He finds a third opening and he rests his arm against the rock wall as he calls again. ‘Greta Maze!’ Only his echo is returned.
He breathes quick and deep. His mouth is bone dry. Only darkness in his vision. Then, far along the corridor, he sees someone, a woman, walking across the tunnel from left to right, from one side passage to another, holding a lantern up with her right arm. She moves quickly.
‘Hello,’ Yukio calls.
But the figure does not stop.
Yukio barrels down the dark corridor blindly, his right hand feeling the rock wall for the entryway the lantern carrier scurried into. With his left hand, he pats the handle of his family sword and the touch of it brings a comfort that does nothing to slow his heartbeat. His boots kick up dirt as he walks and the corridor is cold and the air is thick.
‘Hello,’ he calls.
His right hand finally finds a wide space. ‘Greta Maze,’ Yukio calls. ‘Molly Hook,’ he calls into the passageway.
His feet move faster as he turns into the black void and he keeps his hands on the walls to feel his way along the corridor. ‘Hellllooooo!’ he hollers, the sound echoing through the tunnels. He moves faster still because his heart beats faster still and he cuts his hand on a sharp rock edge sticking out of the wall and then he releases his hand from the guiding right wall and breaks into a jog.
‘Greta!’ he screams. ‘Molly!’
And he builds to a blind run and then his face slams hard into a junction wall and he has to stop and put his hands to his nose because it feels like it’s about to run with blood. He breathes hard, looks up once again, looks left, looks right, but finds only darkness. Then he looks left again and sees the woman with the lantern once more, turning right into another passage, and he runs after her. ‘Wait!’ he says. ‘Wait.’
And he charges down the passage and his arm reaches out for the guidance of the rock wall and his palm finds air and he turns right quickly into a new passage and he sees the lantern woman moving slowly now into a doorway from which light spills into the darkened corridor. Yukio pads quickly to the glowing light and turns into the opening. ‘Greta Maze!’ he barks as he enters another spacious cavern that looks almost identical to the one he just woke up in, except there is only one large wooden bed with no mattress here – no tables, no chairs, no stretchers, no piano. And the bed is in the centre of the space and all the people of this troubling underworld, all the sleepers, all the half-dead, have formed a circle around it. ‘Ssshhhhh!’ says Marielle, turning from the circle to admonish the Japanese pilot. ‘They are dreaming.’
Yukio can make no sense of the scene and the confusion makes him ache and the incongruity of it all makes his head throb even more than it throbbed when he woke from his dreaming. He must catch his breath and as he does he sees that Greta Maze is lying on the large bed, lying on her side in a deep sleep and the baby who fell from the sky is sleeping there, too, nestled in the warmth of her chest. Yukio can see now that all the men and women of the cave hold wax candles aflame and they are watching Greta sleep and they are whispering in Chinese and at the head of the bed stands the piano player with the hair as white as Sakai snow in winter, scribbling his observations in a notebook with a pencil as long as his thumb.
Yukio’s fast-beating heart turns to fire, and a rage inside him compels him to break through the circle of cave dwellers and crawl onto the hard bed. ‘Greta Maze!’ he screams. ‘Wake up.’ He screams again in broken English. ‘Wake now. Wake now.’
Two old Chinese men with thin bones and long beards reach for Yukio. ‘Noooooo!’ one old man wails. ‘She is dreaming. Noooooo.’ And then more of the cave dwellers reach for Yukio, tugging at his arms and shoulders and speaking in Chinese, loud and panicked.
‘Wake up, Greta!’ Yukio hollers, his hands shaking her now. He pushes her hard and she flops over onto her back, eyes still closed.
‘She will not wake,’ Lars says, matter-of-factly. ‘She does not want to wake.’
‘Why did you wake, Yukio?’ Marielle asks. ‘You were dreaming so beautifully.’
Yukio shakes Greta again. More cave dwellers crowd around him, hands reaching for him. The pilot turns and all he can do is roar because he doesn’t have the words to speak to them. He pulls his shortsword from his belt and he charges at Lars, whose bulging blue eyes are so crazed and wild they can only stare in wonder at the stranger who now raises a blade to his face and drives him hard against the cavern wall.
‘Back!’ Yukio snarls as he tears the notebook from the old scientist’s hands and throws it across the room. Yukio grits his teeth – the wild dog of his fury, the tiger of it – presses the blade tip hard against Lars’s throat and lets loose a barrage of hate-filled words in his native tongue that spray against the old man’s face, words about how Yukio came to this forest to escape the killing of men but every bone in his rabid body right now is willing him to resume it. He roars and raises his elbows high and drives the blade hard and straight towards Lars’s eyes, adjusting his thrust late so that the sword slices the top of the botanist’s right ear and stabs through the handle loop of a gas lantern that hangs from a nail against the rock wall.
Yukio lifts the lantern up with
