DESCENT

HIGE

The mech wouldn't stop cycling, not the usual one but something that Hige recognized to be different. There was a certain harmonic buried somewhere in the right shoulder that cycled every forty seconds or so like it had a bad ache in it. He'd run diagnostics twice and nothing, everything read nominal across the board.

"That hum again. What is that fucking hum?!"

"You're imagining it," said Năsti.

"I'm not imagining it, it's doing a thing."

"A super advanced mechanoid robot is doing a thing? Wow, it's a mech, things are what it does."

Maybe if you stopped rubbing that fucking sword every day you'd learn how machines actually work.

The broken Katana sat wrapped in cloth near Hige's seat in the cockpit, both halves nestled together the way Năsti had arranged them. He stood legs crossed on the left shoulder, with the Odachi laid across his knees and ran a cloth along the flat of the blade as he did everyday.

Șocherel sat against the glass window on the right with the Bible open in his lap. He hadn't turned a page in a while. Whether he was lost in deep thought or simply stuck, Hige could not tell.

The mech trudged on through ice and snow that stretched in every direction, with a lazy sun that barely broke through the clouds.

"You guys ever think about before?" Năsti said, still running the cloth along the blade.

"Before what?"

"Before the bombs. Normal life, funny shit. Come on, someone's got a story."

"I think about it sure, but nothing worth telling."

"Yeah well I am bored as hell, so you're going to find one." He looked across at Șocherel, "Socky. Before the war, a funny one. Go."

"I once had a bottle of tomato juice–"

Hige and Năsti didn't give the man a pause. "...And?"

"And maybe fucking wait? So I had this plastic bottle of tomato juice, received it as a gift by some farmers I used to purchase from."

He started sniggering. "A few weeks later I go into the shed looking for something and I see the bottle that suddenly had a different shape than I remembered."

"So I think huh…they changed the design. Well, it wasn't that weird right? Farmers are always doing things."

"So I pick it up to see what they changed, and right as I flip, it explodes in my face."

The delivery was so flat and devoid of anything that it took a full two seconds before the other two processed it, then they both started howling. Hige slammed the console, causing the mech to briefly lurch from a stray input. Năsti grabbed the hull plating to steady himself, with the Odachi sliding across his knees.

"Easy there," said Năsti, still laughing.

Ahead, the terrain was changing slightly. They veered off the asphalt into the pure white that was breaking up with dark shapes under the snow, geometry that might have been once a farming field. The mech adjusted its stride to compensate and they swayed gently on the shoulders like passengers on a slow boat.

Năsti fished a strip of dried ration meat from his coat and bit off a piece. He offered Hige the rest, from which he took a chunk and gave another to Șocherel through the other window.

"Your turn," Năsti said to Hige, chewing.

"Pass."

"Bullshit, you have tons. The Cip wall story alone—"

"That one's Cip's, I was just a handy projectile. You go, I know you have one locked and loaded."

"Alright alright…" He pondered on that for a while, then facepalmed.

"So there was this girl at work, a new hire. I was… I was mesmerized by her fiery red hair, her energy; she felt kinda wacko, my kind of wacko you kno'?"

"Very poetic Năsti," Hige said.

"Zip it. So, I find out she's uh… she's… into horses."

One of the mech's legs got stuck for a second as if it just processed what it heard.

"No wait fuck, not like that… well… I don't know… but I meant that her desktop background was her sitting on a horse. Her phone lockscreen was a portrait of another horse. She talked about horses like Hige talks about the mech."

"I don't—"

"Anyways… I invite her to one of those countryside horse viewing things, cause I found a discount coupon on one of these freebie websites, and she said yes, she actually said yes. So I packed a nice lunch, put my nicest underwear that didn't brand a Star Wars logo and we wen—."

The sound came back right on the clock. Hige glanced at the subsystem log which showed nominal across the board. He looked back at Năsti who was still talking, hands moving and building toward something, but the words were sliding past him. He was watching his mouth move while thinking about that stupid cycl—

"—and the horse fucking nodded, I shit you not."

Șocherel was already wheezing. Hige had missed something, maybe a lot of something, but the image of a horse nodding in agreement was enough to send him over the edge regardless. The three of them fell apart, the sound scattering across the empty snowfield.

Hige opened his mouth to ask what happened after, but the hum cycled again. That fucking hum, Hige wanted to launch the hook into someone.

Holdup. Năsti fitted the hook?....Năsti… Fitted... The hook.

"Năsti."

"Hm?"

"You refitted the cable drum inside the shoulder pod when we left the outpost right?"

A pause. The cloth on the Odachi stopped moving.

"I reattached it."

"Reattached it how?"

"The fuck you mean how, with my hands, the way you REATTACH things."

Hige pulled up the subsystem log on the shoulder pod where the braided steel hook assembly was showing a tension imbalance on the retract motor. Not critical, but it made the whole thing useless if needed in a hurry.

"Năsti, did you torque the retention bolts on the drum housing like I said?"

"Yeah I tightened them."

He what?

"You mean torqued them?"

"Same thing no? Tighten them until they're torqued."

Hige closed his eyes.

He loved Năsti, he would die for Năsti. He would also, given the opportunity, throw Năsti into the Leviathan for his utter ignorance with mechanical parts.

Deep breaths.

Calm.

No biggie.

"Right. I'm going to manually cycle it from up here to reset the tension. Just… nobody move."

The mech stopped moving. Hige keyed a sequence in the console which the subsystem acknowledged in Spanish. A servo whined in the right shoulder pod as the cable drum began its recalibration cycle. The housing pushed into the shoulder pod hatch until it snapped open, it snapped open with the enthusiasm of being nudged by an improperly torqued mechanism.

And Șocherel, who had been sitting quietly on that exact shoulder, was no longer sitting on that shoulder.

There was a moment, a perfect snapshot in the air where he was simply airborne. He was God in the Creation of Adam, with his finger pointed towards the Mech ready to give life, with an expression that was half confusion and half aerodynamic acceptance as he crashed into a blanket of snow about four meters away.

"Ugh fututi cristosii matii Năsti"

Hige looked at Năsti who was absolutely horrified, then at Șocherel lying in a reversed angel position face down in the snow. He did not get up but he could still hear him swearing underneath.

"NASTI WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO TO MY MECH?"

Năsti was already climbing down the mech yelling Șocherel's name. Hige noticed a similarity in him, he looked like Ryan Gosling…

If he died on his stomach.

Șocherel emerged from the snow. He stood upright but winced when trying to straighten up. He pressed a hand to his back and looked at Năsti, then at Hige, then back again at Năsti.

But he said nothing, he just climbed on the other side of the mech where Năsti was originally sitting.

Hige lost it into absolute full collapse. He smashed his forehead in the console wheezing. Every time he tried to stop, he'd look outside at the snow angel figure, or at Năsti's horrified face, or at Șocherel standing there with absolutely no look on his face, then he'd start again.

"Man, I'm sorry," Năsti said.

Șocherel continued to look at that same page in the Bible. "Forget about it. It's fine."

Hige kept wheezing.

"It's not funny Hige," Năsti said.

Năsti threw glances at Șocherel, no doubt wanting to ask for the Odachi to have something to fidget, but he did not dare so. He turned around and started tapping with his fingers on the hull. The hum, at least, had stopped.

Hige thought about the previous weeks.

The forge was the point of all this. It had been for a while now, since they'd left Dogari's chapel with two broken halves of a Katana and a promise that Năsti held as tightly as Șocherel held his scripture, with annoying clarity and without complaint. This was one of the longer journeys the boys had taken since the beginning of nuclear winter.

Hige's sleep had been horrendous since he kept dreaming about something that could not be described in words, or even in his own imagination. Every time he felt close to the source, any fickle memory of that dream ran from his mind like water through fingers.

Then there was Năsti whose walks alone had been getting longer, and Șocherel who kept looping through the same page for days now.

Anyways, the forge was the point of all this. It had been for a while now, since they'd left Dogari's chapel with two broken halves of a Katana and a promise that Năsti carried the way Șocherel carried his scriptu–

Hige blinked. He'd just thought of that earlier didn't he? Yes… he had. The sentence came back to his mind like the mech's hum forty seconds later. His mind had skipped a groove in the vinyl record without telling him.

The mech continued its slumber walk ahead, passing through fields of nothing but snow as far as the eye could see. He continued chuckling as time passed by. Every time he thought he was done, the image of Șocherel airborne would resurface and he'd lose it again.

They passed through remnants of villages, stone and steel outlines under the snow, a chimney standing alone where the walls of a house gave up. Năsti pointed at a road sign half buried in a drift where most of the text had corroded off but a few Cyrillic letters clung on, pointing somewhere that no longer existed.

"Any idea where we are?" Năsti asked.

"North," Hige said.

"North of what?"

"Maratova I guess."

That had been the navigation strategy for a while now, bits of license plates on abandoned cars, the odd surviving road sign, maybe a fuel station logo that narrowed it down to a country and not much else.

The outpost was already far away. It had been a good place with proper food, a hot shower, and people who didn't immediately want to shoot at them. And then the fish…. Hige still thought about that fish, all nice and juicy and grilled over a flame by someone who had actual seasonings.

The hours passed and the landscape offered nothing new, just snow of various hues repackaged in various forms.

* * *

That evening they sat around the campfire where Năsti and Hige cooked, well…cooked was a fancy term, they heated ration meat over fire with some melted snow and leaves until it achieved the texture of a spongy boot sole with a side of green mush. Well, still better than a dry boot sole.

After the ejection incident, Șocherel said precisely four words to Năsti, all of them practical.

Pass. Me. The. Salt.

Năsti passed it like it was a hydrogen bomb while they ate in silence.

"I had that dream again,"

Năsti looked up. "The one you can't describe?"

He nodded.

"So…obviously try to describe it."

"I told you I can't."

"Do try."

Hige sat with his back against the mech's foot and closed his eyes. The only thing he could see was a…humming noise. Static. Like a TV with no channels, but in that noise he could see a shape, a space that was… which had a quality of…nothing, the shape dissipated as soon as he focused on it.

"Hm, well that's fucked up," Năsti went back to his boot soles.

The fire popped and sent a few embers drifting. Hige watched one land on the snow and disappear while Năsti poked with his fork offended at dinner. "Can't even call this edible."

He chewed for a moment. "It," he repeated, almost to himself, like the word bothered him more than the taste did.

"A few hours to the hub if the terrain holds," Hige said. Năsti grunted something that could've been an agreement. Șocherel closed the book with a loud thud and looked at the fire for a while.

"You ever have a thought…that you know is yours, but it doesn't…really feel like you're the one thinking it?"

Neither of them answered.

He picked the Bible back up and opened it to the same page.

* * *

Năsti rode on the right shoulder, Odachi across his back. In idle moments, Hige would catch him drawing it a few inches from the sheath and sliding it back, making sure it was still there. The sword that would be reborn as something that called to Năsti, or whatever he said.

Șocherel rode on the left reading, or holding the Bible open and looking beyond since his eyes were anywhere but the page he kept opening to. He had come back from a conversation at the outpost with directions toward an old transit hub in the same region. His reasoning was that the hub might have power grid connections that could point them to the industrial zone. Find the source, find the forge, a sound argument.

When Șocherel had returned from the conversation, he didn't mention anything specific, he climbed back onto the shoulder and said they need to be heading further up north. Năsti had looked at Hige with an expression that needed no translation. He shrugged, and that made Năsti's eye twitch.

They found the station on the second afternoon. It sat at the edge of what had once been a town, or at least the memory of one. Concrete shells of apartment blocks lined the approach with their windows now long gone, and snow that drifted through them like breath through broken teeth. A collapsed structure further back could have been a school or a clinic or anything else since the roof had pancaked the interior flat into obscurity.

Another entrance was half-swallowed by a snowdrift, but its shape was unmistakable, a wide rectangular mouth framed by the remains of a Soviet arch, with corroded metal ribs where decorative panels used to hang. The ribs were structural though, which meant the archway itself was solid enough.

The mech's lights crashed into the darkness that stood at the entrance, catching mosaic fragments on the interior walls where glistening squares of gold and blue had outlasted everything around them.

"That's a metro," Năsti said flatly.

"Brilliant Năsti," Hige replied.

"No I mean, it's a fucking metro station. Not an "industrial hub" as you kept calling it. They sent us to a fucking metro, I sure hope there's a station built around a zoo cause that should be our stop."

Șocherel was already climbing down the shoulder. He jumped in the snow and stood looking at the entrance, peeking into the black.

"Metros run on a lot of power," he said. "If there's a grid, even a dead one, the connection should lead us further ahead." He went down.

In Hige's logic, another sound argument. Șocherel had a nose for infrastructure the way Năsti had a nose for trouble. If he said a metro grid could lead them somewhere useful, Hige wasn't about to argue the point, they'd come too far to turn around over nothing.

"So some random blacksmith woman tells him about an industrial zone, and he just fills in the rest himself? Power grids, transit hubs, the whole treasure map?"

"He talked to Elena too, she mentioned this area." Hige shrugged.

"Yeah to you, not to him."

Hige didn't have a comeback for that and he also didn't think he needed one. Șocherel processed things, he listened to separate conversations and built a picture from them, as he'd always done. It was why he was resourceful in that manner.

The entrance was large enough that the mech could fit in a slouched position. It gently pushed itself down the stairs. The first level was painfully ordinary. Tunnels were caked in ice and platforms were buried under debris, but the skeletal remains of a train car stood frozen to its tracks like an insect in amber.

They spent the next hour picking the whole place meticulously and found nothing worth of importance. No grid connections, nothing that pointed toward the industrial infrastructure that they needed. Hige was ready to call it in and go back to the surface when the mech's comms started singing.

ANOMALOUS ELECTROMAGNETIC SIGNATURE DETECTED.

DEPTH ESTIMATED: OVER 400 METERS BELOW CURRENT POSITION.

RECOMENDACIÓN: NO TOCAR.

Huh? Four hundred meters…under the metro station?

"Two hundred meters yeah right." Năsti scoffed.

"Could be a power source," Șocherel said. He was already walking toward a maintenance corridor at the far end of the platform, flashlight leading.

Hige looked at the corridor entrance and then back at the mech. The corridor was narrow and it wasn't going to fit the whole thing, so he went back, walked it by the train car and oriented it towards the main stairs. He set the AI to autonomous perimeter defense and the turret spun up out of the left shoulder pod, actively scanning when the speakers crackled.

MODO CENTINELA ACTIVADO.

¿TIENES PREGUNTAS?

Năsti snorted from atop the right shoulder, yet Hige didn't laugh. Sitting in the cockpit now with the mech's lights turning off to conserve power and stay hidden, the joke was landing flat. He looked around admiring the beautiful machine that worked so well every time.

His stomach tightened, something about the darkness outside made the chair feel like a place he might not come back to. He went around the emergency supplies box and picked up three dosimeter bracelets, then a few batteries. Not that the batteries could power anything they had, but one could never know what was down a pre-war area. He jumped.

Please please please let them have walkie talkies.

Năsti strapped the Katana halves to his chest and packed his bag with enough rations to last a while. Then he pulled his sleeve and strapped the dosimeter underneath. It had a thin needle dial and a small square of film that changed color when exposed to radiation. Currently the needle read nothing and the square sat yellow.

"Leave those with the mech," Hige said pointing at the coat. "If something goes wrong down there, you don't want two pointy halves bouncing against your chest."

"I made a promise though."

"And the mech is the safest place within a thousand kilometers, we're dead without it anyway."

Năsti reluctantly approved, then undid the straps and placed them inside the cockpit storage.

Darkness enveloped the station as the mech turned off all its lights, now only a small purr to be heard up close. Next to the subway tube, it looked like a cat curled around its litter.

"Shokky, think fast!" he tossed a bracelet in the air which Șocherel caught with his left palm.

КАРАНТІН

HIGHE

Three flashlights peeked through darkness as they passed through a narrow but long corridor. On the right side multiple doors led into plain rooms which were now stripped of everything, down to the bare metal of old file cabinets. Bolts in the floor marked where desks used to be, and rectangles of slightly less dirt on the walls showed where notice boards once hung.

Who would be stealing a notice board after the apocalypse…

He too would like a notice board back at camp…guess that answers his question.

The left wall was as dull as any could be except for a series of small plaques at regular intervals. Năsti scraped a layer of frost and dirt from one with his thumb.

"Something something Directive 7, Section 4, Subsection 12, Paragraph…"

He stopped reading. "That shit keeps going."

"Mmm you can't beat Soviet efficiency," Hige muttered.

The wall also featured a glass display which contained a framed certificate congratulating the station's maintenance collective for achieving 94.52% operational uptime during the third quarter of 1987.

Next to it was a faded photograph that showed a group of men and women standing in a row unsmiling, in front of what looked like this very corridor. Someone doodled a pair of horns over the man standing in the center top who was looming above the rest like a guardian figure. The nameplate above the photo read Q3 1987 - ШЕРБАНЕНКО П.А.

Further ahead the corridor ended at a T-junction. The right path led to a closer room that opened up in a larger mechanical room with pumps and ventilation, all that a metro needed to run. But left went nowhere, they looked at the bolt holes where a legend map should have been that was now empty and filled with dust. Hige swept his flashlight down the right path, then the left. The right had pipes and a railing mounted on the wall, the left had nothing.

Năsti had been sketching every corridor, room, and turn since they entered the station. If it existed, it went in the notepad. He drew the T-junction now, labeling both paths with small arrows.

"Probably a good idea to go ri—"

"Right's just mechanical," Șocherel said, already ten paces down the left corridor as his flashlight pointed straight ahead. The pen stopped moving, but Năsti hadn't looked up.

The left corridor ran straight for another plain fifty meters before ending at what was a total dead end that had a utility wall with pipes, valve wheels, and a fuse box. On the sides, more unremarkable concrete.

Năsti complained, "Leave it to the fucking trogloids to design such a place."

Șocherel walked straight to the fuse box and crouched at its base, his fingers already working along the edge of the panel before his flashlight had caught up with his hands. He pulled at something behind it, a small latch hidden underneath decades of grime. Behind the main panel there was a second set of cables that went into the concrete. Thick cables, the kind that the military would use for heavy machinery, perhaps overkill even for a metro station.

"The ventilation…" Two of the pipes turned right and fed into the wall as expected. A third, thinner one continued straight and disappeared into the concrete. "There's something here, these cables are feeding into something underneath us."

Hige was already beside him, tracing where the heavy cables disappeared into the floor. Both flashlights converged on the same surface, scanning for a seam, or a panel, or anything else that would open.

Năsti's fingers were already drumming against a side wall into a restless rhythm, one he fell into whenever his hands had nothing useful to do.

Thumb, middle, index, middle, thumb.

The same beat as ever, heavy on the thumb, with three fingers filling in the gaps as snare hit against concrete. Hige's eye twitched, he was trying to trace the thick cables to see where they fed into the floor and the drumming was becoming the only thing his brain could process.

Thumb, middle, index, middle-index-middle, thumb.

He is adding fills now, of course he is.

His eye twitched again.

"Năsti, I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU DONT—"

He stopped, appearing confused by his own action. He beat again once with his thumb, then again. Then he slammed his fist into it and Hige heard it now, a slightly hollow sound with a metallic resonance behind that came through the side wall.

"Nah fuck off what's that?" Năsti kept beating against it.

Next to where Năsti was knocking, a shallow indentation ran from floor to ceiling where old pipework had been bolted into the concrete. It was a maintenance channel just wide enough to service the valves.

"Get the pipes off," Hige said.

It took a while to get the stubborn, rusted bolts out but the pipe housing finally came away in two sections, clanging with an echo against the floor. Behind it the concrete was different; smoother and lighter in shade, not the depressing Soviet pour that lined the rest of the corridor.

Hige kicked and the facing cracked diagonally. They all started kicking it.

A large chunk fell outward. They peeked through the hole where they saw military grey paint in pristine condition. The wall continued to be demolished until the frame of a small metal door stood in front of them. It was small enough that it might have been a broom cabinet for all they knew. But it had no handle, only a recessed keypad on its right side that was long dead and below it a broken panel with a manual release lever.

Two lines stood stenciled across the door in faded white Cyrillic:

ОБЪЕКТ 21
ДОСТУП ОГРАНИЧЕН

"Object twenty-one, what do you reckon that is?" Năsti added.

"I'm thinking one extreme or the other. It's either a BDSM dungeon where the top Soviets came to get their mandated spanking, or it's the most boring storage room in human history, with a thousand identical cabinets and a file on every existing citizen in this town."

"Well I'm betting on the cabinets," Năsti said. "Nobody puts fun so hard to reach."

Șocherel pulled the manual release lever. It resisted for a moment, and then gave a low mechanical groan from somewhere inside the wall. Something shifted inside, a locking mechanism trying to move itself for the first time in decades.

The door exhaled peacefully a centimeter outward, then slid sideways with a grinding reluctance revealing a gap wide enough for one person.

· · ·

The air changed, it was no longer a frosty breeze but something that tasted metallic. It was warm, almost comfortable except for the smell of burnt solder and old computer boards. Hige pushed his sleeve back anxiously but the dosimeter stayed quiet.

The flashlights peered into another dull corridor that broke at another T-junction up ahead. This one was clean though, its wall markings clearly indicating where the rooms led.

Too clean. The metro above had been gutted to its atoms, fully stripped and forgotten.

This corridor looked like its staff just exited a Saturday shift and went home to enjoy the weekend. Everything was intact, from floor tiles to light fixtures and even the paint, that depressing institutional green over grey showed little to no neglect as well. Directional signage which followed military standards lined the junction ahead with crisp arrows that indicated left and right.

Șocherel went first, then Năsti, but Hige hadn't moved past the junction. He was looking back at where they came toward the gap in the wall and past that, at the civilian metro where the mech stood idle.

"Stay safe my love."

Năsti started sketching on a fresh page in his notepad when something caught his eye. He peeked closer at a metal plate that was riveted right above the junction box, which had an acceptance stamp engraved in the metal. 1966 ШЕРБАНЕНКО П.А.

He traced the letters with his finger. "Sher…ba…nenko P.A"

Năsti looked back at the junction box that it was attached to, then scoffed. "Wow, this guy signed a junction box. Full of himself much?"

Where the directional arrows split, a few symbols were aligned into each path with a lighting bolt to the left and a file cabinet towards the right.

Șocherel spent a moment looking at the box. "Power grid's on the left," he said before turning. Hige started moving before Năsti grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back to a crawl.

"Did you see what he did at the end of that wall? He went straight to the fuse box… Didn't look at anything else first."

Hige looked at the figure ahead that was getting smaller in the dark.

"He's always been like that. Besides… he was looking at the wrong wall, you're the one who found the actual door."

That should have settled it, yet it didn't.

"What exactly did they tell him at the outpost?"

"Probably more than he told us…you know how he is, puts things together on his own and then presents the conclusion at the proper moment."

Năsti shook his head. "Come on," he raised his flashlight ahead and they followed after their friend.

Their steps disturbed the fine floor that had the first drops of moisture in decades, clean enough to eat from at this point. The air was getting warmer, noticeably warmer with each turn that they did.

"That's odd," Năsti said.

They reached a longer corridor that had equally spaced doors lined to the right side, numbered from one to eight. Hige shone a light through one of them and it looked like an office room, except that it had a small bed in one of the corners.

Năsti put his face on the door's glass. Then he went to the other one and did the same, then a third one, frowning.

"Why are they all sideways?"

"What do you mean?" Hige inquired.

"Look at them, the table and chair are parallel to the door. Why wouldn't it be facing the door?"

In every room, the desk was oriented so that whoever sat there would be facing the left wall that stood grey and empty. Whoever sat there would have their side to the door; you'd hear someone come in, but you wouldn't see them without turning around.

"So they sit facing that way," Năsti pointed deeper down the corridor. "And they watch the door…sideways? Why not just face the fucking door?"

Hige didn't have an answer. "Maybe the feng shui?"

Năsti drew a few squares with arrows oriented similarly to the desks. He stared at it for another moment, then flipped the page and continued on. They reached the end of the tunnel that led into a larger room. Șocherel stood at the end of it, looking at a large blast door. It was pitch black with yellow letters that typed out a single word.

КАРАНТІН

Năsti didn't need to spell out on his fingers since the letters were easy enough.

"Karantin."

* * *

From inside darkness stood still, until…a hiss, and then a groan. The sound of over 40 tons of leaded steel screeched as they moved against their will.

Three beams of light emerged through the void and moved down a metal stair, with one beam descending faster than the rest. The stairs rang beneath their boots and the echo came back late as it had room to travel around. The warmth, that wrong warmth, still traveled across their faces. Then the boots hit concrete, and the dark had company again.

The processing room up ahead was designed for mass volume. Glass panels ran the full width of this place, dividing it cleanly into two halves: entry side and exit side. The only way through was the metal detector frame built directly into the glass. On either side of the frame, conveyor belts ran through slots in the panel that were wide enough for bags, boxes, and personal equipment to run through.

Inorganics to the sides please. And now you organics, please step through the detector!

The glass walls were joined in the center by an elevated booth where someone used to judge the employees silently.

Hige stood at the conveyor and ran his flashlight along it. The belt had cracked down the center and split after decades of stillness, but the mounting hardware underneath still looked intact, overbuilt for anything he could imagine passing onto it.

He stepped through the detector frame and an airport-scanner anxiety hit him, when you're wondering if you might have forgotten a few bombs in your bag before you left home. But nothing happened with no power to trigger anything, just a man walking through a dead machine.

Năsti was already at the regulation plaques on the far wall, scraping more dust with his thumbnail. Hige swept his light across the row. All useless except for the last one, a laminated card that was bolted at the end like an afterthought. The laminate had yellowed and bubbled at the corners but the image underneath was clear.

"Huh, check this one out."

The image was split into two columns. The first was a portrait, head and shoulders similar to an identification card framing. Except where the face should have been there was nothing, just a clean oval head with no features, and no expression. The second featured a full figure walking away toward an indicated exit with a smiling face.

Hige looked at it and thought about the cockpit; the console, the specific weight of the controls under his hands, the way the mech responded before he'd finished the input. The smell of oil and warm metal that lived through, the one that hit him every time he climbed in and never quite left his clo-

"Hige what if our flashlights die? Those batteries can't do shit." Năsti looked back at him.

He was standing on the other side of the room as they were moving toward the split corridor ahead. The laminated card was behind them both and he had no memory of walking away from it. Hige looked at his hands.

Still his. The right hand was curled around nothing, thumb and two fingers spaced in a grip. He opened them and flexed but the memory of the shape stayed in his tendons, reluctant to leave.

"Earth to Hige, you copy?"

"Yeah, just thinking."

The corridor split briefly around a support column and met again. On the near wall, a small calendar had been pinned beside a utility panel with days crossed off in careful strokes up to a specific date, then nothing.

When he looked up, Șocherel was at the far end, sitting against the wall with the Bible open, same page. Hige almost said something…the distance was what, forty meters? Șocherel would have had to walk straight through without stopping to be sitting there like that. But maybe he did walk straight through, maybe there was nothing here worth stopping for.

Năsti kept eyeing him, but didn't say anything either and the next hallway led into something else.

"Năsti, do you see?", asked Hige.

"I sure do now."

The medical inspection room had light; a fluorescent tube running along the left wall, flickering at the far end where the connection was degraded. The other fixtures were dead, but it was enough to see a room without flashlights for the first time since the surface, and all three of them stood in the doorway longer than necessary, adjusting to the fact of it.

Along the walls were multiple gurneys that featured privacy curtains. The air still carried chlorine, or at least the memory of it as it had gone sour with age. Hige opened his jacket up as he cut past the gurneys toward the far end where a monitoring unit sat on a wheeled stand, its casing cracked at one corner but otherwise still intact, with a single indicator light that pulsed on his face.

He counted without deciding to, and just as the mech's hum on the surface, it pulsed again right when he expected. He turned to the filing cabinet against the wall where four drawers stood, and he pulled a second one. Inside were numbered files, thick, and each one identical in format. He pulled one at random and opened it. Each row entry had a few columns that contained names, more cyrillic gibberish, and a few numbers running down the right margin. Early pages had the same values repeating month after month, barely moving. It looked normal, whatever normal might have meant down here.

He flipped forward and somewhere around the middle, the values drifted. Slow at first, a few percentages that could be attributed to measurement error, then less gradually. He flipped between the first and final entries and shuddered. He pulled three more at random, same thing each time. Steady, steady, steady, then not. He slid the last one back into the drawer and kicked it. The drawer caught midway when a file got stuck outside. He pushed the file in, but it provided more resistance, as something underneath was preventing it from closing flush.

He reached in and felt along the base of the drawer. He found a thinner file, flat against the bottom which he clawed out.

Identical format, identical structure. Except the entries ran normally for roughly a third of the file and then stopped entirely. In their place, a single value was written in the rightmost column.

40.001

Circled in red then…nothing. The whole file past it was empty. Previous files had larger value variations, yet nobody circled anything, so what's the point here?

Năsti appeared at his shoulder. "What's in there?"

He held the file open. Why did he kick the drawer? The reaction was still in his leg but the reason behind it left before it could say anything. He closed the file and set it on top of the cabinet.

"Files," Hige said.

"Anything useful?"

Hige looked at the monitoring unit where the indicator light pulsed right on time.

"Not anymore," he said.

"We should go," Șocherel opened the door and held it for them.

They ended up in another chamber. Hige looked at the frame where rubber gaskets dried and cracked and at the drain in the floor that was discolored at the edges.

"Decon chamber," he said.

Neither of them responded. He checked the seals on his way through; intact on three sides, but the fourth was pulling away from the concrete slightly at the top corner. He pressed it back and it held, then released as the ventilation exhaled, causing his internal metronome to start again.

Hige turned slightly sideways as he stood in the second chamber, which was small enough to only notice if you paid close attention. The ceiling was about the same height, but the walls were closer. Năsti had the notepad out, writing something and then circling it.

Șocherel stood in the doorway and looking up at the ceiling, then back through the chamber they had already passed.

"It's the same as the—" His eyes moved to Năsti, who had the notepad out.

"Nevermind."

Năsti and Hige went in. The walls were almost touching their elbows and they had to keep their arms slightly in to fit forward.

And just about—

The ventilation exhaled.

Gotcha.

Out of slight boredom and curiosity his eyes traced the air duct, an old habit where he tracked nodes the same way he tracked each wire in his mech. The ductwork branched at the ceiling junction the same as the previous chambers. Standard configuration, nothing unusual but the ceiling however…

He raised his flashlight, which reflected back shades of dark green slightly distorted from the curvature of the glass. He tilted the beam at a different angle and the reflection vanished; the light went in and it didn't come back.

"There's a room above this one," he said.

Năsti looked up and his mouth opened. Then it closed, then opened again.

"Ew."

He kept moving, then stopped and turned to Șocherel. "Same as the what?"

Șocherel didn't hesitate. "Same as the booth in the processing corridor. Observation from above."

"Right," Năsti nodded as he turned away and moved on.

The room beyond the airlocks was small and functional with a desk, a filing cabinet, and a chair that had slowly leaned into the wall over decades. On the desk sat a thick logbook, its cover long warped by time. Năsti went ahead and opened it. There were entries upon entries, each one dated and each one signed. The handwriting evolved across the years through different hands. He flipped to the first page, then to the last.

"How long was this place running?" Hige asked.

Năsti held the book open at both ends, alternating between the two.

"Very, very long," He stopped at the first page and held it under his flashlight. "First entry is 1903."

Hige whistled. 1903 was before the Soviet Union existed. Before the revolution, before the war, before any of the infrastructure above them had been imagined. Whatever this place was, whatever it had been built around, someone had found it and started keeping records long before it got claimed by the new management. Năsti slowed near the end, turned back a few pages, then forward again. He stared at something for a while, then he closed the logbook and set it back exactly where it had been.

"Like traveling through the memoirs of radioactive ghosts," he said before turning left through the far door and into the tunnel.

It sloped enough to feel it in the knees and the warmth stayed with them when it shouldn't have as they kept going deeper. Hige's flashlight moved across the walls, finding nothing that needed reading.

He counted again to forty. Once he reached forty there was no more trace of what started the counting.

The three beams of light disappeared into the slope ahead and it was silent again.

НАБЛЮДЕНИЕ

SOCHEREL

Șocherel had more questions than answers and he kept losing them as new ones arrived before the old ones, forming into nothing that made sense anymore. As they descended through the tunnel, he kept brushing his shoulder against the left wall. He stopped in his tracks as he was ejected from his own infinite web of thoughts and into the present. Then he turned his flashlight back down the corridor.

Are the walls curved?

Neither of the others stopped, so he let it go. A narrow metal door was waiting for them at the end of the corridor. The white letters shone as the beams focused on the same word.

НАБЛЮДЕНИЕ

"This one beats me entirely," said Năsti.

"Look in the middle. This one has a tower symbol standing. It's the tower room!"

"Hm."

Șocherel pushed the door and walked through. The path ahead lay through a set of stairs that were angled diagonally, cutting across the space at various degrees. Not a single line aligned with the rest as it descended enough that their lights vanished into the unknown.

What kind of demented soul builds this?

He felt Năsti's gaze in the back of his head.

Hige started down immediately by jumping the last three steps and his voice echoed from below. "This is trippy as hell, they're not even the same height."

Șocherel followed. His line of thought kept resetting with every turn like an instant lobotomy done again and again. He'd start a sentence in his head and by the next landing it was gone, replaced by the sensation of entering a void.

He kept walking. He had a thought about the curved corridors…And then he didn't have it anymore. He tried to reconstruct it, he knew it was there when the stairs turned again. He wanted to say something to Hige. He could feel the sentence waiting in his mouth and the shape of it sitting behind his teeth so he opened it, and the first word was—

He closed his mouth as the landing caught his foot. The sentence had been aimed at someone specific, but now the box where it had been was smooth and clean, gone between one step and the next.

If I don't remember what I forgot, how can I remember that I forgot?

Another turn, his hand moved along the railing, his feet found the steps and he could hear the sound of his own boots. Next step. Then another. He was thinking about the word he'd lost, retracing the shape it left behind—

His knuckles hit a bolt in the railing that was two flights below from where he'd been a moment ago. His body had made the walk without him and stood there waiting for his own consciousness to arrive.

A voice replied from below but words arrived without meaning. He knew that voice, he'd known it for years, but the sounds coming out of it were hitting his ears and stopping there.

He blinked as he gripped the railing with both hands waiting at the bottom. Hige and Năsti arrived after, but he had no memory of the last steps.

There was no corridor this time. The chamber opened up around them without warning. Șocherel's hand was already on the wall when his flashlight caught up to it, the room was wide enough that the beam tapered into nothing before hitting the far side. He swept it left and right, catching edges, angles, and surfaces that didn't resolve into a coherent shape.

Their flashlights traveled the chamber and the glass cubes took them apart. Each caught a beam at its own angle and threw it somewhere else, off a far wall, across the floor, or back at them from directions that none of them followed. For a moment there were more light sources in the room than people holding them.

He counted seven chambers, perhaps more as the far end was past his beam. The nearest one was barely a chamber at all; a metal container that was riveted and windowless. It had no glass, no observation capability, whatever happened inside it happened blind and the only concession to its occupant was a chair that was bolted to the floor at an angle that corresponded to nothing. Not the walls, not the single door, nor any other surface.

He passed the others, each with a chair at its own wrong angle. One had walls lined in something matte and black that dulled his flashlight entirely, the light going in and not coming back.

"Why are the chairs facing the wrong way?"

"I don't know," he moved on before the thought completed.

He slowed near the far end of the room where the last one remained. The mounting hardware matched something his eye had already catalogued without meaning to: The same bracket pattern as the temperature machine in Quarantine, and the same measured plaque found on the junction box. The glass around this one was cleaner than the others and the seal around the frame was tighter, suggesting a more gentle care than the rest.

Inside, the chair was positioned at the same wrong angle as all others, but on the floor beside it, barely visible through the grime on the glass, sat a small metal tin. It had been placed deliberately beside the chair leg, so that one could reach from a seated position.

Șocherel stood at the glass.

"Năsti."

Footsteps behind him stopped.

"This one's different."

Năsti started looking for a way in, which he found through a door that was angled like everything else. As they tucked their heads to enter, Șocherel's sleeve had pulled back on the door frame and revealed the dosimeter needle that sat slightly off its mark.

The floor gave slightly underfoot. It was made of copper mesh, its filaments interweaving in patterns that shifted under their weight like something organic. Șocherel's first step felt wrong, and his second was even worse.

The chair sat in the center. Up close it looked different than through the glass. The armrests worn smooth in specific places where hands gripped the same spot repeatedly over a long time. The floor beneath it was marked with faint scratches in the mesh where the chair had been moved and repositioned many times before someone had decided this angle was finally correct.

Năsti pried open the tin box. "Please god, one single cigarette," he gripped the rusty frame before it revealed to him its emptiness. "Well fuck you too."

Hige's head peered through the door. "Watchu bois doin' in here?"

He jumped down on the mesh. "Whoa, soft. Me likey." He frowned at the chair and moved it sideways. Underneath it revealed that the copper web had a few ruptured filaments standing like broken towers. He massaged them gently with his boot until it looked like nothing ever happened.

Șocherel saw the chair sitting at a different angle and moved it back to where it had been previously. The relief he felt was immediate; nothing else had changed, everything was still as untouched as ever, but the room… felt resolved. He tried to remember what angle the chair had been at originally; was it this one, or did he inadvertently disturb it?

Șocherel glanced back. Hige was still at the window, but he wasn't looking through it anymore. His right hand was resting on the glass, curled around nothing, fingers spaced apart as if gripping a lever that wasn't there. Then he blinked and followed.

The lack of stimuli dulled his senses and his mind could breathe again until he entered a place where patterned rugs ran the length of the floor and small decorations hung on the walls: a framed print here, a mounted shelf there, and a few wall lamps, all implying that multiple people lived here once.

He stepped closer and looked through the glass where a single bed, desk, shelf and a kitchenette stood at odd angles. Hige went beside him and looked through the same glass, moving his flashlight along the frame.

"That three hinge spacing is rated for when the door frame could've held something larger but it didn't though."

Șocherel looked at the hinges.

"What?"

Hige frowned. "Hinges?"

"Right…" He did not register any of those words and resumed looking through.

A climate control terminal was mounted between two of the doors with its casing intact. Hige's flashlight swept across it out of habit and stopped. "Năsti, your friend."

They looked at a stamped plate on the housing with its classic ШЕРБАНЕНКО П.A mark.

Năsti clicked the terminal's power button a few times and nothing happened obviously, but that wasn't going to stop him. "You reckon he stamped each component inside this thing? You wouldn't want to risk using equipment that wasn't approved by the glorious leader Sherbanenko."

Șocherel laughed for the first time since they'd entered this place. Năsti looked at him, then went back to the terminal and clicked the button again.

Ah fuck.

Șocherel held the smile for a few seconds, trying to let it settle into something normal.

Hige intervened, "First rule of exploration, always find the bathroom," before entering one of the rooms.

Șocherel and Năsti walked towards a lone door that stood further than the rest.

Hige's voice echoed from behind. "Holy shit!"

Năsti moved himself out of the way and started drawing the layout near the door as Șocherel stepped into a residential space that was more of a library than a place to live in.

Two stories of shelves were stacked with books and works that now lay in various states of degradation, with a round metal stair leading to the walkways around the upper shelves. The flashlight's beam swept across a large ornamental table that lay in the middle where multiple books lay open with their pages unturned by time.

Hige finally came around with his backpack in hand. He was trying to stuff multiple toilet rolls in one of the side zippers when Năsti scoffed from the upper walkway.

"Check this out, whoever lived here knew English," he held a book downwards.

1984.

He took another one out.

"And of course! Sherlock Holmes."

Șocherel looked through the other corner of the room where the owner set up a reading space. It was a comforting view, featuring a large ottoman chair that was hugged closely by two side tables, each with a separate reading light. A book sat slightly ajar on one of the tables and stuck between the pages there was a small envelope which he picked up.

Inside was a small passport photograph of someone, a man with a blank stare, perhaps forty, in a uniform he didn't recognize.

On the other table stood a brass Samovar that was tarnished to something almost black. A single glass sat in its holder still in position, waiting for water that had stopped coming a long time ago. Underneath the cup was a piece of paper.

On one side, more unintelligible bureaucracy. On the other side…

What?

He stared at the handwritten Latin letters before the words arrived, the first thing he could actually read since they'd entered this place.

— — —

I had to become director to get my own tea.

I am, as previous command was clearly not, military appointment.

This was some deliberate decision from above and I think it is correct one. The facility has been administered by science people for the better part of its existence and the result speak for itself.

Decades of observation. Rooms full of documentation. No resolution, no containment improvement, no actionable conclusion. A scientist will study problem indefinitely if you allow him to. I do not intend to allow it.

From this point protocol is mine. Methodology is mine. Whatever the previous overseer could not resolve, I intend to approach it with discipline that his work was clearly missing.

The environmental variance remains active and consistent. I have no reason yet to find this remarkable.

I moved the chair in Subject 14 because previous orientation served no practical function I could identify.

Sleep has been sound.

Pavel

— — —

Hige finally won the argument with his backpack and stood up, while Năsti came down from the upper walkway with a substantial amount of books. He took off his own backpack which he settled on the table and started shoving them in. When he couldn't fit the last two, he held them towards Hige, who was already watching him. He opened his jacket pockets which were filled with toilet rolls and shrugged. Năsti copied his homework by pocketing the two books in his jacket. Happy with their findings, all three exited back in the hallway and Năsti and Hige went ahead.

"Năsti, will you read us a story back at camp?"

"If you find me a cigarette."

Șocherel followed. As he pulled the door to close, a key caught the light, one that hung on a small hook mounted on the inner wall.

He looked in the opposite direction. Past this room, the corridor continued for a few more meters before terminating at a wall. He hadn't looked past the door when they arrived…

His jaw tightened seeing Năsti and Hige were clearly more interested in books.

"Stop, come back."

What he'd taken for a dead end was a frameless door; flush-mounted, standing slightly higher than the corridor ceiling, something sturdy that could have led into a storage room. It didn't have any markings, nor the usual keycard that accompanied strange doors, this one only had a keyhole and pull bar welded directly to the frame. Șocherel inserted the only key that he had and turned. The door opened inward and cold air rushed in from below.

Thank you, this is how stairs should look like.

He thought about Pavel, how he would casually walk these stairs up and back into his room, ready for more tea and western literature. Behind him, Năsti's voice was casual, aimed slightly left of where he was standing.

"Hige. Did you see this door earlier?"

Șocherel held his breath.

"No."

Șocherel watched the staircase while cold air moved past him steadily. He kept wondering… was it silence? explanation? proof?

Nothing. It was nothing.

БУФЕР

NASTI

Nothing?

Mother. Fucker.

You just happen to figure it all out without saying a single word, just nothing.

Năsti remembered the plate scene.

Was it that funny? Did you even hear it?

He descended a few more steps.

His mind was doing the thing it always did when it had too much material and not enough conclusions: pulling threads and laying them flat, then connecting them together whether they wanted to connect or not. Each moment was perfectly aligned, and each one with Șocherel at the center.

The wall…his hands went to the fuse box before his eyes went anywhere else. Found the latch, found the cables, then pointed at the ventilation pipe as if that's what led him there. But that's not the order I watched it happen.

And the decon chamber. He saw the room ahead, he saw it and almost said something but then stopped. Then Hige said it five minutes later and Șocherel had the answer ready before the echo died. What…was that?

Next, the terminal. He couldn't hear Hige talking about three hinges per door, five seconds before he's laughing at a stupid joke. Which one is it? Are you present or are you gone? You don't get to be both.

And of course, I draw all the damned maps and yet, a door I never saw. Hige didn't see it either and Șocherel stepped out of the library, looked once and it was just there for him. How convenient.

He stopped at a crack in the wall and ran his flashlight along it absentmindedly.

That's four.

The problem was not that Șocherel always had an explanation, the problem was that the explanations were always different. Different for each moment, tailored to each question and each one reasonable, each one just fucking reasonable enough. Anybody can be right once or twice… But nobody's right four times in four different ways unless the explanations are the job.

Năsti had known people who lied, and the worst ones weren't the people who invented stories. They were the people who never had to, the ones who carefully selected just enough from the truth that the selection itself was a lie.

The staircase ended at a door that didn't match anything above it and Hige's flashlight found it first. It had rounded corners, a riveted frame and a wheel lock mounted in the center. It reminded Năsti of a submarine gate, a door built for pressure more than ease of use. The steel was a different grade than anything in the observation rooms or the quarantine corridors, it was darker in shade and coated with a red oxide primer. Individual letters had been stamped directly into the metal, each one hammered in by hand. They were slightly uneven, and had slightly different depths.

БУФЕР

He grabbed the wheel with both hands but it resisted. He and Năsti pulled the wheel by pushing themselves against the frame and causing it to squeal and scream. Then all at once, the locking bolts released in sequence around the frame. Two went through, but Năsti stood at the threshold. He looked at the symbol that was stamped marginally lower than either side of the surrounding letters. A circle, bisected clean by a vertical line.

He imagined a lone eye, peering at him from the unknown below, ready to pull him down at the right moment. The rest of the letters had stopped being letters but the Ф stayed exactly where it was. He shook his head.

It is a stupid letter in a dumb alphabet.

He went through where it opened into a space that swallowed the beam whole. His flashlight jumped up but the ceiling wasn't there so he narrowed the beam to boost the light. It could've stopped somewhere but it did not decide about the height quite yet. The walls were raw concrete and unfinished, with vertical ribs of steel emerging at equal intervals.

He stood in the entrance and tried to find the far wall but couldn't. Hige came through behind him and for once he was silent. The ribs along the ceiling were mounting points with brackets at regular intervals, each one rated for significant load judging by the gauge of the steel. Whatever they'd held was gone, the brackets remained empty, running the full height of the ceiling on both sides and disappearing into the dark above. Something had been here, something heavy enough to need every one of these bolts and anchors.

Năsti walked further in. His footsteps came back to him from multiple directions with the echo arriving at a wrong interval, slightly too late, as if the room was larger than it looked or the sound was taking a detour. He stopped walking and listened to the silence of his own steps.

Șocherel moved along the right wall, his flashlight tracking the brackets. Hige had gone toward the center, crouching at one of the anchor points in the floor, and running his thumb across the sheared bolt. His other hand was resting on his knee, curled around something imaginary.

What the fuck is he holding?

"Whatever was here is probably the reason they built this place," Hige said.

Maybe this is it. Șocherel was sent here to investigate whether "this" is still here or not. Whatever "this" was.

Then his flashlight caught something in the far left corner, a low-framed doorway leading into a side room. Inside at the edge of his beam lay something enormous and riveted, a spiral older than anything above it. He went toward it without deciding to.

Riveted plates were curved inward in tightening bands, each segment slightly bigger than the next. Together they formed a massive coil that turned into itself like a fossil of something enormous. The steel was old and pitted, darkened by age, with its seams stitched together by rows of bolts thick as thumbs.

The structure rose higher than he'd first guessed and was supported by crude scaffolding. The curve descended toward the floor and disappeared into a wide mouth at its base.

Near the center of the spiral was a circular hatch with a rim that lined with fastening points into a hole meant for access just large enough for a person to crawl into.

Or to be placed inside.

He took a step closer where the air near it changed. His sleeve clicked as the dosimeter had woken up, the needle staying steady at a point where it hadn't been before.

"Whoa," he frowned.

This metal beast looked old, perhaps even older than the facility, and yet…It appeared futuristic, like someone had tried to understand a problem better than their own century could allow them to. He ran a thumb across one of the bolts before moving it away.

That's how you get tetanus you troll.

He took in the size of it. This couldn't be the device they stored in the main section…unless they built this one first, a smaller version?

Someone was watching him, but as he turned back the shadows gave him nothing. He looked back at the doorway and the main hall was blank except for a flashlight beam moving separately in the distance. Hige and Șocherel hadn't followed him in.

He turned back to the turbine where the silence was contained. His own breathing came back to him slightly wrong as if the spiral borrowed some of his air.

Four moments where Șocherel was ahead. Now alone with Hige probably talking about me. Is Hige in it as well?

He caught himself again, standing in front of something genuinely extraordinary and his brain was still pulling the same thread, still laying it flat, still connecting it to the same center point. He looked at the hatch with its riveted bands, and at the large mouth that could fit him good enough for a nap.

What if I'm building it? Wouldn't be the first time.

If there was a single conspiracy that was less "credible", a conspiracy that didn't fit right with him, it would be the one in which he's simply… interpreting this wrong.

He ran the four moments back. The fuse box. The decon chamber. The terminal. The stupid door.

What if out of the 4 things that he did, only one or two were weird, and the rest were simple mistakes of Șocherel's nature? Would that change anything? Probably not…

Năsti pulled the notepad out to sketch and frowned at the current page, at small clusters of drawings pressed hard enough to reach the other page behind it. He had no recollection of this.

He crouched at the base of the scaffolding, running his flashlight along the joints looking for a manufacturer stamp, a date, anything that could place when the age of this thing. No plates, no serial numbers. The author didn't want to sign his work.

His light caught a yellowed edge tucked into the junction between the scaffolding rail and the turbine housing. He worked it loose and unfolded it, just a page covered in sketches and margin notes. Rough diagrams of the spiral's cross-section, measurements with question marks beside them, arrows indicating force directions. On the other side more of the sa-

Definitely not the same.

He read the text carefully.

— — —

Coil geometry does not correspond to any acoustic principle I can identify. Resonance theory insufficient. Mechanical suppression theory insufficient. I have now read everything available to me on the subject and find myself at the same position as when I started reading.

I came here to observe the apparatus directly, thinking direct observation would resolve what documentation could not.

It has not.

I have been standing in this room for some time now. I have filled one page with measurements and cannot explain a single one of them. This is the process I criticized. Study the problem indefinitely. Produce more words. Arrive nowhere.

I am now doing exactly this and I wonder if this is how it begins for all of us. You think you will reach conclusion fast through observation. Then you observe. You either observe too much or nothing, and then you write infinite paper about it. Then you do it again.

I wonder if Volkov thought he was different too at the start.

I will go up now, too much stay.

— — —

He took one last look at Pavel's note. Someone had built this before the room around it, before the station above it, and before they three stations on top of that. He held the paper as he walked back out into the main hall. Hige and Șocherel were crouched at one of the anchor points. Hige was pointing at something on the bolt, and Șocherel was nodding.

Were they whispering something? Maybe something about him?

Both went silent when Năsti's boots came close enough. Șocherel straightened, while Hige moved his hand off a bolt.

Năsti held the folded paper out without a preamble. "Found this in there, on a scaffolding."

Șocherel took it and unfolded the paper. His eyes moved across the first line, then they moved across it again. He tilted the page toward his flashlight and started from the top. Once he was done reading, he started again.

"I have seen this before," he said.

Of course you did.

Șocherel reached into his inside pocket and produced a different page. He held both notes side by side under his flashlight.

"Same person. I thought it might be useful to keep it if he decided to leave other notes in English." He held them both out. "Same guy who you two kept joking about."

Năsti took both pages and read them. The second one he already knew, but the first one he hadn't seen before. He stopped at one line.

I moved the chair in Subject 14.

He looked up from the page. Șocherel was staring at a point just past his shoulder, holding nothing. Then his eyes found Năsti and the blankness became attention once more.

"When did you find the first one?"

Șocherel paused for a second. "In the library, beside the samovar."

"And you didn't say anything."

Șocherel shrugged. "You and Hige were filling your pockets with stuff."

Which was true, he'd been on the upper walkway himself hauling paperbacks into his jacket while Hige negotiated rolls into his backpack.

But again, a note kept privately for the duration of an entire station, produced EXACTLY when a second note appeared.

Hold up, he found the note… after he moved that chair.

"Useful to keep both together," Năsti handed the paper back smiling.

Five.

Șocherel folded them and returned them to his inside pocket, causing Năsti's brain to fume at this point.

"Hige, let me show you something that I found"

They went back through the low doorway into the adjacent room. Hige's flashlight caught it immediately and stayed there as the beam travelled the full height of the spiral before coming back down to the riveted bands.

"Is this the most ancient technology we've ever seen?"

"Bet." Năsti said.

Hige crouched at the base where the spiral disappeared into the wide mouth and looked up into it.

"The riveting on this thing," he said almost to himself. "You know how long this would've taken? Each seam individually by hand alone."

"This is what makes this thing peak, whoever built this understood something the people above them never caught up to."

Hige stood and looked at the mouth of the base, then sat down inside it. He shifted around, finding a good angle and leaned back against the inner curve of the spiral. He looked up into the coil above him.

"Actually not bad," he said.

"A nap in a Soviet MKUltra. Neat."

"I'm resting in a Soviet suppression device, there's a difference." He patted the curved wall beside him. "Good steel. Hasn't moved in a hundred years and probably won't move in the next ten minutes either."

Năsti leaned against the scaffolding. "This is how you get tetanus. Or worse."

Hige looked up into the narrowing spiral above. Then he stood, planting his boot on the inner wall where the curve was gentlest, testing the grip. He looked up again.

"Năsti how far can I monke?"

"Very, don't."

Hige was already climbing. He made it about four meters before the spiral tightened enough that his shoulders were against both sides simultaneously. He stopped there, now wedged comfortably and looking down at Năsti with a victorious glare.

"Good view from up here."

"Of what? It's pitch black."

"Of me."

Năsti laughed.

Dumb monke.

The paranoia was there, it hadn't gone anywhere. But right now there was just Hige wedged inside a hundred-year-old spiral four meters off the ground, satisfied with himself.

"Get down," Năsti said. "Before I have to explain how you died."

Hige shifted his weight and started working his way back. His boots found the rivets he'd used on the way up but halfway down he lost a foothold and caught himself on the lip of a plate, hanging for a second before his boot found the next seam.

Tetanus you fu-

"Șocherel, light here."

Năsti pointed his flashlight at the wall where Hige's boot was searching. Hige found the rivet, stepped down and dropped the last meter, landing heavily.

Năsti waited for the correction, yet nothing came.

Hige dusted his hands on his jacket, then frowned.

"Good steel," he said, then walked out without looking back.

Hm.

The spiral loomed above Năsti while two flashlights danced along the far wall outside.

One.

РЕАКТОР

HiGe

The tall passage out of Buffer was lit.

Not by them. The fluorescent tubes were mounted in caged housings along the ceiling, industrial, spaced every ten meters. They weren't powered when the three of them stepped through, but the first one flickered twice and caught as Hige passed beneath it. Then the next. Then another, each one igniting just before he reached it, the corridor assembling itself in a sequence ahead of them. By this point, the fact that a century old place had active electricity was just accepted as something normal down here.

Năsti had an odd look when he spoke, a targeted one.

Șocherel turned his light off let the tubes do the work. He raised the handle as he passed each tube, as if directing an orchestra.

"How polite." He flicked his wrist again in the opposite direction and another light happily participated. "Knows how to do a good show."

Behind them, Năsti huffed something that could have been a chuckle or a scoff.

Șocherel flicked at the next one and his hand stayed up. He stood under the tube longer than the moment needed, then he lowered his arm and kept walking through a slope. The air had that off-putting warmth to it, mixed with burnt electronics and it came from a specific point rather than just accumulating from all around.

Hige's legs carried him and his mind did what it always did, sort things.

Cable gauge: one box. Air temperature: another. Slope angle: a third. They were small compartments that kept the world steady while his feet handled the walking, except the boxes were fleeting now, replaced by shapes where his thoughts should have been.

Someone opened those boxes and it didn't feel like he was the one that did it. He tried to add new thoughts into them, to anchor the points that always kept him steady.

I'm fine. Look: hands, fingers. I can move them, it's all fine.

He walked for what felt like two minutes when the slope changed. At first flat, then gently up, then flat again. A few uneven lights cast down on the concrete before they thinned completely. Most of the tubes were dead by now. He walked through light. Then through dark. Then through light again, each layer peeling more of his boxes, as if ripping the container itself.

The corridor narrowed slightly and the concrete was rougher. He didn't remember a junction but the tunnel was continuing and his feet were on it and that was enough. He was about to say something to Năsti about the cable gauge on the wall when the thing that he was going to say left. Not the words themselves, but the reason. The impulse had been there fully formed, and now the space where it had been was smooth and empty.

He stopped and turned around. The corridor behind him was too dark now with him alone.

Wasn't I in the middle?

He tried to reconstruct it. He was walking- no, they were walking together… He was between them, Șocherel was ahead playing with the lights, and Năsti was behind. The corridor had continued and he'd continued with it, the problem was that at some point this corridor stopped being that corridor. Then he was here…

Back now boy, right now.

He turned—

His hand was on a door which he hadn't walked to. He'd turned around and the door was behind him, except behind him was the corridor he'd come from. He was standing with his palm flat against metal that was radiating heat, and his body was already leaning forward as if he'd been in the process of pushing it open for some time. Inside a narrow metal stair clung to the wall, descending the last few meters before turning sharply onto a suspended bridge which cut across the entire chamber's diameter.

The room resembled a cave, cut into the rock rather than built inside concrete with walls that were rough and curved where they met the ceiling. Heavy steel full of grime lined the near, and cables thick as his forearm fed down from the ceiling into the far side of the room through steel conduit.

A deep blue emerged from the pool that sunk into the floor. A blue that existed in the space between colour and radiation, soft and constant, casting no shadows because it came from everywhere the water touched.

The bridge was barely wide enough for two people to pass shoulder to shoulder, and it looked about as sturdy as it was. Hige stepped onto the bridge and the metal shook beneath his boots, its grating carrying a warning.

From here, suspended over the pool, the water reflection extended downward in perfect symmetry. The blue light swallowed it, the column continuing into depth until it dissolved into cobalt haze. He didn't know which side of the water was real.

He was standing over a functional reactor. After everything above it had died, this thing was still turning. Hige crouched on the bridge and heard the machine breathe a low pulse that ended in a catch, a mechanism completing its rotation a moment too late. It sounded like a bearing that was running dry. He counted his pulse against the machine's pulse with a thumb on his index.

Something had been in his head… A fact, something true and objective. He could feel the shape it left behind and the space where it had been. The space was proof itself that something had been there. You don't notice a tool missing from a rack unless you remember putting it there first, which meant part of him still knew it.

The count reached forty and the cycle completed exactly where he expected it to.

Good timing.

He lifted his hand off the railing but the vibration stayed in his fingers through a faint pulse that didn't belong to his heartbeat. He watched them press against nothing and waited for it to stop, but it didn't.

He traced a band of mineral deposits that ran the perimeter of the pool. Below that a second ring, fainter this time. Then an even lower one where the water idled around. The mech's internal coolant reservoir had the same lines; minerals engraved over decades of solitude. It was a machine that needed to drink plenty, but with no one left to replenish its source.

She'll hold… For now.

Somewhere far away and above him, he heard a word, one simple in form yet unknown in meaning. Then again, even closer.

The bridge rattled when a flashlight beam cut across the chamber ceiling. Năsti came through the door moving fast and stopped on the landing.

"Dude where-"

Then he saw the pool.

Șocherel came through behind him. The three of them stayed like that: Năsti on the stairs, Șocherel in the doorway, Hige leaning on the bridge over the water.

"Oh yeah," Năsti pulled back his sleeve to reveal a jumpy needle. "Of course there's a reactor."

Hige looked up at them.

"What?"

Năsti pointed the bracelet to his face. "You've been gone for…" he turned to Șocherel for a moment, then back to Hige. "How long have you been in here?"

He didn't have an answer.

"We should keep moving," Șocherel said.

Năsti took his notepad out, he had been writing more and drawing less since the previous station. Hige stood up from the bridge and noticed something caught by the blue light on the side frame, a large steel plate bolted to the reactor housing, half-lit by the pool's glow.

ШЕРБАНЕНКО П.А. 1974

Năsti's eyes went on the plate. "If someone asked me to define proper career ascension, I would a hundred percent reference Pavel's stamps."

Hige took a last look at the pool from the top of the stairs where the blue and the hum held. The machine would keep its rhythm for a while longer, alone in the dark, as it had before they arrived and as it would after they left.

Not long enough if you ask me.

ТИШИНА

SO C h ErEL

They followed the wiring down past the reactor housing where the concrete ended and the walls turned to something older. The architecture changed in his feet first as he walked through the cellar of a chapel where the ground became uneven and unfinished. The surface had the texture of something that had been laid by hand and left to cure without anyone coming back to trowel it flat.

Șocherel ran his flashlight along the wall. Individual bricks lay in an arching pattern that curved overhead into a vaulted ceiling. They were uneven, the cement thicker in places where someone had compensated for an improperly placed brick. Iron bars followed the mortar seams, reinforcing where the brickwork was weakest.

Hige's flashlight found the timber first, a vertical brace dark with age and cracked by moisture that was now long dry.

"Wood." Hige said.

"Left or right?" Năsti asked.

The tunnel split into two paths, both disappearing into nowhere, just further down. Șocherel stood at the junction and waited for a clue, but no signage, no markings, no wires splitting to indicate anything, both paths were identical in construction.

"You pick this time."

Năsti jumped his flashlight from one path to another. He took his notepad out and flipped it open, when Șocherel glimpsed his writing.

Words were circled multiple times and arrows pointed to phrases that had no location anchor on the page. He flipped it to a blank, and drew two paths with a brick wall in the center. A drop of water crashed on the page, causing him to look up. He then pointed toward the floor where surface tension pushed the water droplets to the left.

"When in doubt…follow the water I guess?"

All three took a left and passed over more brick arches, each one slightly different from the last. Then his boot found water that pooled where the floor dipped, and a cold shot ran through the sole and into his ankle. Năsti tried to jump to a dry spot and splashed right into it, yet it produced no sound whatsoever.

Șocherel frowned. He stamped the stream with his wet boot, listening this time, but…silence. The walls, the dirt absorbed it entirely. He splashed again harder, and nothing returned, the sound went in and the tunnel kept it as a gift.

His wrist clicked. He pulled his sleeve to reveal a dosimeter where the needle was jumping up and down and he raised his forearm towards the other two. Năsti glanced, then shook his head looking at the floor, and Hige didn't bother to check his at all.

The opening ahead was rough. Chisel marks ran along the edges where someone had widened it enough for a person to pass through sideways. Șocherel turned his shoulders and squeezed through, his jacket scraping stone on both sides. It opened into a vertical shaft that was carved into the rock, dropping below them and rising above into darkness.

Șocherel traced the original wiring down from the top, then found a second generation of cables that ran alongside. Standing platforms jutted out at different levels connected by stairs, each one a crude metal shelf supported by brackets driven into the rock face. Some held heavy equipment tucked away by rotting canvas, while others stood empty.

Hige was already on the first flight, his boot testing each step before committing his weight. It trembled as he descended, but there was no noise.

At the third platform down, diagonal openings had been cut into the rock. The angles didn't sit right with gravity, each one was tilted differently and carved at orientations that suggested some form of orientation, and each room proposed its own geometry.

"These can't be rooms," Năsti said from behind him. "You can't even take a shit anywhere."

Șocherel kept descending. Fourth platform, then the fifth. One of Pavel's bulbs hung from a bracket at the turn, casting a small circle of orange on the stone. He passed through it and back into the dark.

Both generations of wire converged at the bottom, where they terminated at a crude switchboard. The path went deeper into the rock where a corridor awaited them, cut with more care than anything above it. At the end, a single incandescent bulb still burned.

Năsti put his backpack down and sat on the stone.

"I need a breather."

Șocherel walked toward the light.

There has to be an outcome to this forsaken place.

The corridor had been chiseled smooth for twenty meters and at the end the chisel work stopped. The last strikes were still in the rock shallow and unfinished, left at whatever angle they'd been swung. Drill holes ran across the wall in a rough rectangle where chalk lines connected them into the shape of a door that no one came back to cut.

Absolutely not.

He put his palm flat against the wall where the door should have been. The stone was cold and it went on forever. His feet stood there a beat longer, then walked back toward the platform.

Năsti was sitting against the wall writing in the notepad, while Hige munched on a ration bar.

"There's nothing down there," Șocherel said.

Năsti looked up. "What do you mean-?"

"The corridor ends."

Năsti frowned and flipped to a page in the notepad. "No way, all these cabl-"

"The. Corridor. Ends."

* * *

They stood back at the tunnel fork where the brick wall lay idly in between.

"Alright, last one," said Năsti as he closed his notepad.

The right path opened wider than the left had. Pavel's insulated cable ran thicker here, spliced into the old copper wiring where dead bulbs used to light up the way. Șocherel's hand was already on the cable before he stopped walking. The gauge was heavier on this side and the splice work was cleaner, looks like Pavel had learned from his earlier attempts and applied the lessons here. The brick arches were more uniform, built by fewer hands or more experienced ones. Even the floor was drier. Everything about the right path said: this one was used.

He quickened his pace. The right path had been telling from the start by the details, the surfaces, even the wiring. Each section was slightly more refined than before as they moved further. The progression that he'd tried and failed to find in the angled rooms now presented itself clearly in the walls. The chisel work shifted from rough gouges to almost flat surfaces until it opened as before into a natural alcove.

More than half of the lights continued working here, and a few more flickered dimly but still held. The floor was dry and level, the platforms that were connected by metal stairs didn't show the rust that had coated everything as before.

This place had been a proper workspace. A hand-cranked drill rig sat bolted to a wooden frame, its cast iron darkened by age. Along with it stood a rack of pickaxes organized by size with all the handles aligned. Multiple crates of iron spikes and splitting wedges stacked against the near wall, each marked by a bolted plate long gone.

Hige ran his hand along the drill, testing the locking mechanism with two fingers. He opened his mouth to say something, but then he closed it, looking confused.

Șocherel watched Hige who stood there stuck on a sentence that never arrived.

They descended again through the platforms, passing yet another array of angled rooms. These ones had multiple items scattered through them, from simple bed frames to cupboards and storage containers. Every room also had multiple brass lanterns that lined the walls enough to fill it with light.

Năsti stopped at one of the doorways. "They slept here."

"Yeah."

He looked back up the platform stairs they'd just descended. "Why not just…go up?"

Șocherel looked inside at a metal frame with a straw mattress rolled to one end and a lantern bracket above where a pillow would be. A large wood bucket stood at the bottom.

"Maybe there was no 'up' back then," he said.

The wires converged once again at the bottom into a switchboard. Small carbon-filament bulbs pulsed with a steady rhythm where crude copper remained plugged. Next to it was a rudimentary table from heavy wood with legs bolted to the floor. Its surface was stained by lamp oil and it held an assortment of tools and papers. Năsti picked one up carefully.

"Have a look at this."

They were cross-section diagrams, depth markers along one axis and directional arrows along another. Two parallel tunnels converging at a point below where they were standing, right under the previous tunnel that they took. The route ahead continued much further, the other papers revealing a deeper layout within the station.

He looked past the table at the far end of the alcove, where the rock face was exposed. The chisel strikes here were sharper than any in the corridors behind them.

The tools are still here. The plans are still here.

They passed into the rock where another narrow corridor stood. They went in one by one, squeezing through the crevasse.

The corridor ran straight, but its walls tightened, the pressure squeezing on his temples and every inch closer to the end further pulling him inward. The wiring still ran along the ceiling through pristine chisel work. Pavel had clearly run his best efforts here.

Șocherel could feel his framework of mind come back again, he could read this place and it was telling him one thing: further.

Năsti's breathing was behind him and Hige's boots marched on stone. The corridor descended in a slight grade and his legs moved faster and his chest loosened. There was going to be a door at the end of this, there had to be—

The bulb lit the wall. A brass handle sat bolted to the rock at the height where a door should have been, its mounting plate secured with four screws and a spring that still held its weight.

But no door.

The brass was worn smooth in places that didn't match a normal grip. The underside and the edges looked as if someone had held it from every angle for hours, trying different approaches to a problem that had no solution. The mounting plate was slightly bent where force had been applied beyond what the spring was built to take. And on the rock around it, at forehead height, a patch of stone had been worn to a dull polish.

No.

The latch would retract against nothing and the spring would push back and the wall would be rock and the corridor would be over. He knew because he could see exactly what knowing actually meant, it worn into the stone by others who knew it too and couldn't stop.

His hand closed around the brass anyway and the spring shrieked as he pulled the lever down. He leaned all his weight into it waiting for the wall to give. But it didn't, the latch just ground against the stone. He let go and the spring pushed back.

"Soc?" Năsti's voice, from behind.

He kicked the wall, no sound came.

He kicked again harder this time. The wall stood there as it always did, unbothered by him.

The third time something in his ankle gave. He tried to scream but nothing came as the walls swallowed his voice.

The beam of light trashed around as he kicked it again.

He braced both hands against the wall and pressed his forehead into the rock. He didn't inhale for a while. Then he pushed off the wall and turned around as Hige and Năsti stood watching him.

Șocherel walked past both of them through the corridor, past the board and up the stairs, ducking into the first room of empty angled rock. He sat down with his back against the wall and opened the Bible to a page that always gave him counsel. Psalm Ninety-one stood there ready to be heard once more and he read the first line.

"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty."

He knew it by heart, and every time it gave him strength. His eyes moved to the next line, this time uncertain.

"I will say of the Lord… He is my refuge, and my…my fortress: my God; in him will I trust."

"Surely he shall deliver thee…"

"Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the — he shall deliver — the noisome — from the snare"

"From…deliver snare"

He shall c ver thee with his fea rs and under his

W ings shalt

Thou

He threw it against the wall. It made no sound.

His palms pressed over his eyes, fingers buried in his hair pulling at the roots. He sat like that for a while before Hige stepped in. He held out his canteen which Șocherel took and drank deep.

"You're alright?"

"I don't know."

The Bible was lying open across the room. Hige crouched and picked it up, then stayed there. He was counting on his fingers, going up one by one and resetting them once he reached the tenth digit.

Șocherel took another sip, too exhausted to inquire any further.

Hige walked around the room slowly, then crouched where two walls met. He placed a palm flat against the rock, holding it there, then counted once more under his breath.

He looked back at him. "There's air moving through here."

Șocherel stood and walked over. From where Hige crouched, the room told a different angle. The two walls overlapped, one passing behind the other with enough space between them for a person to fit through. From anywhere else in the room it looked like nothing.

Hige pointed at the wall beside the gap. A cable clamp was bolted to the rock where Pavel's insulated wire ran to it and stopped there. A page was wedged between the clamp and the rock which Șocherel pulled out. Hige leaned in.

Șocherel opened it and knew something was wrong before he read a word. The letters sat at different heights and some strokes pressed deep into the paper while others faded to almost nothing.

— — —

Continued junction 6C to 7A with thick cable. Ceramic anchor proved difficult to operate, almost too old for the work. Whoever installed them would probably laugh in my face if I explained to him this. But if the contact is clean it holds for a while.

The passage continues further than I expected and rock composition changes past this point. Previous copper contacts required filing before solder would accept so I have noted this in all junction since the third platform.

I have managed 11 working splices across this station. Each one took longer than the last.

I do not think this is because of distance.

The wire is not difficulty, difficulty is I hear myself no longer.

— — —

Șocherel looked at the note for a while after he finished reading, then folded it with the others. Hige set the Bible down in Șocherel's hand and stood at the gap looking through.

"Get Năsti."

НА С ТИ?

Two.

His shoulder scraped rock as he turned sideways into the gap. The walls pressed his chest and back at the same time. He shuffled one foot forward, then dragged the other to meet it. His tongue tasted the grit under his teeth and when he blinked he felt the dirt beneath his eyelids.

Hige found the room by accident and he walked in to give Șocherel water, that's it. That's all it was.

That's all it was.

Except how is it that every time something important gets found, I'm not around? The note? The room? Șocherel finding something by mistake, maybe, sure, but Hige also finding something by mistake? Entirely absurd.

Maybe he simply heard Șocherel going in that room…That's reasonable. That's what you do when your friend goes batshit insane in a hole, you go to him.

But why did Șocherel have a meltdown? How is it that Șocherel managed to have a meltdown exactly in the right place, AGAIN?

Shut up.

What if Șocherel made the whole scene so that Hige can "pretend" he found the room, do I count a point for each?

Shut up.

Maybe I'm building this…And if I am building this then I built the last one too and the one before that and at some point this fucking structure becomes the evidence and I can't tell which parts I laid down and which parts were already there.

He sighed, exhausted from a brain stuck in overdrive.

What am I even counting?

The gap narrowed and the ceiling dropped. He couldn't stand up anymore so he lowered himself to his hands and knees, then to his belly. He was on the ground and the rock was on his back. The backpack caught on something and he couldn't move forward. He twisted and felt the stone press into his ribs. He pulled harder and rock cut into his shoulder as he pushed further.

Hige's voice came from ahead. "Light here."

He angled his flashlight forward.

Șocherel light here.

Nah fuck that. Only two valid theories here, either he has spent so much time talking behind my back that he mistook who I was, or he no longer knows who I am.

He hissed through his teeth when his knee scraped on a sharp edge. The passage tilted downward and his hands turned wet.

Neither turned, neither cared about him.

Hige stopped.

"What?" said Șocherel.

"I'm stuck here, let me try to move this mound."

Năsti could hear Șocherel's breathing ahead of him. He counted it: two seconds between each exhale and inhale. Nobody breathes like that unless they're actively aware of their own breathing.

He just lost his mind in a room, of course he's controlling it…

Nah, he's controlling it because I'm listening and because he will slip soon, I'm sure of it.

Hige muttered something through the dirt. Then both him and Șocherel pulled themselves up. Năsti dragged himself to the edge and stood. He brushed the dirt off his arms and spat. He was standing on smooth copper clay, the walls sharing the same material.

He pointed his flashlight at half pillars of clay that were carved directly into the rock. Everything his light touched came back in shades of orange, cascading on a few oil lamps that lay broken on the floor beneath their brackets.

Năsti's flashlight moved across the wall where marks stood in the clay. There were dozens of them, all scratched at different depths, different heights, different styles. Some preferred to carve in deliberate strokes, while others gouged deep and fast. A few were gentle scratches, like the person could no longer hold the pressure from uncertainty.

He pulled out his notepad and started copying. First, the easy ones, the ones with letters that he recognized. Then lower, a cluster of shorter marks, older ones. He flipped the page.

He drew a set near the floor where someone used a tool to scratch into the wall. It was not enough, so he ripped the page and drew again. He placed the symbols where they should be, then he flipped another page.

More.

He went back to the center where smaller ones stood between large letters.

"Năsti." Șocherel's voice behind him.

He kept writing.

"Năsti, we should keep moving."

The next section had overlapping marks where two or three people argued on top of each other so he pressed his flashlight closer and tried to separate them. His pen moved faster now.

"Năsti."

He followed the traces closely. If he could follow the depth of them, then he'd know the order in which the words had overwritten each other. There were more past the pillar. He moved to the next section.

A hand lay gently on his shoulder.

He shoved it off, causing Șocherel to stumble back. He stopped writing and moved to another section of the wall.

Neither said a word, they just turned and left, their lights dimming as the corridor curved away.

His pen kept connecting the symbols that shared depth, then those that shared height. The ones with no obvious correlation took a while longer.

Good, very good.

He crouched to reach a set near the floor and propped his flashlight against the base of the pillar so he could hold the notepad with both hands.

There's no reason to overwrite something here, unless you want to hide something.

He flipped to a new page.

Now the wall as a whole this time. Rather than the symbols themselves, he started drawing the general arrangement of everything. His pen drew lines between the clusters with arrows going through a tangled web. He drew question marks over some and exclamation marks over the others. He could feel them arranging into a pattern.

He went back to the first cluster to make sure. His pen retraced lines he'd already drawn, now pressing harder this time. A mark he'd copied on the first pass looked different now. Had the angle been that steep? He drew it again beside the original and they didn't match so he put a question mark on the first one and circled the other.

He flipped the notepad and now drew without looking at the paper, retracing every groove that his fingertips felt, then he went back and traced the second layer. He drew that on that same page, but in lighter strokes so he could tell them apart.

His handwriting on the early pages had been neat, measured. The difference was there without looking for it. The current page was tight and fast, with letters crushed together where the pen pressed too hard. How did that happen?

Six pages both front and back. He remembered starting the first one. He remembered a hand, but between those two points and now the pages had filled themselves. His fingers had dirt worked into the creases of his knuckles and multiple nails were bleeding.

If Șocherel would have done this…

Perhaps one for myself?

He looked up at the wall.

He shuffled back to the previous section when his boot caught the flashlight, causing it to fly away and turn off when it hit the wall.

Deeper now. His fingernail caught an edge beneath both layers. A curve that continued under everything else. The oldest marks, the ones the other two layers were built on top of with deliberate care. He drew once more, retracing the hidden paths.

I'm onto you.

His fingers were ahead of his pen now, finding the next groove before he'd finished drawing the last. He could now see them on paper as they stacked onto each other. He looked down at the notepad, and the bottom layer was obvious from the beginning.

SOCHEREL

HIGE

Năsti looked at the bottom of the wall where the light should have been, yet it was only darkness. He raised his arms to find the wall, his hands retracing the same grooves to the bottom where he left the flashlight, but it wasn't there anymore.

The ceiling pushed outwards and extended into the vastness. Arms and legs became his last tools as he tried to orient himself around. He reached for the wall again, but his hand found nothing. He stepped sideways and reached again only to be met with the same outcome. His chest would burst any minute, when his fingers finally touched clay. He pressed his whole palm flat against it and held it there.

Left or right?

He heard nothing. He exhaled, and not even his own breathing came from a certain direction, so he went right.

His hand stayed on the wall. The clay here was as smooth as any under his fingers, then rough, then smooth again. With no other stimuli left, his mind raced to count his feet.

Fourteen.

Fifteen.

The path curved slightly while his fingertips struggled to keep themselves to the wall, thinning out under them. The passage was getting wider and wider. Thirty-nine, forty.

He stopped. The passage shouldn't widen, even if he took the opposite way it shouldn't fucking widen.

He pressed his knuckles hard into his eyes, causing colors to bloom behind his eyelids: green, then orange, then a pale shifting blue that pulsed gently when he released the tension.

Better, anything was better than nothing. He let go and opened his eyes. The shapes remained, drifting from corner to corner across his view, thinning into dim smoke that the dark pulled apart and reassembled. His retinas kept firing and painting things that weren't there onto things that might or might not be there.

Something moved ahead of him. Air brushed past him, as if something stepped out of his way too late.

Two points stood still in the dark ahead and he watched them. Once he blinked the points shifted closer and his stomach dropped as he took a few steps back, trying not to blink again.

The points stood still, but the more he focused the more they resembled a—

He didn't blink until he was already turning, then he ran. He tried reaching for the wall as he ran but it wasn't there.

He kept running, and his footsteps came back to him wrong. A few too many, half a beat behind. His left hand found the wall and held it there as he continued to increase his speed. A breath passed the back of his neck close, warm, and almost ready to touch his spine.

He hit the half-pillar with his shoulder causing him to go face-front into the stone. His hands found the floor and the clay felt cold on his face. Then it felt too cold as blood started to drip down his nose. He pressed his face into the clay harder and stayed there.

Get up. Do not look.

Get up and go left. Do not look.

Do. Not. Look.

He lifted his face off the floor, nose throbbing as it peeled away. He found the wall with his left hand, eyes closed, and stood.

Zero.

One.

The wall narrowed under his fingers. Narrower meant good, narrower meant back. He held his eyes closed as he moved further.

Seven.

Eight.

The walls were close enough that he could extend both his arms to feel the clay. He wiped the blood off his mouth and kept running.

The walls returned back to his arms.

Fourteen.

Fifteen.

His fingers passed the grooves in the clay, the ones he'd copied. Something scraped behind him but he didn't turn.

Twenty-six.

Twenty-seven.

The dark ahead thinned. He did not trust that. But he trusted it more than what was behind.

Năsti dropped his arms and went for it. He bumped into the walls as the corridor bent around when finally, he saw a light widen ahead as the corridor straightened.

Now, nothing happened, so act like it.

He wiped his nose with his sleeve again and steadied his breathing, then he rounded the curve at a casual pace.

Năsti stopped a few steps back and neither of them looked at him. Șocherel was crouched beside a low passage shining his light through. Hige stood behind him with his arms crossed. His fingers were tapping against his own arm, an incoherent rhythm that sat wrong in Năsti's ears.

The passage connected into a slope with shallow steps carved into clay, going further down.

* * *

The stairs went on for an eternity. With each next step he had to focus on, the truth kept slipping away from his mind when it was mere inches away from discovery.

All three stopped when the ground disappeared. The beam fell for longer than it should have into a flat expanse of clay. The echo of a kicked stone took long enough to arrive that Năsti stepped back from the edge.

A ladder hung from two iron bolts driven into the wall, made out of rope and wood which disappeared into the shaft well before the bottom. A few rungs tilted and cracked where the knots held it, and others were entirely missing.

Șocherel went down first without hesitation. His flashlight swung from his sidebelt with each step, the beam sweeping the shaft wall in slow arcs. Năsti watched him shrink, by the time he reached the bottom his light was a small circle on the clay.

Then Hige went next. He gripped the rope and used the rungs where they held, skipping ones that he didn't trust as much. Now with a few meters left, he wrapped the rope once around his forearm and walked his boots down the wall. He reached the bottom and looked at his palms.

Năsti put his weight on the first rung. It creaked but held. Then the second held as well. The rope swayed against the rock, causing him to tighten his grip. He kept descending. The rungs thinned as he went lower and the gaps between them grew longer. He could hear the other two below him closer now.

Then the wood split under his foot and his hands burned as the rope slid through them. He hit the clay hard on his ankle, causing him to fall sideways onto his temple. The impact emptied his lungs and he lay there… tasting blood again.

Șocherel crouched beside him and extended his hand. Năsti rolled onto his knees and stood on his own. The hand remained there for a moment longer before it withdrew.

Șocherel turned towards the nearest pillar then he kept walking. They were thick, rough cut and spaced unevenly. Their flashlights reached the nearest ones, then lost themselves further ahead. They walked in a loose line. Șocherel was ahead, then Hige, then Năsti. Their boots left deep prints here as the floor turned into soft crimson dust.

Năsti saw three sets of tracks leading back to the base of the ladder. Three sets, not two.

He was still there.

The pillars did nothing but raise more questions. They had been shaped by hands that spent weeks, even months down here to craft such detail. They were carving pillars in the darkness for no one to see, in a place that nobody should ever visit. Hige stopped at one and put his hand flat against it, holding it there. Then he walked away without acknowledging the action.

He didn't even know that he'd done it.

Another point?

Three pillars later, Năsti's flashlight caught something at shoulder height. It was a handprint moulded into the clay coating. This worker pressed their hand here and held it long enough for the clay to remember. The fingers were slightly spread with the heel of the palm deeper than the tips. His hand moved towards the notepad, but it stopped. He kept walking.

Șocherel stopped at a pillar and sat with his back against it, wiping sweat off his forehead. He pulled out his canteen and took a sip, then held it out to his left without looking. Hige took it and drank, then handed it back. Șocherel capped it before Hige had finished wiping his mouth. His lips moved for a beat, shaping something without sound. Năsti stood a few steps behind them. He had his own water, but he didn't reach for it.

Since when do they share water?

He tried to remember. Had they always done this, or had there been nothing to notice until now?

The anchor bolts... Both going silent when they heard him coming. And now a canteen passed without looking and capped without waiting. Small things, things that don't mean anything unless they're connected to the same thing.

Șocherel light please.

The name slip came back without permission and the tape played itself again, so he let it run for a few more loops. His flashlight swept low across the clay as they walked. Three sets of prints behind them stood deep and fresh, the disturbed dust floating a few inches above.

Then a fourth one joined them. The movement was shallower than theirs, its edges softer in the print. They followed it without a word, flashlights moving from print to print. These tracks didn't wander, stop or circle around; they walked straight ahead without hesitation where there were no more pillars, just flat emptiness. Năsti pulled out his notepad and opened it to mark the change.

Their names stood there, circled multiple times in ink that had torn through the paper. Switch to blank. He drew a single vertical line across the page and closed it. Pavel's tracks started ending as the clay underfoot changed; it turned darker, grittier, and it crunched with every step they took.

Șocherel's head stayed forward. Always ahead, never behind.

He hadn't dared look at me once.

The names from the wall passed through his head. He saw them the way his fingers had drawn them, the curves of the letters pressing into the dark. HIGE. SOCHE—

Șocherel glanced back at Năsti without slowing. His feet started trembling and they were no longer able to walk unconsciously. He focused on moving his left leg. Then the right.

You're not in my head.

The letters from the wall, the breathing count, the canteen, the light he asked for by the wrong name, the room he walked straight into. All of it, running at once. Were there other moments too?

The ground underfoot snapped him back when it started growing teeth.

The first one rose from the floor, a dark spine around knee height, angled sharply away from them. Năsti's flashlight caught it and the edge threw back a hard gleam. His flashlight found another, then three more clustered together, all leaning into the same direction. Dozens more appeared from the ceiling, their true height unknown, still angled like the rest.

Hige crouched next to a smaller one and touched one of its needle tips. He rubbed his fingers looking at the fine residue. More clusters rose at every height, all leaning towards the same direction, their direction. Some were as tall as walls, narrowing the space through dark blades.

Șocherel's flashlight hit one above his head and the beam split apart, scattering in multiple directions and coming back from a thousand edges. He lowered the flashlight…

And he could still see as the space ahead held its own light; a gray stillness that sat in the air like fine dust without a source.

The ground sloped to a long and wide descent into a crater. Further ahead two massive shapes faced each other. One rose from the ground, while the other descended from above. Their surface bristled with the same spines that filled the cave, except that these were oriented towards each other and converged at the center where a thin line sat between them, barely visible. When Năsti moved his beam across it the light simply ended there.

They continued down the slope in a single line as the formations pressed closer and closer until they had to turn sideways to pass between the spines. Edges caught on their clothing, their packs, their skin. A needle tip dragged across Năsti's forehead and left a line there.

The same few words looped through him and intensified more with each pass.

The clicking from their wrists became constant now, fast enough that the clicks blurred into a single tone when the path opened at the base of a formation. From here the shape's center looked less like a hill and more like an arm, thinning as it rose until the tip was no wider than a cable. The ceiling told the same story in reverse, and between them…

Someone.

A large body was kneeling at the top of the slope, both of his hands still holding the seam. He'd knelt, pressed his palms to the formation and refused to pull them away. His skin had darkened where they held the line and his body had the color of gray wax.

A recorder sat on the ground beside his right knee with the record button still pressed. Hige reached down and picked up the recorder. He found the switch and pressed play. He pressed again, and nothing happened. Again.

"Batteries," Năsti said.

Click. Click. Click.

Silence.

"Hige, batteries."

Hige stared at him.

Năsti opened Hige's pack and rummaged through the front pocket where he found three batteries. He held them up in Hige's face for a moment, but his eyes passed over them without recognition.

Năsti loaded them and pressed play.

ПАВЕЛ

The tape hiss filled the cave and bounced off the formations in thin echoes until a voice came through.

To however…or better say if someone find this, here is all I know.

I am Pavel Aleksandrovich Sherbanenko, current overseer of structure Twenty-One and the date is…

A pause.

The date doesn't matter here.

Another pause, longer.

I am recording because my hands will not allow to, they do not cooperate with this task anymore. I can carry and move, but pen and letter left me.

Năsti looked up at Șocherel who hadn't moved, and at Hige whose eyes were stuck on his arms. Năsti tried to focus on the tape but his thoughts kept switching to Hige's tattoos.

…I reached below cable terminus, no more point in new junctions. It is not because of difficulty but because what I did is fundamentally flawed because the formations are graphite. They have been growing toward this place for longer than facility try to understand. I do not think they were here when first men found it. I think it grew with them.

Silence came again and Năsti checked whether the spools still turned. They were.

He started counting the silence. He got to thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty–

Volkov… my friend, I owe you apology, one I regret you will never hear. I insulted scientist man from first moment. He told me problem does not reduce to angle, that it is something else happening. I thought this is weakness, lack of direction…

I said a scientist who studies a problem indefinitely is not studying, he is wasting time. I was very proud when I said it to him but now I understand his face from then.

There was a laugh followed by another pause.

Volkov was the only honest man, the problem does not reduce to angle because it is not problem. Problem is solution which is not found. This is not that…this is property. Like gravity, you do not solve gravity because there is nothing to solve. You study it, you stack too many paper about it and maybe at the end you respect it…

You do not build house next to river then be angry when house disappears.

The tape ran to its end and the spools stopped. Năsti turned the cassette over and hit play again.

…We knew that, we said we build higher, we build more. We worked every angle again. The men before who came, men who carved the pillars and put oil lamps when no power existed, they kept coming back…together… They understand you do not turn away from the thing that is property. You sit with it, you mark the steps so next man know to sit with it too.

His voice shifted, as if he'd brought the recorder closer.

Volkov my friend…

Pause.

I allowed good man to be removed because I said no more scientist. I choose my ambition over his life and here I am…

A minute of silence, possibly longer. The cave held still.

Stupid…so stupid. The calibration was first logical argument we ignored. Sixty second standard cycle across every instrument, simplest method to avoid more work. Military use sixty second, why not facility use sixty second too? But you feel it, everyone feels it. The minute is too long, it was always too long.

He laughed again, harder this time.

Hige's jaw tightened as a shape settled into place behind his eyes, one that he kept circling with a pen again and again.

I feel it, I feel the decision what to think next. This is why I go alone right now, I need to think alone. With graphite you do not think alone. With graphite you begin sentence and arrive somewhere you not intend but this is not confusion, this one cannot recover.

When he spoke again his tone had changed. Short pauses stood between words that used to flow together.

Diagonal…rooms. Diagonal…chairs. Diagonal…everything. Incredibly wrong.

It is magnetic, you angle towards source… we angled towards nothing. Building nothing with theory that is very wrong.

Silence.

There are two… shapes…. they expand, or maybe I… expand with it. The difference assumes one framework I no longer…

Short sentences in russian came through now, and a few more where his voice could no longer hold a line.

Șocherel's hand moved to his chest where his thumb traced the golden cross on the cover, back and forth, back and forth.

Beside him, Hige's thumb was moving the same way, against nothing, back and forth, back and forth.

Now a word, then nothing, then the same word again. Then a different word that might have been the same word said differently.

There was a huff in the speakers.

No tea here.

— — —

The tape kept running. They stood there waiting for more, but the hiss continued. Hige lay down on the floor with his eyes up.

Pavel was still there, hands crossed by the seam and graphite growing through his arms. He saw how his knees met the stone, body and head bowed.

If this was how he ended, kneeling… then maybe it was the final act to God as he prayed for his ascension.

Prayed?

Șocherel was still as a stone and stood above Pavel similar to how men stand at the altar. Then he found Hige who hadn't moved, he was still lying on his back and his eyes were on the point where the two arms converged.

Something about the seam bothered Năsti; its connecting tissue maintained the same identical width along its length between the two points. It had a consistent sub-milimiter cut, like the piston clearance on the mech's right leg that needed re-shimming every two weeks.

He blinked.

He didn't know what re-shimming meant, this memory had the shape of something carried from another world.

"Re-shimming," Șocherel whispered, not knowing how it got there, a new box filled with something that wasn't his.

He watched Șocherel's face. Then he watched Hige's. Then Năsti's. All three of them heard it, but none of them knew who said it first. Something shifted in his chest. He started counting a heartbeat that wasn't his, like a second rhythm, then a third, like they had always been there but it was too quiet to notice until now.

Forty. But why forty specifically?

Năsti knew the answer without hearing it, because he was saying it too.

Șocherel touched the seam.

Hige's lips were moving but the words were too quiet. He'd heard those words before…words running through chapel walls in a voice that wasn't his.

Năsti watched them both and didn't find anything strange about it. It terrified him that there was nothing strange about them. The machine in his head that had been counting since the first station, the one that mapped and drew arrows between everything, it just went quiet and got replaced with something else.

Are you satisfied now?

He wasn't. And he was.

The cave breathed around them as graphite dust moved in shallow, angled patterns across the floor.

Șocherel kept holding the seam. A warmth climbed through his arms and into his spine in a pleasant wave, but then he released it which made him angry, and so he gripped it again.

Năsti's palm kept clutching on its own; every time he tried to relax it, it twitched back into a grip.

Hige was silent, his fingers kept beating against the gravel.

Thumb, middle, index, middle, thumb.

Thumb, middle, index, middle-index-middle, thumb.

Can you stop?

Thumb, middle, index, middle, thumb.

Please.

Thumb, middle, index, middle, thumb.

Thumb, middle, index, middle-index-middle, thumb.

Năsti touched his thigh; his thumb beat once and then forgot the rest. He tried again, the signal left his head into his hand but nothing happened. Hige's hand did the same fucking variation, a rythm that nobody would get right by accident. He'd been doing it since he was twelve, and there was Hige, all of a sudden hitting it right down to the half-second. And then it happened like a silent shockwave as his mind started it.

What it created however… Belonged to everyone.

* * *

How would he ever– The page is empty. I held the book and the words moved and I held tighter and they moved faster. I threw it and there was no sound. I THREW IT AND THERE WAS NO SOUND.

WHAT SOUND WHAT SOUND WHAT SOUND

The seam runs forty seconds and the prayer runs sixty and neither

I had names in the boxes–HOW DID HE KNOW THIS

He shall cover thee with his feather and under his feathSHUT UP

SHUT UP

They are doing something together, I'm sure of– Forty. The reactor…the reactor…reactoSHUT UP

My boxes…

Maybe im imagi..Our father who art in SHUT THE FUCK UP

I WILL NOT – Who took my boxes? Who took my boxes? Please give me back my boxes

The handle with no door. I KNEW there was nothing behind it and my hand would not let go. My hand would not …

I had names there…

thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the the arrow. The arrow that flieth by. That flieth. Flieth.

I DONT KNOW HOW TO HOLD A THROTTLE

He shall deliver thee from the–

the needle was jumping–

snare of the–

I raised my forearm from the–

they didn't even check theirs

I moved the chair back. The relief was immediate. Why was there relief? IT WAS NOT MY CHAIR IT WAS NOT MY RELIEF

It…WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE YOU CANNOT BE HERE???

Those are not my teeth THOSE ARE NOT MY TEETH

WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?? Maybe im imagining it

YOU WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO SEE THAT

Maybe im imagining it…Maybe im imagining it

I knew that before I knew it WHY DID I KNOW THAT

The handle was MINE.thisisnotreal The corridor thisisnotreal was MINE. I broke down ALONE.thisisnotreal You were not there. Neither of thisisnotreal you were there.

I threw the – my boxes please – book and it was SILENT and that was – where are they – between ME and GOD and NO ONE ELSE–thiscantbehappening

Thumb, middle, index, middle, thumb. I've been doing this since I was twelve–I HAVE NEVER DONE THIS. WHO IS TWELVE? I AM NOT TWELVE

STOP LOOKING AT IT STOP LOOKING AT MY

Please give me back my boxes please

you were not supposed to see any of this

Pause.

Incredible. Năsti thought our name was on the wall? GET OUT

You…drew our name–I DIDNT I DIDNT I DIDNT SHUT UP

Pages and pages…THIS IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED

WHOSE HAND IS THIS? WHOSE HAND IS THIS?????????

What did we do wrong? NOT REAL NOT REAL

My hands read a room before my eyes do… They always ha–NO

WHO TOOK MY NAMES?

Two. I laughed because it was funny. Because you were funn–WHO AM I

Three. I stopped talking because every time I gave you pieces you went craz–STOP FUCKING COUNTING

Four. You drew the corridor and decided it was done. I didn't decide anyth–I DID STOP STOP STOP STOP

Five. The note was your own test to me –ENOUGH

GO AWAY

It's not enoug–GO AWAY

AWAYGOAWAYGOAWAYGO

GOAWAYGOA

You want more? NO

I was thinking about not GETOUTGETOUT breaking down in a crack in the ENOUGH earth with your eyes on the back of my skull.

Please give me back myTHISISNOTHAPPENING

You measured my breathing–THISISNOTHAPPENINGTHISISNOTHAPPENINGTHISISNOTHAPPENING

Your theories–THISISNOTHAPPENING

You shoved me. ENOU– I put my hand on your shoulder because I was worried about you and you shoved me and I left because…

A pause.

…because it hurt.

Silence. The air drifted and the graphite pattern switched angles again.

Who took my thoughts from the boxes…?

It was quieter this time. Every moment another thought would explode and bring back chaos, but then it was quiet again as the intervals stretched out.

They're gone Hige.

Another ocean crash.

Well that's alright I think.

ASCENSION

Four men on a graphite floor, one was praying at the seam devoted as ever.

Another was on his knees, not praying. His hands were flat on the stone holding himself up, while blood dripped from his mouth on a white book that stood beneath him.

The third was lying on his back, his eyes looking at something that was beyond the ceiling. His fingers tapped the floor slowly in no pattern.

The last one was curled against the base of a formation. He had his knees to his chest and was rocking violently. A notepad stood on the ground beside him, open to a page full of arrows pointing at nothing.

Between them a recorder had run out of tape.

The formations stood, the seam above them stood, the graphite dust on the floor still drifted in the same shallow patterns as it had been drifting every forty seconds. The darkness beyond their bodies was the same darkness and nothing in that cave had registered what just happened, because nothing in the cave had ever registered anything.

It was simply a property.

* * *

The third pushed against the floor and something rushed through his head that wasn't his. Arrows…door knobs…swearing. He held still until it passed like a wave, pulling back but leaving the ground wet.

He pushed again. His knee found the stone, one palm flat, head still down. The silent noise got louder. He grabbed his ears but there was no running away from it. He shifted his weight onto the right foot, his vision went white, and he stood there swaying in the dark with both hands on his knees.

* * *

The book cover had dried up to a crimson red that bled into the golden embroidery.

He went toward the closer one, each step bringing something back: a fragment of psalm on the first, a scream on the second, the taste of copper on the third. He fell beside the praying man who could not move. He put his hand on his arm and the psalm hit him hard enough that his jaw clenched.

He held on and he pulled at the same time. When he tried to pull he would feel himself stopping, for the men could not hold a thought alone. He pulled again. The psalm faded but something replaced it with a voice that shattered his eardrums. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

He let go and it stopped. He grabbed the arm again and it came back, quieter this time, just a low fuck fuck fuck fuck looping infinitely underneath everything. He held on.

The man beneath him tried to push himself up and made it halfway before his face went blank. Something had passed through him too now, and he lowered himself back down.

They tried again.

This time it was a number. Forty. Forty. Forty. Then a sensation of rocking that didn't belong to either of them.

Again. A flash of a notepad page with circled names.

Again. The taste of bile and the absolute certainty that everyone in this cave was lying.

Again. Just the word ENOUGH, repeating until it lost its meaning.

* * *

Nobody remembered how but at some point they were both sitting upright. The other man was leaning against him, or perhaps he was leaning against the other man. They were shaking, with arms and legs unable to stay still. They looked at the third, the rocking had stopped but what replaced it was far worse.

They leaned on each other and took a step toward him. Two steps. The counting started before the third in a looping whisper that kept track of their distance, their breathing, the angle of their approach. On the fourth step one of them stopped walking because he was suddenly certain the other one was lying about something. He didn't know what, he didn't know how. He just knew.

He looked at the man beside him and the man beside him was looking back with the same expression, so they stepped back.

On the fifth step one of them started writing in the air with his finger, connecting things that were not his. He watched his own hand doing it and tried to pull it back but the noise got louder when he pulled. On the sixth his mouth opened.

He hasn't looked at me once.

He didn't say it; something said it through him. The other one grabbed his arm and they stood there, close enough now to touch the man. One of them reached down and the moment his fingers made contact every thought in the curled man's head entered his own at full volume.

Every count, every name, every arrow. Every moment catalogued across seven stations, organized and cross-referenced and airtight and completely insane. And underneath it, so quiet it was almost not there: They're going to leave me. They always leave, everyone always leaves.

He tightened his grip. His fingers closed harder around the arm and he pulled the man closer into the noise, into all of it. The volume hit him like a wall but he stayed exactly where he was. The other man crouched behind them, both of them holding still because movement made it louder and stillness made it bearable.

* * *

The thoughts came in waves now. Longer stretches of quiet, followed by a surge of repetition. Then quiet again.

The second man crouched on the other side and now both of them had a hand on the third. The noise doubled into two channels and their waves combined into one as every thought the broken man had ran through all of them simultaneously. They hooked an arm under each shoulder. They lifted and his head fell forward but they made it to their knees, three men kneeling on graphite.

Like Pavel?

The thought arrived in all three of them at the same time. One of them vomited, while the other two tasted it. They kept kneeling.

But something changed when one of them kept repeating a word. Not a thought that leaked, not a fragment that passed through uninvited, but a word sent on purpose aimed at the other two which sounded clearer than anything that had come before.

Up.

The man in the middle opened his eyes enough that the other two could see something in there that was still him. Underneath the counting and the arrows and the fear, a small, exhausted thing that recognized the word and knew it came from outside.

They pulled and pushed simultaneously. One leg found the ground then limped out. Then another, then nothing for a while because the three of them were standing and the noise came from everywhere. By now none of them could remember what standing even meant.

But the notion returned and the waves turned to a sway with the occasional hurricane in between.

One step.

All three.

Together.

* * *

The graphite thinned under their feet and the clay returned, soft and familiar as they limped on the same ankle. Nobody looked at the pillars when passing through, but every hand that had carved them felt closer than before.

The ladder hung where they'd left it, moving idly in the thin current of air that exhaled from the opening ahead.

They brought him to the base. His hands found the first rung and didn't grip, as the fingers sat on the wood without closing. One of them took his left hand and folded it around the rung. The other took his right and did the same. Then they each took a side of the rope and pulled it taut between them, causing it to stand still.

He couldn't move. One of them put a hand on his back and gave him a small push.

At last his foot moved up the second rung. Then his hand found the third. The movement was slow and mechanical, with each limb moving independently as it received instructions from three different spaces. The two men started climbing alongside, holding the rope and pushing their feet against the wall as the last flashlight flickered a few times.

Fourth rung. The rope vibrated with his imbalance and they held it steady. Through the echo they could feel themselves pushing and pulling, both forces being blended into one incoherent move again and again, but they kept ascending.

Something loosened, the space between the men was growing and the noise kept thinning with each step, causing the man holding the rungs to freeze and fell down. The crash made the other two men buckle from inside. The impact hit their spines a half second before the sound reached their ears and they lost their grip. The rope stretched as the one on right slid down before his hands gripped the rope and fire tore through their palms.

The one on the left didn't share the same fate as his foot slipped and he hit the floor, a feeling that travelled through all once again.

The one still holding the ladder let go from the shock and fell on the other two, causing the pain to triple as his back became their back. They lay in a pile, each pain feeding through the others and returning amplified, causing a loop that was impossible to stop because every intrusion created a new signal and every signal created a new intrusion.

Nothing moved for a long time.

Then the flashlight that stood near one's head died and darkness finally filled the space it left behind. Something older than the graphite took over them; a primal cooperation, the animal instinct that when the light goes everything goes and nothing else matters anymore.

He grabbed the flashlight and got up, the noise peaked louder but there was no time to wait.

He found the nearest by touch, yanked him to his feet and shoved him where the ladder should have been. The third found the rungs again and climbed. Wrong foot, wrong hand each time but it didn't matter.

The rope stretched and croaked as the three stood side by side in the black. They pushed the middle one higher up the rungs. Each movement brought back the noise but now it was competing with something far louder…

The dark. The dark that was already here and was making this ladder and its rungs lose their meaning, so they climbed further.

With their fingers wrapped around braided fiber and feet flat against the rock, they moved themselves up by friction and will alone. Every step one took on solid wood they matched on stone, pulling themselves higher against a wall they couldn't see. The rope swayed when they moved wrong, and they did so every time. A knee before a foot, a hand reaching past a rung and gripping air. Each mistake sent a wave down the rope that hit them in their fingers but they held through it as something passed between all three:

Verse.

Count.

Box.

But the rope was louder, the rope was the only language that mattered now. Feet slipped and found the wall again. Arms shook but they did not let go for they could not let go. The skin on their palms blistered and they climbed anyway, because the man between them was still moving and as long as he was moving they would keep THEMSELVES moving.

Together.

They couldn't see the wall and they couldn't see the rungs, they couldn't even see how far up they'd come, or how far was left, but they could see each other clearer than ever. One of them exhaled and the other two felt it through the rope, a shift in tension so small that in any other moment of their lives they would have never noticed it.

But they did now.

A foot pressed hard against the wall.

A rope tightened on the left.

A rung creaked in the middle.

A rope tightened on the right.

Another rung.

Another foot.

Right.

Left.

Middle.

A rhythm born out of three men communicating through fibers that were older than any of them over and over, through a machine of trust and torn skin that kept ascending.

Fragments passed through their bodies; a number, a word, a memory, a psalm, a dying reactor. They stopped for none, the three men kept climbing toward a different air, one that they could now almost see.

Above them the dark thinned. Grey bled down from the top of the shaft, enough to see their hands, the rope and each other, while below them it reached into nothing.

Then a hand found the cut stone edge. The fingers gripped and pulled, his body following through and rolling over the lip onto a floor that was colder than what they'd left below. He turned around and reached back into the dark, grabbing the other two at the same time.

They lay there breathing. The air had less weight here. It no longer smelt of earthy moisture, but of something industrial, concrete. But the dark was still climbing behind them.

The flashlight flickered back to life.

* * *

They moved and a thought arrived that wasn't theirs, something about a wrong name. They waited for it to pass… and it did faster than before.

Another passage, another thought. This one had a texture to it, a shape that they recognized as unique to one of them. Then another saw a distinction of thoughts when only a few seconds ago he could not imagine that any thought was not of his own.

Their fingertips felt the old markings on the wall, for they now understood it all. Walls blurred around them as they went up by their subconscious that tracked the way back. They dropped to their knees and lowered into a crawl. The stone pressed against their backs and one of them scraped his back on a ridge. The pain stayed with him, only him, and the other two thanked him for that.

Something brushed against a hand; a cable, bolted to the wall with crude clamps. They gripped their guide rope and followed through. By the end of it only one was holding it. For the first time there was a him and a them, separate.

The sound left, breaths exhaling through their mouths in silence. Around them brick and timber followed instead of rock.

The flashlight flickered again, dimming ever so slightly with each pulse. At the end of their view was a dim orange glow. One of them inhaled and it did not carry to other lungs as the other two didn't notice it. The tall one touched the brick with his palm and stood there as another hurricane passed by.

Further on, a single knee hurt when it remembered the bricks it passed. A corridor branched left, from which warm air pushed through a door that none of them remembered anymore. A blue glow swayed softly in the dark.

One of them stopped walking.

The other two continued a few steps before realizing they were disconnected from the man that stood by the door. His hand found the frame and rested on it to feel the machine do its cycle again.

The blue light drifted through one of their heads and the other two didn't see it properly as it shifted. It was private, the first private light in a long time.

Standing at the door, he did something none of them expected. He said a word out loud, the first one since the cave.

"Dying."

A faint whisper, but the feeling still reached the other two.

He let go of the frame and kept walking.

They ran through the tall corridor and the fluorescent tubes were still flickering in their sequence, assembling the path ahead of them as it had on the descent. One of them watched the lights appear. This time he chose not to conduct them, causing the lights to flicker disappointedly.

The brick gave way to concrete and a footstep echoed. It was the first echo they'd heard since descending and all three of them stopped, startled by the single noise. Sound had a shape here, and walls returned it instead of swallowing it. They passed through the buffer, where the smell of old grease and standing water filled their lungs but none of them wandered anymore.

They passed by multiple boxes. One of them slowed at the doorway of one that he recognized. Inside he saw a chair that wasn't right and wasn't wrong either. It simply was, and it had reminded him that he had been here before, with thoughts that were only his. The rush that came when he had changed its angle.

Further ahead, one increased the pace. His stride had changed as he recalled the ankle that he fell on, the pain finally remembering who it belonged to. His body realized further up here that it had its own way of being broken and then stopped. Ahead of him, two shapes moved through the same dark, close enough to hear but too dim to tell apart.

His voice came from behind, barely holding the word together. "Hige."

Hige stopped too but he didn't turn around immediately, he stood in the flickering corridor hearing his own name arrive back into his head for the first time in ages.

"Yeah."

The voice behind continued. "Șocherel."

Șocherel turned around and looked at Năsti. He said nothing else, just nodded once and kept moving.

Three men with three names, sprinting separately through a corridor of flickering light toward a door they each remembered on their own.

Hige took another look at the conveyor belts, coated in dust as always. The scale of it hit differently on the way back, and he understood that they were meant for processing bodies that could no longer remember.

Then one of them saw it first. They weren't sure which, because all three stopped at the same time. The card that sat at the end of the wall, a portrait with clean shoulders and a clean oval, a space left for a person that might have been.

They stood in front of the faceless man and one box now became three, each filled with something that only its owner recognized.

* * *

The blast door was still open and cold air pushed through from the other side. Real, nuclear winter surface cold, the one that they knew by heart. Șocherel felt it on his face and it was the cleanest thing in days. He could hear the other two behind him, footsteps individually hitting the concrete in their own rhythm. Năsti's dragged slightly on the left, while Hige's were deliberate.

His hand found the Bible in his chest pocket. Its weight pressed against his ribs as he kept walking, grateful for a maintenance corridor all long and featureless with no more rooms to distract and no more angles to notice.

Hige ran a hand along the wall as he walked to steady himself. His fingers found the seam where the hollow wall had been opened and he stopped there for a moment, feeling the edge where his dream had finally come to an end. They stepped through and the metro opened around them. After the corridors and the cave and the crawl, the space turned into an oasis, one to sit in and enjoy the solitude for a while longer. But that was not their case.

Hige's posture straightened as he walked towards the dozing cat beside the train who was lost in a dream of its own. It purred cozily and shined the perimeter ahead.

He climbed the chassis by feel with each grip coming back to his memory. The cockpit opened and the air inside was the happiest smell he could possibly breathe, oil and metal. The servos groaned and the mech stood. Its sensors swept the platform registering three familiar signatures for the first time in however long they'd been below.

Năsti kept looking at the ceiling when the claw lurched violently across the station. It caught into one of the dismantled wagons with its nails, biting into remnants of old chairs and cabin floor. It rang through the hall as Hige pulled it towards him, letting it rest across the mouth of a stupid maintenance corridor.

The claw retracted back and a few moments later, it launched again into the last working metro carriage. Metal screamed against concrete as it dragged across the platform, causing sparks to trace bright lines in the black when it finally came to rest in front of the other wreckage.

The mech's hydraulics whirred as it lifted a leg. He adjusted a radial above his head, dialing it all the way right, then stood idle.

The leg kicked with all its force and smashed the carriage through the wreckage, fusing both into one heavy obstacle that wasn't going anywhere from now on. Then the feet punched concrete through the silence and moved towards the entrance stairway. Năsti pulled himself onto the right shoulder, and Șocherel climbed on the other, the mech clearing out into the open. A few lost snowflakes landed on their clothes and hair, happy to see them yet again.

The mech walked further up north, away from the entrance, away from everything underneath.

* * *

A large fire cracked between them where an overhang blocked the wind and blizzard. The mech stood behind them sheltering them further more with its orange hull that caught the dancing flames.

Hige climbed down the chassis. He had rope burns across both palms, raw and shining where the skin tore apart. He sat beside the fire and held them open toward the heat.

Năsti sat with his back against the overhang wall. His ankle had swollen past the boot and he couldn't unlace it without pulling at something that didn't want to be pulled, so he left it as it was. His nose had stopped bleeding somewhere on the ascent but the crust ran from his upper lip to his chin, and he kept tonguing the copper taste without meaning to.

Șocherel had the Bible in his lap. He had a sleeve pulled over his hand and he was rubbing the cover where the blood had dried into the golden embroidery, working at the stain with slow circular passes. It wasn't coming off but he kept at it for a while, then stopped and set the book beside him.

A metal canister boiled snow over the fire, and Hige removed it, pouring a large amount into three canteen caps where a few plants and twigs brewed away. They drank dogshit tea in silence for a while. Hige had found the leaves in the mech's emergency kit months ago and they'd been reused enough times that the water was barely stained… yet, nobody complained, they sipped away.

Năsti reached into his pocket where the pen sat loose and turned it between his fingers the same way he'd turned it through every corridor and every station. His thumb found the click mechanism and pressed it once.

The fire settled as a log shifted and sent sparks upward into the overhang. Wind changed and the smoke followed as it searched for a new direction. They sat with their cups and didn't speak, because speaking meant using individual words again and individual words were still a strange shape in their mouths.

Hige refilled his cap from the canister, the water had no color left in it but he drank it anyway.

Șocherel picked the Bible back up and opened it to Psalm Ninety-one, reading the first line in silence. His eyes moved to the second and the words were there, where they'd always been. He closed it and rested it on his legs.

It was a long time before Hige broke the silence.
"The reactor's dying."

"How long?" Năsti asked.

"A year…I don't know, maybe two. After that the whole place loses power."

Șocherel stepped in.

"Good."

Both of them looked at him.

"When it goes it takes the rest with it. Door or no door, nobody walks down there again."

The fire shifted. Hige poked at a log that was threatening to roll off the pile and it sent up a column of sparks.

Năsti swayed his cup, rocking the tea gently. "Pavel…knew what it was doing to him and he walked there anyways."

"He kept it running," Hige said. "The reactor and the pumps and the rest of it for who knows for long."

Năsti pulled his sleeve and turned his arm toward the fire. The film square indicator had gone into a deep red, well past the mild yellow it had been when they left. He showed the dosimeter to the other two.

"How many years do you think we have just donated?"

"Eh, the boring ones," Hige said.

Nobody said anything for a while, the wind changed and the smoke followed by.

"The graphite," Șocherel said, placing the thought on the table for all to see.

"It was growing," Hige said. "Before the soviets, perhaps even before the facility itself."

A pause as he looked at his cup.

"Engineers tend to build around things they don't understand, guess it was wrong this time."

"Chairs too," Năsti added.

Neither laughed, but the fire spat a flame or two.

"Do you think he found what he was looking for?" Șocherel asked.

Hige took a sip. "I think he stopped looking… and that's when he found it."

"It…" Năsti said quietly.

Nobody tried to name it, the thing that happened to three men at the bottom of the earth, for none of them were even sure that they wanted to.

Hige climbed up the mech and stood on its shoulder searching for something in the chassis. He came out with an unlabeled bottle of a dark amber liquid and propped it against the mech's leg. He went around the fire and grabbed each canteen from the two, throwing the previous piss into the darkness, then he poured a hefty amount in each and shared them back.

They all took a swig as the fire was getting low. Șocherel added another log with a gentleness that mimicked Dogari and his candles.

Năsti stared at the fire for a long time. He took a mouthful that was too large and winced.

"I had this whole…"

He stopped.

Then he started again.

"There's no version of sorry that could ever cover this."

"Năsti, for fuck's sake..."

Șocherel pushed a log deeper into the fire with his boot. It broke apart under the weight, causing sparks to fly upward.

"Ask next time. Anything you need to clarify, just fucking ask before you go insane again."

Năsti didn't say anything for a while. He was looking at the fire and his thumb was tracing the edge of the cup. The wind picked up and the flames leaned sideways. Hige leaned over and refilled their cups.

"Șocherel…Hige, the both of you…"

"I'd be growing graphite now if it wasn't for you."

Hige took another swig.

"You held the rungs."

Năsti watched the fire while his jaw tightened.

Șocherel stood up and looked at them.

At Năsti, who was still holding his cup with both hands and staring at something in the fire that only he could see.

At Hige, who was leaning against the mech's foot with his eyes half closed, firelight reflecting in the amber still under his lip.

He waited, there was no rush any longer. There hadn't been a rush since they made this fire. Năsti looked up and read something in Șocherel's face. He nodded and pushed himself to his feet, wincing when his ankle reminded him of his own pain. Hige opened his eyes and pulled himself up.

They came around the fire, close enough to feel the warmth.

Șocherel raised his cup and the other two raised theirs. Three cups stood high instead of two or one or none… And so they cheered.

After a while the fire burned lower and nobody added more wood, they just laid down and the silence returned, different this time.

Năsti was staring at the sky which was calm enough now to show a few stars, faint behind the nuclear haze.

"If the earth exploded into a million pieces," he said, "would the property stay at the same point in space? Or would it travel with the debris?"

Hige looked at him.

Șocherel looked at him.

The fire popped.

"What?" said Năsti.

* * *

The mech trudged north through the morning flurry. Its servos had settled into a steady rhythm that Hige knew better than his own heartbeat, the steady groan and release that meant all joints were bearing the weight evenly. The forge crossed his mind for the first time in a while; after all, it had been the entire point of all this.

Năsti sat on the right shoulder with a coat hanging over his head. He'd decided the forge can wait…at least for a little while. Instead of the blade, a copy of Sherlock Holmes sat in his lap and he turned to another page, fully enthralled by the mystery.

Șocherel sat on the left with his head against the window. He watched the snow as it turned into a white static, the world outside dissolving anything that pretended to have any edges. From here it didn't really look like the world was as broken as it was. It looked as those days prior to Christmas when there was nothing else but to watch the flakes fall.

Smoke rose from one of the villages that they passed in the distance, and they watched it until it disappeared behind them. Inside the cockpit a servo cycled and reset at 60 seconds right on the clock. The mech's speaker crackled softly.

ALERTAMENTE

EXCESO DE PREGUNTAS ESTÚPIDAS DETECTADO.

Hige opened the window on his right where Năsti was reading.

"Hey Năsti?"

"Hm?"

"I know what you're thinking right now."

Năsti's fingers stayed on the corner of the page and he did not dare move at all.

He threw side glances at Hige.

"You're thinking of..." Hige slammed his palm into the console and the unlocked hatch released Năsti into the air.

For a moment, he had his limbs spread and back arched as he was tumbling, resembling Lucifer being cast out of Heaven for asking too many stupid questions.

Then he crashed on his back and lay there. Snow started covering his face but he did not bother to move.