I sit up slowly, every bone in my back protesting. Dravven snores softly across the room. Borzen hasn’t moved, still standing, arms crossed, but his eyes are closed now. He trusts me, at least a little.
I pad barefoot across the room, crouch low beside the symbol.
It’s carved into the wall. Not digital. Not projected.
Physicallycutinto the alloy with claws or something stronger. The metal’s curled back at the edges, rough to the touch. Still faintly warm.
It glows, faintly—white against the dark. Not enough to be seen unless you’re looking for it.
Reaper glyph.
I can’t read it. But Ifeelit. Deep in my chest. Like a tuning fork was struck against my ribs.
I don’t know why, but I whisper, “You were here.”
It’s stupid. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe Dirk was screwing with me, sent some actor in a monster suit to make the game more interesting. Maybe I imagined the whole thing and I’m going delirious.
But my gut says otherwise.
This mark is real. This moment is real.
And he saw me.
He wanted me to know.
I press two fingers to the glyph. It tingles, like static on skin. Then I walk back to the cot and curl up again.
I don’t sleep much.
But the fear doesn’t feel quite as sharp now.
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 wasmessy.”
