The silence which followed his words was like the one at a funeral. It was as if the tiniest sound, the shallowest breath, might shatter it into thousand pieces, pieces that could never be reassembled.

Wide-eyed and confused, Tyson kept looking between Beor and Loralei, trying to see some traces of malice and cruelty that painted Sunshine's face. However, he found none.

All he could see was horror and shame. Yet, whether they were genuine or a mask they put on to hide from their wrath was beyond him. Having never been a good actor, he couldn't recognize deception in other people either.

"Excuse me?" Sybil's high-pitched voice finally broke the tense stillness. "You are saying that all the people I lost, all the struggles I faced were your fault?"

"Well, I wouldn't say it that way," Beor said hesitantly. "We helped make the Time Maze, but we weren't involved in anything that happened to you. At the time, we were probably already the victims of the Maze ourselves."

From Sybil's tightened fists and rage-filled eyes, it was clear that she didn't believe them. After all, she had spent years trying to find someone to blame for her friend's fate other than herself, and she finally found them. She could punish someone for his disappearance. She relished the idea of someone paying for what happened to such a great guy.

"We thought we were just making a fun tourist destination," Loralei said defensively. "We had no idea that it would end up like this. When we first learned about the side effects, we were willing to pull the plug on the project."

"But you didn't, did you?" Sybil said, her face turning a dangerous shade of red. "You figured earning tons of money was more important than the lives of regular humans? Was that what happened?"

As she said that, Sybil took an angry step towards them, and the only thing that stopped her from attacking them then and there was Tyson's hand holding her back. She would have shaken off if it weren't for a small part of her that knew they needed them. If they wanted to escape, they needed them alive and more or less unharmed.

"It's not like that," Beor said, raising his hands defensively. "We shared our concerns with our co-founders. They said they would bring it up during the next board meeting."

"Let me guess, they lied? They didn't bring up the small issue of people being erased from existence," Sybil asked, sounding more like her regular self.

She did her best to get her rage under control because they needed to be level-headed to figure things out.

"Not only that, but they prepared a nice little trap for us," Beor said, almost choking on his rage. "They called a meeting, and before we knew it, they hit us with a Time Eraser and thrust us into the Maze."

"Dude, this is all so messed up," Marcus finally spoke up, taking him a bit longer to catch up with what was happening. "You were like duped on the highest level ever! How could you be so gullible?"

"Yes, Marcus, thank you. That's very helpful," Beor said sarcastically.

It made him even more frustrated to know that the clueless guy was right, that they were horribly fooled. And he never saw it coming, not even for a second.

"We trusted them. How can you not trust the people you have known for a long time?" Beor said, biting his lower lip nervously. "We were wrong to think that our friendship meant more to them than the money. That was our downfall."

"Still, I don't understand why they kept you alive," Tyson said, putting his emotions aside and thinking about everything practically. "Wouldn't it have been easier to just kill you? Quiet you forever?"

"Maybe, but they would still be left with a problem," Beor said, able to guess their reasoning. "People would have continued disappearing, and they would have had no way to fix the glitch. This way, they could use us as guinea pigs to try and fix everything."

"We can see they failed to do that," Sybil said calmly. "How did they get the taste of their own medicine then? If they were so good at covering up their trails."

"People never managed to change big historical events, no matter how much they messed up. However, I think too many people were erased when history corrected itself," Beor said, contemplating the complexity of his own creation. "They could no longer hide the issues from the public, and it probably reacted as any angry mob would."

"How?" Marcus asked with fascinated excitement.

He was like a small child listening to an exciting story for the first time. It didn't even seem to cross his mind that what was a story for him was real life for someone else, that someone had suffered and disappeared altogether.

"By lashing out," Beor said knowingly. "Still, these are just my conjectures based on my knowledge of the time and the information we gathered while in here."

"But who would have the necessary knowledge to trap them the way they did?" Tyson asked, hoping there might lie the answer on how to escape. "I am guessing not many regular people knew how it all worked. Especially not what they needed to do to keep them inside."

"Maybe our boss was aware of it. God knows we filed many detailed reports about everything. I never thought he understood it, but he might have," Beor said thoughtfully.

"Your boss?" Sybil asked, getting tired of all the complexities of this new, staggering revelation.

"We were funded by AGAKOR, the largest cooperation in our time. Their CEO Yot Atoa was the first guy who came up with the idea of time travel being used for tourism. Being a billionaire, Yot was ready to pay any price to make his dream come true," Beor said, his memories coming much faster than they did when he first got them back.

"One thing I never got is why? Didn't they realize that it was too dangerous?" Sybil asked, having spent years thinking the Maze was some sort of prison because nothing else made any sense.

Stomping around the past sounded like a horrible idea. One that had not enough benefits to be worth it. So, the idea that people saw it as a fun pastime was impossible for her to swallow.

"Isn't every scientific advancement dangerous in its own way?" Beor asked rhetorically, feeling called out. "Besides, early tests showed the time's ability to heal itself. Even the biggest of wounds, aberrations, found a way to correct themselves and leave history as we know it unchanged."

"Then how did things go so horribly wrong?" Sybil asked, fully aware they were getting off-topic but needing to know why her friend had to disappear. Whose sins was he paying for?

"Our biggest mistake was exactly that. We tested time on its biggest wounds, most important events," Beor said, having thought quite a bit about what went wrong, weighed down by all the souls he was carrying on his conscious. "We assumed that smaller scapes and bruises to the timeline would automatically correct themselves, and they did. But not in the way we expected them to."

"People started getting erased? That's how it fixed itself?" Sybil asked, already knowing the answer to her question.

"Yes," Beor said, lowering his head in shame.

Loralei put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Yet, the fact that she didn't remember made the gesture less soothing than it would have otherwise been.

"Guys, why are we still just standing here chit-chatting?" Marcus asked as Sybil and Tyson tried to process yet another shocking turn. "We have the evil scientists who created the Tunnels of Time Dread. Why don't we just force them to tell whatever is controlling this, the AI, or whatever it is, to shut the whole thing down? Problem solved."

When he said it like that, it sounded simple enough. However, Tyson knew that nothing was ever that simple. There were always obstacles to go over, so careful construction of a plan seemed like the wisest course of action.

"I resent being called that," Beor said, giving Marcus a death stare. "We were just trying to enrich people's experience, make it more immersive..."

"Then you should have gone with virtual reality," Marcus interrupted him decisively.

Seeing that he might have a point, Beor ignored that comment and continued his previous thought.

"But you might be onto something," Beor said.

"What do you mean?" Sybil asked, feeling hopeful for the first time in a while.

"The robot guardian is controlled by the AI. Since it clearly obeys my orders, maybe I can tell it to lead us to the AI," Beor said as a semblance of a plan started forming in his mind. "Once there, I might be able to use some of the old deactivation codes. If they work, they might be able to shut everything done. Even if it's only a temporary shutdown, it should give us enough time to escape."

"I told you it was simple," Marcus said, smirking at his brilliant idea.