“I didn’t get out.”
Thatstilled me. What did she mean?
She curled her lips into a sad smile. “I don’t mean that metaphorically, like I still feel as though I’m still there. I mean that very literally. I tried to make it toward the portal, moving in a roundabout way, avoiding any monsters I saw, but in the end, I just couldn’t get close enough. The portal closed.”
Even with her explanation, I understood it no better. No story had ever come out about a person surviving in a dungeon. While a stable dungeon wouldn’t collapse when it closed, there was no way a person could survive ten years inside one.
She went on, as though she accepted I would have trouble believing her story. “A closed dungeon like that, it’s different from what people expect. It’s dark, for one. The portal supplies way more light than it seems like it would, so everything is darker after it closes. Only the purple streaks in the sky give any light. Also, people always assume that the monsters would get worse, but it’s the opposite. When the portal shimmered and collapsed, like a waterfall, the dungeon got so quiet. The monsters stopped screaming, they stopped rampaging.”
“They’re no longer aggressive?” I asked, trying to think of what a monster would look like if it weren’t drooling and growling and lunging.
“They’ll protect themselves, but they don’t seek out conflict the way they do when the portal is open. It’s almost like the portal is an energy that doesn’t belong, that drives them mad.”
“Were you alone? Weren’t there other survivors? Are they all still in there?”
That had her curling her shoulders in. “There were lots of survivors at first, but they got sick quickly. Corruption levels are high in the dungeons, and it seems if anyone spends much time in there, it infects them. They didn’t turn into espers—they just fell ill. Headaches, vomiting…eventually they just died. Their bodies disintegrated like monster bodies do here, and within two weeks, I was alone.”
“Did you know you were a guide?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. I had no idea why I didn’t get sick. I just lived off the food and water I found, the stuff locked in the dungeon with me.” She swallowed loudly, a gulp that said she had reached the part of the conversation she really had wanted to avoid. “I think it was about three weeks in when I met him.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“No. He never told me his name. He was a mentalist, powerful, corrupted. He must have been there a long time, living inside The Pitt like it was his own little kingdom. The beasts obeyed him, doing as he said. He used them as guards to keep me from running off.”
“I didn’t think corrupted could be guided,” I said, not wanting to deny what had obviously happened but trying to understand it.
“Yeah, I didn’t think it could happen, either. Hell, I didn’t even know I was a guide. You know how I guide, by pullingcorruption? Well, he didn’t give me that chance. He just poured the corruption into me, forcing it inside me as though that would somehow make him not corrupted, anymore.” Her voice quieted more, and she talked as though she hated the conversation, but she pushed the words out anyway. The courage was commendable. “It didn’t work, of course.”
“What you did to the corrupted at the hotel—”
“It’s different. For one, I’m not a scared child anymore who doesn’t know how to use my powers. Also, the level of corruption is different. In our world, there’s a limit to the amount a person can hold, but in the dungeon? It’s everywhere, so no matter how much I pulled from him, how much he forced me to take, it always filled back up like he was a vacuum.”
“Did he do anything else?” I hated the question, and given that she’d said she’d never had sex before, I had to think he hadn’t raped her. Still, I needed to understand fully, to know what exactly had happened.
She shook her head. “He didn’t have any desires like that. He just told me I was his, that we were bonded—guide and esper. That’s what he tells me in my dreams, that he’s mine, that I’m his, that he’s coming for me.”
“He’s still alive?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I assume he’s still in The Pitt. There isn’t much to hurt him in there, so unless the time becomes too much and he kills himself, I don’t see why he wouldn’t still be there.”
This all felt like information that was brand new, facts I had to fit into what I thought I understood about the world. I had no idea what it meant in general, how it created a full story, but I knew better than to doubt her. I’d learned enough to realize that Yun wouldn’t lie, not about this, so even if it made no sense, I trusted her.
“Is there any way he’s talking to me?”
I frowned, then shook my head. “The portal cuts any ability for a mentalist to pass through. If I am outside a dungeon, Carter inside, I can’t contact him at all. They are different realms, even if they occupy the same space for a small amount of time, so they can’t be crossed.” However, something else occurred to me, something I didn’t want to share.
I thought about the way her mind had all but thrown me out earlier. Could the mentalist have left traces behind? A mentalist could shore up a person’s mental barriers, but could one erect special ones like that? He wouldn’t be able to contact her from a closed dungeon, but perhaps he’d left traces of his power that could still affect her?
I’d never heard of that, but I’d also done little research into what a corrupted mentalist could do. Given that mentalists were one of the rarest type of espers, there was little research on us. Even when one corrupted, they were usually killed so quickly that no true research could happen.
“How did you get out? It hasn’t opened again, so how did you escape?”
She stared down at her hands, the tension inside her growing. “I was there for so long. It was hard to know how long, since there’s no day or night, but when I did get out, I’d been gone for six months. Every day was worse than the one before, with him pushing me more, forcing me to guide more, toying with me more. He wasn’t going to let anything happen to me that would kill me, and I couldn’t imagine living this way. I refused. It was just too much, and I wasn’t strong enough.”
Something inside me shivered, a fear I wasn’t accustomed to soaking into me. Part of me wanted to tell her to stop, to not tell me anymore, because I had no doubt it was headed to even darker things.
I remained silent, let her speak. I owed her that much.
