

“I killed her.” The Nemarian continued to shiver, refusing to meet Lus’s eyes.

“You… killed her? Why, Quniwel?” Lus wasn’t quite sure the Nemarian was in his right mind.

First off, there was no way Yonnex-Quniwel killed Wsr. The Kremel would have snapped his neck in a heartbeat if he even tried. And Quniwel hadn’t even been given a blaster like the rest of them due to his distinct lack of skill with such a thing.

“They told me to.”

“They?” Now Lus was getting nervous. Quniwel had actually gone insane. Where was Wsr? Maybe she’d passed out from the gas, in which case they needed to find her fast.

“I’m sorry, Lus.”

“Let’s get out of here and talk about it. Wsr is pretty tough. She might not be dead after all,” Lus attempted to comfort the nutjob standing a few feet off. The only danger the Kremel was in was from poisoning, and he needed to get Quniwel out of here so he could come back and do a proper search without worrying about the obviously psychotic pilot.

“Not about that.”

Lus froze, his eyes glued to the Nemarian who was staring directly at him now.

“They say I have to kill you too.”