"The Great Safe is this way," I said, pointing to the sign warning of extreme danger.

Durwood looked up from wedging a grenade into one of the limestone's deep grooves. "Could be another dozen rooms, one worse than the next."

"Right—we lucked out," Quaid said, smearing blood from his scraped arm. "You keep picking up the dice and rolling, eventually the house wins."

I pointed out the AmDye schematics had said there would be four chambers. "Oubliette, plants, nanoblades. This is the last."

Durwood said, "Schematic also had 'em vertical, not horizontal like they are."

But I heard acknowledgment in his tone. Grudging, but it was there.

Once a matter of honor was put to Durwood, a matter of bravery, he couldn't shirk. His psyche wouldn't allow it.

One down, three to go.

"Henri said it would be dark at the very end," I argued, pointing at the black, black glass in front of us. "Dark! The Great Safe is right here."

Yves and Piper, who'd both overheard my exchange with Henri, looked at me cockeyed like I was stretching it.

Quaid gestured to a row of symbols that ranged from skulls to a gas mask to the biohazard triple scythe.

'Dark' seems a bit of an understatement," he said. "I don't see us waltzing in with a couple flashlight, collecting the gift-wrapped kernel sourcecode, and saving the planet."

Piper said, for the tenth time, "Hell no."

Yyes had heard rumors of a hyper-gravity project but assumed them to be false. "The idea of microscopic black holes, constrained, bent to our scientists' whims." The old man shivered. "Surely they never managed it."

A fraught look was passing through the group when bullets began zinging from behind. Suddenly a fine limestone spray was everywhere.

I met Durwood's eye.

He looked at the grenade in his hand.

"This stops now," I said. "The evil. Here and now."

He pulled the pin and rolled the grenade toward our pursuers.

I yanked open the opaque glass door and we all spilled into the chamber.

Behind us, the grenade detonated. The first part of the explosion was bright in my ears, then the door closed and there was nothing—no sound, no light, no wet humidity. A full and unrelenting void.

All directional sense deserted me. I raised my shoe to step and had no clue when—or if—it would find solid ground. (When it did, the surface was gravely and porous.) The sensory block was that oppressive. I heard the start of murmurs around me—quickly swallowed—and whooshing that made me think of a roomful of washing machines on Delicate.

I saw fleeting eddies of light, such transitory flashes I wondered if they only existed in my mind.

Yves Pomeroy hissed from somewhere, "Do not leave the gravel!"

Imagining Fabienne Rivard and Blake Leathersby hot on our trail, I charged into the mysterious void. My ears and heart thumped, my thoughts blared, my eyes groped for any cue. It was like falling forward through a cavern.

After several crunching footfalls, my left foot landed quietly—on a smooth surface.

I had barely registered this as a problem when an organ-rattling force jerked me rightward.

Both legs flew out from underneath, my torso suddenly parallel to the floor. Next I felt Durwood's rough hand around my wrist.

"What was that?" I said, my brain still processing, still spinning.

The disembodied voice of Yves Pomeroy: "The scientists wanted to limit their effects to light—perhaps they have not fully succeeded. Hence the gravel."

"What happens if...if matter, something like a body gets sucked in..."

I trailed off, leaving a vast silence between us.

The Frenchman said, "It ceases to exist."

Those washing machines seemed to whoosh louder.

Can you hold a funeral for a body that "ceases to exit?" Are my children going to see my face again? Ever?

Durwood said something, quickly truncated, about how they were supposed to go about finding an exit.

"It will be difficult, très difficile," came Yves's voice. "One must catch outside light in the instant before the gravity fields seize it."

We wandered through blackness for a full minute, poised, ready to lurch after any speck of light. A few false alarms were shouted, then taken back.

When Piper's shoulder brushed mine, I jumped halfway out of skin.

Fleeting pops and bangs started from one end of the chamber. I couldn't tell whether ahead or behind, left or right.

Durwood said, "I jammed the door some to keep 'em out. No telling how long it holds."

I felt my breaths shortening and concentrating start to fray.

How long had we been here, five minutes? Ten?

Twenty?

"I saw it!" called a voice I took for Quaid's.

"A blip, a flash—something! To the left, about the level of my ears."

Durwood sighed wearily. "We need a whole door. Not just a flash."

"Yes, a door—it must've been a door!" Quaid said. "I only glimpsed it but I think...I mean, I gotta believe if we—"

"Believe. You done enough believing for us all."

We'd loosely joined hands to stay together, and I felt Durwood's clench now.

Quaid said, "You know what, Wood? I'm about done with your negativity. Contrary to your clear beliefs, it is possible for a non-jarhead civilian to make a useful observa-"

"Stop it, both of you—arrêtez!" Yves said. "One cannot find our location by sight here, but it remains quite possible by sound."

Durwood and Quaid gave up bickering, and we all held our breath.

In the opposite direction from where Quaid had indicated, a walkie-talkie sounded, followed by a squeak like body armor creasing.

Fingers closed around my wrist. We were moving again, all of us moving, the way Quaid had suggested. I walked in a crouch and with my fingers spread to detect any surfaces nearby.

Gunshot cracked.

We moved faster and lower and yanked each other's wrists. Another crack. Then another.

As I scrambled to stay with the group, it felt like the air did figure eights around my head. Could these mini black holes bend a bullet's path?

I ran into somebody's back and squashing my nose. We were stopped.

Durwood whispered, "This the spot, 'bout here?"

Quaid answered, "Sss-sure."

There was the sound of a hand passing across a surface.

"No door yet," Durwood reported.

"Might've been a couple feet left. I think we drifted as we were walked."

A sharp intake of breath. Before Durwood could address his unhelpful partner, a drumroll of plings sprayed the wall overhead.

We scrambled away to the right, coordinating again with pokes, jerks, and shoves.

Then a knob twisted.

"Yahtzee!" Quaid called, attracting fresh fire.

A rectangle of light appeared, and I dove for it. We all did—a rolling, twisting, desperate escape.

I landed in a heap with Yves and Piper. The door sucked shut behind us. We could see again.

We were in yet another limestone hall. It was enough to give a person déjà vu—except that this place felt different from the others.

The others had been narrowing steadily, if irregularly. This hall shrank precipitously. Only a single crawling figure could fit through.

It felt like the end of an excavation—like we were relentlessly encased in rock, like we'd reached the end of the line but still needed to confront a last pocket of wickedness.

We crawled twenty yards like soldiers through a trench, emerging in a broader opening big enough to fit everyone shoulder-to-shoulder.

Another door.

Another sign.

"LE GRAND COFFRE-FORT. UNE PERSONNE SEULEMENT."

Following by stick-figure depictions of a heartbeat monitor, temperature gauge, and pressure-sensitive floor.

Yves wasn't saying anything so I translated for the group.

"The Great Safe." The words came out hoarse off my dust-choked throat. "One person only."

—

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