Zahir woke with grit in his teeth and blood in his mouth.
For a long moment, he didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just listened. The air around him wasn't like the tunnels above—no mildew, no rot. Instead, it carried a dry, ancient stillness, as if untouched for centuries.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
The chamber around him was vast, its boundaries lost in shadow. The walls were adorned with intricate, fractal-like carvings that seemed to pulse with a faint inner light, casting delicate patterns across the stone floor. It was as if he had fallen into the heart of some forgotten temple.
A groan echoed through the space.
Zahir's muscles tensed. He turned his head toward the sound and saw the guard—a BQP enforcer—lying a few meters away. The man's leg was twisted unnaturally beneath him, and blood oozed from a gash on his forehead. His pulse rifle lay just out of reach, its power core flickering weakly.
Instinct screamed at Zahir to act. He pushed himself up, biting back a wince as pain lanced through his side. His eyes locked onto the rifle first. He limped toward it, each step measured, and picked it up, feeling the residual warmth of its recent discharge.
The guard's eyes fluttered open, clouded with pain and confusion. He blinked up at Zahir, recognition dawning slowly.
"You…" the man rasped, voice thick with blood.
Zahir didn't answer. His heart pounded against his ribs, not with fear—but with something colder. Something sharp. He stepped closer. The rifle in his hands felt both too heavy and too light.
"Help me," the guard coughed, lifting a trembling hand.
That hand. That tone. Pleading.
Zahir stood over him, and a memory cracked open behind his eyes—a pool of blood crawling towards his knees, the acrid smell of garbage. Sirens in the distance, but they weren't coming for him.
Zahir stared down at the guard. A familiar helpless flinch was in his eyes—the kind he'd seen in the mirror many times. He was an expert at pushing away. Elai and Mekka could be trapped, or worse. He couldn't afford softness or hesitation.
The rifle shook once in his grip. He adjusted it, finger hovering on the trigger. His jaw clenched so hard it hurt.
He remembered the last thing Kasik said to him in the rain.
Then he spit on the guard., muttered, "You're gonna die anyway."
And pulled the trigger.
A pulse burst through the guard's head—silent, clean. The body jerked once and stilled. Zahir didn't move. He just stared. His finger was still on the trigger.
So much had happened in such a short time.
His head still throbbed and his ribs still ached badly. It seemed him and the guard they fell almost an entire story, maybe more. Mekka got shot. And a dead body was bleeding out at his feet.
'Was that too easy?'
He didn't have time to sit with it. Two of his day ones could be dying above. He needed to move.
He crouched beside the body, his hands working on autopilot—rifling through pockets, checking the belt pouches. He found a beat-up crack knife—charge light flickering—good for one desperate strike. A crushed pack of stims, the kind that jacked your reflexes just long enough to get yourself killed. And a half-rotted burn-patch, barely clinging to the inside of the guy's jacket, meant to glue a wound shut if you slapped it fast enough.
All of it went into his coat.
'Last hand takes the pot.'
Rising to his feet, he scanned the chamber more carefully. At first, it was the carvings that drew him—their strange symmetry, the way light caught their ridges and spilled across the stone in cascading shadows.
The designs seemed to bloom and coil at once—shapes echoing themselves over and over, shrinking into tighter loops until his eyes couldn't follow. Every curve carried a smaller version of itself, like the wall had been etched by something that understood infinity a little too well.
He narrowed his eyes, leaning in.
"…The hell?" he muttered under his breath.
It seemed like the carvings were moving. No—they didn't move, exactly, but…
His eyes couldn't settle.
Every time he tried to trace a line, it bent away. Every time he blinked, the whole pattern rearranged. Not dramatically—just enough to make him doubt his perception.
It reminded him of something. Not a memory, exactly—more like a sensation.
That strange, nauseating moment when reality buckled for just a breath. When the air stuttered, and doors opened that shouldn't, and bullets missed by inches. The dissonance of his glitch.
That's what the chamber felt like.
He frowned.
He had this weird sense that the patterns were almost leaning toward him. Not literally, but the longer he looked, the more claustrophobic he felt.
He turned away, shaking it off. No point staring at walls—not when Elai and Mekka might still be alive somewhere above.
Zahir retraced his steps and looked up toward the broken ceiling where he'd fallen through. The jagged mouth of the collapse was at least three meters overhead, and the slick stone offered no grip. He wouldn't be climbing out that way—not without gear or a miracle.
So he searched.
Moving along the curved perimeter of the chamber, he scanned for any break in the walls. No doors. No vents. No seams. Just more of those maddening designs.
As he was walking, he passed between two sets of patterns twisting in different directions. Just then, he felt a subtle static pressure, like the space around him had exhaled, just once, without warning.
His body paused on instinct.
He retraced his last few steps. Slowly. Carefully. Nothing.
Then, he moved back to where he'd frozen. The exact spot.
The air shifted again—so slight it could've been imagined. But it wasn't. He felt it. Like the pressure in his skull changed.
He took another step. Nothing.
Back one pace. Hum.
'There.'
His heart climbed into his throat.
He wasn't imagining it. The chamber was somehow responding.
He turned in place, testing the sensation. The moment his foot landed in a certain arc, the pressure returned—gentle, probing, like some invisible tension line being plucked.
What are you? he thought, not sure what exactly he was referring to.
Zahir exhaled and took one more step forward.
The hum deepened.
And then… the patterns began to move.