“You can’t trust your eyes in this place,” the lizard said. “Looks like the Husk here distorts space. If we’re fast enough, we can slip out without having to face it.”
A maze that deceives the senses. Good thing I didn’t have any conventional senses to foil.
By reading the Ether in the air, I could slowly analyze the right and wrong paths as we made our way through. I pushed him from behind with my wind, doing my damndest to make sure he didn’t take a wrong turn — though there were several incidents where we both made mistakes.
“I really hoped that Rosentear would spit me out somewhere nicer,” he said after three dead ends in a row. “There has to be something else around here.”
Half a day had passed since we first met, according to Samson’s beacon. Nothing but aimless wandering and pre-emptive monster shredding since.
“What I wouldn’t do for an ice-cold beer,” he grumbled, dragging his gloved hand against the wall. The withered vine-like growths stretched far too long when he pulled on them, like they were made out of elastic rather than plant matter. “If only this godsdamned Husk thought to keep the air conditioner working—”
He paused without warning. Then he reached back and held me up, as though inspecting a newborn child.
HELLO, I tried, pulling on one of the strings connected to my improvised voice modulator. HOW ARE YOU DOING? ARE YOU FEELING WELL?
“You son of a bitch,” he said, pulling down his mask. “I should’ve seen it sooner. Motherfucker.”
Without warning, the lizardman turned heel and began to backtrack. Two shots from his blaster unlocked the twisted remains of a laboratory; he wasted no time barricading, stacking several overgrown filing cabinets to replace the door he blew open. When we were firmly secured, he marched over to a row of terminals and swiped a layer of dust away from a keyboard.
“Backup power must be coming from somewhere,” he said, tapping keys a few times. The screen didn't respond. “These machines are old, but I bet they still use flash drives. Good standard — and that means you have a job to do.”
Lizardman tore off a terminal’s side panel, then crammed me into between all the electrical components.
“C’mon,” he said, giving me two thumbs up. “Do your thing. Shouldn’t be too hard if you rewired a Nexus unit, right?”
…Seriously?
Did he really think I was a master of technology because I mangled a single piece of tech into working for me? Technology wasn’t that simple, man.
Cautiously, I tried pushing Ether into the different parts of the machine. Computers are not simple contraptions; I recalled fragments of memories dealing with the various intricacies of hardware and hoped that nothing would go wrong.
A minute later, I heard a boot-up chime.
“Beautiful,” said the lizard. He pulled out a thumb-sized metal rod from his sleeve and jammed it into the monitor. “Stay right there and keep the machine going. I’ll scan through and see if there’s anything useful — must be a reason the Rosentear and Husk chose this place.”
Something about the term ‘Rosentear’ didn’t sit right with me. It sounded like a vaguely scientific term mangled into something easy for the general populace to accept, like artificial intelligence or homeopathic medicine.
Eugh. Let’s try to steer the conversation away from that:
THE HOOK REQUEST IS MISSING REQUIRED INFORMATION. PLEASE REVIEW YOUR ENTERED VALUES AND SUBMIT AGAIN.
The man continued typing, fingers flying across the keyboard. “You could’ve looked all this information up. You’re hijacking my Nexus terminal right now so this is, more or less, entirely your fault.”
How rude. I repeated myself, pulling harder to make the voice sound angrier.
“Fine, what do you want to know about? What a Husk is? A Rosentear? Both?”
Distorted fanfare. Tell me everything, scales.
“Husks are the monsters you’ll see roaming around these parts. Rosentears happen to be little portals that loop this way and that — they’re just part of the natural landscape, nothing to really worry about.” He retrieved the staff lists on the terminal’s screen and frowned to himself. “Seems like this used to be a research facility. Old, too. The one here must date back to the start of the Frontier, not that it really means much.”
Could’ve told you that myself, if I had a voice.
The lizard sighed to himself as he browsed through the terminal’s files. “Nothing useful to us here. No hints to the Husk’s weakness, and we’re still trapped down here.”
MEDITATION AND DEEP BREATHING MAY ASSIST IN STRENUOUS TIMES, I offered.
“I’ll do those when I’m dead, thank you very much.” He began pulling me free, Ether pseudo-cables trailing behind. “I hate the Husks that look human the most. You’ll see what I mean if we don’t find a way out of here.”
Hey buddy, aren’t you a lizard? An actual lizard on legs. Does that really fall within the broad umbrella of humanity these days? C’mon, Lizardman, don’t go disparaging others like that.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Maybe it was for the best that I couldn’t talk normally. I needed to watch my mouth and mind now that I had to worry about things like social etiquette.
Just before I completely disconnected myself from a system, a curious trill rang from the computer’s speakers. Lizardman stopped pulling on me and looked back at the terminal, where there was a connection warning blaring in red.
“Are you doing that?” he asked.
NEGATIVE.
A nod. “That’s a bad sign.”
“—Testing, testing, testing, hello? Is anybody there? Is this really a signal?”
Static popped from the speaker, followed by a faint voice. Lizardman lowered me to the terminal and said, “Somebody is. Identify yourself.”
“Lyra!” the voice stammered. “Lyra Krause. I’m a senior scientist trapped down here. Please help me, the seals on this room can’t be—”
Lizardman cut her off, tabbing to the staff list again. “The employment records say that you’re a research assistant. An intern.”
Lyra’s voice turned huffy, panicked. “T-That shouldn’t matter right now!”
“Your first words were a lie. How can I know anything else will come out of your mouth?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry — forgive me, I’ve been trapped down here for a week and I'm running low on resources. I won’t last a few more days. I don’t want to die like this. Please help me, I’m begging you...”
In two sentences, this guy turned somebody into a sobbing mess. I was suddenly very glad that I was mute and quiet and only along for the ride.
“Take a deep breath. Relax. Conserve your air, if you’re trying to save that.” Lizardman waited until the voice sounded steady again, then asked, “Calm?”
“Yeah, yeah… calm enough.”
“Tell me what’s going on over there in as much detail as you can. This place is a mess to navigate, and if you want us to find you, you need to be as precise as possible. Lyra.”
“Us?” she echoed, her voice growing hopeful. “T-There’s a rescue team? How many of you are there?”
The lizard looked at me, then back at the monitor. “Enough.”
Lyra gave us directions. She told us the short-hand of her story, how she woke up from a stasis-pod a week ago and found herself trapped in the residential sector of this laboratory.
“Not that there’s much of a laboratory left down here,” she said before she cut the call. “It’s all twisted and bent now. But I’ve found that as long as you keep the place in your mind, it’ll stay the same.”
It was a blatant lie and maybe Lizardman figured that out too, but the directions were real. We realized she was the real deal after the first two turns led us into an entirely different section of the labyrinth, where the halls had turned to overgrown, veiny marble and the red sirens beat in tune with the pulse of the black lianas.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Lizardman said. “At this rate, I’ll be gathering an entire party down here.”
The directions lead to a teal decontamination room with a mirror-glass window installed on the left hand side. My ride investigated the showerheads, testing the hoses and fiddling with the knobs. When they yielded no water, he tried the door on the other side of the room.
The door led directly to a bedroom, and facing us was a woman aiming a pistol at Lizardman’s chest.
“Easy now,” Lizardman said, throwing up his hands. “We’re here. And I doubt that thing could get through my armor.”
Lyra lowered the pistol, but her expression grew perplexed. “I thought you said you had a team?”
He looked over his shoulder and I figured out his intent. Wishing I could wave in greeting instead, I pulled a string.
GOOD MORNING.
“It’s a little cramped,” Lyra said, closing the airlock door behind us, “but make yourselves at home.”
A little cramped it was.
The room Lyra had been staying in was caught somewhere between a depressed person’s bedroom and a padded room for the insane. There were four grey cushion slabs that I presumed were beds, a liquid-filled coffin shaped pod on the left, a terminal on a desk on the right, and stacks of meticulously organized supplies built into little towers on the tiled floor.
Lizardman took a seat on one of the free bed slabs and tested it. Springy enough to contain his weight; he nodded his approval and laid me and his blaster to his left.
This time, he didn’t take off his gas mask.
“Nice place you got going,” Lizardman said. “Bet you could survive here for a while if you really tried.”
“If you could call this surviving.” Lyra took a seat across from us, sipping a can of apple juice through a straw. “I’m more worried about the… monsters around here. One of them’s blocking the main exit — the only thing I can do is fend off the hunting parties and, well, twiddle my thumbs until I die.” She gazed at the pistol at her side, a bog-standard black gun with a flashlight, then at us. “Actually, wait. How did you get in?”
“Technical malfunction,” Lizardman said. “I followed my combat team after they tested experimental wormhole tech and never came back out. Been stuck here fighting a few days, as well.”
Lyra stared at us. Then she nodded, sympathy swelling in her pale brown eyes.
“You’re amazing. I barely survived the last ones that came after me. Took me everything and then some to just run away back here, which seems to be safe.” Her gaze flickered towards the airlock. “For now.”
Lyra was a completely normal person, as far as I could tell. Compared to Lizardman, she belonged to an entirely different species, one that actually had hair and recognizable human features. She wore her long brown hair in a ponytail, and a pair of square glasses sat on her nose, the right lens bearing the wounds of several cracks.
She was too normal for a place like this.
She stared at us. We stared at her staring at us. Eventually, she set the can on the floor and said, “Mind if I ask a few questions?”
Lizardman glanced at the can she was drinking from, then fixated on her glasses. “If I can ask a few in turn.”
“Sounds like a done deal! Alright, so… What is that?”
The first thing she did was point at me.
“It’s an experimental beacon with an AI assistant,” Lizardman lied. “Bit in a rough shape, but it does the job. It’s hooked up to my system and feeds me information.”
Another lie. I felt like I should play my part, so I pulled another string.
BE ASSURED THAT OUR PRODUCTS ARE ONLY OF THE HIGHEST QUALITY.
Lyra’s eyes sparkled. “Oh. Oh wow. That kind of stuff exists now?” She raised her electric watch and smiled giddily. “It’s only been a few years, too. Can’t wait to get out of here and get my own assistant.”
My Ether-based senses allowed me to view every angle of a room at once. With it, I noticed something strange.
“What were you doing here?” Lizardman asked.
“Doing research on nanotech,” Lyra answered. “Well, that was what I was supposed to be doing. In reality, the company had me analyzing the weird reactor they had built. Looking for discrepancies in the flux.” Her shoulders slumped. “I guess it was nanotech-adjacent, but really, really boring.”
“You’re the sole survivor. How did you escape here?”
Lyra rubbed her nape, suddenly conflicted. “Pure luck, I guess. I remember the backup generators kicking in. Memory’s a bit foggy there.” She reached over and patted her pistol’s grip. “I was lucky enough to find a security closet and I took what I could. Lots of food around, you see?”
“I do see,” Lizardman said. He looked around for a few moments. “Say, what’s the time and date again?” He gestured to his wrist, where a circular piece of blued iron sat. “I need to recalibrate my systems.”
“The fourth of Second Winter, half past midnight.”
It was subtle, but Lizardman leaned forward ever so slightly. “And the year?”
Lyra tapped her watch. “1119, Lunar Era.”
Lyra’s clock was set nearly 300 years behind Samson’s beacon, which told me the year was 1429.
That meant one of us was a straggler out of time, or a very good liar.