Chapter 8
GYON
The maze is laughing at me again.
Or maybe that’s Husker. The whole place is just one giant mouth and I’m stuck in its throat.
“You’ve got sixty seconds, big guy,” Maze Master chirps through the vent grille above. “Make the right choice or—pop goes the noggin!”
There’s a man strapped into a chair across from me. Human, civilian, shivering so hard his bones knock together. Red dot on his forehead like some twisted game of tag. Wall panel behind him is already primed—barrels humming. His life is on a timer.
I look at the puzzle.
It’s a logic cube. High-dimensional. Dozens of rotating plates and chroma-keys. I could dismantle it with brute force in thirty seconds. But that’d trigger the fail-safe.
I have to solve it. Play the rules. Be the good little monster.
And I’m not fast enough.
I snarl, slam my hand into the final plate, and watch in frozen horror as the wall-mounted emitter pulses.
The man doesn’t even scream.
His head is just—gone. Like someone erased it with a cursor. The rest of his body slumps forward, blood geysering from the stump.
The Maze Master giggles. “Oooooh. That was messy.”
The viewport splatters red. I wipe it away with my forearm. Behind it, a second civilian is sobbing. “No, no, no, no…”
“Round two,” Dirk coos.
This isn’t a game. It’s war. And war means I fight back.
Even if the enemy is made of walls.
Especially then.
I move through the corridors like blood through a vein—quiet, pressurized, inevitable. My skin still buzzes from earlier shocks, the charge residue settling deep in my bones. Dirk’s Maze Master hums and jeers from different vents, taunting me with nicknames and kill counts.
“Crowd favorite,” he calls me now.
Like I’m some gladiator fighting for applause instead of survival.
Like I asked for this.
I punch the next camera I see, shattering the lens. Sparks spit into the air.
Another trap opens up ahead—floor section gliding aside to reveal spinning fans beneath. I don’t hesitate. I climb the wall, claws gripping the textured plating, and haul myself into the duct above.
The maze tries to kill me. Fine.
But now I’m learning its rhythm.
There are blind spots.
Places the cameras don’t cover. I find one near a corner junction where three corridors merge. A vent shaft to the right has just enough room for my shoulders. I wedge in, crawl five meters, and drop into a utility maintenance node. It smells like hot dust and stale coolant.
But there’s no Maze Master voice here.
No drones.
Just stillness.
For two minutes, I breathe.
That’s when I hear it.
A voice. Hers.
Not live—recorded. Playing from a wall speaker somewhere above, looping on a delay.
“I know you’re scared. I’m scared too. But we’ve got each other, okay? I won’t leave you.”
She’s speaking to a civilian.
A child, maybe. Or someone too broken to speak back. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.
What matters is the sound of her voice. The way it holds. The tremor beneath the calm. The mercy.
It doesn’t belong here.
It doesn’t belong anywhere near me.
But I want to wrap it around my neck like armor.
I break open a maintenance panel and scavenge the schematic chip. It’s fragmentary—only two percent of the maze structure. But it’s enough.
Enough to show me patterns.
Husker didn’t just make this place randomly. There are loops. Reused layouts. Behavioral triggers. AI-controlled variables, sure—but with constraints.
It means I can learn it.
I start charting the dead zones. Places to rest, to hide, to move undetected. I’m not playing the maze anymore.
I’m hunting it.
And I’m leaving signs.
Every panel I crack open, I scratch a glyph. My name. A warning. A promise.
If she finds them, maybe she’ll understand.
She isn’t alone.
When I emerge again, there are three civilians huddled in a corridor. One’s bleeding from the thigh, eyes glassy. Another’s cradling the third—dead, neck bent wrong.
They spot me and they scream.
I don’t stop.
I’m not here for them.
I’m here for the fire-haired engineer with blood on her hands and steel in her bones.
My jalshagar.
And I will burn this entire maze to find her.