from land and dropped, to sink endlessly into an eternal deep.” He paused. “My crew sees the same thing that I do, Captain Alanik.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “Our ships are programmed to replicate the illusions of the delver maze. For us right now, it’s just programming. If this were real, you’d probably all see something different.”
At least, that was what I’d been told to expect. Only it seemed that much of what the Superiority “knew” was really guesswork. If I entered a real delver maze, would the same rules actually hold there?
Hopefully, you’ll never have to find out, I thought. Hesho and I took the right-hand exit and flew through a corridor that appeared to me to be crystalline, but Hesho saw flames. Both of us, however, saw a large boulder at one side of the room—so we flew over and inspected it. A tug on it with a light-lance proved it was real, and it tumbled out into the room.
“How odd,” Hesho said. “Did someone come and install that boulder specifically to hinder our path?”
“Supposedly,” I said, “this maze is built to replicate the kind of oddities and mysteries we’ll find inside the real delver maze.”
“Our scanners are useless,” Hesho said. “I have reports from my instruments teams—and they can’t tell what’s fake and what isn’t. It seems that the Superiority has programmed our ship to be fooled by this place, something I find disconcerting. I don’t like the idea of seeing what the Superiority shows me, even if it is for an important training simulation.”
As we flew deeper, I was glad to have the kitsen with me. Bringing a wingmate made all kinds of practical sense, not just for identifying what was real. On a more basic level, it was comforting to have someone to talk to in this place.
We passed through several other strange rooms with a variety of odd visuals—from the walls melting, to the shadows of enormous beasts passing just out of sight. We were attacked by embers in one, which I fired upon—before realizing Hesho couldn’t see them. My shots hit the wall, blasting off pieces of metal, and the entire structure rumbled in a way that I could swear was threatening.
“How can we hear that?” Hesho asked. “Instruments report a vacuum outside the ships. There is no medium for sound to pass through.”
“I . . .” I shivered. “Let’s try that tunnel over there.”
“I don’t like this,” Hesho confided as we moved down the tunnel. “It feels like it’s training us to rely upon one another’s eyes.”
“That’s a good thing though, right?”
“Not necessarily,” Hesho said. “While all experience is subjective, and all reality in some ways an illusion, this offers a practical danger. If we come to rely upon consensus to determine what is real, the maze could simply exploit this assumption and trick us.”
In the next chamber, we were attacked by embers that were real this time—and I almost ignored them, a mistake that could have been deadly. I responded to Hesho’s warning at the last moment, dodging as a barrage from the heavily armed fighter vaporized them.
We were left in a room with junk bouncing around and hitting the walls before starting to pool toward the bottom. Sweating, my heart thumping, I led us through the next passage. Scud, was I ever going to get used to this place?
We reached the end of the tunnel, and my floods shone on a strange membrane covering the opening. It ran from the floor to the ceiling, and pulsed softly with a rhythm I could hear.
That sound suddenly seemed to ring through the entire structure. My fighter thumped under my fingers.
I stared at the membrane, shocked. We’d only been in the delver maze for . . . what, half an hour? Maybe a little longer? I’d expected it to take hours upon hours to find the heart.
“That’s it,” I said. “The membrane. The thing we’re looking for. The . . . the heart of the delver.”
“What?” Hesho said. “I don’t see anything.”
Oh. I took a deep breath, calming myself. An illusion. Which meant—
I saw the entire universe.
In a blink everything vanished around me, and somehow my mind expanded. I saw planets, I saw star systems, I saw galaxies. I saw the scrambling, useless, tiny little insects that covered them like chittering hives. I felt revulsion. Hatred for these pests that infested the worlds. Hordes of ants swarming on a dropped piece of food. Buzzing and mindless, disgusting. Painful, as they’d swarm me, occasionally