His stomach roiling painfully from lack of food and water, Kendrick stared down the long, empty corridor and called out, listening to his voice echoing into the lightless distance.
He had almost convinced himself that if he searched hard enough he could find an escape route, some way of hiding from Sieracki's cameras indefinitely.
He kept a tight grip on the long, wicked-looking knife that he had found lying in an alcove minutes after the shield doors had opened, as he had entered these lower levels for the first time.
I could just leave the weapon here, go find Ryan, talk to him and refuse to fight. That was the right, sane and sensible choice to make.
Kendrick knew that there was a cache of food and water, along with medical supplies, in a locked vault somewhere on the very lowest level. There were weapons too – if you could find them. But the vault unlocked itself only when just one person remained alive.
There were other choices, of course. Some people preferred to just lie down and die. Others walked calmly into the field of fire of a gun turret to end it quickly. One side corridor had soon been transformed into a graveyard where the corpses were dragged and left to rot. Over a few days the stench of decay, permeating the empty passageways, had become inescapable.
And there were also stories of a demon that haunted the lowest levels of all.
Kendrick glanced back in the direction of the shield door, now firmly closed behind him. Ryan had to be in here somewhere – Ryan who had sworn to his face that he would not be the one to die. That didn't make Kendrick any less determined to find some kind of rational compromise. But he'd been down here for over an hour now, without any sign of his selected adversary.
More time passed, immeasurable in that endless night.
The first few times that Kendrick heard the distant roaring, he felt sure it was some form of auditory hallucination. But then he saw light flickering down in some far corner, the first light he had seen in… for ever.
Perhaps, he mused, the roaring noise came from something burning. At first the flickering seemed painfully bright to him, but his augmented senses rapidly adjusted themselves. He stared along the corridor, moving closer to the wall.
What is that? he wondered again. It sounded very much like the roar of flames.
'Explain,' Sieracki's voice boomed over the tannoy.
Kendrick flung himself to the corridor floor, frightened to the core by the sudden echo of the voice.
'You said something was burning? Explain,' Sieracki repeated, his voice insistent.
Perhaps, Kendrick thought, he himself had spoken without even being aware of it. The light suddenly grew much brighter.
'I don't know what I saw. I-'
'Our instruments show nothing burning,' Sieracki replied in his familiar flat tones. Kendrick had heard answering machines with more emotional depth.
He framed a reply, then stopped when he saw something that he would never, ever forget.
At first Kendrick thought that the figure was burning. But if this was fire, then the flames were of liquid silver. Insane laughter filled the air and the figure ran at him, almost whooping with joy. Kendrick stood, awestruck, as the creature ran towards him down the long corridor before stopping suddenly at an intersection.
All of a sudden, Kendrick could see something flowing through the conduits that lined the walls and ceiling. No, not seeing; more like a kind of sensing, like trying to hold an image steady in his mind. There for a brief instant, gone the next, always wavering then shifting away.
It was a little like the times when he had become aware of the flow of energy in the electronics systems around him, but on a level of complexity and depth that he could never have previously imagined. Energy, flowing through the walls, suddenly as clearly visible as the streets of a city on a summer afternoon. Bright pulses flared out everywhere from the walls and the ceiling.
Kendrick shouted out to Sieracki, unable to keep himself from babbling. 'What was that? You never told us about this. Is it human? For God's sake, what is it?'
'Explain.'
'I saw him glowing. I never imagined… I thought he was on fire.'
Kendrick stared up at the nearest camera. 'Didn't you see it?'
Sieracki was silent this time.
Kendrick wandered, lost, until he came to yet another of the Maze's thousand intersections. Here a shaft curved down into murky blackness. Empty offices filled with shadows beckoned him on either side. He gripped his knife tighter, imagining Ryan lurking in there, waiting.
He climbed down the dark stairwell, the air echoing with his lonely footsteps. Tiny lenses glittered here and there, crudely epoxied to any available surface. He pictured Sieracki watching him from the comfort of his own office.
From somewhere ahead sounded the clattering of feet. Kendrick ducked into an empty office space till the noise began to recede. Something metal gleamed at him in the corner of the room.
He picked it up: a catapult. Not a child's toy, however, for this one looked deadly. Next to it lay a small box filled with steel balls. He wondered how much damage could be done to a human body with such a missile.
Nobody who returned from the lower levels had ever reported finding firearms there. Of course, firearms lacked artistry from the point of view of a man like Sieracki. Just aim and fire – that wouldn't tell Wilber what a bio-augmented soldier might achieve in hand-to-hand combat. A catapult or a knife was more visceral, more immediate. In the context of Sieracki's grand experiment, they made perfect sense.
Disgust and self-loathing filled Kendrick as he threw the catapult down where he had found it. He stepped back out into the corridor, flooded with sudden hatred.
'Can you hear me, Sieracki?' he screamed, his voice echoing down the empty corridors. 'Fuck you, I'm not playing your game any more! Do you hear me? Sieracki!'
'But you have to.' The voice sounded close, very close. 'Or else he'll just kill both of us.'
Ryan lunged out of the shadows. Kendrick caught sight of him at the last second. He spun out of the way, crashing into a wall as something hot streaked across the side of his chest. He felt a stinging warmth traverse his flesh.
Ryan's forward momentum had sent him crashing into an ancient file trolley and tumbling to the ground amid clouds of dust. Kendrick felt a sudden desire to fight, to win. The knife was already in his hand, poised for a killing lunge. Instead, he stepped rapidly away from Ryan, keeping the knife pointed towards his adversary, so that at least he could defend himself.
'For Christ's sake, Ryan, just listen to me. There has to be a way out of here. We could-'
'There isn't,' Ryan growled, picking himself up from the dust. There was a determination in the words as he met Kendrick's gaze.
'There has to be,' Kendrick insisted.
He glanced down to see blood soaking through the thin paper of his shirt. Ryan had injured him – but surely it was only a flesh wound? He was still standing, still ready to protect himself.
'Uh-uh,' said Ryan, shaking his head. He was carrying a knife like Kendrick's. Dried blood stained the dusty floor between them, and Kendrick tasted bile at the back of his throat. 'Next time, defend yourself,' Ryan warned him, backing away. 'I never said I was going to make this easy for you.'
Ryan turned and fled. Kendrick watched him go, dumbfounded. Then he went back to pick up the catapult.
