“I . . .” I stepped closer to her. “I’m not convinced this maze was fabricated.”
“The humans—”
“I know where the Superiority says they got it,” I said, cutting her off. “And most of me believes their story. But I don’t think the humans fabricated this. It’s too . . .” What? Eerie? Too hauntingly surreal?
It shows me real hallucinations. It’s not a fabrication. Not completely.
“I think it must be a corpse,” I said. “A delver’s corpse, repurposed to train on.”
Brade frowned at that. “I don’t know if they can even die, Alanik. You’re making assumptions.”
Maybe she was right. Still, I kept my helmet on as we scouted through the cavern, sticking close together. The moss on those rocks was alive, as best as I could tell from picking at it. What if it released, like, dangerous spores or something? I would have felt a lot more comfortable if Brade would put her helmet back on.
As we reached the far side of the room, I spotted something on the floor. A web of deep green, hidden behind a pile of rocks. I waved Brade forward and approached the patch. It looked like a spiderweb of green fibers, and was about a meter in diameter, circular.
“You see this?” I asked.
“A membrane,” she said. “Made of green fibers.”
So it wasn’t a hallucination. I knelt, poking at the fibers, then looked at Brade. She didn’t seem eager to push through it, and I found that neither was I.
“I was furious,” Brade finally said, speaking in a soft voice.
“Huh?” I asked.
“You asked earlier,” she said. “What it felt like to be taken from my parents when young. It made me angry.”
She knelt, yanking at the spiderweb of fibers, pulling it back and revealing a hole in the ground. It looked to be about two meters deep, and the light on my helmet showed a metal floor at the bottom.
“It seethed inside me for years,” Brade continued. “A molten pit, burning like destructor fire.” She looked back at me. “That’s when I realized the Superiority was right. I was dangerous. Very, very dangerous.”
She met my eyes for a moment, then pulled on her helmet again and activated the channel to call in to Flight Command. “We’ve found the heart,” she said. “Entering now.”
She lowered herself down through the opening. I hesitated only a moment, then climbed down after her. My heart began beating faster, but our headlights showed only a small, empty chamber with a very low ceiling.
“Well done,” Winzik’s voice said in our ears. “Alanik of the UrDail and Brade Shimabukuro, you are the seventh pair to reach this room in the training.”
“What happens now?” I asked. “I mean, if we were in a real delver maze? What would we find?”
“We don’t know what it will look like,” Winzik said. “Nobody has ever returned after entering the membrane. But in the event of a true delver emergency, you must detonate the weapon. The lives of millions may depend on it.”
The weapon. We’d been told several times that one existed, though we had been given no details on it. We were assured that if a real delver emergency happened, we’d each be given ships equipped with one of the weapons, which was apparently like some kind of bomb that we were supposed to detonate near the membrane room.
“Great,” Brade said to Flight Command. “Now that we’ve gotten here, I think we’re ready. Brade out.” She leaped up and pulled herself up from the room through the hole, entering the chamber with the moss.
I followed, turning off the line to Flight Command. “Ready?” I asked her. “Brade, we’ve only made it to the heart once. We need to run this mission many more times.”
“To what end?” she asked. “The rooms are starting to repeat; we’ve seen everything this test maze can show us. We’re as prepared as we’re going to be.”
I caught up to her. “I doubt that. There’s always room for more training.”
“And if this fake maze makes us grow complacent? The real thing will be unexpected. Insane, or at least beyond our kind of sanity. If we just run through these same rooms, we’ll get too comfortable with them. So the more we train, the worse off we could be.”
Once we reached our ships, I hesitated, thinking of what she’d said earlier about being angry. Then, after a moment of indecision, I pulled off my helmet. I didn’t want to risk my microphone picking up what I was going