Charlie's lungs burn like he's swallowed a mouthful of hot coals. He bends forward, one hand braced against the corridor wall—cold, rust-eaten metal that flakes under his palm. His pith helmet has gone askew, and he can feel his khaki shirt plastered to his back with sweat.
He looks up.
The corridor stretches empty in both directions. No flash of Vesta's rainbow hair. No sound of Jelly's cheerful bouncing. No—
"Oh no." The words escape in a wheeze. "We got separated."
He spins around, scanning the gloom behind him. Nothing. He turns back, studying the fork ahead. Two passages yawn open like hungry mouths. One slopes upward, the other descends into darkness.
His hand finds the back of his neck, rubbing absently. The leather satchel at his hip feels heavier than it should. All that research. All those notes. And now here he is, alone, in what is clearly a death trap of the highest order.
"The proper archaeological protocol for this situation," he mutters to himself, "would be to establish a base camp and perform systematic reconnaissance." He pauses. "However, given the complete absence of a base camp, reconnaissance supplies, or, for that matter, any semblance of a plan, I find myself forced to improvise."
He considers the passages. The upward one, he notes, shows signs of recent traffic—scuff marks, the faint glint of oil. The downward one is pristine. Untouched.
"Clearly," he announces to no one, "the path of wisdom is—"
He stops.
Footsteps. Heavy. Rhythmic. Drawing closer.
Clank. Clank. Clank.
Charlie's blood turns to ice water.
He knows that sound. He's heard it before—on the deck of the Dreadnought, in the chaos of the ambush. The unmistakable cadence of a cyborg on the march.
His eyes snap to the downward passage. The dark one. The one that no one has taken.
"Sod it all," he whispers.
He plunges into the darkness.
---
The corridor swallows him like a mouth closing. The walls press closer here, narrower, the ceiling lower. Rusty pipes run along the ceiling, dripping condensation that plinks against the metal floor in irregular rhythms. The air grows thicker, heavier, tasting of old copper and machine oil.
Charlie walks quickly at first. Then, when the footsteps behind him fade, he slows to a brisk stride. His hand never leaves the strap of his satchel.
"I am an archaeologist," he tells the gloom. "A linguist. A scholar of the highest order. I have deciphered scripts that would make lesser minds weep with despair. I have translated fragments of the Void Century that the World Government would kill to possess." He swallows. "I am NOT going to die in a maintenance tunnel on some backwater death trap of an island."
A drip lands on his nose.
He wipes it away with a grimace.
The corridor branches again. And again. And again. Each turn looks exactly like the last—same rusted metal, same dripping pipes, same oppressive darkness. Charlie's sense of direction crumbles like ancient parchment.
"This is fine," he says, his voice edging toward something unsteady. "This is perfectly fine. I am simply... conducting an impromptu survey of the island's subterranean infrastructure. A valuable academic exercise."
He pauses at an intersection, peering down each passage in turn.
"Left," he decides. "Left is always correct. It's a known fact. Leftness is a property of—"
A low groan echoes from somewhere ahead.
Charlie freezes.
The groan repeats. Louder this time. Closer.
"Right," he whispers. "Right is also correct. Rightness is a property of—"
He hurries down the right passage, his boots splashing through a shallow puddle of something he refuses to identify.
---
The tunnel opens into a chamber. Not a large one—perhaps twenty feet across—but the ceiling rises high enough that Charlie can stand upright without his pith helmet brushing against the pipes. The walls are covered in something he almost doesn't recognize.
Writing.
His breath catches.
"Those are..." He steps closer, his eyes drinking in the symbols. "Those are calligraphy. Mixed with, what is this...?" He squints, tracing a finger along the wall. "Hieroglyphs? No, that's not right. That's... that's Poneglyph script, but rendered in a dialect I've never encountered."
His professional instincts war with his survival instincts.
Survival loses.
Charlie's satchel hits the floor. His magnifying loupe is out in an instant, pressed against his eye, his breath coming in short, excited gasps.
"This is remarkable. Remarkable. The fusion of grammatical structures alone indicates a level of cultural synthesis that predates the Void Century by—" He trails off, mouthing the symbols silently. "Wait. Wait. That's not a religious invocation. That's a…"
He scribbles notes in his journal, ink flowing across the page.
"This isn't an island. The origins. This is..." He looks up, his eyes wide behind his glasses. "This is remarkable! But how? This predates the ancient weapons. I found…"
Another groan.
Closer now. Much closer.
Charlie's head snaps up. The writing on the walls glows faintly in the darkness, pulsing with a rhythm that matches his heartbeat.
"No," he whispers. "No, no, no. I just found this. I just found this."
The footsteps return. Heavy. Inexorable.
He scrambles for his satchel, stuffing the journal inside, and casts about for an exit. A narrow passage on the far side of the chamber catches his eye.
He runs.
The passage leads down. Deeper. The walls grow wetter, slick with moisture that runs in rivulets down the metal. Charlie's boots slip on a patch of slime, and he catches himself against the wall, his palm coming away covered in something dark and foul.
"Wonderful," he gasps. "Just wonderful. I've found the most significant archaeological discovery of the century, and I'm going to die in a—"
He stops.
The passage opens into another chamber. But this one is different.
This one is inhabited.
Rows of figures line the walls. Stasis pods, just like the ones in the vaults—but these are different. These are occupied. Sleeping faces press against the glass, their expressions frozen in states of terror, despair, or utter blankness.
Charlie stares.
"What..." He takes a step forward. "What is this place?"
The groaning comes again. Not from behind him this time.
From inside one of the pods.
A hand presses against the glass from within. Fingers splay wide. The groan becomes a rasping whisper.
"Help..."
Charlie backs away.
"I don't—" He shakes his head. "I can't. I don't have the key. I don't have the codes. I don't—"
He turns to flee.
The corridor is blocked.
A cyborg stands in the entrance, its single red eye fixed on him with mechanical intensity. Half its face is human; the other half is a grinding mass of gears and pistons. Its arm ends in a blade that hums with barely contained energy.
Charlie's voice climbs several octaves.
"Hello there, good sir! I don't suppose you'd be interested in a scholarly debate about the merits of—"
The cyborg charges.
Charlie runs.
He doesn't know where he's going. He doesn't know how he's going to survive. All he knows is that his legs are pumping, his heart is screaming, and somewhere behind him, the cyborg's footsteps are getting closer.
"THIS IS NOT HOW I PLANNED TO DIE," he yells.
The corridor twists. He takes a sharp left, then a right, then another left—and finds himself in another chamber.
This one is different.
This one has an exit.
A hole in the ceiling, rough and jagged, leading up toward what might be open air. Dim light filters down through the gap, and Charlie doesn't hesitate.
He climbs.
His hands find purchase on rusted rungs. His boots slip twice. Once, he nearly falls, his satchel swinging dangerously, threatening to drag him back down into the darkness.
But he climbs.
And when he finally pulls himself up through the gap, gasping, trembling, his pith helmet still somehow perched on his head, he collapses onto a surface that's cold and rough and outside.
He's made it.
He's on the surface of the island.
Charlie lies there for a long moment, staring up at the hazy sky, his breath coming in ragged gasps. His hand clutches his satchel to his chest.
"I found it," he whispers. "I actually found it."
He laughs. It's a shaky, unsteady sound.
"I found the source."
Then he groans.
"And I have no way to tell anyone."
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