I paused my ship near the wall, where my floods illuminated ancient etchings. Patterns, words in an untranslatable language. I knew this place. Though the scale was larger, it looked exactly like a tunnel I’d traveled a hundred times, a place where I would trail my fingers on the cool wet stone. A hidden maintenance locker nearby would hold my speargun, my map book, and the pin my father had given me . . .
Almost unconsciously, I reached out toward the wall, though my fingers hit the glass of my canopy. I was in a ship, an alien starfighter, traveling through a deep-space maze. How? How had it reached into my mind and reproduced this place?
My eyes focused on the glass of my canopy. Reflected in it, as if sitting right behind me in the cockpit, were a pair of burning white spots as large as my fists. Holes puncturing reality itself, sucking in everything and crushing it into a pair of impossibly white tunnels. They looked like eyes.
The hair on my neck rose. I opened my mouth to shout, but the eyes vanished—and along with them the changes to the tunnel. In an instant, I was back in just another metallic corridor, one of a thousand in this maze.
“Hey,” Brade said in my ear. “You coming or not?”
I twisted and looked over my shoulder, but saw only the back part of my cockpit—a cushioned wall affixed with an emergency blanket, flashlight, and medical kit.
“Alanik?” Brade asked. “There’s something over here. Come tell me what you see.”
“Coming,” I said, hands trembling as I put them back on the controls. Scud. Scudscudscudscudscud. I felt alone. Small. I had nobody to talk to about this. Cobb and my friends were trillions of kilometers away, and even M-Bot was cut off from me until I returned to Starsight.
Dared I mention my vision to Brade? That had been no simple delver maze hologram. That had been from my own memories. Would she think I was crazy? Worse, would she think I was one of them? Was I seeing these things because some part of a delver had attached itself to my soul?
My controls went crazy as I reached the end of the tunnel. They said I had hit a patch of artificial gravity, and—even more strangely—had entered atmosphere. This ship barely had any wings, but it still deployed ailerons for steering, and the atmospheric scoop powered on to help me make high-speed turns.
Just ahead, Brade had stopped her ship. “What do your sensors read?” she asked.
“Atmosphere,” I said. “Nitrogen-oxygen.”
Brade boosted forward a little, entering a large chamber that looked like it had a mossy floor.
“You see that moss?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, then let loose with her destructors. An explosion flared yellow-orange on the side of the chamber, blasting off flaming bits of metal. I felt the shock wave from it, my ship trembling.
“What?” I asked. “Why did you shoot?”
“Those blasts made fire that burned, instead of being smothered in the vacuum,” Brade said. “And I heard it. We’ve passed through an invisible shield and entered a pocket of atmosphere.”
Alarmingly, she popped the canopy on her ship.
“Brade!” I yelled.
“Relax,” she replied. “Pilots reported rooms like this near the heart.” She lowered her ship down, landing on the mossy surface. Then she climbed out and dropped to the ground.
I eased my ship into the chamber. After all the tricks we’d been through in this place, she was willing to just climb out? True, she had her helmet on, and her flight suit would double as a pressure suit, but still.
“The membrane should be here somewhere,” she said. “Come help me look.”
Nervous, I settled my ship down next to hers. I checked my console and was relieved to find that the pressure differential was minimal, so I popped my canopy. I unstrapped, trailing Brade’s form with my eyes as she poked along the ground. Finally I climbed out onto the ground, my feet scraping on the moss. It was real, no hologram.
I carefully picked my way over to Brade, who pulled off her helmet and looked around the dark chamber, lit by the floods from our fighters.
“Brade,” I said, hitting the microphone that would project my voice out of my helmet. “What if it’s a trap?”
“It’s not,” she said. “We’ve found the heart. This is the whole point of the maze.”
“We got here so quickly though. Only like what, three rooms?”
“It moves around,” Brade said, examining the cavern. “They must