When he had graduated from secondary school, Wildwing’s parents had done the predictable and thrown the exact sort of party that every teen dreads. They filled their home with people he barely knew, all of an older generation, with the pretense of a celebration as a means of having a social event. It wasn’t malicious, and as ‘social events’ went it was a fine sunny afternoon of food eaten in the backyard, exchanging the sort of vague pleasantries one does with people who have technically known you all your life, but didn’t actually know you at all.

Canard’s parents, on the other hand, had gone for the other end of the spectrum, which was to tell their son he could grab ten of his closest friends and occupy a basement for an uninterrupted evening. Neither of these events were bad memories, but of the two, Wildwing vastly preferred the latter. He couldn’t recall the names or faces of most participants of either gathering. He did recall that, despite being a rabble of unsupervised teens in the second party, they had done nothing more unseemly than be rambunctious.

Somehow those memories had been lost in the rubble underneath everything else. They had come back to him some time in the night, such that Wildwing had remembered in the half-dream haze of waking, and had to ponder for several moments if he had imagined the entire thing in his sleep, or if it had been a real memory. In the end, he had decided it had been real, if only because he did not have good dreams anymore. Good dreams had long been replaced by things he could barely call dreams, but all ended with him waking up, so he didn’t know what else to call them.

Canard had not remembered the party itself when questioned, but did recall a scavenger hunt the morning prior, that had kept them distracted and wandering the city before returning to his home. Wildwing had conversely not recalled the scavenger hunt at all, but upon reflection was able to bring up a disjointed memory of trying to detach a water bottle that had been taped far too well to a light pole.

Then the conversation had to turn into productive things. Things that bothered him at night instead of good dreams.

He had to ask about the parasite. Canard had stopped their casual walk through the hallways of the Pond to consider for a long moment the specifics of the disease, and in the end had given a frustrated sigh. “I don’t know. I didn’t see any experiments but… what I did see was evil enough, I wouldn’t be surprised. This is what your new girl is claiming?”

“Whatever it came from, it’s real,” Wildwing said. “I’ve… seen what it does.”

Canard waited, expecting him to say something more.

“I don’t understand what Dragaunus gains from it,” Wildwing said, instead on elaborating on the procession of bodies in their care.

“He doesn’t have to gain anything. Some people just like being cruel.”

“You’re not wrong,” Wildwing agreed. But that didn’t sit quite right with him. Emily and Winterwing were not just people, they were specific people. Out of a billions of possibilities, infinite possibilities, they were handed these two people. That was not random cruelty, could not have been.

There was a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, and Wildwing realized Canard was fidgeting with his hands again.

“What do you have there?”

Canard held it up for him to take, and dropped a piece of jewelry in Wildwing’s waiting hand. It appeared to be a necklace on a thin gold chain, some sort of dark marble that could be rotated in its setting.

“I was actually going to ask if it was yours,” Canard said with a shrug.

“Mine?” Wildwing said, rolling the stone under a thumb. “Not… quite my style.”

“Not Tanya’s either, apparently.”

“You asked?”

“Well, I asked if I could get it from whatever vault my clothes are in, and she subjected it to just about every test she could think of,” Canard smiled, genuinely. “I assume she would have skipped a few of the more creative ones if she knew it was hers.”

“Where did it come from?”

“You know… I’m not sure? I thought it belonged to one of you, when I picked it up.”

Wildwing turned it over again, but could see nothing in it that Tanya’s scrutiny had not already uncovered, and dropped it back in Canard’s outstretched hand. “No one’s mentioned missing something like that.”

Canard nodded, looking at the trinket doubtfully. “Well, it has to belong to someone, I guess, even if they aren’t here.”

Mallory turned the corner, coming upon them standing there, and hesitated for a moment, unsure if she were interrupting. Wildwing greeted her cordially, and she first stared at him, and then Canard, and then slipped between the two of them with a mumbled greeting, turning sideways as she passed as if she had to slip through a tight corridor. She disappeared around another bend without looking back.

Wildwing gave a moment for her to pass out of earshot, before saying “I have no idea what that was about.”

“It’s fine,” Canard said. “She did not like me the first time we met, either.”

Wildwing must have raised an inquisitive eyebrow without even realizing it.

“She kicked me in the gut hard enough I couldn’t breathe,” Canard said with unexpected cheer. “She didn’t like Tanya either, at first. We worked through it. Couldn’t have stolen the Aerowing without her authentication codes.”

Wildwing nodded, absentmindedly, before realizing what had been said. “Wait, what?”

“Oh, she didn’t tell-?” Canard gave a laugh, “Oh, shit.”

There was an audible click.

Their section was cut away from the fusion generator, then the world turned red as the emergency lighting and back up power came online. All within the length of a second, barely enough time to flinch, and again it took Wildwing a moment to understand what was happening.

“Oh,” he said, and then realized how stupid that sounded.

Canard was only slightly more eloquent. “Shit.”

Wildwing turned, wondering exactly how much of the section had been isolated this time. “Mal!” he shouted as he moved towards the intersection of hallways where she had turned. “She was right-”

As he made it to the corner, he was stopped short by a blaster leveled at his head, and Mallory’s startled face behind it.

“You?” she asked, turning the weapon away, visibly confused.

“Us?” Wildwing frowned, glancing over his shoulder as Canard caught up with him.

“Thank the stars,” Mallory grumbled. “I’ve been stuck in here with these clowns for hours.” She nodded over her shoulder with her chin.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Nosedive said, theatrically placing his hands on his hips. Behind him, at the edge of the gloom where the red lighting had faltered, Emily was standing alone, gazing back into the dark.

“Hours?” Wildwing said. “You walked by us a minute ago.”

Mallory holstered the weapon. “No, I walked by you, did my strength training, and ran into Nosedive on my way back for lunch.”

“But that-” Wildwing began, and then he caught himself. Very little had made sense, of late, and stating it out loud would not help.

Whatever the phenomenon was, it distorted space. During the first shift, Emily had somehow found her way alone, through a maze of hallways she had never seen, should never have been able to navigate. The only feasible route for her should have brought her directly through the section with people trapped in it, yet never did.

Space and time were supposed to be similar, Wildwing knew that much. It seemed plausible to him, that a strange power effecting space could also effect the passage of time. This was Tanya’s purview more than the rest of them. She might know.

Four of them clustered together in the intersection, with the fifth at the fringe. It was most brightly lit spot. He didn’t know if light offered any extra protection—in all likelihood, it did not, but it felt better to at least know they would see trouble coming. Emily stood apart, occasionally peering back to them over her shoulder, the strange cold blue of her eyes alien in the red gloom.

“Have you seen anything?” Wildwing said, urgently.

“You mean a giant, angry slime monster?” Mallory asked. “I’m not sure.”

“I have great confidence I’d know if I’d been eaten,” Nosedive added.

Wildwing looked beyond them, into the dark. Emily had taken an interest in the floor, tracing a route he didn’t understand in the air with a finger, as though she were cataloging a seam in the plating. There was a conversation between Mallory and Nosedive, that he only half heard, trying to plan what they were to do next. The building shifts began and ended without their consent, and the beast that lay within them was indifferent to anything done to it so far. If it helped Mallory and Nosedive keep calm to pretend that they had a plan of action, he would not take that illusion from them.

Emily was growing increasingly agitated, to the point that it appeared she was trying to say something to catch their attention. He tried to follow her tracing finger. The emergency lighting came from directly above them in the intersection, and shadows bloomed almost as a flower at their feet, petals pointed out in every direction until they blended into the dark beyond down each corridor.

Mallory’s shadow had split strangely and turned an impossible dark, as if a second, stronger lightsource fell on only her.

“Hey-” Emily started, as Wildwing began to word “Mal-”

A limb of shadow wrapped around Mallory’s foot and snatched her from their circle, lifting her weight easily, and pulling her back into the dark. She made a startled sound and Wildwing tried to grasp her, fruitlessly. Emily stood between Mallory and the mouth of the hallway with arms wide, catching her in a tight embrace, though both toppled to the ground in the process.

There was a moment of relief, where Wildwing let himself exhale, and Mallory almost, almost, had time to thank Emily for intervening, and then both ducks were both pulled cleanly off the ground, into the darkness, beyond his sight.

It was Nosedive that snapped out of surprise first, taking off into the dark after them. Wildwing tried his best to follow. The emergency lighting became dimmer as they ran. He nearly tripped as he came across something small on the floor, and realized it was Mallory’s blaster. He stooped to recover it, enough time to check behind and confirm that Canard was behind them, though he did not run with as much enthusiasm. Wildwing could hear indistinct shouting as it echoed down the otherwise empty metal hallways, and what could have been the screeching, grating noise of metal as it twisted. Shouting meant that there was someone still alive to shout.

He ran for what felt too long. The more he thought about it, the more wrong it felt, and though he could not have told one steel-plated wall from another with certainty if asked, he was fairly sure that he was passing too many intersections, too many dark gullies that he did not recognize. There were red pinpricks of light down some of them, too numerous and dim to have been the emergency lighting. He did not stop to scrutinize, only made sure again that Canard had not fallen somewhere behind.

He nearly ran directly into Nosedive’s backside in the inscrutable dark.

In the center of the corridor before them, a hole larger than his wingspan had been physically punched into the floor. The twisted panels pushed inward into the space, jagged and torn as easily as paper. This appeared to be the source of the shadow appendage and a long arm reached inward from below. It was still firmly wrapped around Mallory’s leg, and Mallory herself had tried her best to leverage against the ragged steel with her free foot to keep from being dragged into the hole. Emily and Nosedive had taken position on either side of her, adding their own weight to her efforts. The limb threatened to pull them all over the jagged precipice, or failing that, may have simply settled for tearing off Mallory’s leg.

Wildwing fired over their heads with his wrist launcher. The first puck merely vanished into the shadow limb, unnoticed, the second, explosive round shredded it as a fraying rope. Its separated end dropped the three struggling ducks, and the main mass disappeared over the torn edge of the hole. He did not expect that to be enough to dissuade it. From Tanya’s description, the creature did not seem to be able to die, much less be seriously wounded.

“Everyone okay?” Wildwing called.

“Yep,” from Nosedive.

“No,” from Emily.

And an exhaled “Fuck!” from Mallory.

That was enough. Alive and able to complain was better than the alternative.

Wildwing gave a nod, though it may have been too dark for any of them to see, and chanced a look into the hole itself. Where he expected to see something like the support structure, or pipes, or maybe large cables, instead there was deep black that traveled down, down, down further and wider than the foundation of the Pond reached. In its embrace, there rested million pinpricks of red light, resembling a night sky that looked up from below, rather than down from above.

He stood through a hole that should not have existed, staring into something alive and angry. The smooth lines of long, lithe creatures began to resolve, the stars becoming eyes. A thousand limbs and teeth, twisting snakelike between each other, a writhing hungry mass lurking beneath the surface of the world, all slowly turning their attention upward, staring back at him.

There was movement next to him. Mallory, on her feet, though favoring the leg that had not been attacked, looking over the twisted steel teeth and into the pit. He handed her blaster back to her.

“There’s supposed to be a weapons locker and firing range directly under this section,” Wildwing said aloud, as though she wouldn’t have known. She murmured numbly, and the other three gathered around them with trepidation, gazing into a pit that gazed back.

A point in the fluid movement of creatures broke free, twisting and turning in agitation. Its frantic dance spread to the beasts around it, like the boiling of water. For a moment, he thought they were growing larger, and then something cold gripped his stomach, and whatever strange trance that had taken him was broken. Not larger. Closer.

There was a sound like nothing he had heard before—a high pitched wail that made teeth hurt.

For a moment they held their ground, Mallory and Nosedive grabbing at weapons, Wildwing activating the shield on his wrist, and then, when they realized the multitude of what was coming, courage faltered. It was not one unkillable thing. It was all of them.

They did not have to be told to run, were already several footsteps away as Wildwing shouted it, and he fell in behind them, retreading their steps into the impossible hallway that they had just traversed moments before. He could feel the dark under their feet, knowing that inches below the floor, the illusion of safety the steel gave was no stronger than if they were running on old, thin ice.

There was no where to run to, and they ran just the same.

Wildwing was blinded by a sudden sea of bright blue.

The lights turned back on. There was a loud, audible click, as the section was reconnected to its power supply. Something shifted in his perception, and the ground felt solid again, the steel no longer reverberated worryingly with each stride.

He slowed, then stopped and turned to look back the way they had come. They had run deep into the maze, and yet they had not made it more than a few meters from the hole.

The wriggling mass of the long limb that had grabbed Mallory lay on the floor, cut off from the creature that spawned it. Without its master, it appeared that its slimy, oily surface was simply boiling away. There may have been the echo in the air of that loud wailing, or it could have been the hissing of a lost limb passing into nonexistence.

The hole in the floor remained, and when he approached it again, shield active and cautious, the starry sky was gone. Rather, there was now just a few inches of steel paneling torn open, and beyond that the expected and in tact conduits and cabling of the shield lattice, running under the floor. The hole was almost superficial, something that could be addressed and replaced in an afternoon.

The limb lost form as it boiled beside him, turning into a black, motionless stain, and that too began to evaporate to nothing. The hum of the shield generator was back, punctuated with breath being caught.

“For the record,” Nosedive broke the uneasy silence, “I don’t understand what’s going on, at all.”

“Don’t you get it!” Canard shouted.

Wildwing abandoned his scrutiny, giving the boiling black stain a large berth, and turning his attention to the health of the others. “What? What is it?”

Canard evaded his attempt to rest a hand on a shoulder, taking several steps backward. “Don’t you know what that is? I’m not going back there, I’m not going back in there!”