*** SUBCUTANEAN ***

by Aaron A. Reed


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Each rendering of Subcutanean is different. This copy was generated from seed #50344 and is the only copy generated from that seed.
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PART ONE

DOWNSTAIRS





Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

Frank Herbert





One cannot write about something one is still inside.

Italo Calvino












I don't know how to tell you this. I never wanted to gut you, reach inside and pull things out, not again. Old wounds and sleeping dogs, you know. Tales better left untold. And you've heard this one, haven't you? Even if your version never quite matched mine.

But that's what writing this is for. If it's a story, maybe we can understand, come to terms.

Pretend it's not ours.

I don't think I ever told this to you. When I was little, my dad used to come tuck me in at night, and sometimes I'd blink and he'd disappear. He'd be sitting on my bed, singing or smoothing my sheets or telling a story, warm and alive, and between one blink and the next he'd be gone. My heart would thump and I'd clutch the blanket, terrified, eyes thrashing back and forth across the dark spaces of my room like a trapped bird looking for a way out, looking for him, but he'd be gone, and I'd be alone.

Maybe premonition. More likely was that I'd fall asleep, waiting for him to come in, and dream he had. Some noise would jerk me up to a room where he'd long since looked in on me and pulled the door gently shut. But how I rationalize it makes no difference. It doesn't change how I lived that loss, each night it happened. How I can feel it even today. The person who loved me most, erased from existence in a blink. I'll never forget how that felt. Even if it never really happened.

But this story. Our story. Maybe it's a language we can speak. Find in the telling the truths that matter. Embellish, revise. Excise. Revision.

Although our story really did happen. You know that, don't you?

Fine. So. You ready?

This is what happened when we found the stairs underneath my bed, and decided to go see where they led.





Chapter 1




Right from the start things were wrong, but I couldn't see it. Maybe I didn't want to. Or maybe I'm being too hard on myself. There wasn't exactly a roadmap for what happened, a script to follow. But it's undeniable that even on that very first night, the night of the Russian dance club, everything was already wrong.

I was on the back porch, looking over the dying backyard grass at the sunset reddening the top of college hill. We'd moved in a few weeks back, Niko and I and our friends, mostly his, students and lapsed students and a few brave graduates, still settling into the rambling old off-campus house we'd found in the newspaper. (Cast your mind back to a time when kids like us had figured out the internet but people old enough to own property hadn't, so instead of browsing classifieds our bandwidth went entirely to downloading all the music in the world.) My Bio homework a brown bag from the liquor store, and he went straight up to his room, not even looking at me. I didn't feel like talking to him either.

We didn't know what was going on; we didn't know how to stop it. We didn't know anything.

We might have stayed in our funk for another couple days, except something happened the next morning.

The local history lady had left me a voicemail at around 7:15, a solid fantasy movie and credits before I normally woke up. She'd been useless when I'd stopped by before, and her tone of voice in the message---"something a bit exciting's come to light about your house"---made me assume she'd dredged up some trivia as a pretense to get me to come back and keep her company. Maybe get me to join the local history society myself. A warm-blooded young person like myself could even aspire to become treasurer.

So it was a couple hours before I got around to calling her back and asking when would be a good time to come over.

"Oh, come right away," she said, voice syrupy. "This really can't wait. Just wait till you see what I've found."

Not at all encouraged, I agreed to head over, and biked the mile or so to her fastidiously tidy house. The visit got off to an ugly start when she asked why I hadn't brought my colored friend this time. "Actually, he's Greek," I said through clenched teeth, and then wished I had the guts to say something else. She served me tea again, weak to the point of tastelessness, and spent so much time making small talk I'd convinced myself she hadn't found anything and this whole exercise was a waste of time. Worse, she kept glancing at my pride bracelet and pursing her lips, and then pretending not to have done either. I wanted to get out of there but was too mentally exhausted to remember how social interactions were supposed to work, what niceties would bring a conversation to an end.

The third or fourd time I pressed her about what she'd found, she got up with a smug smile and bustled out, returning a minute later with a file folder holding a few photocopies.

"I did some digging on your address," she said, "and found something rather interesting." She pressed up against me as she handed over the file, a bony shoulder and cloying perfume crowding into my personal space. Trying not to sneeze, I opened the file and pulled out the first page.

Clutching the page, I scanned the smudged text. It was a blurry copy of an old newspaper ad, maybe from around the turn of the century. It advertised, in a hand-drawn, swirling font, some attraction called "THE ENDLESS GARDENS."

I noticed the address and almost choked on my tea.

Our house had once stood on the site of a large private garden, it seemed, collected by a woman the ad assumed needed no introduction: THE RENOWNED HORTICULTURALIST MADAME LUCIA DE LA FONTAINE. The gardens were apparently extensive---ACRES AND ACRES, the copy read, which to be fair was a more defensible claim about their extent than calling them endless.

The next clipping, a review entitled "A Stroll In Fontaine's Fantastical Forest," described the wide range of plants brought to the gardens from all around the world which "seem to have grown prodigiously in their new soil despite wildly varying climes of origin, fed by an effervescent spring bubbling up from deep beneath the earth." The reviewer's chief complaint was that the vegetation was so dense and the paths so prolific that "it is all too easy to become lost," allowing with a note of unease that the gardens were "perhaps too large."

Madame de La Fontaine herself, briefly profiled, came off like an out-of-touch heiress who had poured a fortune into the gardens, ignoring the advice of experts that the plants she'd uprooted were unlikely to survive here. She seemed to have taken a great deal of delight in proving them wrong. "It is indeed my fondest hope," the article quoted her as saying, "that this small corner of Eden will continue to grow and thrive here, so I may share with visitors both present and future a small part of the arboreal wonders I have seen in my travels around the globe."

The date on the photocopied review was from the spring of 1879.

I flipped to the other few pages in the folder as the woman twittered on about her sleuthing skills in the county archives. There was a short clipping announcing that de La Fontaine's gardens had been closed to the public, with a reference to an unexplained "disappearance." Of the lady herself? It wasn't clear. _1892_ was scrawled in pencil on the back.

Next was another advertisement, this one for a bank. This would have seemed incongruous except for the illustration that clearly showed our house, or how it must have looked brand new. The overall impression was of overwhelming success: the ad was festooned with decorative ribbons with all-caps slogans swirling artfully around the house: YOUR FUTURES ARE SAFE WITH US, and EXPANDING ONCE AGAIN, and WE WELCOME NEW CLIENTS, and finally THE LORENZO TRIPLETS.

This last ribbon was draped over a small oval portrait in the lower right of three mustachioed men. Actually it looked like the same portrait printed three times, side by side. Tiny florid text beneath read WE ARE ALWAYS AVAILABLE, EVERY DAY AT ANY HOUR and WE WILL NEVER STOP INVESTING IN YOUR FUTURE and, even bolder underneath that:

WE NEVER TIRE.

The final clipping was from a few years later, an official notice that the bank had been shut down. Apparently vast reserves of counterfeit money had been discovered in the basement.

My heart thumped, somewhere in my chest. None of this made sense in the large but bits and pieces seemed disturbingly familiar. Expansion. Duplication. Impossible dreams. I started at the portrait of the three men. Three. Why _three_?

She noticed me looking and tapped the portrait with a pencil. "Italians," she said with a smug little smile, "can't trust them."

It took me a full five seconds to recover from this cognitive shift. "Excuse me?"

"'A Dago organ-grinder plays at my door each day,'" she quoted in a singsong. "'And then a Dago damsel asks me to pay, pay, pay!'" She chuckled. "From something mother used to sing me. I know it's not fashionable to say those things any more, but there's truth in old rhymes. Wouldn't put _my_ money in an Italian bank, that's all I'm saying. Did you find some old counterfeit banknotes in your cellar, young man?" She leaned closer; her breath smelled awful. "Were they"---she winked---"still greasy?"

I recoiled from her, hot anger kindling somewhere inside me. "No," I said, "I didn't. And I don't think their nationality had anything to do with it. At all." I'd never been more sure of anything in my life.

She puckered her mouth, glanced again at my pride bracelet. "Well. Should have realized you'd be the _sensitive_ type."

I couldn't take this any more. Her racist bullshit aside, the notion that what was happening to me was a cute mystery for her to solve was so disconnected from the growing existential dread of the past few days I wanted to slap her. I tried to remember she'd done me a favor, but in that moment I couldn't stand her. She was everyone who thought my problems had simple explanations, everything wrong with a world that was broken and couldn't be bothered to care about fixing itself. For a moment, brief and burning, I hated her.

And that's when her face came unstuck.

This was back when movies were still celluloid, and at the second-run theater by our house the film would sometimes jump the gate, get misaligned. When that happened the image would smear, frames no longer projected neat one after the other but running liquid through the machine, all movement turned into vertical bands of distorted color; and the audio would go juddery, vague, and distant, recognizable but distorted. Clipped and monstrous.

This was like that but in three dimensions.

The woman exploded. Her face twisted and smeared, exposing blood and bone. The back of her tongue flapped against her pulsing epiglottis, her eyes round spheres peeling back, turning inside out, her lips deformed and pulled like taffy into a twisting shape that reached from the ceiling to her knees. Her fingers had gone long as tree branches and skinny like pencils, twisting and jerking backward at frantic angles; the pattern of her dress had multiplied and filled the empty spaces in the air and was so thick now I choked on it. Everything moved, everything in her sounded, and the sound was a scream, like her lungs were jet engines, her voice box a bleating thing the size of a cow being flayed alive.

I dropped the teacup and the files: I vaguely remember them tumbling toward the floor in slow motion, spilling and twisting around each other. I was screaming too. All I wanted was to get away. I stumbled back and my head cracked against a cabinet of china plates; I held up my hands to shield myself, as if such a pathetic act could matter against a thing so huge and horrible. It came toward me, moving fast. I couldn't stop it. My sanity frayed.

And then she snapped back into herself, and her voice returned to normal. Almost. It still juddered, like the floor beneath her vibrated a hundred times a second. And her skin was boiling and rippling, like something inside it was desperate to get out. Thousands of tiny somethings pushing and pounding with disproportionate strength against her wrinkled flesh.

She reached toward me---and maybe this was all in my head, maybe she was trying to help, reacting in shock to my reaction, what must have seemed like some kind of seizure---but as she opened her mouth to speak, the rippling distortions made it into a grin. A huge, horrible, ravenous grin, malevolent. Gleeful.

Her reaching fingers writhed, and her eyes were wide and round as saucers.

I jerked to my feet and ran.

For a while I didn't even know what direction I was running. I bolted straight through intersections and past oblivious pedestrians, not seeing them. I wasn't thinking about anything at all. I didn't stop until a knife in my side brought me up short, bent me double, and I realized I'd been running a long time.

I collapsed on a patch of hot grass and threw up, retching and gasping. Gnats scribbled the air around me. Somewhere a dog barked.

I stayed there five or ten minutes, breathing jagged, looking down, studying my hands on the grass and my puke, dealing with those three things, the hands and the grass and the puke, not wanting or able to look up or deal with anything else. Nothing happened. After a while that started to help.

Eventually I climbed to my feet, got my bearings. I realized I knew where I was. I walked slowly back to our house.

I never went back for my bike.


#


When I got home, Niko was gone. I let myself into his bedroom and curled up on his bed, because I needed to be surrounded by something familiar. The smell of him was an anchor to reality. Maybe the only one.

I must have drifted off, because moments later the afternoon light was dying and his hand was on my shoulder, shaking it. I jerked awake, guilty excuses on my lips before I realized he didn't seem concerned about me breaking in. His hair was matted and he had a distant expression, staring past me.

"I took a piss," he said quietly, as if to someone standing behind my left shoulder, "and the bubbles were like eyes. There were thousands of them, floating. Staring. Iridescent, like oil. Something grinning underneath them, though, behind them. Something babbling and grinning and hungry and even when I closed the lid and flushed them away I could still hear them, down there, all of them..."

I sat up,
grabbed his shoulders and shook him, then did it again, hard. His head flopped back and he grabbed my wrist, a faint annoyance reaching his face. I was glad to see anything there at all.

I let him focus on me before saying, "There's no eyes."

He stared at me.

I shook my head, more sure of it now. "It's not a thing out there, stalking us. It _is_ us. We're what's wrong here. We're the ones who don't belong." I swallowed, bile still souring the back of my throat. "We're slipping. Losing our grip on... something. This whole world, maybe. Or it's losing its grip on us."

I had his full attention now.

"And I don't know what happens when we let go, or it does," I finished. "But I don't think it's good."

He stared at me, hopeless. "There's no way back."

"No. Not yet." I took a breath. "Not until we find one."





Chapter 7




We taped big sheets of artist's paper to the wall of his bedroom to make a map, shoving piles of CDs and unwashed dishes and dirty t-shirts and two scuffed snowboards out of the way to clear space. He transferred our notebook sketches to the wall and we filled in the rest from memory. It was imperfect, because stairs down there ran up and down and the wall was flat, and also because the hallways twisted at weird angles and we didn't have surveying equipment to sort them out. But it was a start.

It was also painfully incomplete. Dozens of doors had never been opened, countless halls had only been glanced into. Almost everything we had seen was from that single hall off the big room, the one we'd tried on a whim our first time down. Other than peering around the first couple corners, we hadn't explored the other four halls at all.

Niko swept a hand across all the empty space. "We're fucked."

"Look," I countered, "we know the other versions of us found a key, somewhere. And we also know the two sides are staying almost exactly in sync. Close enough to spill coffee the same way."

"Not close enough to leave the same fucking note."

"Still," I pressed on, "that means the keys can't have been too well-hidden. We could have almost found one, walked right past it. Maybe the only difference was a momentary decision about which door to go through, what wall to glance at."

"Doesn't matter." He stirred his coffee, morose, and sat it down to cool on his dresser, next to a half-empty older mug growing a skim of mold. "The other me already got to the key on this side and took it through with him. There's no key left to find."

"We don't know that. And besides, we have no idea what else might be down there. We need to keep looking."

He ran a hand through his hair, a familiar gesture, but he looked changed. His eyes were getting sunken, from lack of sleep or some more worrisome deficiency. His face, so often laughing, hadn't smiled in days.

"Synchronicity," he said. "That's the problem."

"How do you mean?"

"I think we're getting out of sync with them. Day by day, decision by decision, we're losing our lockstep. And the more out of sync we get, the harder it is to go back."

"Speculation."

"And the deeper," he pressed on, "the deeper we'll have to go to find another way through."

"Nice. You're leaping all the way past conclusions now to the realm of utter bullshit." But I didn't have energy to argue with him. Clearly we couldn't solve anything from up here. We needed to go back down. We had to fill in the blank spaces on that map.

Our first expedition departed the next morning. We had backpacks, trail mix and energy bars, lots of flashlights and batteries, twine, spray paint, a compass, graph paper, whistles, and rope. Despite everything, I think the prep got us fired up a bit. If answers were down there, we'd find them. We skipped class and I called in sick to work, and we both agreed if necessary we'd do the same tomorrow, and the next day. Finding a way back was top priority.

We chose one of the unexplored halls off the big room, and decided to explore as much of it as we could, until we'd mapped it all or got too tired to keep going. We picked the one at the far end, opposite the stairs back up. Right away we found something different.

The first few twists and turns were the same as what we'd seen before: carpet, wall sconces, scuffed doors. But after a short and confusing snarl of hallways and tiny rooms, the floorplan opened up into an area with a slightly different style of sconces, and longer, straighter hallways.

Except some of them went straight down.

We stood at the lip of one of these pits and peeked over the edge. It was like someone had taken a regular hallway and stood it on end. The brown carpet went right over the lip and continued straight down, passing sideways doors, sideways wall sconces. Maybe seventy or eighty feet down, it hit a carpeted bottom and leveled out again, branching in opposite horizontal directions. The pit filled the exact center of a junction; we could step around the corners into hallways leading off in the three other directions from the one we'd arrived. It was a five-way intersection, all at right-angles.

A couple dozen paces down one of those halls was another pit.

"What is this," Niko sighed, "challenge mode?"

When you think of treacherous terrain a basement hallway isn't the first thing that comes to mind, but clutching the corner and peering vertiginously down, the pit looked as unscalable as the Matterhorn. There was nothing to get a grip on, except the doorways every twenty feet or so. Clearly we couldn't get down without climbing gear, nor come back up without it either.

If you fell... if you got stuck down there...

We stepped carefully around the pit (which was awkward and terrifying because it came right up to the ninety-degree edge of the wall) and kept exploring on the same level. But the pits were everywhere. Each horizontal hall would dead end sooner or later, and the side rooms were all small and empty. Some of them had hallway pits, too, leading down from their exact center. After an hour we'd mapped out everything we could get to without a climbing harness. Other than going back to the big room, there was no way forward except eleven pits, each at least fifty feet deep.

"Maybe difficult is good." Niko perked up. "This is the first thing we've had to work for. Maybe it means there's something interesting down there."

"Or maybe one of the other hallways leads to a room filled floor to ceiling with keys. No point guessing."

We went back to explore one of the other halls---we didn't have much choice---and found something different there, too. About half the doors led not to rooms, but to crawlways.

They were those half-sized doors you find sometimes that open onto water heaters or the electric meter in your house. Flush with the floor and about three-and-a-half feet tall, they opened onto similarly miniaturized corridors, snaking off in two directions for a dozen feet with T-junctions at each end.

Niko leaned casually against the door and poked his head inside with a suave expression. "Hey," he said to the crawlway, "How _you_ doin'?"

We figured out pretty quick it was a maze.

You could stoop-walk, but crawling on all fours was a lot more comfortable. (For me, at least. Niko kept bumping his head and swearing.) The tiny hallways branched and split constantly, keeping to neat ninety-degree angles. Those ever-present wall sconces remained brightly lit, but the crawlway never went the same direction for long. Doors were scarce, and they all led back to normal-sized halls.

Once we realized how easy it would be to get lost, we retraced our steps and sat panting by the entrance.

"Promising," Niko said. "They're making us work for it."

"Makes no difference," I said. "It's the same problem again. We can't risk getting lost down here."

"But this is easier, man. We don't need specialized equipment. Just some way to leave a path. Hansel and Gretel, like you said."

Or maybe Ariadne. I had a ball of twine in my pack, so we settled for a simple solution: tying one end to my ankle, and the other around the half-door's knob. After some deliberation, we decided to keep our packs on, despite the awkwardness of crawling the tunnels with them. Having girded ourselves with stuff, we felt naked without it now.

We set off to map.

It wasn't long before we realized the crawlways accounted for an oddity in our mapmaking. If you look at the blueprint of a normal house, it's economical with space. Rooms and closets and halls fit into each other like well-stacked Tetris pieces. Downstairs was not like that. Large swaths of empty space surrounded most of the rooms. Hallways went farther than they needed to, adjacent to nothing. Niko'd talked about bringing a sledgehammer down and breaking through one to see what was behind it---but now we had an idea. The maze of crawlways filled up the emptiness behind the walls. Not in any logical or sensible way, though. As we started mapping them out in a notebook, I remembered the graph paper mazes I used to draw in school. A crawlway would wrap around the outlines of what must have been a room, then double back and wrap around itself again. Sometimes a bunch of branches would split off from a small area. There were dead ends. We had no sense of whether we were on the edge of the thing, near the center, or if the geography even had a regular enough shape for those terms to signify.

We'd figured all this out before moving too far, comparing what we'd seen to our map. Niko developed a plan to push toward a direction where we thought there should be lots of empty space, and find out whether the crawlways filled that up too.

What happened next caught us completely unprepared.

We'd started crawling in a promising direction. I'd begun to feel almost cheerful: we were solving the mystery, peeling back this place's secrets. Surely it was just a matter of time before we found a way back home.

Something _yanked_ my ankle from behind.

I gasped and twisted around. The twine tied to my ankle was taut, and pulling me with terrible force, starting to drag me back the crawlway. I cried out, digging my fingers into the carpet.

The twine scraping against the edge of the junction behind us sounded coarse and ugly, like a rusty knife dragged over the hairy skin of a coconut.

"What the fuck, _help me!_" I shouted. The loop around my ankle was viciously tight, cutting off circulation. My fingers scrabbled for purchase but the carpet wasn't shaggy enough to grip.

Niko scrambled back towards me, shrugging out of his pack and grabbing my arm. But as he pulled me back the twine dug into my ankle like a vise, like the pressure would saw the line straight through my foot. It _hurt_. "Cut it, fucking cut it!" I gasped.

He cursed and let me go, whipping back around to zipper open his pack, letting the line start to drag me away. The sound of the twine scraping the corner seemed way too loud, like someone was holding a mike against it. I reached up to grab a wall sconce and the cheap thing twisted off in my hand, sparking as the bulb went out. I held onto it stupidly as the line around my ankle dragged us both away, reeling out drywall-dusted power cable from the wall.

I panicked. My mind flashed through visions of monsters waiting just around the corner, reeling me in. A horned demon. Some evil-eyed little girl from a shitty horror movie. And then the history lady flashed into my head, inside-out and distorted past the breaking point, eyes white and wide; and I jabbed my fingers into the grooves in the fake wooden wall paneling and started babbling

	ACRES AND ACRES

mind slipping towards the only place it might be safe 

	YOUR FUTURES ARE SAFE WITH US

and Niko cut the twine.

I missed the lead-up in my nightmare, but he'd dug through his pack for the Swiss army knife, lost at the bottom with the camping gear, then struggled to squeeze ahead of me without kicking me in the face. He told me later he'd barely touched the blade to the twine when the taut line snapped, whipping around the corner in a fraction of a second.

He had to spend a minute calming me down. My mind had skidded toward some rarely glimpsed drop-off, pulled edgeward by a dark and primal gravity, and it took time to climb handhold by handhold back up to the light.

What brought me back, prosaically enough, was the growing unpleasant tingling in my foot. Pins and needles: painful, but familiar. The knot on the twine had slipped down and pulled a tight loop around my leg just above the ankle, digging half an inch into my jeans. Niko helped me cut it off and I sat rubbing my foot for a long time, calming down, waiting.

Listening.

After maybe fifteen minutes we started back, Niko up front with the knife. I was equally terrified bringing up the rear, though, constantly looking over my shoulder, miserable and afraid.

The fact that the lighting was so bright and consistent, so cheery, only tinged my fear a more metallic shade.

Around the corner we found the cut end of the twine, slack and unmoving. We followed it all the way back to where we'd come in.

It was no longer tied to the doorknob, like we'd left it. The twine lay coiled up in a neat loop. Right outside the threshold.





Chapter 8




"This changes everything," Niko was saying. We were in the funny-shaped room behind the closet with the unfinished board game, dust gathering on unresolved plans for world domination. We'd moved all our expedition gear in here; we didn't want to explain things to anyone else, and the rest of the housemates had forgotten this room even existed. I rubbed the ugly bruise ringing my ankle, sitting on the grimy hardwood floor with my pant leg rolled up.

"Does it? How?" I winced, prodding a tender spot.

"It's the first concrete sign there's something down there. Not glints of light. Not sounds. Something physical."

"Yeah, reassuring."

He conceded the point, slumping down next to me. "But why now? What brought this on? Is the maze forbidden? Did we break some kind of rule?"

"Marking our way."

"What?"

I sniffled. "It's the first time we've tried to leave a permanent trail, something unambiguously marking the way back. Maybe whatever it is... ugh." It still felt awful to verbalize it, give it that kind of legitimacy. That kind of power. "Maybe it didn't approve of that."

"What about the spilled coffee? That's a kind of a marker. We didn't get in trouble for that, and it didn't disappear or anything. Maybe whatever's down there doesn't want us exploring the crawlways. Because they lead to something. Something big."

I punched the wall, suddenly angry. "Who knows? None of it makes any sense anyway."

"That'll go on our tombstones. A week from now, when we're dead of fucking dimension poisoning."

"Well hey, dude, it's either that or lung cancer thirty years from now." I mimed taking a drag off a smoke. "At least dimension poisoning's probably quicker."

He laughed despite himself, and I chalked up a mental win. Cheering him up, making him smile, was so ingrained in me I barely noticed I was doing it any more. Maybe that day, I shouldn't have been. It wasn't exactly a situation to be cheerful about.

_Do I do it because I really want him to be happy? Or is it that I can't stand it when he's sad?_

"I'm not going down there again," he said with grim finality.

Neither of us said anything for a long minute.

"Okay fine, I am. You're right. You win. We find a way back. Somehow."

"There's monsters up here, too," I said softly.

He sniffed. "Or maybe we're the monsters, man. Crawled out from under the bed."


#


We decided to explore the vertical shafts, instead of going back into the crawlways. We didn't know whether what had happened was a message or a provocation. I thought the bruises on my ankle were message enough: Keep Out. Niko argued that was exactly why we should ignore it. Wherever they don't want you to go is probably the most interesting place to be. On the other hand, maybe the message had been like fences around Chernobyl.

Maybe what was farther in was worse.

So we settled on the shafts, which had the virtue of being unusual and promising terrain without even mild signs of demonic infestation. One of Niko's ex-hobbies was rock climbing, but he'd stopped after the accident jacked up his wrists. Bits of gear still lingered around his overstuffed bedroom, though, so we'd assembled some rope, harnesses, carabiners, and a couple of grappling hooks from the sporting goods store. The box called them "Grip Monkeys," which seemed incongruously cheerful.

We picked the first pit, since they all seemed about the same, and set about securing the grapples in a doorjamb in a way that would hold our weight. We'd each go down on our own rope, one at a time and using the second as backup. We also had extra Grip Monkeys in our pack, in case something happened to these.

Along with the usual gear, we also brought down a camcorder. We were too broke to afford the newer all-digital cameras, so we borrowed one that shot on Hi-8 tape. This was before the whole found footage craze, so we didn't think to take the camera down the pit with us and record weepy confessionals into it: we were going to leave it down the hall from the shaft, trained on the pit and our ropes and the Grip Monkeys, hopefully capturing anything that tried to mess with us.

When we were ready, and since we didn't have a tripod, I left the camera on the floor a dozen paces back, pointed at the pit, and hit record. We shouldered our packs and Niko tied on to the rope. Moving carefully, he stepped over the lip, and started to rappel down the carpeted "floor" of the shaft. I watched his grapple nervously, but it held his weight, tines set deep into the solid wood of the door frame.

The bottom of the shaft seemed a mile down with Niko dangling above it, but probably only dropped about seventy feet. He moved fast and soon was stepping onto the once-again-horizontal carpet at the bottom. He shined his light back up at me and gave the all-clear.

I followed him down, trying to think only in particulars about what was happening and not the terrifying big picture. I focused on old climbing lessons, what my hands were doing. One thing at a time. Presently I'd made it down too.

The hall at the bottom of the pit stretched off to either side, like we were at the junction of an upside-down T. Detaching from our dangling ropes, we picked a direction and began to explore.

Things got weird down there.

The hallways continued on as they had above, and there were more pits. But now they didn't go straight down. Not quite. They descended at angles ranging from severe to subtle, never quite true to vertical. Some were almost ramps. Others changed their angle or gradually twisted as they dropped. And while the pit we'd rappelled down was lit, none of these were. They each plunged down into darkness.

And there were more of them. A lot more. Hundreds. Most opened from the middle of a hallway, filling its width: easy to jump across, but wearing a pack you felt clumsy, were acutely aware you were one stumble away from a very bad time.

We decided to avoid any unnecessary leaps, but the pits were so thick they hedged us in, pushed us inexorably in a certain direction. If we tried to veer too far off course, they'd get denser, and we'd have to backtrack or turn aside, angling back to our former heading. And the longer we followed it, the more the hallway angles edged off true.

It was subtle at first. But the horizontal hallways were getting less and less level. We'd stumble on a floor that canted slightly left, or tilted a half-degree up or down. The walls, too, were growing angled, some leaning outward a degree or two instead of staying neatly parallel, or bent a little bit inward at mismatched angles. It made us feel drunk. You've seen so many well-constructed hallways in your life, your brain doesn't know how to process ones that don't behave.

We kept going.

The halls branched and spread endlessly. We gave up trying to map, other than the route back. We passed through regions of dark and regions of light. The decor rarely varied from its ubiquitous blandness. Sometimes little things were wrong. A door turned sideways, opening outward. A knob embedded in the ceiling, unable to be turned. Crown molding running in a line a foot above the carpet. We searched around these anomalies, but never found anything useful.

Some of the rooms got larger, too big for rooms in a house. More like a school gymnasium. Still the same carpet, though. And it felt like we were seeing more of the anomalies, the farther in and deeper down we got. Doors or sections of hallway paved in bathroom tile; weird cube-shaped extrusions or cavities in the edges of rooms. It was like the deeper we went, the more flexible the rules became---of architecture, of stability, of god knows what else.

Behind one unassuming door we found something that looked almost like a backstage, with a wood floor painted black instead of a carpet, cinderblock walls with folding chairs stacked against them by the hundreds. But no curtain, no audience, no racks of lights above. In fact there was nothing above: the walls rose up beyond the range of our flashlights.

In the exact center of the room was one of those caged metal utility ladders, climbing up into that darkness.

Mostly because it was going up and not down, we decided to try it. Or I decided, anyway, hands gripping the cool metal rungs before Niko could raise an objection. I felt reckless down here, brave enough to try anything. The exact opposite of the me on the surface.

Besides, the ladder looked just like the one at my junior high when I'd been on stage crew. I'd climbed it a million times. The metalwork of the cage felt like a blanket. Safe.

Within a minute I'd climbed disturbingly high. I didn't look down but the beam of Niko's flashlight, trained on me, had faded to glimmers, washed out by my own. Everything around and above was dark. And _quiet_. All Downstairs was quiet, of course, but here it seemed monstrously so, a quiet of infinitudes, even the sounds of my own body sucked away into the emptiness around me.

Niko seemed so far away.

"Find anything up there?" he asked, putting a hand on my shoulder. Startled, I looked down. My hands were still gripping the rungs of the ladder, but my foot was on the floor of the stage. I was on the ground. Niko was beside me.

"What happened?" I felt dizzy.

He frowned. "You climbed up for a while, then you came back down. Anything up there?"

I made him try. The same thing happened. I watched him climb up, high into the darkness above. Then, without missing a beat, he reversed course and came back down. When he made it back to me he was as startled as I'd been. He felt like he'd been climbing up the whole time.

We tried experiments. Keeping in verbal contact. Focusing on our movements. With enough of that, it was possible to realize that you'd started moving down again before you'd come all the way back. But always with a sick and juddering sense of grinding gears: one part of your brain kicking in and telling another it had been looking at things wrong. It took a moment to perceive, like an optical illusion. We stopped after a particularly nauseating moment when I was listening to Niko below me chanting _You're coming down, you're coming down, you're coming down_, and all my senses were telling me that was wrong, that I was still climbing up, climbing up, climbing up, and when the truth crashed into my perception I felt such a wave of sickness that I almost lost my grip on the ladder, had to clutch it shivering for minutes, cold sweat breaking out all over my body. After that we decided to stop experimenting.

We were getting tired. Just before turning back, though, we found one last curious room. We could hear it before we opened the door.

The room was the size of a squash court, though not quite as tall, the whole thing covered in green bathroom tile, even the inside of the door we came through. A sink rose serenely from its center. Scalding water blasted from the faucet, releasing clouds of billowing steam and filling the air with a moist, sticky warmth. The sink was full, water spilling over its sides and flowing down the porcelain like some artsy fountain, then streaming away across the tile, presumably according to some imperceptible tilt in the floor. It vanished down an open hallway, carpeted once again, slanting down at a steep angle from a corner of the room.

We walked over to the hallway to peer down. It was closer to vertical than horizontal, dropping at a vicious angle. Where the hot stream hit the tilted carpet it became black with mold, and the walls and ceiling were stained with rust and moss. Like water had been coursing through it for a long, long time.

From the slanting darkness rose a hot smell of rot.

"This feels different," Niko said.

We walked back to the sink and tried to turn off the faucet, but the hot and cold knobs spun loose. The scalding water rushed full force out of the tap, churning noisily in the basin.

"We're going to have a hell of a water bill," I joked, but then remembered something. The newspaper article from the history lady, about the gardens that once grew wild here, fed by a spring from deep underground that kept the unlikely menagerie of plants alive. Kept them multiplying. A bank that grew and grew until it had far more money than had ever been deposited.

Something felt on the verge of snapping into place, making sense. But I couldn't quite see it.

Niko was beaming his flashlight down the tunnel, chasing the descending path of the stream. "This would be rough going. Steep and slick. We'd need better climbing gear. And I can't see how far down it goes."

I took a deep breath. "It feels like that's the way, though. Doesn't it?"

He ran a hand through steam-wilted hair, eyes still pulled down the shaft. "Jesus, I hope not."


#


I couldn't stop thinking about the wet tunnel as we retraced our steps. Images of it flashed through my mind. The desire to know what was past the reach of our flashlight beams, what was down there, was maddening. I was planning how soon we could come back down, what we'd have to bring with us. What it would take to keep pushing deeper.

We passed through the last few hallways to the base of shaft we'd come down. On the carpet directly underneath were our ropes, coiled up neat, Grip Monkeys still tied to the end.

"God damn it," Niko said with feeling, craning his head to glare accusingly at the shaft and fling curses up its length. We couldn't see anything unusual up there, not from down here.

Our way back up had been cut off.

We had extra grapples in our packs, but the originals didn't seem damaged: just detached. The shaft was too narrow to throw one all the way back up without hitting a wall, so we settled for hooking a doorway, halfway up.

Our position now was much more precarious. We couldn't tell if the grapple was set properly: we just had to trust it. Niko volunteered to go first. From the ground below, I watched him climb, anxious.

And for some reason, that was the moment I finally accepted that I was still in love with him. I'd tried so hard to convince myself I wasn't, that I'd moved on, wrung him out of my heart, that all we had was an especially deep friendship. But watching him dangle from that rope, knowing he could fall at any second, I couldn't pretend any more. I'd never stopped loving him. I didn't know how. Maybe I never would.

And that was also the moment
the grappling hook ripped through the molding of the wooden doorframe far above, and Niko fell.





Chapter 9




Time seemed to snap and twist back on itself in opposing directions, both too fast and too slow. Terror struck me like lightning, searing me with unbearable matching thoughts: _he's going to die_ and _there's nothing I can do to help him_.

Then he grabbed the edge of the next doorframe down and his body slammed against the horizontal door beneath. I watched the bottoms of his sneakers as they kicked and flailed at the smooth beige wall, scrabbling for purchase.

He was still too far up. _Too far._ If he fell...

"Are you okay?" I shouted up at him, or something equally useless. My lungs were clenched so tight that for a minute I couldn't breathe back in.

He'd managed to press the toes of his sneakers up against the wall, but there was nothing to stand on. His position was desperate, hands gripping the inch of molding like claws. I could see muscles trembling even from here. He clung to the wall quivering like a caught-out insect, paralyzed with indecision.

"You're okay." I tried to keep my voice light, in control, willing confidence into it and up to him. My mind thrummed as it raced to find him a way out. He was still clipped on to the climbing rope but the grapple now swayed useless beneath him. The hallway pit ran featureless above and below the doorframe he clung to: there was nothing else to get a grip on, not for a dozen feet in either direction.

"The door." I projected calm authority. "You need to get the door open. If there's a room inside, it'll only be a little drop. Niko. Are you listening to me?"

He shook his head, as if snapping out of shock, found the doorknob beneath him and focused on it. It was on the bottom side of the door from our perspective, at waist-height for Niko, but too far off to the side to easily reach.

He lifted an ineffectual foot to try kicking at it, but it was too high. I watched his fingers slip towards the edge of the molding.

"Nice idea." I tried to keep my voice steady. "Just try again, okay? I'm right here. If you fall, I've got you." But did I, really? My arms were stretched out stupidly, but if he fell into them from that height it would break us both.

He kicked again, more desperate this time, foot still far from the knob. His shoe scudded across the smooth paint of the door. His fingers gripped the molding so tight they'd gone white. He couldn't hold a grip like that much longer.

"You almost had it," I lied. "Come on, buddy, you got this."

"Just shut up for a second," he shouted, flashing a glare down at me. "Stop fucking telling me what you think I want to hear and shut up."

I fell silent, face flushed, paralyzed. Singed.

He stared at the knob, and the silence sharpened until I couldn't help but break it, to say out loud what I knew he was thinking.

"You'll have to let go with one hand." I said it as even as I could. "Just for a second. To turn the knob." I breathed. "There's no other way."

He nodded. I stood helpless below him, arms still stretched up, aching.

Then he did it.

In one quick move he pressed his body in toward the door, letting his toes take as much weight as they could, let go of the frame with his left hand and thrust it out hard toward the knob. He brushed it and for a horrible moment it looked like he wouldn't be able to grip it and turn it, the angle all wrong, and so was his balance, now; but then his fingers wrapped around the knob, his wrist twisted and it turned.

The door clunked and swung inwards from the bottom as his weight pushed against it, and he half-collapsed, half-scrambled through as his balance was lost, fingers slipping off the frame. He tumbled inside, banging knees and shins, and fell through, the door swinging shut behind him like a cat flap, muffled thumps and curses making their way through the walls.

But before I could even breathe out, a shock of awful, sawtoothed sound smacked into me from above, and I was so startled I bit my tongue. It was utterly alien, a juddering metallic _twang_ that lingered in the air, throbbing, jittery, reluctant to die away.

And then I realized what it was.

The sound turned in an instant from monstrous to mundane. Niko must have thwacked it as he tumbled past, flailing: one of those springy metal doorstoppers, no doubt surprised to meet a falling body instead of a hastily opened door.


#


We made it to the top, in the end. It took a series of shorter climbs to each sideways room, treating them like miniature base camps, places to rest before flinging the grapple up another dozen feet to the next door, the next cube of safety; testing each set of the grapple more thoroughly, belaying each other as best we could in the patently unsafe circumstances. But at length, we'd made it back out.

"Sorry about earlier. What I said." I'd just grabbed his hand pulling me up the last few feet, and now we were sprawled on the carpet, mercifully horizontal again, like two mountaineers on the world's blandest summit.

"Don't worry about it. You just... do that sometimes, and it bugs me." _Tell him what I think he wants to hear._ I shut my eyes. "I wish you'd..." He lifted a hand, gestured vaguely in the air, dropped it in defeat. "Whatever, forget it. There's a million more important things to worry about."

The camcorder was where we'd left it, sitting on the carpet pointed at the pit.

The door frame where our original grapples had been attached wasn't damaged. We'd seated them pretty firmly, so this suggested that rather than being yanked free from below, someone had carefully unhooked them from up here.

Of course, the ropes had also been neatly coiled at the bottom. Someone had to have done that from down there.

I didn't want to watch the tape, not while we were still Downstairs. But Niko, face grim, insisted. So I huddled miserably beside him while we watched the footage on the tiny flip-out screen.

The tape had run to the end, so we backed it up a bit and hit play. To our dismay, the ropes were going over the edge right to the end; whatever happened, it had been after the tape ran out. Niko held down the rewind button and we settled in for a long haul. We spooled back through the whole tape, but nothing changed: it was two hours of motionless footage of the hallway and our ropes. Finally we saw ourselves spring back up from the pit at high speed, first me and then him; dicker with the grapples and rope, then zip over to the camera to turn it on. The tape clunked to a stop.

Cursing up a blue streak, Niko hit play.
We watched in numb frustration as everything we'd done earlier played back: the same discussions about rope and seating the grapples, the same lame jokes failing to ease tension. There wasn't much point to watching it all unfold again. We just didn't know what else to do.

On the tiny screen, I was standing a pace or two back, wondering aloud how much gear we should take down with us. I hated how my voice sounded on tape, how my face looked. I always had. Even on the tiny screen I could see red blotches. On the screen a miniature Niko sat on the edge of the pit, adjusting his ropes.

Distorted by the shitty camcorder speaker, he said, "How far down do you think this goes?"

My image shrugged, said "We could possibly go far deeper."

My skin crawled. "Oh my god."

Niko glanced at me. "What?"

"That's not what I said." My head was spinning. What _had_ I said? Something like _It can't possibly go much deeper_, maybe. Not that.

Screen-Niko said "Yes, right. In fact, we shouldn't you and I come back up this way at all. No. We should go down and we should let's stay down there, down and deep." His voice sounded strained, but he pulled his rope tight smartly. "And don't come back up until we find it, man. What it is we need to find."

Where it gripped the camcorder, Niko's hand was pale. "I didn't say that either," he breathed. "I mean I said something about that long, some of those words and phrases maybe. But they're _different they're fucking different---_"

I shushed him, because the voices on the tape were speaking again. But now the words were familiar, mundane. We both watched the screen, afraid to blink, but nothing else seemed changed. Everything played out as we remembered. Except now every word and gesture caused a spike of uncertainty. _Had_ I said that, exactly that? Had I moved my arm that way, stood in precisely that spot?

Video Niko started to rappel. The camera focused on my legs as I stood up top, watching him descend. On the screen I waited, then clipped onto the rope once he'd made it to the bottom.

Screen-Ryan checked his harness, took a deep breath, and started down.

He paused before his head dropped out of frame to call down to Niko: "Coming down." I remembered saying that.

Then he turned and looked straight at the camera.

Straight into the lens.

He held the gaze for a long moment.

Then he glanced, deliberate, down the shaft. Then back to the camera.

Wide-eyed.

His head dropped out of sight.

We sat frozen, watching the video of the empty hall for a minute, two, the grainy image showing nothing but the empty hall and our ropes.

Niko breathed out. "Jesus." He closed the screen and sat the camera down, backing away from it like it was a bomb. "Jesus fucking Christ."

I kept staring at it. EXPANDING ONCE AGAIN floated through my head, the copy from the old newspaper ad. WE ARE ALWAYS AVAILABLE, EVERY DAY AT ANY HOUR.

WE NEVER TIRE.

"Jesus," he kept muttering. "Jesus."


#


We slept in the big room that night because we always had low-level headaches now when we went upstairs. (Also, because I thought I heard someone up there, rummaging in the kitchen. The housemates were all supposed to be at a party. "Hello?" I'd called, but no one answered. The noises stopped, though.) We were becoming trolls, hiding from sounds, afraid to go out under the sky, only venturing from our cave to get more supplies, stock up for further ventures down. I slept under the foosball table, gathering dust. No one but us had been down here for weeks.

It won't surprise you to hear I had nightmares.

In my dreams I replayed the tape, over and over. Each time I rewound all the way to the start, intent to watch it through, make sure there wasn't some clue I'd missed. And each time the tape was different. It was always Niko and the pit and I, but never the same. And whenever something changed, fresh dread flooded through me.

Some of the changes were slight, barely there, and I struggled to catch the altered words, the different glances. Sometimes our words were rearranged, as if to make cryptic cyphers, buried meanings on the verge of making sense but never quite resolving.

In some of these variations, Niko and I were boyfriends. A couple. I could tell from the words we used, the way we looked at each other. Nothing that would have been obvious to anyone but me. I watched these scenes over and over, rewinding to catch the little glances, secret smiles.

There were other, worse versions.

There were dream-tapes where a gaunt Ryan and Niko with aged and wrinkled faces hobbled up to the camera in wonder, picked it up, passed it back and forth between them in awe. Like they'd been trapped down there for a lifetime. They pawed at the lens in a stupid glee, as if they'd forgotten what a camera even was. As if it might somehow be a portal back through time.

There were tapes where we cursed out our watcher-selves, told them to go away, to never come down again, that what was down there would kill us. There were others, far worse, where we smiled like wolves, invited ourselves to come down, and stay.

There were shots where the grapple failed and Niko or I fell, the sound of a sickening crunch reverberating up the shaft. There were shots where we looked right into the lens and stepped willingly off the edge.

There were shots where the carpet turned soft and we sunk into it like quicksand, Niko screaming while I smiled until fibers closed over my head. There were shots where hurricane winds sucked us screaming into the pit.

And on one tape---and I rewound and re-watched this over and over, in the dream---water from all the hallways poured into the pit, a four-sided waterfall. The carpets were black and sticky with moss trailing down into the vertical shaft, the walls dense with masses of plant life, vines and fronds and branches and leaves, the air thick with steam. Something jostled the camera and it surged forward with the tide, water sloshing against the lens, until the scalding stream carried it over the edge and it fell, straight down into that boiling pit, surrounded by water on every side, gathering speed, falling into wet and steaming dark, faster and faster and faster...

I would jerk awake at this point, coated in sweat, and try not to fall back asleep. But when I did I'd find myself rewinding the tape yet again and pressing play, hoping this time the footage would return to normal. It was always changed, and I'd have to watch it all over from the beginning, hoping this version would show something useful, a hint, a clue, an answer.


#


I woke to the smell of stale nicotine. Niko leaned against the stairs back up to my room, staring into the dark, a lit cigarette between his fingers.

"Our lease says no smoking in here," I grunted, still shaking off nightmares.

He took another drag. "Blow me."

I laughed and he flashed me a wicked grin. It felt good to laugh. Even if it was a little bit forced, to make sure he knew that I knew he was kidding.

Rubbing my eyes, I sat up in my sleeping bag. After a moment I scrunched over beside him, back against the stairs.

We steeped in smoke and silence for a long minute.

"Did I ever tell you," he finally said, "about that time I went camping by myself, up in Brushwillow?" I shook my head. "Used to do that a lot, after the, uh. Accident."

I took that in. He hadn't brought it up in a long time. Neither had I.

"I went by myself, cause I didn't want a lot of people around just then, and it's easier than twisting people's arms to get them to come with you. Planning around schedules, all that bullshit." He shifted into citation voice. "'The one who goes alone can start today; but the one who travels with another must wait until they are ready.'"

"Yeah, Thoreau. You quote that one a lot."

He shrugged. "I like it up there. Anyway."

I waited, staring into the whorled beige universe of the carpet.

"So this one night I'm up there, alone. I'm in my tent, and it's dark. Cloudy, no moon. I'm sleeping fine, on my back, you know, head up against the edge of the tent. And then I wake up, cause I hear something, just outside."

He sucked on the cigarette. "Something breathing. Low, hissing, gurgling breathing. Sounded huge, like a bear or something, a big-ass wolf. And it was right on the other side of the tent flap. Inches from my face. Like something had pressed its muzzle against the nylon, that thin nothing sheet of ultralight fabric, and was waiting.

"I still remember what that felt like. Fucking terrifying.

"I was too scared to move, so I lay there a long time, hoping it would go away. But it didn't. The thing stayed where it was. Kept making those horrible breathing sounds. Inhale. Exhale. Raspy, choking."

He flicked the cigarette onto the carpet, rubbed it out with his foot.

"And then I realized where the sound was coming from. The breathing was coming from me. I was sleeping on a root or something, my head had gotten into some funny angle. I was snoring, basically, and woke myself up. But I didn't realize what woke me was a sound I was making myself."

I was too tired to process this. "Cool story."

"Do you get what I mean, though?"

I rubbed a hand over my face, tried to think.

"You're saying maybe there's not... a _thing_ down there. That somehow, all of it is us."

"Echoes," he said. "Reflections. The rooms are reflections of our shitty old house, and the things we're seeing, experiencing down there, maybe they're not alive. We're causing them, somehow. And now we're ascribing intentionality to side effects. Jumping at our own shadows." He lay back down on his sleeping bag, staring up at the ceiling.

I remembered something from a neurobiology class. "Did you know there are more neurons going from your brain to your eyes than in the other direction?"

"So?"

"From your brain to your eyes," I repeated, "not the other way around."

He blinked. "That doesn't make sense."

"It does if you realize that vision is mostly the brain telling the eyes what it expects them to see." I rubbed my face again, trying to wipe off the exhaustion. "We think we have two little cameras in our head. We don't. They're little yes-men, reassuring us nothing unexpected is happening. That's why that trick works, with the guy in the gorilla suit. You ever see that video in school?"

He nodded. "You're watching a bunch of people toss a ball around, and the guy in the gorilla suit walks right through them, and it's like he's invisible. He even waves. But you don't see him the first time, because you're watching the ball. Then you watch it again looking for him and your mind's blown." He smiled faintly. "Dude in my high school science class swore the teacher changed the tape."

"You don't see the gorilla because you don't expect to. There's no reason he'd be there, so your eyes don't notice him. Even though he's in plain sight. Standing right in front of you."

We were both quiet for a while.

"So maybe we're somehow looking at this wrong," I finally said. "We're not seeing something. We keep saying it doesn't make any sense. Maybe we're just not seeing it the right way."

"Maybe." He closed his eyes. "Or maybe there's nothing there to see."

"Niko. About the accident." I swallowed. "That night."

He rolled over. "Don't want to talk about it."

"I know. But if you ever did want to, I mean, if you ever needed that again---"

"I don't. Go the fuck to sleep, man."

We both closed our eyes and tried.
I could feel the camcorder dream lingering, eager to take over again. I tried to fight it off, but I was so tired.

"Even if we are the wolf," Niko muttered, just as I was about to drift off, "that doesn't mean it's not trying to kill us."


#


I tried to take a midterm and it was a disaster. I hadn't been to class in weeks, which didn't help, but everything I'd learned earlier had vanished from my brain, neurons reclaimed, I supposed, for more important things. Then I started hallucinating, questions and pencil marks multiplying and layering on themselves even when I looked up from the test, abstractions filling the darkened auditorium, and I had to flee, whispering a hurried apology to the T.A. that I was having a medical emergency. She told me to go home and take care of myself. I was halfway home before I remembered that phrase has a positive meaning, too.

I'd thought she was telling me to commit suicide.

Something was in my room when I got back. I stood outside the closed door, number two pencil still clutched in my hand, listening. It sounded like an elephant. Heavy, clopping footfalls made the floorboards groan. Wet, agitated breathing rasped. Dust motes danced at my feet in a strange breeze, sucked under and pushed back out through the space below the closed door, rhythmic. Air moved with faint fleshy sounds, like a hundred quiet people flapping their arms, flailing.

I crept away, miserable, and by the time I came back with Niko and he threw open the door in some play at courage, there was nothing there.

I collapsed into his arms, sobbing, and he let me stay there for a while until I'd calmed down. I clung to him, afraid if I loosened my grip he'd disappear. Like dad, tucking me in. Gone between one blink and the next.

He had a perpetual headache now. He kept describing it with the word "stabbing" and only that word, as if clinging to the sound of it. Like using a different one would acknowledge the pain too had changed, grown worse, was no longer caged by the word he'd picked to trap it. I could see how much it hurt him to think, to make words, to move around. He ground his teeth. He was being worn down.

My headaches weren't getting worse, not yet anyway. It was the strain of always having them that wore on me. Of wondering if I'd have them for the rest of my life.


#


We left to explore down the slippery tunnel late that night. It might have made more sense to leave after a good night's rest, but neither of us could sleep, and spending so much time down there meant night and day were becoming academic concepts anyway. Niko caffeined up (I was jittery enough already), and we loaded our packs with canned food and power bars, thick gloves, and crampons from the sporting goods store. "12 points of contact ensures solid grip on ice," the box had said. We didn't expect the manufacturer had tested them on slime-covered carpet, but it was the best we could do.

In my pack was also a gun. I bought it from a place I'd driven past every day on my way to work but never gone into until that morning. The friendly clerk agreed to waive the mandatory waiting period in exchange for the last of my ATM cash. I didn't tell Niko about the gun. I thought it would make me feel safer but it just felt heavy.

It had been a hot day and the old house clung to that heat through the night with grim brick desperation. Descending into chillier air was a relief. With every step down the headaches diminished, our mood improved. It was almost addictive, being down there.

We retraced our route through the upper halls to the top of the shaft and reset the grapples. This time Niko hammered them into the doorjamb, face set, until he'd driven the steel spikes three inches into the wood. Even so, neither of us really expected they'd still be there when we got back.

When, or if.

Getting down was a familiar exercise now, danger mitigated by procedure and repetition. We retraced our route to the tiled room with the sink. The water was still running, hot and steaming, rushing across the floor to the corner with its angled hallway lined with slimy black carpet. We shined our lights down the hot throat and the steam grabbed their brightness, bounced it back to us maliciously. We couldn't see more than a few body lengths down.

Niko ran a hand through his curls, deflating again in the hot moist air; scratched the hair behind his ear furiously, like a dog with an itch. "Are we sure about this? Really really? Because it sort of seems like a colossally stupid thing to do."

"You have a better idea?"

He sighed, looking down the steaming shaft unhappily.

"No, I don't have a better idea," he said at last.

We pulled on the crampons and the heavy gloves. Harness, rope, knots. Check. Niko pounded two new Grip Monkeys into either side of the angled tunnel entrance. We tied on. Double-check.

Then, each holding our rope, kicking hard to sink the sharp toes of the crampons deep into the slimy carpet, we started down.

It was slow, hot work. Once we got inside the slanted hall, the steam was oppressive, everywhere: we were instantly drenched with it, like rot-smelling sweat. Even with the crampons our feet slipped. The sludge was deep and slick, a stew of algae and mold and fungal slimes, green-black and stinking of putrefying jungle, of horrible things happening under your carpet, inside your walls. We held tight to the ropes with steam-wet gloves. The walls and floor twisted and bent as we descended, as if the constant moisture had warped them, but the downward angle stayed vicious.

It was a gullet. We were letting ourselves be swallowed. No---worse. We were forcing ourselves in. Eager. Like we couldn't wait to be digested.

We were nearing the end of our sixty meter ropes when everything went to shit.

All at once we were sliding. Our ropes had gone slack in our hands, no longer connected to anything. There was no time to dig in the crampons; we were already moving too fast, careening down like a grotesque slalom. Neither of us screamed, focused I guess on trying to grab hold of something, anything, but there were no doorways, no light fixtures, nothing but the thick hot slime and the scalding water. I tried to dig my feet into the oozing carpet but my loose rope had entangled me, my pack was in my way, my face was smeared with scalding gunk and I couldn't open my eyes.

My hand closed on Niko's leg and I grabbed it. A moment later the floor angle shifted and he cried out, threw his body sideways, brought us both to a shuddering, squelchy stop.

We were soaked through, overheating. Scalding water ran past us down the slope. I blinked my eyes open and saw he'd wedged himself into a kink in the tunnel. One of his knees was scraped open and a dull red mark on his forehead was beginning to swell. But he'd done it. He'd stopped us.

Ropes slithered down the tunnel past us, followed moments later by two grapples still tied to their ends. Niko reached out to grab one with his free hand, but his weight shifted, and he had to throw the hand back against a wall to re-brace, cursing. I tried to snag them with my foot, but didn't even come close. They vanished down the tunnel, trailing rope.

Niko's face was tight. He tilted his head down toward me. "This was a mistake. God, we're so fucking stupid. Ryan, man. We have to go back."

"Calm down," I gasped, head filled with the roaring of the water, blinking gunk from my eyes. "Don't panic. We can do this."

"Man, I'm barely holding on. I don't know how much longer I can keep from slipping. We have to try to climb back up."

"Back?" I said, confused. "You want to go back?"

He stared down at me. "Of course back. Are you fucking crazy? Where the fuck else?"

"There's nothing good up there. Nothing right." I kicked my foot for purchase, managed to rest at least some weight on a hidden protuberance. "Besides, nothing's changed. The plan's still the same. This is the best lead for finding a way back to our side."

"Are you not paying attention?" he hissed, furious. "Something is trying to kill us."

"So let's find out how to stop it." I tried to keep my tone reasonable. "We're halfway down already. Climbing back up will be hard, regardless. Why not get all the way to the bottom first?"

"Because we don't even know if there is a bottom." His face was blotched red with fury, with sweat, with the scorching heat of the air. "Halfway? We have no fucking idea how deep this goes. I should have said this a long time ago. You're obsessed. You get obsessed a lot, man, let it drag you down. Your stupid records." He took a deep breath. "Well now you're obsessed with this place, and it's blinding you. It's _feeding_ on you, your obsessions. Multiplying them. You can't see it, or maybe you don't want to, but I do. I'm looking right at it. Like the gorilla in the crowd."

I was angry. "If I'm obsessed with anything, it's with finding a way back. We're running out of time. We either figure this out, or we're stuck here forever, in the wrong universe. We need each other to get through this."

"You're obsessed with me, too," he muttered. "When was the last time you hung out with someone else?"

"When was the last time you did?"

He shook his head angrily, dismissing this.

"Our housemates," I pushed, "when was the last time you hung out with any of them? Anyone other than me?" He stared back, seething. "Their names. I bet you can't even remember their names." I was bluffing. But could I remember them, either? Names, faces. No. There was nothing. None of those people mattered, not to me, not to us. We were the only thing that mattered. Getting back to where we'd been, what we'd had. What I'd wanted.

He shook his head again, violent, like there was something inside it he wanted to dislodge. "You're living in a fantasy," he spat, "you always have been. _I can't be what you want me to be, okay?_ I can't be what anyone fucking wants me to be. You all have these versions of me in your head, these ideal perfect Nikos, but they're not real. I can't live up to them." He opened his eyes, stared yearningly back up the shaft. "Help me. If you really care about me, help me back up. Don't be like everyone else. Don't just fucking _use_ me to get what you want."

"Going back's not going to help. There's no answers up there." He wasn't understanding. I reached for something else. "Those headaches aren't going away. You think you can live with that pain? Forever?"

"Better than being fucking dead!" He seemed to realize I wasn't changing my mind, turned away to reach for a handhold, but there was nothing there, nothing to grip, and he scrabbled pathetically at the slime.

"Is it?" I shouted, angry, desperate. I had to say something, something that would make him stay, keep him here, and my mouth raced ahead of me. "You won't make it, up there, not with pain like that. We both know you won't."

He tensed, glared down at me. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"You know exactly what it means," I said, shaking. "Never really helped you. I've done nothing but help you. I've always been there for you. Every fucking time you fall I pick you back up. _You'd be dead if it weren't for me._"

He shot me with a gaze of such cold fury I cringed. "You're fucking poison," he hissed, "you know that? A fucking snake. I wish you'd let me die that night. I wish we'd never met. _Let go of me!_"

And his hand did close on something, and he pulled himself up, triumphant. His leg was slipping out of my hands, and I couldn't bear for him to crawl away from me, couldn't handle the thought of going back up to that world, to any world where everything was wrong and nothing I wanted was possible, so I pulled. I pulled, too hard, and both his hands slipped, and he crashed back into me, only I wasn't holding onto anything but him any more so both of us tumbled down, faster and faster, slipping and twisting and scraping together down the steepening blood-hot slope, down and down and down into darkness.






PART TWO

MULTIPLICIOUS





They have no idea what happiness is. They don't know that for us, without our love, there is neither happiness nor unhappiness: there is no life at all.

Tolstoy, "Anna Karenina"











Chapter 10




The first time someone kissed me it didn't really count.

I'm in the closet at the back of the band room, sophomore year of high school, and this annoying girl, Krissy or Kristy or something, has followed me in to grab the music stands, and she's especially giggly and flighty and nervous for some reason, brushing up against me, and then the lights switch off and she grabs me and I realize it's a setup, she got someone to stay out there and flip the switch: and in the sudden gloom she grabs me and crushes her lips against mine. And all I can think of in this moment is Bradley, this cute sweet transfer student who a month before had found out I also liked weird old music, so he corners me after band one day to talk about it. He loves old music, strange music, making weird cross-genre mix tapes, and he plays some for me out of the half-dozen he keeps in his backpack, which is also filled with loose-leaf sheets of staff paper scribbled with notes because oh, he also composes, too, and he's impossibly cute and I'm so flustered, embarrassed, because as obvious as his interest seems now, back then it's not even possible for me to consider it. I never once think that he might be like me because I've never met anyone like me. We spend hours in the practice room and make plans to hang out again and then the next day in the hall some kid from the varsity team shoves him to the ground, hard, sends his books flying. Calls him a faggot. I'm paralyzed, half a hallway away, frozen while I watch Bradley say something from the ground, a denial, maybe, and the jock is saying something back, evidence, maybe, but I can't hear because my pulse is pounding in my ears. I'm too afraid or ashamed to go help him, to say anything at all, risk the ugly spotlight of the jock's face turning on me, too, because he's clearly making a thing of this, drawing a line. Not in our school. I imagine a chalk outline around Bradley, red graffiti. A queer died here. I can't move, not even when he finishes collecting his things, gets up, and walks away, taunts at his back, walks down the hall towards me, and now I can move but only to turn away, face flushed and heart galloping, and I can't look at him and I don't know if he sees me there as he passes by. But he isn't at school the next day and the week after I hear he's transferred somewhere else, and I never see him again. And now in the dark closet as this dumb girl's lips push against mine all I can think is that it should have been Bradley, my first kiss should have been him, and now I've fucked it up, lost it, failed him and myself and even this girl, whose eyes I can't meet either as I pull away and brush past her out of the closet and past snickering faces to the door outside, changed, maybe, or maybe not. Her hair was in the way, after all, long straight blonde strands of it tasting like strawberry conditioner, so our lips didn't really even touch, let alone tongues. Was that a kiss? Did it count? Who knows. I don't feel like it should, and anyway I don't feel any different except maybe worse, somewhere deep down, even less experienced and less ready and less sure of who I'm supposed to be. I drop out of band not long after that. I've always liked listening to music more than playing it, anyway, and I like to listen alone.


#


I plunged into a pool of steaming hot water, instantly immersed, choking. My scrabbling hand found something slimy but solid and pushed against it. My face broke the surface and I gasped, slipping and struggling to my feet. Water came up to my waist. I wiped rank muck off my face, blinked burning eyes open, tried to catch my breath.

It was utterly dark. All I could hear was splashing water.

"Niko?" I shouted.

Nothing.

I shrugged off my pack, zipped it open with blind, shaking fingers while struggling to keep it above the waterline, and fumbled around inside. My hand closed on a plastic tube. Glowstick. I pulled it out and snapped it, shook it, frantic.

A dim blue glow began to bring the world back, a breath at a time. Churning water was everywhere, white and frothy. Steam swayed. A few steps away a sheer angled shaft climbed back up, lined in oozing black gunk and coursing fluid. The one we'd slid down, presumably. Turning all the way around, the edges of my dim circle of light suggested level hallways, flooded, leading off into darkness in three directions.

No sign of Niko.

Something dark and coiling swirled in the water: my rope. I grabbed for it and reeled it in. One end was still attached to my waist. At the end of the other, my shiny grappling hook trailed tangled green streamers.

I searched the frothing surface, but saw no sign of a second grapple, or a second rope.

Shutting my eyes, I tried to sort through the confusion of the sliding fall. We had tumbled, together at first, my hands grabbing for his slime-drenched shirt, the sodden edges of his pack. But there was nothing to get a grip on. After those first few moments all I could feel was my own tangled rope, the pasty mulch sliding past me. I assumed I'd gotten ahead of him, or behind.

But what if I hadn't? What if he'd managed to stop himself again behind me, wedged himself into another kink in the tunnel?

Or what if the tunnel had split, somewhere up there?

I didn't want to think about the third possibility, but I spent a few grim minutes duck-walking through the water, old rescue swim lessons running through my head, feeling my hands through the muck beneath the churning surface. I found nothing solid. No backpack, no rope. No body.

He wasn't here. I was alone.


#


Everything in my pack was soaked. I threw out a waterlogged sandwich and watched it drift in the churning current before vanishing beneath the foam, as if someone hungry underneath had grabbed it. I'd lost a crampon in the fall and couldn't find it, so I took off the other one and maneuvered it into my pack. The blue light from the glowstick turned everything the same shades. Black and blue.

I had no idea if the dripping gun would still work, and was seized by a thick fear now of firing it down here---of how far that sound would carry and what it might attract---but I slipped it into my belt anyway. It still didn't make me feel safe but I tried to pretend it did.

My flashlight wouldn't turn on, even with fresh batteries. "Water resistant," according to the package, but I imagined it had been subjected to an environment outside factory test conditions. I strapped it to the top of my pack anyway, hoping it might dry out and be useful again. I had a dozen waterproof glowsticks, so I wasn't really worried about light.

Not yet, anyway.

I stared up the shaft we'd tumbled down for a long time, considering. Climbing back up---without a rope, with only one crampon, without someone helping me---seemed impossible. I tried to picture Niko up there somewhere, struggling to pull himself back up, handhold by slippery handhold. If he made it to the top, he'd throw another rope down to me.

Wouldn't he?

I waited a long time, as long as I could stand it. It might have only been a few hours, maybe even less. But it grew more and more maddening to simply stand there, soaked through, bathed in steam and sweat, doing nothing. Wondering if he was trying to find me. Wondering if he'd left me behind. Wondering if he was drowning or dead or lost, somewhere in this maze.

At last I decided to move. If he'd made it back up, he could take care of himself. And if he was down here somewhere, maybe I could find him. Offer help, if he needed it. If he'd take it. Anyway hadn't I said it would be silly to make it all the way here and not explore?

It was the deepest we'd been yet. Maybe there were answers down here. Or at least another way out.

I picked a flooded hallway, took out my keys and gouged a crude arrow into the shitty paint of the wall, drywall dust spilling out. Breadcrumbs, to find my way back. Or show Niko where I'd gone, if he was lost down here too, or came looking for me.

_And if something else comes looking, you're pointing it right at you._

But there was nothing to be done about that. I gave the shaft back up one last doleful look, then turned to the hallway and began to push my way forward through the hot, sluggish water.


#


I wandered. I'm not sure for how long. The black water's surface smoothed once I moved away from the turbulence at the bottom of the shaft, swallowed up the glowstick's dim blue light. There were no longer any curious features or unusual architecture: only an irregular grid of junctions. The infrequent side rooms were always empty. Sometimes the floor or ceiling sloped up or down, not always in sync; so the water level would drift from ankle-deep to above my waist, and the ceiling from claustrophically low to beyond the reach of my light. The halls trended wider and narrower, too, in unpredictable rhythms. I worried for a while about stepping into a pit I couldn't see and dunking myself again, but there weren't any. Nor were there stairs, up or down, or even light fixtures. Only hallways, branching, recombining, endless.

The air stayed steamy, and while the water cooled as I moved farther from the hot inlet stream it was still uncomfortably warm. I felt hot and clammy, thick-headed. Mist swirled in the air, sculpting the dim blue light into strange shapes and shadows.

I kept gouging arrows into the wall with a key, kept moving. If I kept moving I wouldn't have to stop, wouldn't have to think.

Walking takes almost no thinking at all.


#


I came to another spot where the hallway widened, but this was different. Running along the indentation in one wall was a row of pay phones.

I slowed to a stop and stared, wondering if they were really there.

They rose from knee-deep water, six of them each on its own steel pole. The ceiling had risen so high my glowstick couldn't find it, but light stabbed down from somewhere, spotlighting each phone like it stood beneath its own personal streetlight, fierce and bright after hours of flat blue glow.

Water sloshed as I trudged over to the nearest phone, reluctant but intrigued. Pay phones don't normally live inside a house. Did that mean something?

I touched the black plastic of the receiver. It felt grimy and cold. As if in a dream, I lifted it, held it to my ear.

Dial tone.

I blinked as it droned in my ear. This didn't make sense. If there was no power this far down, surely there weren't phone lines either. Some telecom grunt hadn't run a cable all the way down here, snaking it through all these endless halls and vertical shafts, had they? Hope they billed by the hour.

The sound of the dial tone was uncomfortably familiar.

Without meaning to, I reached out a finger and dialed a number from an old commercial jingle. Seven sing-song digits.

A voice told me to insert fifty cents.

I almost laughed at this familiar banality. I slapped my pockets, but had no change. I hadn't expected to need any.

I put down the receiver, lifted it again and dialed zero, still not really expecting anything would happen.

A ring, and then a woman's voice: "Operator."

My bluff had been called. I didn't know what to say. "Er... I'd, uh, like to make a collect call."

"Please hang up, dial star nine seven, then the number you wish to call. Say your name at the first tone."

"Thanks," I managed.

She was gone. The silence hung oppressive in her absence. I needed a voice back on that line. With a couple words she'd made the familiar loneliness unbearable.

But who could I call? Water sloshed around my knees as I considered the utter inexplicability of my situation. Should I call the police, explain I was lost in my own basement, miles from the surface? Ask the fire department to send a rescue team through my bed, down the vertical hallway, and throw a rope ladder into the slimy tube in the giant bathroom?

Or maybe I'd call a friend. You know, one who'd believe me, who wouldn't hang up thirty seconds into my story. In the movies, whenever someone says "You wouldn't believe me if I told you," there's always someone to say back: "Try me." This person invariably turns out to be surprisingly open-minded.

I knew with grim certainty this was not going to work for me. The only friend I had like that was Niko. And he was gone.

I felt desperately alone.

My fingers brushed against the dial pad, hesitating. They punched star nine seven and then kept going, tracing out a familiar pattern, a groove deep in muscle memory. My fingers knew it well.

At the first tone, I said my name.

Something clicked and whirred in the receiver. A pause, and then, a ring.

Another.

Another.

Someone picked up and said, "Hello?"

"Mom." Relief flooded through me like adrenaline. You trust a voice like that on a primitive level, instinctual, in parts of your brain deeper than logic, than thought.

She must have heard something in my tone. "Honey? What's wrong?"

"What, I only call you when something's wrong?" But my eyes were tearing up and my hands were trembling. I held the phone tight against my face. It smelled like old sweat and institutional cleaner.

With my other hand I wiped my forehead. Swallowed. "Nothing's wrong. Just wanted to hear your voice. How are things? Tell me what you're up to." I didn't care what she said. I only wanted her to talk and keep on talking. To hear sounds from a normal world and pretend I was part of it. That I'd ever been part of it.

She humored me for a minute, but I could tell she was worried. And I could think of nothing to say that would get me out of here.

"Alright, star man," she finally said, and my brain flashed to my sixth birthday when she dressed up like an astronaut to bring in my cake. Crêpe paper planets and glow-in-the-dark comets. "Fess up. What's going on?"

"I'm... I'm in trouble, mom." My voice was breaking. "Something's happened. You remember my... my friend Niko?" I rushed forward, babbling. "I've lost him, mom, I don't know where he is, where either of us are. I fucked things up and I don't know what to do. This is too big, all of this is too big, and I... I made a mistake, and..." I bit my lip so I'd stop talking, something pressing down hard on my chest, and gripped the phone like it was my last anchor to reality. Maybe it was.

She took a deep breath. Let it out.

"Oh, honey," she said. "Is it... is it AIDS?"

Of all the things to be terrified about right then, that one was so far down the list that my brain sort of tripped over itself, downshifted straight back to first and stalled the hell out. "Oh," I said. "Uh. What? No. No, it's not AIDS. Mom. I wouldn't tell you something like that over the phone." I took a deep breath, and once again said something I probably shouldn't have. I said it with deadly seriousness. "It's HIV."

There was an awful silence.

Then I started giggling. I couldn't help myself. "That's not funny, Orion," she said, but then she was laughing too, and neither of us could stop, even when she kept trying to, kept saying "Orion" again in her serious voice which just set me off more, which set her off again too. And if I could have given anything to stretch that moment out forever, I'd have done it in a heartbeat.

I wiped tears from the corners of my eyes. "I'm sorry. No, it's not that. I can't really explain it. I guess I just needed to hear your voice more than anything. I'll... figure something out."

"That's my smartie." I could picture her expression when she said this; she'd said it a lot. "You're sure it's nothing I can help with?"

"I'm sure." The blue monochrome of the glowstick made the pay phone into an artsy abstraction; the blackness around me sucked away all the rest of its light.

"Well, you'll figure it out. You always have, even when... when there wasn't someone there to help you." She took a deep breath. That was a big thing for her to admit. "You know you can always ask for help when you need to. But you won't always need to. And that's okay."

Tears were pushing out of my eyes again, damn it. I leaned against the booth, screwing them shut. "Thanks, mom," I whispered.

"I love you, sweetie," she said. "Do you want to talk to your father?"

And out of everything that had happened, all the unexplained and terrifying and gut-wrenching things, nothing hit me like those words did. Sometimes words hit harder than a slap. You feel them, like ten thousand volts. They sour everything that came before, ruin everything coming after. That's how those words hit me.

Because my father was dead.

"No," I managed in a quiet, trembling voice.

"Oh, he's right here, honey, it's no trouble. Hang on."

I stood clutching the phone, unable to move, to breathe.

Faint rustling sounds came over the line.

"Well hey there, son."

This is something you probably won't understand unless you've lost a parent. You have to put things away when that happens. Something is gone and parts of you went with it, in ways that aren't always obvious. You have to accept that this person is not coming back. You may not want that to be true but it is and you can't change it, and you need to believe you can't change it, which isn't quite acceptance, but still. You do it. You put the pain from those missing pieces in a box and nail it shut and you don't forget it or accept it, not exactly, but you learn to stop thinking about it. After a while it's almost like you've buried the box, or lost it. It's gone.

And then you hear that voice again, and you realize nothing was ever buried or lost or even nailed shut. The box has been there all along, wide open, and everything in it still has exactly the same power to hurt you. It's just been waiting for the right moment to try.

"Hey, dad."

The words came out against my will. _There's been a mistake_, I thought dreamily. He's still alive. Just a dream that a freight truck doing ninety smashed into him on a country highway with a busted stoplight, killing him instantly, taking him away from me between one blink and the next. It made sense: it had never felt real, anyway. Some strange multi-year delusion, not easy to explain but so, so easy to accept.

Or maybe in this universe it had never happened.

_Maybe here, he's still alive._

This had never once occurred to me since I'd passed through to this side. It was too huge a change. All the differences were so tiny, so inconsequential. Not like this.

_Or._

_Maybe it's not him at all._

Something inside me withdrew, to wherever small animals go in their heads while staring down looming headlights. Some residual part of me thought I ought to move, speak, react. Get out of the way. But I didn't know how.

"Good to hear your voice." My dad. He sounded like he meant it. "How you holding up?"

"Dad." I wasn't in control: I sounded distant to myself, like someone else was speaking. "Dad. What's going on?"

He chuckled. "We were going to ask you the same question. Your mother and I were a little worried after that call the other day."

I couldn't think. "Call?" I said stupidly.

"From you and Niko." My father hesitated. "We couldn't figure it out, son. You want to let us in on the gag?"

"Uh. Gag?"

"Sure. All that business about _going deeper_."

My blood was frozen and my mouth had gone dry. "What?"

"You said," he explained, voice still achingly familiar, "you both said the next time you called, I was supposed to remind you that you have to go deeper." He cleared his throat. "That, um." I could hear the rustle of a paper, like he was reading off a notepad. I could see him, squinting through his glasses. "That you're not deep enough yet, and you need to keep going. Deeper and deeper. As deep as you can get." He cleared his throat. "Pretty mysterious. What's it all about?"

The ground felt like it was dropping away.

"So what's the news, son?" my father said, a hint of a smile in his voice. "You in deep enough yet?"

I dropped the phone. It swung on the end of its metal coil, spinning slowly. I could still hear his voice, faint and distorted---

"Ryan?"

---dad's voice, drifting faint from those tiny holes in the receiver, as I backed away, staring---

"Orion? Are you there?"

---and my shoulders hit the wall, and I couldn't back away any more but I could still hear his voice coming out of the receiver, so I pulled out my gun and shot it.

Somehow I hit the dangling receiver on my first shot, and it exploded. Tiny bits of plastic shrapnel cut the air. One whizzed past my cheek and sliced it open. I didn't notice. I raised the gun to the boxy metal body of the phone and shot that, too. I shot it again and again until the gun wouldn't fire any more.

My ears hurt. The reverberations were deafening, echoing endlessly. I pictured compressed sound waves expanding through miles of hallways, like a dangerous thought lighting up more and more neurons, bouncing off skullbone to keep reflecting, multiplying, feeding on itself. A sound crashing up staircases and down shafts in rippling patterns of interference and reinforcement. I stared down at the gun in my hand, thoughts dull, shots ringing and echoing in my head and through the halls. I unclenched my hand and the gun fell into the water, vanishing under the surface without a splash.

The phone made a distinct, metallic _clunk_.

I looked up at its bullet-riddled surface.

Inside, something was tumbling down through the pay phone's innards, dinging and plinking past metal obstructions. My gaze moved down, following its invisible path through the body of the phone.

Finally, the clattering stopped. The gate of the coin return jiggled as something clunked into the slot behind it.

Not wanting to, I edged forward. Part of me reached out while another part tried in horror to call my hand back, but it kept moving. It pushed the gate open.

In the coin return was a small brass key.

I stared at it for a long moment. Then I snatched the key and pulled back, turning away from the bank of phones in the same movement. I slogged fiercely on through the water and down the hall, moving fast, not looking back.

My ears still rang with gunshots. In the silence, that ring kept sounding almost like a distant telephone, bell clanging somewhere far behind me. I tried to ignore them, but the ghost sounds didn't fade for hours.





Chapter 11




In a flooded side room half the floor had given way. Water cascaded down into consuming blackness, no lower level visible. I stepped carefully past the open door and the current rushing in, tide sucking at my shins like it was hungry for them, and sloshed away fast up the hall, shuddering at the thought of that black pit. You fell into that thing, God knows where you'd land.

Soon after, the hall began sloping up. The carpet went from wet to merely damp, and then, between one step and the next, dry.

Up ahead glimmered a tiny spark of yellow. I stumbled closer: a night-light, plugged into an outlet at the base of the wall. Something about it whispered of lightning bugs and sleepy summer nights, and all at once I felt immensely weary. I fell to my knees when I reached the weak light and sloughed off my waterlogged pack, then curled up around the tiny pale glow as if it was a campfire. My face snuggled into the brown whorls of the carpet like the fur of some huge indifferent beast. I slept.

My body did, anyway. My mind kept marching.

I dreamed waterlogged halls. I trudged, not making any attempt to mark my way or track my position. I searched for nothing, found nothing: just wandered. When I realized I was dreaming I tried to break free of the nightmare, but lucidity was slippery, fumbled away between heartbeats, and I kept losing it. I walked halls lit only by flickering sea-blue light and thought of nothing that wasn't them.

Once, in a long, straight hall of waist-deep water that never seemed to end, the surface ahead of me shifted, swirled.

Something was moving underneath.

I stopped short, squinting, and held my glowstick high. The ripples flung its dim light back to me, bunched up and distorted. But I could make out something person-shaped under the surface, swimming toward me.

The gun was in my hand: in this dream, I'd forgotten I lost it. Gripped by fear, I aimed it at the thing under the surface and pulled the trigger. But the shots went wide, from the angle of the water or some grim nightmare-logic. Whatever it was kept coming.

I cringed back against the wall. The thing beneath the water was doing the breaststroke with smooth, efficient moves. It didn't break the surface and it never came up for air. Through the rippled distortions I could see no face.

But as it swam past, I could see it wore my clothes.

It didn't slow down. I pressed my back against the wall, cold sweat prickling on my face, helpless to stop my head turning to watch it pass.

It swam to the end of the hall and around a corner, never stopping for breath, leaving a wake of dark whorls and eddies behind.


#


I woke with a parched, sticky mouth. My face was glued to the carpet with dried blood from where the piece of phone had cut my cheek. I tugged myself free, which reopened the cut. Wincing, I sat up and rummaged in my waterlogged pack for something to staunch the bleeding, still half-asleep. I'd left my soaked shoes on and my feet felt like they'd swelled to twice their normal size inside them.

My glowstick had long since burnt out. The nightlight's weak yellow glow reduced the world to a dim circle of carpet, a few feet across. And I was groggy, still shaking dream-remnants from my head. So I didn't realize until I started digging for a fresh glowstick that someone was sitting a few feet away.

I gasped and leapt up, scrabbling back against the wall behind me. I could see only tennis shoes, catching the amber edge of the nightlight, and the faintest hint of a body in the shadows behind them, knees pulled up with clasping hands. Someone sitting with their back against the wall, faint yellow glints in two eyes. Watching.

I stayed there trembling for a moment, too afraid to either come closer or flee into the blackness back the way I'd come. I'd left my pack in the circle of light, between me and whoever was sitting beyond it.

I realized I recognized the shoes.

Hesitant, I cleared my throat. "Niko?"

The face was so shadowed I could barely make it out, but I thought it smiled. "Hey, man."

The voice was cracked, weak. But familiar. Unmistakable.

I stepped back toward the light. "Shit, dude, you scared me." He made no move to get up. "What happened to you? We got separated and I didn't know what to do. Did you find the arrows I left? Jesus, I'm glad you're okay."

I knelt and pulled a new glowstick from my pack, but he held up a hand.

"Okay if we talk for a minute first, like this?" he said. "Been in the dark for fucking ever and that thing will murder my eyes." He lowered the hand. "Cool?"

It was such a relief to hear his voice again I shoved the glowstick back down, along with a vague sense of unease. "Fine. So what happened?"

"Rather hear what happened to you. Tell me everything."

So I did. How I'd waited at the bottom of the shaft, explored the water-soaked hallways. I told him about the call at the bank of payphones. But I left out the part with the gun, because in hindsight it felt stupid, and because I remembered he didn't know about the gun, and I didn't want to mar our reunion by revealing I'd kept something from him. Something else, anyway.

He didn't say much. The yellow glints bobbed at times like he was nodding or cocking his head. But the darkness was fierce. All I could really make out were his shoes, and the hands clasped around his knees. In the pale yellow of the night-light they looked skeletal, emaciated.

Disquiet crept into me, rising through the floor into my feet and up my bones. I couldn't see his face. I wanted to.

"Hey," I finally said, "this dark is kind of freaking me out. You can shield your eyes or whatever, but I've got to have some light. Okay?"

He sighed, as if resigned. "If you have to."

I reached carefully for a glowstick the same way I used to walk deliberately towards the light switch in my childhood basement, shepherding growing panic with a forced front of calm. I pulled one out, snapped it, shook it, blinked at the surge of orange light from mingling chemicals, and held it up, anxious, as the light crept toward him.

The electric orange was shockingly bright, and he'd winced and held up a hand to block it out. He kept it there for a long moment as I squinted, pupils squirming. Finally, almost reluctant, he dropped the hand and met my gaze, defiant.

Something was wrong with him.

He was changed. Distorted. Something had leathered him, shrunken and withered his features, hollowed his eye sockets. At first he seemed like some poorly made copy, face a twisted parody of the one I knew so well. But then I started to realize what had happened to him.

Time.

He was older. Much older.

I was still in the shallows of my twenties, remember. I hadn't been around long enough to see how age inscribes itself on people, crumples parents into grandparents and invalids and corpses. I hadn't seen friends lose hair and teeth and muscle tone. I hadn't loved someone long enough to find out what decades do to them.

The Niko against the wall looked twice as old as he should have been, maybe more. He was wearing different clothes, but out of his standard wardrobe: the bowling shirt with "My Name Is BONG" on the lapel. It wasn't threadbare or faded. Something bulged from the front pocket, maybe a penlight, and his pack leaned against the wall beside him.

He held my gaze, waiting. We stared at each other for a long time.

I finally broke the silence. "What happened?"

He took a breath. Let it out. "You can see what happened." He cleared his throat. I realized he wasn't tired, or strained. His voice was just older. "So. Yeah. I'm not your Niko, man. Okay? I've been through more. A lot more."

I stiffened. "You're the one from the other side?"

He smiled. "Ah. You still think there's just two sides. Sure, course you do." He shook his head. "Guess that's how it seems near the surface. A pair of possibilities. Neat. But deeper down, things get more... _tangled_." The word sounded heavy in his throat, dangerous.

"What do you mean?" I couldn't stop staring at him, at his face, and I swayed with the sick feeling of recognition and strangeness, curdled together in that fierce orange light.

"There's a lot of space down here, Orion. A lot of possibilities. Most of them... aren't good." His glance had drifted down the corridor, but now it snapped back to my face. "_My_ Ryan and I, we got lost. Long time ago. Real fucking lost. Never made it back."

"Your Ryan?" I looked around, panic spiking. "There's some older version of me down here too?"

He looked away. "No."

After a moment, I realized he wasn't going to say anything else. And then why.

His eyes flicked back to mine again, as if fascinated by them. He stared with something like hunger. At seeing my face again? At seeing anyone?

"Been on my own a long time," he said, as if explaining. "Gotten used to it."

Suddenly I couldn't accept any of this. "Your clothes." I shook my head. "Your shoes. No. They haven't changed. They should be worn down to nothing."

He looked away again, out into the blackness down the hall. "Like I said. Lot of possibilities." He cracked a knuckle. "We weren't the only ones who got lost. Bumped into lots of other Nikos and Ryans down here over the years. Most of them dead. Sorry to say." He cracked another knuckle, methodical. "But the clothes are fine, man. The clothes fit great." He forced out a barking laugh, abrupt and cold. I wondered how long it had taken his laugh to shrivel down to that emaciated sound.

He sniffed. "You get used to it. Stealing clothes, I mean. Stops being strange after a while."

"But how do you eat?" I felt angry, not the least because my skin was crawling at the thought of him grave-robbing other Nikos. Other Ryans. "If you've been down here so long, how the hell are you even alive?"

He turned back to me again, no longer wistful but with a dangerous sharpness. Maybe you've heard the phrase "thousand-yard stare" and maybe you've even seen one before, but I hadn't. It _struck_ me. I believed everything he said next, no matter how fantastic. The words were only flavoring on the truth in that stare.

"There's a room," he began, voice graveling, "not much farther down from here. Different from anything up here. Bigger. A bit bigger." That laugh again.
"Can't walk the length of one of its walls without stopping to sleep. Takes five or six sleeps to walk all the way around, keeping the outer wall to your left the whole time. Passing all the doors." He shook his head. "Maybe a few thousand halls leading out. Most of them slanting upward. But only one goes back to the surface. The rest lead nowhere, or in circles, back to one of the other ten thousand halls.

He took a breath. "When you come into this room, though, you can tell something's different. The carpet ends. It turns to asphalt."

He stood up so quick I cringed back, but turned to the wall and placed a hand on it. He drew his finger down, then over and around, drawing an invisible square; then drew invisible grid lines in it. "Asphalt," he said. "City streets. City blocks. A huge grid of them. Suburban streets. Crosswalks, stop signs, you know. What you'd expect. Lawns, but they're all dead. No sun, right?"

He turned back, leaned against the wall. "And all the houses," he said, fixing me with that stare again, "are ours."

"What?" I couldn't break his gaze.

He shrugged. "Not exactly. None exactly. But all close enough. Sometimes the foyer's a mirror image, or the front door's changed, or there's one more bedroom on the second floor, one less. Or the carpet's different, or the wallpaper, or the kitchen's smaller or there's no bricked up fireplace, or the fireplace is bigger, or there's a fish tank instead of a fireplace. Sometimes, maybe one in ten houses, I can't see a difference. But I think it's always there. Not that I've checked them all." He laughed again. "Did the math once. There's ten million houses. Give or take. I've been down here a long time. But not that long.

"Each one has that upstairs porch room, though," he went on, relentless. "Your room. And they're all filled with your stuff. Little variations again. Sometimes your bookshelf has a copy of _Dhalgren_, sometimes it doesn't. That one I always look for. But it's your room, in every house. And your bed.

"And under every one of those beds, there's another Downstairs, as big as this one. And if you can find your way down, another huge empty city with another ten million houses. Each slightly different. Each slightly different than the ten million up here. And sometimes, other Ryans and Nikos come up out of them, expecting to find the real world, with people and a sun and all. They're real fucking disappointed. Especially when they wander too far and can't find the house they came out of again.

"Sometimes I'll meet them on the streets, crying, panicked. I stay away, of course. Can't get too close, like you know, or. Bad things happen." He pointed to his temples, and I flashed back to that feeling of wrongness when my double and I had almost bumped into each other.

He looked away. "Course they're usually dead by the time I find them," he added lightly. "But. Your question. Each house has a pantry, food. Once in a while one has power, too, lit up like Christmas in all that dark, and the fridge is running and cold, and there's lunchmeat and milk and leftovers inside. Unspoiled. So there's plenty to eat. Just not a lot of, you know. Ambiance."

He stepped closer. "I heard your gunshots. That's how I found you. Don't know what you were shooting at but doesn't matter. _You're not lost._ Are you." He glanced behind me, back the way I'd come. "This goes back up, doesn't it? To the surface. The real surface." He closed his eyes. "With light and birds, and grass, and people who aren't you or me. I can't tell you..." He opened them again and I wanted to shrink back, close my eyes and pretend I'd never seen something like that in human eyes, let alone in his, that hollowness and greed and something else, too, something worse. But I couldn't. I could only stare back, cringing.

"I can't tell you," he said more quietly, "what it would mean to me to find my way back up there. Orion. I can't stay down here any longer. I can't."





Chapter 12




I wanted to find my Niko, but this one argued against it. Impossible, he said. Like finding a needle in a haystack. Except this haystack went down forever. In the best-case scenario, he explained patiently, we'd wander until our food ran out, and then with our last dregs of energy and luck find our way back up and out, empty-handed.

He didn't mention the worst-case scenario.

We argued. He insisted the smart strategy was for us to retrace my steps to the base of the slide and climb back up. "The closer to the top, the fewer possibilities," he said, "the fewer choices. And fewer chances of making the wrong one." When he found out I hadn't seen my Niko since we got separated in the shaft, he grew even more convinced. "Maybe he's not down here at all. Maybe he caught himself on the way down, like you said, and he's up there now waiting for you. Worrying." He gave up convincing me. "Or if he's not, he'll realize heading back is the smart option. I _know_ he would, buddy." He tapped his head. "Trust me."

I couldn't deny this plan made sense, but I felt sick. Too much was wrong. "Look. Even if I take you back up there, it won't be your world. You can't stay. If you're on the wrong side too long, you start to feel---detached." I shuddered without meaning to. "Like it's rejecting you. Like antibodies swarming. It'll kill you."

He shrugged. "We don't know that. I'll risk it. Anything's better than staying down here."

"It's not just that." I felt like a coward, but desperately wanted an excuse, a reason he couldn't come back with us. "You know about that sick feeling when you're too close to a twin. That's even worse than the headaches. So say we find my Niko and get you both back to the surface. Then what? The two of you get a double on campus, move in together?"

He sighed, impatient. "You think I haven't thought this through, all the time I've had? You help me get back up, I'm gone. It's a big planet. I've learned how to survive. I'll never get within a hundred miles of either of you again."

"Wait a minute." I'd had an idea. "That sick sensation, when you're too close. We can use that to find him." He raised an eyebrow. "Okay, maybe you're right, and there's too much space here to find him by dumb luck. But you've got a sixth sense for where he is. You're like a magnet we can move through that haystack, feeling for tugs. Any twinges and we steer closer, till we're close enough to do the rest by shouting."

"You're not listening to me, Orion." He was getting angry. "There's a lot of space down here. You have no idea how much space. You're never going to find him. You need to accept that. You'll get us both lost. And I'm _sick_ of being lost, buddy. Fucking sick of it."

He had an intensity my Niko never had---though maybe there'd been something like it latent in him, waiting for the right trauma to pull it out like a loose thread. It scared me.

He was right. I didn't want to get lost down here, either. I didn't want to end up like him.

But I also wasn't willing to give up on my Niko.

I dug out my keys, held them up. "Look. I've been using these to mark my way. There's no chance of getting lost. And I've got plenty of food, still. For both of us. So we keep searching. Keep marking the way. Be methodical, map it out. And if the food runs low..." My throat felt tight. "If that happens, we'll turn back. But I can't give up on him yet. I can't."

His eyes narrowed, and I could see him weighing something behind them.
"Fine," he said at last. "Until the food runs low. But look. Buddy." He put a hand on my shoulder, squeezed it, tighter than I would have liked. "I've been down here a lot longer than you. These halls are deceptive." He kept his eyes locked with mine, not looking around, like the walls would notice him if he did. "We'll look as long as we can. But if we do this, you've got to trust me. When I say it's time to turn back. We turn back." He wasn't asking. It was an order. His eyes drilled into mine and there was something cold and grim in them, like a general leading his troops to slaughter.

But then a corner of his mouth lifted and he clapped my shoulder, dropped the hand. "That okay with you, man?" he asked, and he sounded so much like his old self it ached.

"Fair enough," I said, even though I didn't want to. It made sense, I supposed, for him to play guide. But my stomach twisted when I realized what I was agreeing to, realized the power I was ceding. Realized I'd agreed to trust someone who, in every way that mattered, I barely knew at all.


#


Elder Niko was obsessive about marking our way---I could hardly blame him---so we made slow progress. But despite his initial misgivings he seemed committed now to finding his younger double. Even downright cheerful about it.

We slipped into something like a rhythm, despite the surreal circumstances. He declined my offer of a glowstick, and didn't pull out the penlight or whatever from his shirt pocket, instead keeping close to me as I swung my light around, peering down all the hallways we passed. Sometimes, for a moment, I'd forget it wasn't him. Then the light would catch the hard-edged crow's feet around his eyes, or he'd ask in nostalgia-tinged tones if I remembered something that happened a week or a month ago, and reality crashed back into me. I supposed from his perspective I was like a long-lost friend at a high school reunion, so as woozy as it made me feel I could understand this behavior.

I thought I could, anyway.

He didn't seem to need much light. I asked about this and he shrugged, saying he spent most of his time in total darkness. Sometimes, he said, there were long stretches between lit-up rooms, between scavenged batteries or glowsticks. My skin crawled when I imagined trying to navigate this endless labyrinth by feel, never knowing when you might step into a puddle of water, a bottomless shaft. A body. I thought of him wandering these halls in utter darkness, face placid, eyes unfocused, fingers skimming the paneled wall, the only sound the scuff of sneakers on carpet. Sniffing for rot at hallway junctions. Feeling on hands and knees for corpses and their backpacks of supplies, like a blind crab scavenging for leavings at the bottom of the sea. I thought of getting so used to this that it no longer seemed awful. That it seemed perfectly normal.

As the hours passed the sense that he was keeping something from me, that something was wrong, only grew. He kept asking about the way back up: casually, like making conversation. But he wanted to know what was above the slide, the layout of the rooms before that, whether we'd come through a fridge or a sliding glass door, which pit exactly we'd rappelled down, which branch I'd taken off the Big Room to get down here. He was trying to reconstruct the route back out. Maybe this made sense---maybe he was just curious, or hedging his bets in case we got split up, like I had with my Niko---but behind the jokes and easy laughter I sensed calculation. A front. Performance.

Now and then I'd ask if he'd gotten any twinges of feeling, hints we were getting close to another Niko. He'd answer right away: Sorry. Nope. Nothing. At one point, annoyed, I demanded he stop for a minute and really try. He apologized with abashed sincerity, and we stood at a junction for ten long minutes while he concentrated, the wrinkles around his eyes creasing as he squeezed them closed---but when he opened them again, he shook his head. Nothing. He seemed sad but not surprised.

Like he already knew there was no one to find.


#


We'd come to a maze of endless narrow rooms and hallways lined with empty shelves of all shapes and sizes, like a fractal pantry. Stairs twisted up and down through shelf-lined landings, doors opening onto endless dead-ends lined with more shelves, stained and bent from past weight but supporting nothing. We poked around a space the size of a mansion, cluttered with oddly-sized corners and crannies, finally realizing the whole area was a dead end. There was no other way out.

"Maybe it's time to turn back," Elder Niko said when we realized this, solemn. We were near the back of the big cluttered space, in a long narrow dead-end with twenty-foot ceilings, flimsy shelves stretching all the way to the top. The air was dry and smelled of dust. "Man, it's going to be hilarious when we find out my younger self's been topside this whole time. Lounging on a blanket in the backyard, you know, under the sky. Catching some rays. Listening to tunes. Waiting for you to get out." He laughed, and his voice sounded hollow, swallowed up by endless rows of empty shelves.

His face grew more serious. "Or maybe he's so lost we'll never find him. Orion. I tried to tell you. This place is too big." He gestured around us, took a deep breath, looked chagrined. "It's a lost cause, buddy. I think it's time to give it up."

He took a step toward the door, but I was in his way, bristling. Holding my ground.

He stopped, looking confused. "What's up?"

I couldn't explain my trembling, except for a deep-seated certainty that this was wrong. Everything about it was wrong, just generally, but a specific wrong thing was the way this place had taken Niko from me and done this to him, made him into something I couldn't understand and didn't trust, and I couldn't stand this stalemate any more. Some yawning possibility loomed before me, like I was blindfolded on a precipice, about to step forward. But I had to know. Better to fall than stay lingering on the edge.

I met his eyes. "Tell me."

"Hmm?"

"Tell me whatever you're not telling me. What's really going on. I want to know."

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Damn it, stop _pretending_. Everything is not okay. You're stringing me along and you need to stop it. Be honest with me."

"Oh?" His expression had started to shift. Something was slipping.

"Stop playing games." I clenched my fists. "Stop _using_ me. Look, we can do this together. You need me to get out of here. Both of you do. I know the way back, and I'll help you, but I need to trust you. And you need to trust me. Okay?"

He nodded, looking serious, and bowed his head. Then gave himself one final nod. As if coming to a decision.

He looked up smiling, stepped forward, and punched me in the throat.

I staggered back, pain exploding from my neck, but he stepped forward at the same time, looking bored. He punched me in the face so hard I spun sideways and slammed into the wall of shelves, something crunching in my nose, and he kept stepping forward, grabbing my wrists and kicking my feet out from under me. He twisted my arms as I fell so I landed face first, and still he kept moving with me, descending with his knee in my back so when I hit the ground his full weight slammed down on top of me. He punched me hard in the kidney, twice, grinding my face into the carpet with his other hand now somehow on my head.

My mouth was open but I couldn't breathe, or scream or speak or think for lack of breathing. My throat felt crushed, my lungs paralyzed. Pain like a stab wound tore open my side. I couldn't think enough to move muscles.

Never taking his weight off the knee digging into my spine, he pulled something from his bag. I heard a rip, and was so sure it was some part of myself it confused me when I felt no pain. Something sticky wrapped around my wrists, tugging the hairs on my forearm. Duct tape. And now I did struggle, feebly trying to dislodge him, kicking my legs. Pathetic as a half-squashed bug, twitching, not realizing it's already dead. In moments he'd bound my ankles, too, and then my knees.

I tried to make a sound, to beg him to stop, or ask why he was doing this, but all that came out was a coarse rasp, not even a gasp. So I begged with my eyes instead.

He met them and laughed. He knew what I was trying to say. It amused him.

He frisked me: hands patting my ass, my pockets, my crotch. "Gun," he said, impatient, "where's the gun?"

I had just enough breath back to grunt a word. "Gone."

"Stupid." He cuffed the back of my head. "There's worse things than me down here. And worse _me_s." He smirked, but his hands had found my back pocket, felt what was inside. They reached in, urgent, and dragged out the key. His breath caught.

He bent down and shoved it in my face, angrier now than he'd looked while beating the shit out of me. "What's this? How long ago did you find this?"

My head spun, trying to think of some way to regain control. "Couple," I gasped. "Hours."

"Have you used it yet? Gone through?"

I didn't want to answer his questions, but I couldn't see how lying would help me, either. I shook my head.

He stood up and slammed his fist down on a shelf, cracking the flimsy wood. Then he started to pace, furious. Thinking. I groaned and rolled partway onto my side. The pain in my kidney was evolving from a stabbing into a roiling burning sickness, like something inside me boiled, threatened to burst. Breathing felt like forcing air through pipes sealed with rust.

"My Niko," I rasped. "Looking for me. Won't let you. Do this."

"Your Niko's dead," he said, and he said it so simply, so matter-of-fact, it sunk into me like another punch. "Found him and got rid of him before I found you. I always kill the Nikos first. Makes the headaches go away faster."

It felt like the room was dropping. I didn't want to believe him. I fought not to. "No," I gasped. "Bull. Shit."

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out what I'd thought was a penlight. It wasn't. It was a finger.

He tossed it onto the carpet by my face and it rolled once, coming stiffly to rest a few inches from my eye. It was cut through at the knuckle and pale and dead. But more or less the right color.

"I've killed him hundreds of times," he said, sounding bored again. He was watching me, though, and as he noticed my tears he gave them a small, sad smile, as if touched by my naiveté. "And you, too, you little bitch. You're even easier. Always freeze up at first. Or if you don't, you try to grab my arm. But the same way every time, right? So that makes it simple to break your wrist. When you double over whining, it's easy to grab your skull and smash it into the ground until you stop moving."

He knelt down, turning his head sideways to study my face, as if curious about the effect his words were having on me. "This time's different, though. _You're_ not lost yet. _You_ know the way back." He reached out and tousled my hair, playful-rough. "And you're going to take me there, Orion. Take me back up. Or you're going to die."

He stood up again. "But this fucking key. Complicates things. You said you're on the wrong side, from your perspective. Yeah?" I didn't answer; he went on as if I had. "That means there's another you who's also found a key. The twin key to this one, on the twin side. And if that other you didn't get ambushed by his old bestie"---a wicked grin---"he'll pop through to this side soon enough. Because. You find a key, you're almost certainly only a few hours away from finding its door."

I couldn't see how this changed things. "Why does that m-matter?"

He turned the key over and over in his hand, staring at it. "Staying in sync. Wasn't that always our theory?" It was like he was asking the key. "I think we have to. Buddy. I told a lie earlier. I don't always kill you both right away. Sometimes I... ask questions." He scraped a thumbnail along the key. "Find out where you've been. What happened before. The ones who have it worst are always the ones who got too out of sync. With their doubles. And if they lose it entirely... if things warp too out of true..." He made a sucking sound through his teeth, bringing it to a crescendo and then cutting it off, like a tire popping in reverse.

He glanced at me, then back to the key. "That's what happened to me. My double and I, we... diverged. And something tore. Or popped, maybe. Think pairs of soap bubbles, floating in infinite void. They need each other to stay stable. Our universes got too far apart and it wasn't good for them. They're gone now, or too far to ever reach. Dark.

"But yours..." He grinned even more broadly. "A ripe pair. Undamaged. Still connected. To each other, and to you. You. I can follow you back into them like a thread. Like a fucking thread, Orion. Up and out and back and into the light."

This is the part where if I was a spy or an action hero, I'd be secretly digging a knife out of my pocket, working my way free of the bonds, taking advantage of the villain's distracted ranting to try for my freedom. But I wasn't a spy. I was a Bio major. I'd never been in a fight. I was trussed up, I couldn't move, the pain was still excruciating, and I had no idea what to do.

As if to reinforce my stupid squandered opportunity, Niko seemed to notice me again. Abruptly he put the key in his pocket (his front right pocket, I noticed, desperate not to be completely helpless) and dug through my pack. With a satisfied grunt, he pulled out rope, and proceeded to tie my hands and lower arms behind my back, so tight my elbows almost touched.

My freedom was slipping away. I tried to keep him talking. "But..." I had to clear my throat, heavy. "If you... if Niko's dead---my Niko---isn't it too late? How can anything be in sync now?"

He paid no attention to this, continuing his rope work. When he was done he wrapped the end a few times around my neck and fear spiked through me, but then he lifted me gently to a sitting position, leaning against the wall.

He went to the pack and pulled out my flashlight, shaking it. "This thing work?" I didn't answer: he was already toggling the switch on and off with no effect. He grunted, dug some batteries from his own pack and slipped them in, nodding in satisfaction as the light came on. Pocketing it, he rummaged through my pack, eyes lighting up when he found my cache of food. He ripped open the wrapper on a power bar and took a huge bite, grunting in satisfaction. Ignoring me.

"Niko," I said, trying not to cry. "Please let me go."

He grimaced, like what I'd said had hurt him, and scooted closer to me, still chewing. He touched his fingers to my chin and lifted my head, gentle. Stared into my eyes with a frown. Like he'd lost something in them.

"I told another lie earlier, bud," he said, swallowing. "Sometimes those houses down there do have power, like I said. Who knows why or where it comes from, but sometimes they do."

I kept my eyes on his, hoping to find some empathy or humanity there.

He took another bite. Chewed more slowly this time.

There was nothing in his eyes.

"Power," he said, mouth half-full, "cold fridges. Sometimes. But nothing inside. They're empty. All of them. There's no food down there, buddy. None at all."

I couldn't stop trembling. I couldn't look away from his eyes.

He swallowed again, shoved the last of the bar into his mouth. "But you and me," he said, mouth full, "other versions. Man, there's _so many_ of us. Popping up out of those houses, those millions of houses. Lost. Always lost. Pathetic. Eaten all their food. Starving, out of their minds. They're already dead, really. Or a nudge away."

He swallowed the last of the power bar, licked his lips and the crumbs off his fingers. Then he leaned forward, slow, like he was going in for a kiss.

He stopped, face inches from mine.

"Wouldn't it be such a waste?" His breath smelled of processed figs. "Such a shame for all those deaths to have been for nothing. To have served no purpose. Don't you think?"

"Niko," I begged, wanting it to mean so many things.

His finger touched my lips. "I think you get it. So. We have to find the door this key connects to. We have to wait for your doubles to come through---yours, and your dead friend's. Swap places with them. Pass back to your side. Keep things _synchronous_. And then head up, up, up into the shallows, back to the surface, away from this place forever, and synchronicity can go fuck itself." He stood up, reaching down, and grabbed my shirt to jerk me to my feet. He wrapped the end of the rope around his arm.

"But we'd better get moving. Cause your door's going to be farther down from here. And best for both of us if we find it before I get too fucking hungry." He gestured back toward the way out of the jumbled maze of shelves, mockingly polite. "After you, amigo."





Chapter 13




Like a bitter parody of the exploring I'd done with my Niko, a million years ago, we kept moving. I led, Niko following behind holding the rope wound around my neck. He'd cut the duct tape from my ankles so I could walk, but tied a blindfold made from a damp shirt tight around my face. "Little handicap," he said, "case you decide to wander off." I cringed as he clapped me playfully on the back. "Don't worry, bud. If you're good, I'll tell you when you're about to walk into a pit."

We searched. At intersections he'd describe each hallway, and casually discuss which way to go, as if we were equals. As if he hadn't threatened to kill me and worse. Other than a preference for moving toward anything weird or different, he seemed content to let me choose the direction. He marked the wall, tracing our path with fastidious care---"If we're doing it on this side, they're doing it on theirs, too"---and on the whole seemed downright cheerful. For a while he whistled something I finally placed as the theme to one of our favorite shows. Just the second bar, over and over again.

Like he'd forgotten the rest.

From his descriptions, I gathered we were passing through a maze of identical drab halls. The carpet underfoot was sometimes dry, sometimes thick with something that felt like dead mulch and made me stumble, and often slick with slime and mold. We must have been only just above the water table, if such a concept made sense down here. Probably it didn't. Sometimes we'd go up dry stairs to a soaked hall at the top, or along a downward slant that went from squelchy to dusty. We were near water, anyway, moving through histories of past inundation. Niko described walls streaked with damage from it, paint browned and peeling. Once he found some mushrooms growing from a split baseboard, and stopped to eat them. I could hear him chewing, a slimy sound. The smell as they mixed with his saliva was of pond scum and rotting dirt. He offered me one, but I declined, and he seemed unsurprised. He said they'd keep you alive but weren't especially satisfying. I tried not to hear menace in that.

There were few side rooms here, but he'd open the door to each we passed and check it. Bedroom-sized, he told me, all empty except for a small drain in the center of each floor.

It was hard to keep my balance, blindfolded and with arms bound behind me, and I stumbled a lot. The adrenaline from earlier had worn off, leaving behind a dozen throbbing aches and a deep exhaustion. How long had I been down here? I couldn't come up with a number, but my body knew the answer. Too long.

At the next intersection I tripped on a rough patch of carpet and collapsed, smacking my chin against the ground. It hurt, and I started crying. Sobbing, actually. I'd never felt more useless, pathetic. Niko told me to shut up, and I tried to pull myself together. He sighed, and suggested we take a rest. Sniffling, I agreed.

He sat me up against a wall. I clenched and unclenched my tingling hands; from the elbows down everything was numb. After a while the tears stopped.

I wanted to sleep but couldn't bear waking back up to this. I wanted him to untie me, unwind the rope from my neck, let me go. I wanted to get away from him, or better yet for none of this to ever have happened at all. I wanted to be dreaming of something other than hallways, and him.

I could have none of these things. But he hadn't gagged me. I could still talk. And maybe talking together, like we'd done so much, I could find a way to reach him.

So I asked him about the things he'd seen, and he told me.

He spoke of rooms where the carpet was worn, could be ripped up to reveal floorboards underneath. He spoke of ripping up those floorboards to find more floorboards, of excavating down ten feet with no sign the boards ever stopped. He spoke of corridors whose floors and ceilings began to steepen in either direction, rising up to the vertical, gigantic carpeted wheels serving no rational purpose.

He spoke of more connection points between paired dimensions, useless to him since he couldn't find his way to the surface of any---and all _tangled_ down there, he said again. The connections always had some kind of airtight seal. Garages with electric doors on either side; lobbies with revolving entryways; a shower, but vertically stretched, thirty feet of bathroom tile with frosted glass doors at the top and bottom, and climbing its steel fixtures, faucets and knobs sticking out at random from the walls, climbing it all the way to the top in absolute darkness. Because that was another universal feature of the connections, apparently. Your light, whatever its origin, would go out in the space between, like my flashlight in the fridge. He'd taken a burning two-by-four into one and as soon as the door shut behind him the flames simply stopped, not even glowing embers left behind.

Sometimes there were furnished rooms, he said, that you could almost imagine were part of a regular house. Out the door you could pretend there was a kitchen, maybe, with bacon frying and morning light slanting through the window, or a porch with a cool breeze. As long as you stayed put it was almost like being home. He said these rooms, by far, were the most dangerous of all.

He spoke of catwalks over voids, of ladder bridges over Niagras of scalding water, of a maze of closet the size of a city block, endless cramped turns ducking under dusty coat hangers. He spoke of vast caves made entirely of stairs: walls, floor and ceiling expanding and contracting in carpeted, ninety-degree edges. More than a decade later, the first time I saw a blocky cavern descending into shadow in _Minecraft_, I had to shut the game down, right then, turn on the lights, walk away. It looked exactly how I'd imagined Niko's stair-edged pits.

Finally, he trailed off, and we steeped together for a while in the thick, unbroken quiet. I was trying to think what I could say to keep him talking, but he broke the silence first.

"You would have gone wild for some of that shit, man. Wish you could have been there." His voice was wistful. "All our crazy, stupid theories. We were wrong about everything. But it was more fun being wrong together."

I licked my lips. Maybe this was my chance.

"Yeah. Hell yeah," I started. "Jesus, man, I can't imagine what it's been like for you." _Isn't the phrase "I can only imagine?"_ some part of my brain whispered. I shook it off. "I mean, I don't know what I'd have done, if it were me. Alone down here." I took a breath, extemporizing. "You've... done things to survive, and I mean who could blame you? Who's to say when push comes to shove what's right or wrong when survival's at stake?"

He didn't make a sound, and I couldn't see his face through the blindfold. But I sensed a tide shifting. I'd said something wrong. My chance was slipping away.

"_You don't have to do this to me._" I hadn't meant to say it and not with such pitiful desperation, but now I couldn't help myself, couldn't stop babbling. "We're friends. You're my friend. We're only going to survive by working together. You don't have to keep me tied up like this. I want the same thing you want. To get out, get the fuck out of here---"

"Friends." he interrupted, voice dangerously quiet. "Is that what we were? Back in the day?"

My chest was tight. "Weren't we?"

I heard a scratching sound. A dog itching itself. I couldn't see but had a clear image: he was scratching the hair behind his ear, head tilted, half-turned down. Something he always did right before explaining something he didn't think he should have to explain.

"I've had a lot of time to think, Ry." His voice was still calm. "About our _friendship_. About _us_." I jerked: he'd rested his fist on the top of my shoe. "Why we ended up down here."

I was losing him, or had already lost him, but I didn't know how or why or what I could say to reverse it. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," he said, lifting the fist and letting it fall back on my sneaker. "I think maybe there was more going on than I really appreciated at the time. For. Example." He punctuated each word with a harder bap on my foot. "We only found this place because of you. Remember? Because you found it, underneath your bed."

"Okay," I said, "but---"

"And _that_ only happened," he said, hitting my foot harder, "because we were both living in that house. And why was I in that house, friend? Why did I end up moving in?"

"You just said it. We were friends." But something ugly was burrowing up. I shoved it down. "I mean maybe it's my fault you were there, sure, but I didn't mean to... I mean I couldn't have known... you needed a room, and so---"

"I needed a room, and you wanted to help me out. Is that it?" This time he punched my foot, hard: it ached through the shoe. "Why me, Ryan? _Why. Specifically. Me._"

"We were friends," I said again, like a mantra that could save us. I was cringing back, eyes clenched shut behind the blindfold.

"That's not it," he said, but then I sensed him stiffen, twist his head away. He switched on the flashlight and dim light filtered through the blindfold. He seemed to be pointing it down the hallway, back the way we had come.

"What is it?"

"Shut up. Did you hear anything?"

I shook my head, distant relief mingling with fresher fear. "No."

Silence. It seemed to expand in my head, like those disposable earplugs, eating up all the empty space.

Finally he turned back toward me. "I think something's following us."

Some_thing_. Not someone. Oh. "Like what?"

"You know about the other versions of us down here." He snickered. "More than you'd like to. The doubles, and their doubles from the other houses, and so on. They're us, more or less exactly. Which is why we get that sick feeling when they're close. And because they're us exactly, it makes them easy to take out. Don't have to learn their weaknesses, because fuck, you already know them." He paused for a moment. "But there's... other ones."

I wasn't sure I wanted to prod, but found myself doing it anyway. "Other ones?"

He shook his head. "Ever see someone watching you down here? Like at the edge of your light?"

"No," I said, hair rising. "I mean... I don't think so."

"If you get closer, you can see they look like us, too. Always a Niko or an Orion. On the outside, anyway." The pattern of light shifted as he swung it down each of the other hallways, then back to the first again. "When you get close to a double of yourself, you can feel it. Right? Feels wrong, somehow. Bad. Something to do with the synchronicity, I think, the risk. If the two of you see each other get out of sync, if you understand you've broken it... bad news, and your body senses it. That danger.

"But. These other things. You get close to one of them, even if it looks like you, you don't feel anything at all. And that somehow makes it so much worse." He spat. "Because it means the Mimickers aren't human. They look like us, but they're not, not really. They're something else."

"You named them the fucking Mimickers?" I was horrified. "Thanks. Not creepy at all."

He laughed a genuine laugh, then cut it short, like he was upset with himself. Like I was pulling something over on him. "They _are_ creepy, dumbshit. They just stand there. They don't usually come too close, but if you walk up to them, they don't move away. They don't move at all. They watch you." He sniffed. "I mean they move their eyes, you know. To track you. Their heads. They breathe." He unscrewed the water bottle and took a swig. "But they don't respond to anything you do. _Anything._"

He paused, as if to let that sink in. Or as if remembering something.

"And if you walk off," he continued, "they'll follow you. At a distance. But if you stay in one place for too long, sometimes. Sometimes. They kind of creep up on you. Slow. Edge a tiny bit forward every now and then. Like they're eager, but also real, real patient. I woke up one time and two of them, two Nikos, were bent over me. Standing there for fuck knows how long while I slept. Staring. Mona Lisa smiles."

He shrugged. "If you sprint for a while, take some twists and turns, you can shake them. Creepy, yeah, but not a problem."

_Oh well that's fine then._ "What are they?"

"No idea." He laughed that hollow bark-laugh again. "Maybe echoes, or waves, or something. Waves and particles. Superimpositions. This whole place, Downstairs, it's like some kind of huge multiplier. You've figured that out, right? At least that much? It multiplies. Dimensions, people. Rooms. Ideas. Emotions. Some kind of chain reaction that got started somehow, sometime. There's a spring down here," and he was almost chanting now, murmuring, his voice gone strange, "clear waters at the source. Deep. All the water comes from there. Very, very deep. It splits, and splits, and splits again, and keeps splitting. Thousands of times. Millions. And each stream is as big as the one it's splitting from, and they shouldn't all fit but they do, and it's wrong, it can't fit in your head, it's too big _it's too big..._"

He seemed to catch himself, stiffened.

"But the Mimickers," he said, in control again. "They do it too, sometimes. There'll be two of them, moving almost in sync. Or four. I think if two bump into each other, they sort of stick together, cluster up. And if those two meet others, they all join up, like a fucking molecule. Snarled in bigger and bigger tangles." He was watching me now, I guessed; I got the sense he was smirking, enjoying the effect the story was having on me. "One time I had to walk through a whole room full of them. All just standing there, packed shoulder to shoulder as I shoved my way through. They weren't doing anything. Just looking. Looking at me."

I turned my head nervously in the direction of the hallway I couldn't see. "And you think there's one back there now?"

"Oh, I know there is," he said. "It's standing right there, watching you."

I jolted back, lost my balance, and topped over, kicking back with my feet and scrambling to right myself. My skin was crawling and all I wanted was to get farther away, except I couldn't see it, couldn't see anything, and _what if a second one is coming up behind me---_

But Niko was laughing now, big belly laughs, and it slowly dawned on me through my terror what that probably meant.

"You fucking pussy." He climbed to his feet, grunting. "Dumb of me. If you'd wet your pants I'd have to smell it the rest of the way."

I awkwardly struggled upright, stood, furious. He made no move to help.

But I knew him too well. He might have been bluffing at the end, but only to cover for being legitimately scared. He _had_ heard something down the hall, or thought he had. And he hadn't been teasing when he'd started talking.

At least some of that had been true.

He tugged on the rope around my neck. "Storytime's over, bitch. Get moving."


#


Walking blind into the unknown isn't fun, and gets worse when you're freshly terrified of it. I kept expecting now to walk into a body, someone standing in my way, fleshy and warm and inhuman. Staring. But I didn't. To my captor's credit, he never let me walk into a wall (or a pit), although he was sometimes rough with jerks to the rope around my neck to correct me.

But I was reaching the limits of my endurance. My collapse by the nightlight felt like eons ago, and maybe I'd only slept for an hour or two there, anyway. Waves of emotion had washed through me since then, each one leaving its own high-water mark. I stumbled even over level ground. I was barely awake.

Niko finally noticed, and agreed we could stop for "a sleep." He let me lie down, but kept my head covered and hands tied. It was better than nothing.

It's a testament to the depth of my exhaustion that I fell asleep within moments. This time, I didn't dream.

I blinked awake some time later, not quite sure what had woken me. Niko breathed quietly, a few feet away. I got the sense he was sitting up against the wall, legs folded up, and I was lying at his feet in the center of the hall. It was dark. He must have turned the flashlight off, not that I'd be able to see much anyway with a t-shirt tied around my face.

I wondered if I could, very slowly and quietly, wriggle away. Like a worm out of a tackle box.

He reached out and nudged me with his foot. "Don't even think about it, bitch." But the nudge was gentle, and his voice tired.

We stayed there for a long moment, listening to each other breathe.

Finally, he exhaled, loud, frustrated. "You think I want this?" He sounded desperate. Near tears. "I don't. Any of it. Scaring you like this. I'm not a monster, man, I don't get off on it. I'm doing what I have to. You don't get that, I know, but you haven't been down here long enough. Nowhere near long enough."

I stayed quiet, afraid to say something that might make him angry again.

He sighed. "I don't always kill you, either. Or at least not right away. Sometimes, first. For old times' sake, you know. I fuck you."

The word _fuck_ stung me.

He leaned forward, holding his head a foot above mine. His breath tickled the fabric at my ear. "You do remember, don't you? The time we did it?" He sounded concerned. "That night, after I tried to kill myself?"

Sometimes when a person is stung their body overreacts. They swell up, maybe so much their eyes are forced shut. It's called anaphylaxis. Unprotected, in the Greek. But the point is it's not the sting that's doing it to you, not really. It's your own body, blinding you and destroying itself in a misguided attempt to keep you safe.

"Yes," I whispered.

"That was maybe the closest I ever felt to anyone." His voice was calm, bland, like recounting a decent lunch he'd had. "I loved you so much. Not in that way, you know. Not the way you wanted me to. But I figured what the fuck. You saved me. No, not just that." His finger brushed my cheek through the fabric and I flinched. "You _needed_ me. I was _everything_ to you. That felt so fucking good."

I was trying to stay motionless. I remembered a safety video they'd made us watch at Yellowstone. _If you're on the ground and a bear attacks you, curl into a ball and play dead. Don't fight back. The bear will win._

I couldn't open my eyes, couldn't breathe. Maybe it was the anaphylaxis. Something somewhere was terrifying. Doppelgangers lurking in basement hallways. A camper in a tent, terrified by his own snores.

_The bear will win._

His hand moved over the shirt wrapped around my head, not quite touching it, not quite pulling away. "I want to get that feeling back sometimes, you know? It's so fucking lonely here. You can't blame me." He laughed, so loud and close to my face I cringed. "I mean. Don't get me wrong. I'd prefer a girl but there aren't any down here. Just us. Only us."

His fingers outlined my face. "Anyway. Doesn't work. Never works. Never the same with you." He breathed out through his nostrils and it tickled the fabric by my cheek. "I can't trust you. Any of these versions of you. Ry, Ryan, Orion. You seem different but you're all the same. Everything you ever said or did after that. Was bullshit. None of you gave a shit about me, did you? What I needed. Who I was. You just wanted it to happen again.

"And the next time I tried to off myself, that's the only reason you stopped me, isn't it?" He rapped his knuckles on my forehead, through the shirt. "Isn't it, bitch."

"No." It was so soft, I'm not even sure he heard me.

I could feel him shrug. "Anyway, that's why I kill you, after. Case you were wondering."

He sat back up, wincing. "But sorry, man, not tonight. Got a headache." He stood, kicked me in the side. "Come on. Better keep moving. We're close. I can feel it."





Chapter 14




Before long the floor began to change in frequent, abrupt transitions. First it went glossy-smooth, then to shag, then to changing patterns and textures of creaking wood, tile, and carpet. I stumbled more and more over bumps and irregularities, as if the floor was crumpling, bunching up as we neared some pressure point.

Niko opened every door we passed now. At the third one after we slowed down, he sucked in a sharp breath.

"Definitely on the right track. You're gonna need eyes for this, kiddo." He pulled my blindfold free.

I blinked in the sudden glare from his light. He stood between me and the open doorway at the end of the hall. It was dark inside, though I could see something piled up jumbled in the gloom behind him. Bricks?

"Take a look," he said with a grin. "I'll shine the light. But don't lean too far in. I wouldn't bet your life on my grip on the rope."

Wondering what he meant, I shuffled to the doorframe. He turned and shined the light past me, and that's when the vertigo hit.

The door opened onto nothing. Past the frame, the floor dropped away into blackness. The flashlight only went so far, of course, so I shouldn't have been able to tell how far down the drop-off went.

Except I could.

Far, far below us were tiny clusters of lights. Irregularly spaced, but stretching out in all directions. Maybe miles down. It was like the view out the window of a red-eye, flying over suburbia at night.

That wasn't what gave me the vertigo.

Curving down from the base of the doorway was a complex, multi-colored structure I couldn't at first identify. My impression of bricks was wrong, I realized. They were books. A mounded pathway of them: a ribbon of books and long flat pieces of wood, jumbled up like after an earthquake, curving down and away towards a point maybe sixty feet below and another sixty from the door. The chaos converged there into a tall rectangular object, where the sheets of wood became flat and level, interspersed with neat rows of books.

A bookcase. I blinked. It sat on a long narrow platform covered in junk. It was as if the bookcase had exploded, but only in one direction, toward us: books and shelves multiplying and propagating outward and upward in an ever-widening wave of fractal repetition, connecting the bookcase to our hallway with a web of itselfness.

"It's a Confusion," Niko said with a satisfied grin. "Means we're real close now."

"A what?" I backed away from the horrifying drop-off.

"What I call them." He shrugged. "Most of Downstairs tends to follow normal architectural rules. Walls, floor, ceiling, measurements more or less what you'd expect. Bedroom objects in bedrooms." He played his light along the path of books, embossed titles and snatches of cover art bouncing it back. "But close to a connection point, things get jumbled up. Like it's harder to maintain the semblance of order, for some reason."

I thought of our fridge, in a kitchen with a pool that had a door at the bottom.

"This one," he added, frowning down, "is pretty fucking weird, though."

Still struggling with vertigo (tipping forward, arms bound, unable to stop myself as I plummeted past that cloud of books and tumbled into blackness) I followed his gaze. The stream of book-stuff converged at what I'd at first seen as a narrow strip of ground some way below and in front of us, itself suspended over that awful drop. But as I focused on the strip of ground, I realized it wasn't a flat surface, but something more complex: a sort of huge tube or pipe, maybe thirty feet thick, stretching away in both directions. It made slow, lazy curves as it went, like an immense statue of a snake slithering through grass. You could walk flat along the top of the snake's back in either direction, assuming you could get down there in the first place. Its endpoints, if any, were lost in darkness.

And it got weirder.

The tube appeared to be made of the same scuffed, dusty hardwood floor tiles as my bedroom. A profusion of tatty throw rugs clung flat to its surface even on the curving sides, like stickers on a tipped-over water bottle. And a motley collection of bedroom furniture was scattered all around it, also attached in some gravity-defying way to the curved surface. No matter the angle, the furniture rose from the hardwood tube as if down was towards its center. A dresser canted at a forty-five degree angle; the top of a bookshelf poked up around the edge of the curve, like peering over the horizon of a tiny planet. So yeah, picture looking down at a giant snake that had somehow coated itself in superglue and slithered through a secondhand furniture store, encrusting itself with beds, nightstands, dressers, floor lamps (some lit), bookshelves, bureaus, trashcans, and laundry hampers. Escher's own frat house. And all suspended over a miles-high drop down to god knows where, connected to us via an exploded pathway of library.

"Holy shit," I said.

He laughed. "Damn straight. Okay then. Who wants to go first?"


#


It was me. Surprise. Niko realized he'd have to untie my hands for me to climb down, and if he went first, there'd be nothing to stop me running off back the way we'd come. I'd be running in the wrong direction, away from the supposed portal back to my own side, but I felt like that might be preferable to being the prisoner of a hungry psychopath who looked like a strung-out version of my dead best friend.

Of course, if I went first there'd be nothing to stop me running off along the impossible bedroom-tube, either. Except I'd have exactly two directions to choose from and Niko would have a birds-eye view on which one I picked. Academic, anyway: he retied the rope around my ankle, let out enough slack for me to get down, and wound the other end around the doorknob of the last room back, a few paces up the hall.

"This probably won't hold your weight," he added, tugging the rope experimentally. "Not for long anyway. But if I brace myself and take some of the load, it should be enough."

He explained the plan while sliding fresh batteries into a headlamp and tightening it onto my head: I would climb down the ribbon of books and shelving while he and the doorknob stood ready to catch me if I fell. When I got to the top of the tube-path---the back of the snake---he'd retie the rope to himself, and follow me down while I braced from below. He reminded me that since we'd be tied together, catching him if he fell would be in our mutual interest.

He also mentioned, quite casually, that he had no plans to kill me. Our deal held. Once I got him to the surface, he'd vanish and I'd never see him again. If I messed with him, though---tried to untie my rope while down there and run off, or got funny ideas about yanking it---he would hunt me down. He told me of his expertise at hunting me down---me, personally. He'd done it dozens of times. He'd know which way I'd choose at intersections. Where I'd try to hide.

And once he found me, he'd hurt me. He'd spend a long time hurting me.

He was an expert at that too, he said.

As if to illustrate this point he pulled out a camping knife with a long, serrated blade and flipped it open: the kind you'd use to saw through small deadwood to make tinder. We'd looked at one just like it at the sporting goods store, my Niko and I, but decided not to get it. After admiring it for a moment, he closed it and attached it to his belt. I wondered if this was less a threat than insurance against being tied together above a gut-clenching drop. Maybe some of each.

He watched me watching the knife, with cut-glass intensity.

"Time to go," he said.

I clutched the doorjamb, trying not to stare down at the twinkling lights far below. Trying to think of some way to get out of this.

"What do you think's down there?" I asked, buying time.

He didn't look up, focused on a knot. "I think we're above the City. With all the houses, like I told you. From down there you sometimes see clusters of lights, way up above. This must be one of them."

He pulled the cinch tight. "Found a couple smashed-up Ryans and Nikos down there, too. Never understood what happened to them, before. Try to be careful, buddy."

He got to his feet, wincing and putting a hand momentarily to his temples. "Okay, quit stalling. Get moving."

"Hang on." Fear sweated out of me. "We don't even know if this book path thing will hold my weight. Or if this portal you're looking for is even down there."

"It's down there." He set his grip on the rope. "I'm sure of that. But as for your first concern..."

He shrugged, then shoved me, hard.

I flailed, but my body was already past the edge of the door, my hands too slow to grab the frame, world tilting at a sickening angle. My sneaker tried to glue itself to the carpet of the hall but my center of mass was too far out, way too far. My head dropped below my feet and I opened my mouth to scream as I began to fall into nothingness.


#


With a muffled _whump_, I crashed into the mountain of books. It would have been like falling onto a lumpy, moss-covered slope, except for the edges of shelves biting into my back. For a second I slowed, a faint cloud of dust and wood pulp rising around me, and then I started to slide.

With a whimper I grabbed for a handhold and ripped off the cover of a Stephen King paperback. I was picking up speed, scraping and slipping down a slope that was murderously steep, dislodging books that slid away and tumbled down into nothingness. Frantic, I jammed my hands into gaps between them, dug in my left foot. My right was dangling out into the void, but my other three limbs, thank god, were enough to stop me. I gasped, inhaling book dust, heart pounding, and wondered idly if Borges had ever had this particular nightmare.

From somewhere above, Niko laughed. "See!" he called down. "Speculate, theorize all you want. Only way to get answers is to dive in head first. Or butt first, in your case." He let out some slack in the rope. "Now untwist your panties and get climbing."

I wriggled away from the unthinkable drop-off, back toward the flatter middle of the book-path. I was close enough to get a good look now, and recognized a lot of titles. Sci-fi paperbacks, biology textbooks, graphic novels, biographies of composers. Some of them were books from my own bookshelf, and the rest would have been plausible to find there. Tens of thousands of them. They seemed to be stuck together with something like glue: strong enough for the slope to keep its basic shape, but not strong enough to feel safe trusting your grip to.

I looked back up. There was no wall around the hall we'd come through to get here. It stretched back into empty space beyond the limits of my light, wreathed in billowing pink insulation. Huge lumps swelled from the sides, also swaddled in pink: presumably the last few rooms we'd passed. It looked like a long pink tongue, thick with diseased bumps, that we'd wriggled to the end of and crawled out the tip.

Shuddering, I looked down along the path of books, scouting my route to the relative safety of the impossible bedroom's curving surface. The steep slope flattened as the path dropped and converged to bookcase. I decided facing the books and right-side up was the safest position to start, like descending an especially literate climbing wall. When the thing became more horizontal, I'd have to twist around and crawl, then drop the last few feet to the top of the tube.

It was awkward and slow going, in part because I took significantly more care than I strictly needed. I did not want to trust my life to that murderous asshole and a fucking doorknob, or to the integrity of a yellowing Ursula Le Guin paperback.

One handhold and foothold at a time (and ignoring Niko's frequent insults and urgings to hurry the fuck up) I finally made it to the bookcase proper, which stood innocently on the curving top of the tube. The books and shelves converged into order as if by magic, like every few inches down were another frame of an explosion played in reverse.

I clambered down the last few shelves and stepped onto the dusty wooden floor, unclenching hands rubbed raw and scraped with paper cuts. While nice to be off the ribbon of books, this felt only slightly less precarious. The very top of the huge tube was level enough, but the edges curved down on both sides with alarming speed. The zone where I felt comfortable standing was a rounded summit only five or six feet wide; after that, the slope got steeper and steeper.

Looking down the length of the tube, the flat zone of safety stretched forward like a sinuous path, but in no way a clear one. To navigate it, you'd have to clamber over beds, edge vertiginously around angled desks. It was as if all the furniture was bolted to that cylindrical floor. Turning toward the sickening curve of the drop-off and seeing the tops of bedroom junk poking up from beyond the horizon a few feet away, I again couldn't shake the sense I was on a tiny planet furnished out of the IKEA catalogue and the dregs of garage sales, albeit one stretched from a sphere into an infinitely long cylinder.

Experimentally, I took a few steps curveward, wondering if gravity somehow worked differently here; but it didn't seem to, at least not for me. The angle felt steep and dangerous. My own "down" was still toward the twinkling lights miles below. Whether the furniture really was bolted to the floor or just obeying its own special rules would have to remain a mystery.

I finally remembered Niko, who'd stopped berating me some time ago, and glanced up to see what he was doing. He wasn't there. I frowned. The rope tied to my ankle curved up to the lip of the hall, tracing the path of the books, and vanished inside. I was so far below the hallway now I could only see a few feet of walls and ceiling through its open door. The corridor still seemed lit by the refracted glow of a flashlight, moving around somewhere back there, so I figured he hadn't gone far. Maybe he was untying the rope from the doorknob and tying it to himself, so he could follow me down. But he'd been at it a while.

_Shit._ This was an opportunity, and I was squandering it. I glanced down at the rope tied to my ankle, but there were multiple knots, some kind of Navy-ass shit, pulled so tight my foot was losing circulation. Sharp. I needed something sharp. I cast around desperately. A few paces from me was a nightstand with drawers, and I yanked one open, hoping for---I don't know. Something. Anything. But there was only junk inside: a few dusty paperclips, a mechanical pencil with a missing eraser. A single red prize ticket from a skeeball alley.

I stared at it, despair creeping over me.

Light played across my face. I started and looked up, guilty. Niko was back, peering down distractedly from the hanging doorway, the rope now tied around his waist. He didn't seem to notice what I was doing. He seemed on edge.

"I think there's one of those fucking Mimickers up here," he said. "Way, way back in the hall. At the edge of my light. Doesn't matter. Not going back that way, are we? I'm coming down. Find something to brace yourself on. Brace good and tight," he added, "because if I fall and you're not secure, you're coming with me, baby."

Maybe that would be preferable, the best fate for all concerned.

But maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he really wasn't planning to kill me. Maybe there was a door up ahead for my key. A way back.

_Without Niko?_

My survival instinct shoved the thought away, like a drowner pushing their rescuer down into the choking depths, desperate to keep their own head above water.

I looked for a way to brace myself, and that's when I discovered the furniture _was_ bolted to the floor. Whether on the top of the curve or sticking horizontally out of its side, it was all attached with thick steel bolts at every contact point to the ground, even the plastic trash cans. None of it budged an inch even when I put my whole back into trying to move it.

"Bracing shouldn't be a problem,"
I shouted up, but there was no response. I figured he hadn't heard---the empty space around us swallowed up sound, creating a surreal distance to everything, like someone had turned down the volume on reality---but when I looked up to shout, Niko was staring back down the hallway behind him again.

"I think it got closer." He glanced down at me for a moment, face unreadable, then looked back down the hall. "While I wasn't looking. Fucking creepy. In fact..." He trailed off, staring at something I couldn't see. My vantage point only showed a couple feet of ceiling.

"What?" My stomach churned, as if in warning.

He didn't look away from whatever he was staring at.

"It's got something in its hand," he said, quite calmly.

Nausea swept through me, chemical fear. Hairs prickled all over my body.

"It's coming toward me, Ry." He was still calm, still staring down the hall. "I'm starting down in twenty seconds. Tie the rope around something. Fast."

Maybe he was messing with me again. Trying to put the fear of god in me so I'd hurry it up.

Or maybe he wasn't. I knew what his calm tone meant. What he hid behind it. He was fucking terrified.

"I've never seen one move like this," he said, voice still calm. "It's running down the hall towards me, now. Ryan. Hurry."

Something inside me screamed. _He's not lying and something is coming and there's nowhere to run and maybe I should let it get him but I'm tied to him I'm fucking tied---_

I ripped my gaze from the floating hall and cast frantically around the narrow path of safety for something secure, anything heavy. There: a bulky bed with a bookcase headboard filled with knick-knacks. I scrambled underneath it, over on top of it, then scrambled underneath the bed and back over the top, pulling the rope tied to my ankle behind.

"Hurry up," he shouted from above, still staring down the hall, and then _I could hear it_. Footsteps, beating against the carpet. Something running down the hallway, running flat out. A manic run. Fast. As fast as it could.

"Ready," I shouted up, not sure which side to root for, not sure of anything but the pulse hammering in my ears.

He nodded once, then pulled his gaze away and swung out over the edge, flipping around to face the book-slope, feet feeling for purchase while he clutched the end of the carpet. Focusing on his hands, not glancing down the hall again, he started down. His descent was much quicker than mine, efficient and smooth. But still not fast enough.

It was coming for him. The footsteps thudded the hall above, creaked loose floorboards. They were close.

"Shit," he said. "Shit shit shit." He was still close to the doorway. Too close.

_What is it what does it want why is it running what does it have in its..._

With shocking suddenness a hand wrapped itself around the doorframe. It gripped it tight as a body appeared behind it, skidding on the carpet, coming to a halt on the edge of the drop-off. I shivered as I saw it, every part of me shocked into motion like I'd leapt into an ice-cold stream. I wanted to scream but couldn't. My gaze was fixed on the thing in the doorway.

And then I recognized its face.

It was Niko. Young again.

_My Niko?_

He raised his hand and shot his older clone with my gun.

But even as he did something _changed_ around us. The tube rippled beneath my feet, writhing, flexing. Far below the lights of the city seemed to drop, expand; new lights winked on in the emptiness between them.

Downstairs was growing larger.

I looked back up. The bullet had gone wide as both Nikos had grabbed for support in the sudden groaning sway. But now younger Niko was lifting the gun again while Elder scrabbled for handholds of musty paper (_and it can't be my gun_, I thought distantly, _no more bullets_) and younger Niko changed his aim, steadied himself; but Elder snarled, leapt back up four feet of books in a frantic bound, and wrapped his arms around his double's lower legs, hanging his whole weight on them; and younger Niko's knees buckled and he tumbled forward onto the slope with a cry.

Or maybe it was me who cried out, I wasn't sure, and I couldn't breathe, because both Nikos were snarling, scrambling for purchase on each other, on the gun, on the precarious slope beneath them as they tumbled down it, ripped-off pages fluttering in their wake. They were seconds away from slipping off the side, from plunging into the void of empty space beneath us.

"Look out!" I shrieked, but young Niko had jammed his gun hand into a gap between two hardbacks, jerking both Nikos to a halt. The pillar of books shuddered with crumbling pulpy sounds, a hundred rips and tears; a dozen volumes shook free and fell. I felt the same crawling horror of watching a spider fight a scrabbling insect, vicious, instinctual. Elder Niko leapt a body length up the slope and grappled for his double's gun hand. The gun went off again with a muffled thump, swallowed up by the books and the void around us.

Elder Niko lifted his other arm high and elbowed his double hard in the gut, but was met with a savage kick; he grunted and started sliding again, grasping at slippery covers for purchase. Young Niko struggled to pull his gun arm free but all his weight hung from it now and the collapsing books had closed on it like a vise. Elder had grabbed his leg and was yanking on it; he kicked at the grasping hands, and as he did I remembered something vitally important.

"He's tied to me!" I screamed.

Elder laughed as Niko's eyes widened. "That's right, asshole," he shouted. "If I go, your boyfriend goes."

Niko bit his lip, recalculating, and pushed himself higher with a grunt, yanking his arm free. But as he did the gun caught on a dust jacket, and before he could grab it the weapon was sliding and scraping down the slope. Toward the other Niko, who lunged for it, laughing.

In a clear mental flash I saw what would happen: he'd grab it, he'd shoot young Niko between the eyes; his face would go slack and he'd fall off the edge into the void and vanish, and it wasn't that I loved him or couldn't survive without him but something else, a pure flash of righteous indignant anger rising up in me. After coming back for me, after _rescuing_ me, when he could and maybe should have left me behind, he didn't deserve to die like this.

Elder was stretched out precariously, hand only inches from the gun, and without thinking or planning I grabbed the rope trailing up to him and yanked it, with all the strength I had.

He let out a _whoof_ as his torso lurched back, all the air forced out of him, and balanced for a heartbeat at a crazy angle, only one foot touching the confusion of books. Then momentum pulled him backward, over the side, and he fell.

Everything happened very fast.

The gun tumbled off the uneven edge and dropped away into darkness.

Elder screamed in fury and grabbed for the edge. He caught the corner of a thick hardback but it pulled free from the others, and he fell, still holding it, arms and legs flailing, trailing rope behind him.

But dislodging the book had kicked off an avalanche. More and more books were slipping free now, tumbling into nothing like a sand castle balanced on the edge of a crumbling cliff. My Niko scrambled up the slope like an ant in a sandtrap. Losing ground.

All this happened faster than movement. Maybe my brain had sent signals to my muscles, but they hadn't arrived yet, or my body was too confused to interpret them.

Elder tumbled down, rope twisting behind him. He reached toward the cylinder, but it was too far away; he was going to fall past it. He stretched for a piece of furniture instead and collided with it, face scraping against the top of a sideways bureau; a spurt of blood exploded from his cheek even as he scrabbled to get a grip but he was moving too fast, and he kept falling.

Above me, my Niko cursed and dove off the collapsing tube of books as it gave way beneath him, and then he was falling too. Only he wasn't tied to anything.

I finally moved, lurched forward to do something, anything. But Elder had fallen out of my sight line around the curve, and his end of the rope tied to the bed I stood on snapped taut with a creak, wrapping tight to the cylinder's curve.

Young Niko plunged by on the edge of my vision in a rain of paperbacks, colliding with a piece of furniture and tumbling with it. Before I could think, before I could stop myself, I threw myself off the edge of the cylinder after him, arcing down into nothingness.





Chapter 15




I'd never skydived or bungee jumped before; I had no experience with free fall and barely any even with contact sports. My angle was wrong. I realized this as my foot left the wood of the cylinder, realized there was no way to correct my course. I'd shoved off at too steep an angle. I was going to fall beneath him.

Desperate, I reached my hand up, but he was one step ahead of me. He couldn't reach me, but grabbed for the rope trailing behind me, tied to my ankle. Then it went taut and I jerked to a stop, the rope around my leg yanking me back with a stab of pain and flipping me upside down. I swung in sickening arcs, head twisting from side to side trying to understand what was happening, but for a moment nothing made sense, my headlamp strobing through images I couldn't assemble into a coherent whole: a length of blue and white rope, a swinging body, a line of dusty floorboards. Frantic, I reached up and grabbed the rope, pulling myself more or less upright, swaying dizzyingly, face battered by the landslide of books only now starting to peter out.

I took a breath but it didn't help.

I dangled thirty feet below the cylinder, two ends of the same rope rising to curve up its top side towards the anchor of bed they were wrapped around, now out of sight. Beneath me, Elder Niko swung from his end of the rope. His side happened to have been longer and he'd therefore come to a rougher stop than me; he was gasping, momentum swinging him in sickening arcs over the void beneath us.

I looked up for younger Niko, and immediately regretted it.

He'd stopped his fall by grabbing hold of my rope, but he wasn't tied to it, and was far enough above me that the bottom side of the cylinder was within reach, upside-down furniture bolted to its surface. And before I could open my mouth to scream _No!_ he leapt for it.

He arced across empty space, smashing into another bookshelf, this one mostly upside-down, that I'm pretty sure was an IKEA Billy. He grabbed for a shelf but it pulled free, designed to resist only force pulling it down; books flew everywhere, but Niko's grip flashed to the solid side of the bookshelf and he jerked to a halt, clinging like a confused squirrel to the angled side of the bookcase.

The rope creaked uneasily. I looked down. Elder Niko was climbing his rope, hand over hand. Murder in his eyes.

I leapt up mine, for a second sure I'd be faster. I had a head start. I was twenty years younger.

But my life hadn't been given over to surviving down here, to stalking, to killing. And my slack coiled beneath me: a leash, tied to my ankle.

Elder reached the loop and hung his full weight on it.

I slipped four feet before my grip on the rope was firm enough to stop me, friction-burned hands screaming.

Below me, he laughed, and sprang up the rope like it was a ladder. My arm muscles were already aching. Before I could pull myself up more than a foot or two, his hand closed around my ankle.

I strained to pull away, kicking. I looked up. Younger Niko's gaze met mine; he clung to the slanting bookcase, skiwampus, casting around for a way to help, but there was nothing in reach. He couldn't help me.

I looked down and saw the same face, shriveled in a blink by decades of rage into something monstrous.

"We don't have to do this," I panted, still trying to shake my leg free from his cold grasp. "We can all go through, get to the surface. Then go our separate ways. Like you said."

"You fucking idiot." With the hand not gripping me he fumbled at his belt. "You thought after all this time down here I'd _forgive_ you? That we could be friends again like old times? No. You're going to die. And then I'll hunt that bitch down"---his eyes flashed up to his younger clone---"and kill him, again. First things first, though." And he reached up with the knife he'd unclipped from his belt, flipped it open, and sawed into my calf.

I screamed, trying to pull away, but his other hand gripped my leg tight, and I looked up through the pain and starred vision at my Niko's shocked, helpless, too-distant face, and below me his double laughed and kept sawing with terrible strength. In one fierce thrust he sawed through my jeans and into my skin, and drew the serrated blade back, cutting deeper, into flesh, into muscle.

"It's your fault," he grunted, and the strength drained from my hands as hot pain sliced through me.
"I went looking for you. You know that? How I got lost." My blood dribbled onto his face and he spat it away. "We had a fight. Don't remember. What about." He pulled the blade back and I screamed, trying to twist away, but he only gripped me more firmly. "But I remember hating you. I remember that. I remember hating you and deciding to go back anyway. If I hadn't, if I'd turned around, I would have felt the sun again." His breath was ragged. He shifted his grip on the knife. "But I went back. For you."
He sawed the blade deeper and I screamed and realized, then, that I couldn't escape this, couldn't escape him, that if I didn't die from falling or bleeding out or being left for dead the best I could hope for would be a life down here in the dark, like him, left to wander forever, trapped, helpless, lost. Fighting it was impossible. It was already done and settled, and had been from the moment we'd first set foot Downstairs, from the moment we saw the house, from the moment we'd first met.

"He won't forgive you, either." He grimaced up at his younger self through teeth stained red by my blood. "He just hasn't realized it yet."

"He's not you," I gasped, "he'll never be you." And because I couldn't make myself believe it I stomped down on his face as hard as I could.

He let out a _whoof_ of air and something crunched as a splatter of blood arced out into darkness. His eyes rolled up into his head and he went limp, and then he fell. In thirty feet he reached the end of the rope around his waist and it jerked him to a horrible stop, flailing his limbs like a scarecrow. He dangled there, spread-eagled, face up, over the void. Unmoving.

Somewhere above me Niko was whooping in victory, but I barely heard him through the blood thumping in my ears, the high-pitched scream of pain in my leg. Refocusing my eyes, I dragged them down. The knife was still embedded in my calf. As if from a great distance, I reached with one hand, gripping the rope tight with the other, and pulled it free in a queasy sucking motion. Blood dribbled down my pant leg, dripping off my foot. Numbness and pain rippled through me, and muscles spasmed in my arm, but there was something I had to do before any other concerns. Woozy, I pressed the knife to the second rope, and started to saw.

"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 seemed distant, swallowed up by 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. A dangerous unreality was taking hold, like this was a video game. A dream. I shook my head, fighting mental fog. Tried to feel the pain in my leg, to 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 ankle.

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, carefully, 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.

"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.

"It's all because of you," he muttered, eyelids fluttering closed. "You're where all the possibilities spring from. You started something, somehow." He blinked, coughed. "The flow. The troubles. This dream. This. Stream. Irrational." He swallowed, made the ghost of a laugh. "Three eight, three, eight three, eight three eight..."

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 feedback loop, like those gardens grown wild and tangled in places they never should have thrived, species not meant to root together kept alive through some misguided hope, some impossible force.

"I'm sorry," I said, gently pulling free of his grip and slipping the key 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... someone better than me to be your friend. 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, the 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.

The angle was awkward for throwing, and this time the missile went wide, plummeting down into darkness with its pages aflutter, like they wanted to take wing. But he'd 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 to saw.

"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.

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.






PART THREE

MANIFOLDWISE





...before I die I want to see 
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes, 
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be, 
Yet on brown fields there lies 
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies 
And in grey sea?

"On The Road To The Sea," Charlotte Mary Mew (1869-1928)











Chapter 16




I woke up from a dreamless sleep to face the unpleasant truth that we couldn't stay here forever.

Getting back on top of the cylinder had been like navigating an especially surreal and challenging climbing gym. From his perch on the bookshelf, Niko had 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, till gasping, he scrabbled up to the top of the tube. From there he could pull me up; all I had to do with my shredded muscles was keep hanging on, although that was hard enough. Once we'd made it,
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 at the foot of the bookshelf, whose fractal overspill had all collapsed and fallen into darkness, 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.

We kept to the level ground on either side of the trench, and 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, up close to him like that, 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 past us. 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 roof above flattened, the curves at its edge sharpening, until they 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 walking through a pipe suspended over empty space receded, and we felt once again embedded in earth.

There were no side doors, no other stairs up. There were no decisions to make. We just walked. Other than an occasional grunt or word of coordination, we didn't speak. 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. It had been there a long time, underneath everything we'd 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 chamber and ran out the trenches in the middle of each tunnel.

In the center of the room, under the water, was a stubby concrete pillar topped by a metal hatchway 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 became strangely hesitant, our momentum lost. 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 echoed off vaulted brick. 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 was inches 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 a few revolutions, 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 defeated their own evil Niko with exactly the same strategy and ended up here at precisely the same time as us?"

He shrugged. "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 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 was a climbing rope, the same kind we'd used with our Grip Monkeys. It stretched down in a taut line out of sight, towards the hidden wall of the room beneath us.

Niko reached into the hatch to give it a tug; it seemed taut. "Thirty-five meter rope," he said. "And the end's cut off, so it's got to be shorter than that. Looks like someone marked the way through." He pulled off his shirt and started emptying his pockets.

"What are you doing?" I asked, 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 ominous. Unknown. This was happening way too fast. "Wait. 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.

"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. The ground quivered, like a mountain turning over in its sleep, and the surface of the water pinched and jittered in sympathy. And just as this happened Niko reached up, eyes wide, and touched two fingers to my lips. Made a zipping motion across them. I was shocked into silence by it all: the sound, the absurdity of the gesture, his fingers on my lips. The fear on his face.

"Don't," he said, quiet. "Please."

We both took a breath.

"You have to trust me, Orion. Everything will work out for us. Everything. But you have to _trust me_, now, here, about this if nothing else."

The rumbling receded. The water smoothed out.

He took another breath, seemed to notice his fingers were still touching my lips, pulled them back. Stared at them.

And as his eyes flicked back to mine I saw something there I'd never seen, no matter how much I'd wanted to. Something hot and desperate, yearning, vulnerable. Something that rippled in the space between us, flickered and grew, a mass, almost a shape.

And I understood.

The finger, lying cold on the carpet inches from my eye, the whorled texture of his fingerprints.

_I'll hunt that bitch down, and kill him. Again._

How easily he'd found the trapdoor, led us straight here to the way back through. How sure he was about what I'd find on the other side.

And the way he'd fought for me. The way he'd been looking at me.

He wasn't my Niko.

The ground groaned again beneath us, more dangerous this time. A brick fell from somewhere above, made a splash loud enough to make us both flinch. But we didn't break eye contact.

"Don't say it," he breathed.

Synchronicity.

I felt like we were balanced on an impossibly heavy pivot, a mountain peak turned upside down. If we leaned too far in any direction...

Two soap bubbles, pressed together, floating in a vast empty void. Trembling.

Somehow we were closer than we'd been a moment before. The curves of his jaw, his cheek, were aches inside me, blood-memorized, bone-familiar.

The air around us held its breath. Where the water touched my knees, it thrummed.

His lips were too close to mine. It would be so easy. It would last forever, like dying winter sunlight slanting into a room through melting icicles, lighting it up, setting fire to the neurons that had always struggled to keep truths and fictions apart and burning them away forever, every universe fading away like stage lights until the spotlight of that kiss would be the only thing left. What I'd always wanted made real, at last.

"I want to," I breathed.

"Then do it." The need in his eyes was almost too bright to bear.

I shook my head. "Not that. I want to trust you."

He blinked. "Then do that." But I pulled back, biting my lip, and his brow creased with worry. "Can't you?"

I wanted to laugh. _Trust?_ Could we _trust_ each other? The question unraveled into a million strands, tendrils stretching back through everything that had happened down here, and everything that had happened before that. Trust. What a beautiful, fucked-up, irrational concept.

He kept his gaze locked on mine.

I tried to see him. Really see him. I willed the layers of muck and confusion between us to pull back, to clear away and reveal someone, at last, who I could understand. The Niko who forgave me. The Niko I'd hurt. The Nikos I'd saved, damned, slept with; the ones who needed me, who hated me, who wanted me dead. The one I'd tried so hard to find, looked everywhere for, down here, up there, inside us both and beyond possibility. Each of them were tales disguised as truths; worlds that I yearned to slip into like tailored gloves, sized just right; stories reassuring me that I finally understood what I deserved, good or bad, where I belonged and who I belonged to, and who belonged to me, where I didn't have to be alone in a dark bedroom any more with no one who loved me to tuck me in, too afraid to fall asleep.

But people don't wrap up like that into nice little cages, contained. We weren't each others' stories. He wasn't the Niko I wanted. None of them had been, even if this one thought maybe he could be, was as deluded as I'd been. We'd mistaken shadows for substance, all of us: chased them and failed, of course, to grab them, become shadows ourselves in failing.

But we weren't shadows. We were more than that. We deserved more.

Something swayed inside me, as if I'd let go of one handhold and gripped another, shifting my weight even though I wasn't sure the new grip would hold. But by then I'd already done it, already committed. And it held. It didn't let me fall.

"I'm going through." I took a deep breath. "But it's not because I trust you." He looked alarmed but I raised a hand. "It's okay. Let me finish. I don't deserve your trust, and maybe I don't know how to give it to anyone else. But if I have to start somewhere I should start with myself. And I think I can do this. I _trust_ I can. Okay? I made Tiger Shark in swim club and I can hold my breath for three minutes and I can make it. I can make it through. I can. But Niko, you can't come with me." Tears sprung like pinpricks to my eyes, but I blinked them back, fierce. "You _can't come with me_."

"Bullshit," he said, stepping forward, even though I could see he knew I was right, see it in how his faced creased with pain. "I belong with you. Your double, on the other side..." An ominous crack sounded from somewhere above us, but he pressed on. "He doesn't feel the same way about me. I don't _belong_ with him."

The ground dropped out from under us, like a plane hitting turbulence. Rumbles quivered in stone far below.

"Niko, stop," I said, afraid to look away, to even glance at the walls around us, as if they could read the truth in our eyes. "You can't come through. You know why you can't."

"I can live with pain," he said, reaching out for me; but I must have looked shocked, because his expression changed to placating alarm. "No, it's okay. The pain doesn't matter. It'd be worth it. You're worth it."

"I'm not." I shook my head, angry, never more certain of anything. "You think I could live with myself, putting you through pain like that each day?"

"Everything will be all right," he pleaded, ignoring me. "It'll be fine, it'll all be fine, just let me come through. Let me try. _Let me try._"

And I couldn't bear to see that need in his face, reflected back at last after all this time, and wondered if he'd seen it too, how sad and jagged and pathetic and painful it was, and how the way I'd hidden it for so long had only made it more of all those things, and I couldn't stand hurting him anymore, and then the words came that we should have said to each other long before, not that any words could fill the gaps inside us but these were the ones I had and they were better than nothing, so I said them: "I'm not the only one who can love you."

He stopped dead, face draining of color.

The surface of the water twitched, rippled. Waiting.

I took a long, ragged breath and realized what I'd said was true. And not just for him.

He broke our gaze. His eyes fell to the water beneath us like he'd dropped something, watched resigned as it sunk away for good, no longer trying to save it.

"Guess, from your perspective," he said carefully, "that should have been my line."

"Yeah, well." I waved my hand at the architecture around us. "Life's got a funny way of fucking everything up."

He laughed, sudden and loud, and even if things weren't right, even if the edge between us was jagged and always would be, it was good to hear that laugh again.

We breathed. It was settled.

"So," he said. "You'll swim through. Pass your other." He swallowed; I nodded. _Just my other. Not his._ "And then we'll each be where we should be." His face hardened into a mask as he said this, grim and colorless. Then he looked at me, the corner of his mouth twisting in pain but also a challenge, flinging some of the pain back: "You'll be fine without me, I guess. Yeah?"

It did hurt, like he knew it would. Well. At least we were saying truths to each other. Not quite the same as trust, but a good start.

I stripped down to my jeans, self-conscious, but Niko was spinning a theory about the identical set of clothes I'd find on the other side. If alter-me was swimming through too, he should have had this same thought, and we'd both have dry shirts and shoes waiting, and wasn't that cool?

I wasn't really processing this, still overwhelmed. Trust. Pairs of universes, pulling apart. Drowning, death. Dry clothes seemed like insubstantial details. I tied the glow stick to my belt loop, emptied my pockets of everything non-essential.

"Oh hey," he said as I did this, affecting it as a casual afterthought, "I want you to take something through for me." He pulled a plastic bag from his pocket, folded-up pages with something written on them inside. "Hold onto it for a while, okay? Just till you get back through."

"Sure." I took the bag. "I suppose I shouldn't read it until---?" A faint judder rippled through the ground; for an instant the water danced in interference patterns.

He looked pained. "Please, please don't." Glancing around, he took a deep breath. "Okay. You ready?"

I wasn't, so I stepped forward and hugged him, fierce as the roiling lump in my throat.

His bare skin, still damp, felt hot against my own. He held me tight, wet curls rubbing against my face. Heat passed between us, but it was the least of what had.

We'd loved each other, at times. Even if the people we'd loved were mostly in our heads.

It was nice, but his curls were tickling my nose, and I pulled back before I meant to, reflecting his surprise at this with embarrassment. For a second it looked like he thought I was going to kiss him, and then I thought maybe he was thinking of kissing me, and we both stood uncertain for a second or two before dropping arms and stepping back.

Awkward. But sort of perfect for the mismatched shape of us, which was, if nothing else, our own.

"Are you going to be okay?" he asked, without spite this time.

I didn't know how to answer, because despite these tidy revelations, the thought of never seeing him again still stabbed at something deep inside me, and maybe always would; and the idea that anyone in this or any world would ever know me as well as he did seemed impossible. But I nodded. Eventually, maybe, it would be true.

"How about you?"

He grinned. "I don't plan to spend a couple decades sulking down here like that asshole, if that's what you mean." He looked up at the arched roof above us, scanning the bricks like there might be constellations in them. "I've never known what I wanted, man. Just what everybody else wants me to want. I'm sorry I mixed you up in all that." He shrugged. "Guess I should figure that out, yeah? Spend some time with myself. Maybe more solo camping, you know? Wandering in the wilderness. Worked for Jesus."

"Sure," I said. "You see that wolf again up there, man... you fucking wreck it."

We grinned at each other, one last time, or maybe for the first time, depending on how you looked at it: and then I turned away, toward the submerged portal, the way out, the way home. I stared down at it.

The thought of swimming into that hole without knowing the way to the other side stabbed a different part of me, the one concerned with oxygen and continued existence. I pushed the fear down but it kept manufacturing images for me: jeans snagging on hidden nails that held me back while I flailed uselessly; huge dead fish swimming the flooded halls with flaking gray skin, bulging eyes growing larger and larger as they closed on me. I imagined drowning. Breathing water instead of air. Spasms of lungs. Knowing you were about to die, only not soon enough. Not nearly soon enough.

I took a deep breath, then another. I tried to slow my heartbeat. I didn't look at Niko.

Another breath. _Breathe._ Deeper and deeper.

I stared at the circular opening, visualized the motions I'd make. I tried to believe I could do this. I tried to push down the sliver of doubt lodged somewhere in my throat.

Gripping the sides of the hatch, I paused. I wasn't ready. But if I waited any longer, I'd never be.

"Later, skater," I said, not looking back, then took one last huge breath and dove headfirst into the hatch.





Chapter 17




The room below was, in fact, a bathroom, lined in tile that glowed red in the light of my glowstick. Chromium sink fixtures and a frosted-glass shower threw back fiery light. 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 into a murky hall, following the guide rope which led onwards 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 instead of a shimmering boundary of 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 other side, and there was no ceiling, either. Everything was dark.

And 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

	EXPANDING ONCE AGAIN

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

	YOUR FUTURES

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 numb 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 a gangrenous red 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 the handle of 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 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 red 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 Mimickers, 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. I'd lost some panicking, and my muscles burned through the rest as I shot myself through the airlock. An urge to breathe was taking hold of me, a tingling thrum running through my body as cells clamored for air. My lungs were empty. I couldn't swim again the distance I'd come, either forward or back.

Ahead of me, down the mirror-tunnel toward the other hatch and the other junction room, a deep red light burned, brightening. The reflected light from another glowstick.

I watched myself swim into the room, holding it.

Amidst all the panicked horror and desperation, I hadn't noticed the wrongness creep up on me, but now I realized that sick feeling had been there all along, getting stronger, flavoring my more pressing concerns. This wasn't one of the things, I realized. It was me. My double, from the other side.

We were passing each other, as planned. But the plan had failed.

We stared at each other and both realized I wasn't going to make it.

Blood diffused from my nose in billowing red clouds; the cut on my leg burned a deep, dangerous ache. My torn fingernails stung where I'd clawed at the door. I was damaged, flawed. The worse-off copy. Looking at him, unharmed, whole, I accepted that I was about to die. It was surprisingly easy.

He tilted his head, studying me. As if considering something. Or trying to see me, really see me, like I'd tried so many times to see Niko.

_Do it_, I thought, _I'm too broken to make it. Go back. Or go forward. Just go. Live. Be the one who lives._

His expression changed. Just a little.

And then he launched himself at me. At once the sense of wrongness spiked, as if approaching some exponential maxima. His face winced at this in exact sympathy with mine, but he didn't pull up, slow down. Instead he crashed right into me, hard. Tumbling, he wrapped his arms around me, held me, did the last thing I'd have ever expected.

He pushed his mouth to mine, and flooded my lungs with his air.

The wrongness had reached an unbearable threshold. But as his lips touched mine the sensation exploded outward, like magnets pushed against repelling poles till they slip from your fingers, flip around, snap into place. The water quivered around us; the room groaned, launching wet clouds of mud from splintering lintels, sending subsonic shockwaves shuddering through us. His breath flowed into me. I couldn't think, let alone protest or react. Boots tumbled around us, long laces waving like antennae. I remember that.

And then he was empty, and I was full.

He pulled back, blinked, smiled a smile I knew from the mirror. It meant _Oh, well, what you gonna do_.

He'd picked me.

A huge rumbling crack broke over the growing crescendo of rumbles and groans, and we both looked up. The ceiling had split in a long ugly scar. But the room wasn't collapsing on us. The split filled in almost immediately with new plaster, just as a different split bisected it, which also instantly filled.

The room was getting bigger.

My double grabbed my elbow, pushed me toward the hall he'd come in through, the way to the hatch to the other world, my world. And I started to swim. I shouldn't have. I should have thanked him. I should have given back half his air, or dragged him after me, found some way to save him. I should have died. But I didn't. I swam. I swam with everything I had left.

He'd made a mistake. Bet on the wrong horse. But I wouldn't forget it. I wouldn't forget him.

All around me the architecture was groaning, flexing, like something waking up. Plaster dust pillowed into the flooded hall in thick weightless clouds as the walls split and reformed, split and reformed, like bones breaking and healing and rebreaking, growing fractionally longer each time. I swam past a crack that didn't fill in but puckered into a new doorway, a flap of wallpaper lengthening and hardening into door. New doorways were spawning all around me; new pits gaped open in the floor. I ignored it all. I swam. I swam for my fucking life.

The guide rope, taut as a bowstring, snapped, whipping past my face as its two endpoints pulled away from each other. It didn't matter. I knew the way.

I swam into the mirror bathroom, shiny new sinks sprouting on the floor, on the ceiling; the toilet multiplying and splitting in porcelain osmosis, someone's pretentious art project. I swam up to the ceiling---already much higher than a bathroom ceiling should be---put my hands on the wheel of the hatch, and turned.

It didn't budge.

The groaning rumbles of hell surrounded me, my body was once again starting to tingle as my second lungful of air reached its end, my face throbbed and my leg was on fire, and the wheel wouldn't turn.

I pounded on the hatch, screaming in fury, the sound utterly lost in the cacophonous eruption of architecture beneath me.

I braced myself, gripped the wheel so hard I thought my knuckles would pop, pulled on it with everything I had.

Then I tried turning it the other direction, and the wheel spun.

I yanked it around, then forced myself up against the hatch, lungs burning, kicking hard, and pushed and swung it up and open, and then I was through, breaking the surface. I breathed, huge and deep.

Then I coughed. Clutching the sides of the hatch, I coughed, blinked, tried to take stock of this new hexagonal room. A huge crack had opened in the floor, and all the water had drained out. The groaning and clanging was sharper up here, out of the water, but mostly coming from beneath.

I pulled myself out of the raised pillar and tumbled to the bucking ground, wiped blood from my face. I was gasping, coughing, bleeding, hurting, panicking, and also, somehow, living. Deservedly or not.

Piled on the lip of one of the tunnels out were a pair of shoes and a dry, folded t-shirt.

An ear-splitting crack rang off the walls. Bricks fell from the ceiling in a deadly shower, landing a dozen feet away. I grabbed the shirt and pulled it on over my wet torso, slipped the shoes over numb and wrinkled feet. The ground heaved beneath me like the back of a whale taking a colossal breath before diving deep, and as it did it swallowed up the bricks, incorporated them neatly into itself like a child's plastic puzzle pieces falling into matching slots.

The floor of the bathroom, through the open hatch, was gone. Tile walls descended, vanishing into darkness. They were splitting and rejoining, like some fractal screensaver, an optical illusion in constant motion from the corner of your eye but damnably still if you looked right at it.

Something was broken. Something had diverged too far. There were too many possibilities and they couldn't all fit. They needed more room.

Time, I decided, to get the hell out.

With a great belching snap, the floor punctured upwards and a spout of cloudy water billowed up. Another spout exploded from the other side of the room. I picked one of the circular tunnels and started running down it, as fast as I could on my hobbled leg, while behind me the depths of Downstairs sloughed and squirmed into new permutations, unseen. I was too busy living to look back.





EPILOGUE






The art of losing isn't hard to master; 
so many things seem filled with the intent 
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

"One Art," Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)



I hope this finds you well, if it finds you at all.

I walked by our old house this morning. The whole yard was flooded, caution tape everywhere. Empty driveway. Whoever lives there now must have abandoned ship while they waited for the plumbers to sort it all out. But it gave me an idea.

I always wondered what you must have felt, waiting on the other side for your Ryan to come through, imperfect though you knew he'd be: waiting while the whole place started to shiver and crumble and expand around you. Maybe you thought we both died down there. Maybe you did too but I don't think so. I bet you were smart enough to run.

I hope you found another way back up to the surface, like I did. Took some doing. There were no more power bars by the time I made it out and hadn't been for a while. But I did make it out, in the end.

Maybe it would be better to let you keep thinking I'm dead. Maybe I shouldn't be writing this. But I think you'd rather know. There's a difference between dead and gone, despite the expression. I think you'd prefer knowing one Ryan, at least, survived. I never really did understand how you think, but I'm reasonably sure about that.

Water gushing up from the basement windows. A mess. But I found a little whirlpool in the swamp of the front yard, a big exposed pipe sucking liquid back in. Back down. That's where I'll drop this, I suppose. Maybe that pipe just leads to the city sewer system, but maybe, if I'm lucky, it goes a lot deeper.

I'll triple-bag the shit out of this first, though, because, and I hate to say this, the letter you gave me didn't survive my swim through.

The seal on that baggie must not have been tight. When I finally pulled it out, back on the surface, the letter was soaked through and mostly illegible. Something seemed to have expanded it, too. All that was left was a nightmare of bloated wood pulp and smeared squiggles. Too much of both. But after a lot of tweezer work, I pieced together a little. Not the whole story, but enough to maybe get the gist.

We were wrong, weren't we? About you guys being trapped on the wrong side, like us. We could never figure out why you didn't use your keys to come through, since you should have had them both, one bent on the counter and the other stuck in the door. We didn't think how easy they'd be to miss. How the two of you, coming back to your own side from an expedition, might have gone straight through without seeing them at all.

How the four of us all ended up trapped together. Only you had no need for the keys or to get back through, because you were home where you belonged, on your own side. The problem was that two doppelgangers had followed you through.

Us.

You figured it out a lot quicker than we did, I think. How that loss of synchronicity had pulled our twin houses partially apart, like a gardener starting to separate two potted flowers. Even if we'd had the key, the connection through the fridge was gone. Too shallow, too close to the surface. What would we have found in there, if we'd forced it open? Maybe an endless tunnel of fridge insides: vinyl walls, crisper-drawer floors, stretching to infinity, going nowhere. How's that for a road to hell?

So you had to figure out a different way to get rid of us. We were sleeping in your beds. Eating your food. Stealing your lives while you lurked below, afraid to come near us and push things even farther out of sync. Sneaking up to steal food in the middle of the night, thieves in your own house. And the only way to send us back was to find another connection point, a deeper one, down where roots still twined together. And prod us into finding it, too. You had a lot more time to explore than we did. Downstairs became your home.

You couldn't explain things to us, not directly. Because if we'd also realized how much things had diverged, it would have tugged our universes even further apart. So you tried to find the subtlest ways to send a message. Saying things without changing hardly anything. Tweaking the note, the video. Pulling us back from the dead-end of the crawlways. Nudging us away from the red herrings closer to the surface, to deeper explorations. Toward the new way through you'd discovered. A flooded tunnel, buried deep. A way to get us back home.

I think about that a lot. We were your monsters. But you helped us anyway. Maybe you didn't see any other choice, but still. That was pretty great of you.

A lot of your note was illegible, and like I said, there seemed to be way too many pages, and a lot of duplicates. But toward the end I could piece together a few phrases, and I think I figured out some of how your story ended.

Once you'd found the flooded connection, you could pass through to our home universe, and help clear the way back for us. Leave guide ropes. Make it easy. One of you stayed to keep an eye on us, to make sure we "discovered" the flooded tunnel. Once we did, the plan was probably that you'd swim back through in advance, so that, when the time came, all four of us could pass each other, and the two of us could keep holding onto the thread of belief that synchronicity wasn't broken. At least until we were all in the right place again and what we believed no longer mattered.

But then that other Niko crept up from the depths of possibility and fucked everything up. You didn't see that coming, I don't think. How could you have?

Bitterness, multiplied. Multiplicious.

Did you find your own body, murdered, mutilated, in one of those bland hallways?

I'm so sorry. I can't imagine what that must have been like.

I don't know quite how to tell you this next part.

Your Ryan never came back because he saved me. He _chose_ to save me. I don't know why. I didn't deserve saving. But he did it anyway.

You saved me too, of course. On the bedroom tube above that awful void, and other times besides. And I deserved even less to be saved by you, maybe. Maybe you should have let me die. But you didn't. Neither of you did. And I can never pay you back for that.

I am enclosing ten bucks, though, for the drink you bought me that night at the Russian dance club. I assume your Ryan was as much of a mooch as me. I did say I'd get you back, didn't I?

I should wrap this up. If I spend all day writing mysterious letters to another man, my boyfriend might get jealous.

Donovan. His name's Donovan.

Maybe it's ridiculous to think something as tiny as a triple-bagged USB key wrapped in a ten-spot could possibly find its way to you. If our two universes connect at all any more, it's far down in knotted skeins, hopelessly tangled. I imagine this baggie winding its way through miles of piping, tumbling down moss-covered tunnels, floating through submerged, warped bedrooms. Somehow making its way back up to another surface, another flood. Seems silly. But I see it in my head, vivid. I try to believe there's a world where it could reach you, even though the odds seem astronomical.

On the other hand, with so many possibilities down there, maybe it's inevitable. Maybe this message will multiply, splitting off into thousands of fractal copies, a million USB keys floating to a million surfaces, ending up in the hands of a lot of confused people but also, too, in yours.

Maybe one of those versions will even seem right to you. Irrational, but true.

I haven't dreamt about you in years, but I did last night. Not in particulars. Your name just sort of floated through me, troubling in some way but not defined. A word repeated until it loses its meaning, becomes obsessed with itself. A reflection's reflection. It's why I came by the old house, but all that was here was a flooded yard. All it reflected was me.

I never knew what we were to each other back then. Something less than all those things we never were, but more than a friendship. An else-ship, maybe. An other-ship. Traces of mingled shrapnel under shared skin. Broken pieces of each other we tried to make our own.

I guess we're left with what we had. _Have._ Definitely have, yeah? Because we're gone to each other, but not dead. We survived.

So hey. I hope you're doing all right in your weird world where people say "fourth" instead of "fourd." I hope you found better people to hang out with and a new set of hobbies and someone to appreciate your fashion sense. I hope you realized you were someone worth saving, too.

I miss you sometimes, but that's okay.

We made it. And I think we'll be alright.

Nah. Scratch that.

I trust we will.






ALTERNATE SCENE



_Here's a scene from Subcutanean in a different rendering from the one in the main text of this version of the book._


#


_(From Chapter 1...)_ Right from the start things were wrong, but I couldn't see it. Maybe I didn't want to. Or maybe I'm being too hard on myself. There wasn't exactly a roadmap for what happened, a script to follow. But it's undeniable that even on that very first night---the night of the Russian dance club, remember?---everything was already wrong.

I hadn't wanted to go to the club. But Niko insisted. "Russian techno, man, one night only. That new place over by the old stadium. Lots of sexy people will be there, including us." I ran out the usual litany of excuses: I had work in the morning, I had Bio homework to do, I hated going out to clubs with a burning passion. He batted them all away without any obvious effort, and so that's how I found myself pressed up against a wall listening to music so loud it hurt, arms crossed, feeling miserable, wishing I was back home listening to a Dvořák symphony instead.

When I could see him through the crowd, I watched Niko surf it, laughing, gesticulating wildly as he somehow held conversations despite the deafening racket, and dancing his ass off, mostly with girls, and once or twice with guys, whether out of politeness or genuine interest I couldn't tell. I'd never really been able to tell. He flirted with everyone, flashed the same manic energy in all directions. I'd worn my rainbow pride bracelet at his insistence, the one I'd bought a few months back and mostly been too chickenshit to wear (it was a college town but a conservative state). I might as well have worn a bag over my head, despite Niko's assurances that The Gays were almost definitely very into Russian techno, he was pretty sure. "Or maybe all those pulsing Slavic rhythms will make some drunk straight guy want to get all experimental and shit," he said, waggling his eyebrows. "Never know."

I knew. And I was right: nothing happened. No one talked to me, or even noticed me, and standing there, I couldn't imagine why they would, why anyone would want to talk to an acne-faced geek in clothes that didn't fit, leaning against a grimy wall and wishing he were anywhere else.

From across the club, Niko caught my eye, and gradually danced his way up to me, strobe lights washing out his tawny skin, twisting through his dark curls. He arrived within the eighteen-inch earshot zone and shouted something.

"What?"

He put his lips up to my ear, shouted again. "Having fun, Ryan?" He pulled back with a cheeky grin, and cackled in delight when he saw my expression, grabbing my arm. "Come on, man," he yelled, "let's get some air."

Dragging me through the crush of people, still dancing, bopping his head to the music, waving at some people and smirking seductively at others, he somehow managed to maneuver us through an impossible blockade of bodies without stepping on any toes or getting stepped on in return, toward a back exit I hadn't even realized existed, all while making eye contact every few steps to make sure I was okay. I'd never figured out how he managed to do so many things at once. Sometimes even one thing at a time was too much for me.

We pushed through a metal door into a blessed pillow of colder, quieter air, where a handful of smokers stood around chatting. I took a deep breath, more relieved than I'd expected to be. Niko pulled a single cigarette from behind his ear---he'd quit; someone inside must have given it to him---and bummed a light from one of the smokers. We walked a few paces farther out into the parking lot, enjoying the night air.

"So what's wrong?" he finally asked.

I sighed. "This isn't really my scene."

"Leaving the house isn't really your scene, yeah, I get it." He blew smoke from the side of his mouth, raising one wry eyebrow. "But you have to take chances, man. Get out of your comfort zone. I mean what was the point of coming out if you never actually _go out_?"

"Well it's fucking easier for you," I said, feeling miserable. "You can sit next to some girl in class, bump into her on the street. Say sorry for spilling her coffee, waggle your eyebrows, and boom, long term relationship."

"Yeah, that's definitely how that works," he said. "So if it's that easy, Ry, how come I've been single for the last forever?"

"Your terrible fashion sense, probably," I said, looking down at my sneakers, although truth be told it was a mystery to me too. It had been almost a year since his last relationship. Still more recent than mine. "Okay, lame excuse. I'm just... bad at meeting people. And I don't get how you're supposed to do it when the music's so loud you can't even think."

He shrugged. "Serendipity is everywhere. So give it an excuse to happen to you. Get out there, take chances. I mean there's gay people everywhere, dude, even in this shithole state. You just have to man it up and figure out who they are."

I looked up at him, startled, but he was looking away towards the horizon, expression distant, thinking about something. I looked back down at the ground before he could see me looking. _Stupid._

"Should I take you home?" he asked at last.

"You don't need to babysit me." My mood was blackening. "I can look after myself."

"So do. No point making yourself miserable if you're not having fun."

"I thought..." I didn't know how to finish. I thought he'd wanted me to come. I thought if he were here, maybe I'd enjoy it. I thought I could pretend to be a person who enjoyed clubs, crowds, Russian techno. I'd thought, despite all evidence, that tonight would be different. 

"You're right. Guess I should jet." Hoping my voice wouldn't betray what was welling up inside me, I looked up, met his eyes with the best fake smile I could muster. "Catch you later, man."

He looked straight back at me and I could tell he wasn't buying any of it.

Flicking the cigarette onto the asphalt, he ground it out with his heel, clapped my shoulder. "I'll come with you."

"No, you don't have to," I said, flooded by an awkward admixture of guilt and relief. "I'm fine. You go back in there and have some fun. Find some hot pixie chick with feathers weaved into her hair and go wild."

He shot me an annoyed look, brushing black curls back from his eyes. "Orion. I said I'm coming with you." He put an arm around my shoulder and guided me into the parking lot. "The hot chicks in there obviously have terrible taste in music, if that's what you could call what they were playing. I expect you might have some opinions about that."

"_Well_," I said, emphatic, and laughed, surprised at myself. At him. He had a way of turning things around like that. Defeat into victory. No into yes. Everything was better again, at least for now.

Talking, laughing, we struck out into the night for the long walk home.








ABOUT THIS COPY



_There are several hundred places in the master copy of_ Subcutanean _where text can vary. Here is a sampling of some of the decisions made by the rendering code when this copy was generated._






‣ Your narrator was a bit more pessimistic than the norm.

‣ Your narrator preferred to avoid slang.

‣ Some proper nouns in this copy that might be different in others include Mimickers, Grip Monkeys, and _Dhalgren_.

‣ Your Ryan had a bit of a drinking problem.

‣ The progression of your glowstick colors was blue, yellow, orange, red. Read into that what you will.

‣ Your versions of Ryan and Niko found the ladder to nowhere.

‣ Your Niko fell when climbing the vertical hall.

‣ Your Ryan and Niko didn't find the Library Chasm.

‣ Your Ryan spoke to his father on the pay phone.

‣ At the bottom of your Downstairs was a city of recursive houses.

‣ In this version, the final fight took place on a tube of bedroom-stuff suspended over an endless dropoff.

‣ Your epigraph authors included Leo Tolstoy and Charlotte Mary Mew.






BACKER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS



Countless permutations of thanks to my crowdfunding backers who helped make this project happen!


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Aaron A. Reed is a writer and game designer focused on exploring new ways for authors and readers to tell stories together. His award-winning games have been featured at IndieCade, South by Southwest, Slamdance, GaymerX, and the Independent Games Festival, and he has spoken about digital storytelling at Google, PAX and PAX East, WorldCon, NarraScope, and the Game Developer Conference. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a MFA in Digital Arts and New Media, and aims to continue abusing them both in interesting ways.

This is, by some definitions, his first novel. Or maybe that was _Blue Lacuna_. Or _Hollywood Visionary_. Or _The Ice-Bound Concordance_. It's hard to say.

Aaron lives with his totally real boyfriend in Alameda, California, in a house without a basement.






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