ANOTHER DOOR OPENS


Reed did something he rarely, if ever, did.

He panicked.

Something solid rested just within the foam, an obstruction he pushed against and pushed against, but to no avail. He thrust himself backwards, bodily heaving his weight away to make a tactical retreat; but the substance clung to him like a leech, holding him fast in the wall. Clearly if one faction wanted him to escape, the other just as firmly did not.

Reed could feel a tingle like the fizz of rising bubbles in his lungs, and his eyes were beginning to burn behind the lids. His air was running out. Leaning back was only holding him here like a fly in a spider's web, and any attempt at gaining leverage only stuck the hand or foot he pushed with into the stuff which had once been playdough, but which was now molasses. So, with a sudden, full-body heave, he changed tactics—he threw himself forwards again.

He had been leaning with his every strength and the give was sudden; Reed crashed to the floor beyond with a brutal smack, the last remnant of breath clapped briskly from his lungs like compacted bellows, and his skull bouncing off the ground. He lie, that lukewarm, now blessedly solid material under his cheek and chest, dragging in air thankfully, seeing nothing but the shifting suggestion of colorless forms surrounding him. Wherever he was, he knew only two things; there was oxygen, and although he could make out the faded gray curves of his own hand on the floor, it was horribly dark.

Malcolm Reed was neither a faint-heart nor a fool; he knew that his escape from that billiard ball holding cell had been orchestrated by something beyond his own human ability. That either the Dark Man's influence had infiltrated this, the energy-to-matter creations of a malevolent, unseen enemy . . . or those impostors had allowed him to escape for reasons of their own. No escape, perhaps, but a release. For what, he was unsure; but, whatever the reason, they had provided him the opportunity he needed.

He only wished he knew who to thank for it.

For a moment he lie, inert and giddy, feeling the blood flooding back to his head. The dizziness passed a little more with each hungry breath, and slowly his night vision settled onto the gray, washed-out walls of the place into which he had fallen.

Hands feeling their way to either side along sheer walls of the same dishonestly perfect texture, Malcolm stumbled to his feet, gritting his teeth against the wrench in his torn shoulder, and stood unsteadily, wedging himself upright in the narrow space with both hands.

He was in a long, dim corridor, lit from no light source he could see to an eerie bluish glow like stifled phosphoresce. This corridor curved on indefinitely; there were no doors or vents or openings in sight. As Reed took in these surroundings, he could slowly begin to make out his pulse thudding like a dull hammer against the inside of his skull, and his chest involuntarily began to tighten; because, as he looked, he became more and more certain that this was a trap. But, much as he knew he would be playing their games, he had no choice but to follow the corridor around until he could find that one detail he might exploit. Not holding out much hope, he tested each wall once, found them to be solid this time, and walked.

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He walked for far too long and always the corridor swept away at his right hand, obscuring his view of the length of it without ever turning sharply enough to be a corner. He found not a single door, window, air vent or hatch. Every plate that made up the walls and the floor did not only lie flush as the blocks of the Great Pyramid at Giza, but seemed melted together so precisely the joins were invisible—if joins there even were, something about which he had his doubts. They may simply be decorative lines scored into walls as much one piece as that globe had been. Both walls ran on unbroken, not a single rivet protruding from the sleek surface. Occasionally, for thoroughness' sake, he tested each of the walls, traced his fingers along it, prodded it. It was completely solid, and did not budge.

He walked, telling himself with an absolute lack of conviction that around the next curve there would be a door—locked, probably, but still a real, honest door—and that if he gave up now he may be forfeiting his best and only chance to escape, trap or no trap. He walked but there was only so long he could go on before he was forced to realize he was going around in circles. The corridor was so uniform that he could have passed his start point five or six times, and not known it.

He would have to think of something else.

Malcolm had done what any good tactical officer would do—he had circled this pointless maze and taken in enough information of his surroundings to know that his best course of action was to wait. He sat, his back to the unyielding wall, and rested his head against it. He stared at the unending ceiling, feeling the raw edges of his shoulder wound rubbing one against the other, and screwed his eyes shut against the rising queasiness. Steeling himself against the pain, Reed fumbled to unfasten his uniform, peeling the sweat-blackened cotton away from his upper body. The fibers caught in the raw edges of the gash and he hissed as they snagged against the flesh, but he gritted his teeth and nudged the undershirt aside to examine the damage.

It was a deep cut some four inches across from front to back; a thin stream of blood black as treacle trickled from it and slipped wetly down his arm. He dared not disturb the wound, but skated his fingertips through the red-black trail that oozed from it, smearing oily red across the skin below, and rubbed it between his fingers. He raised his hand to his nose, and sniffed the spot of blood; the too-familiar stench of lemonade was overpowering.

He was about to ease the undershirt back into place when something about the injury caught his eye; already, the weeping edges were drying black. And another, pertinent fact; this wound overlaid, exactly, the scar he had carried for most of his life. In fact, impossibly, it was the wound from all those years ago . . . spontaneously reopened, without an apparent catalyst to do so.

As he watched, the blood dried completely to close the open gash, and the scabbed line began to recede. In that same, remarkable fashion, it began to melt away. He looked on, openmouthed, as the cut healed completely.

What remained was unbroken skin, overlaid by a bloodied uniform with no apparent cause of the stain to show for it. The scar, the one he had carried since he fell in the pool as a boy, was gone.

(When it's healed . . . then I'll tell you what you want to know)

Whatever else lie at the end of this maze, he now knew that the time had come for the last of his questions to be answered.

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Although his feet had stopped, his mind continued in repeating circles. He waited for the wave to pass. As a boy he had learnt to tolerate sickness, hardened by practise to allergic reactions. The wooziness was probably an amalgamation of causes, the blow to the head, the lack of oxygen . . . and of course, he had neither slept nor eaten for the past couple of days. He felt a distant twinge of guilt at the knowledge that Hoshi had willingly given up her own sleep to sit with him, but he carefully put it aside, fencing that stirring concern over her disappearance away from his current train of thought. He could do nothing for her or for any of the friends he had sworn to protect unless he could first save himself.

He had still to learn who would prove the victor in their chess game.

The sick sweat streaming down his back and pooling in his palms had made his skin icy as it cooled, and he shifted position, his feet planted squarely on the floor in front of him and his knees drawn up at sharp angles. He laid his palms flat on the floor to either side of him, rested his head back, and willed himself to stay lucid.

It took a while for it to sink in, but after a moment, Reed noticed that the palms of his hands were getting warm. At first he dismissed it as a symptom of his illness, but as he concentrated on that heat radiating between his splayed fingers he accepted the floor itself was hot.

He fell forward on his knees, a spark catching in his mind and a growing hope fanning the flame. The one variable in this sterile corridor could not be a coincidence. Chances were it was the Dark Man, trying to show him a way out.

You're assuming there is a way out, he reprimanded himself. They really could have beamed you in, you know.
But he ignored the voice, and carried on.

He scrutinized the floor plate where he had been resting, pressed his palm and then his knuckles to it, and found it was uncomfortably hot and growing hotter by the minute. It had been cool, he felt sure, when he sat down. So the plate had heated on contact, he supposed, and in the absence of a better explanation, he guessed weight must have been the trigger. And that, at least, made sense; he wouldn't have noticed or perhaps wouldn't have set off a reaction all the time he was mobile, only passing over the sections which would respond to him. At last, he had a lead. Good or bad, mechanism of friend or enemy, it was a lead.

Hardly daring to hope his theory would be supported, he touched the plate next door.

It was stone cold.

Reed laughed giddily and stood up, caught as he straightened by a flash flood of light-headedness, and cast his eyes over the floor plates. He must have hit his head harder than he thought; the formless light was dancing, and his laughter bounced like a stone rattling in a tin, thudding heavily from wall to wall. He breathed, and made himself refocus.

That was when he saw the clue he had been hoping for.

On some of the floor plates, emblazoned in lines of thin blue fire as fine as a spider's web, was a number.

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He stared stupidly at those numbers for an eternity. They made no sense. He had always been gifted in number sequences and logic problems, had always tested well, but these made no sense. There was no reason for them to be there but for him to see, and no discernible pattern in their organized jumble, though they held a semblance of deliberance about them.

No. They were going to make sense. He was going to make them.

A little help, here? Reed voiced to the silence. There was no reply from the Dark Man. Guess you don't know, either, he muttered.

He stood facing the way he had been walking, so the numbers would read intelligibly the right way up, and mentally charted each one.


8 14
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10 18 12
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14 18
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16 22
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22 18
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26
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20

And on one, faintly there in those same calligraphed lines of light, was a sequence:

32, 38, 30, 34, 28, 34, 26, 30, 24, 30, 22, 26, 20.

He hoped.

The grayness was blotting out his eyesight again, and for the first time the vague fuzziness began to worry him. What was the matter with him? He rubbed his eyes, trying to clear them, and studied the sequence again. His head ached gently.

A 32. Then a 38. Easy enough, if this key obeyed the rules of most number sequences. The difference was a 6. Then a 30. Take 8 from 38 and you get 30. So: add 6, subtract 8. But there the sequence changed.

From 30, it did not skip to 36, as he expected, but 34. A difference of 4, not 6. So his sequence so far was add 6, subtract 8, add 4. Breathing hard, Reed looked at the next number, praying it rose by 6. Praying it was a 40.

It was 28.

He palmed the sweat from his eyes, knowing something was seriously wrong. It seemed the nearer he came to a solution the sicker he became, and it occurred to him to wonder if the nanobots were somehow infecting him to slow him down. But he didn't have the time for such foolish luxuries as waiting for his vision to stop kaleidoscoping. These beings could decide to change the rules at any time.

A 28. A drop of 6 from 34.

He looked at the next. If it was not a rise of 6 this time, then his suspicions of a sequence were either incorrect, or it was hideously long.

It was a 34.

Reed breathed a sigh of relief, and moved onto the next. A 26. A fall of 8. At last, success.

The sequence fell into place from there, ending with a 20. Add 6, subtract 8, add 4, subtract 6. And 20 was the last of the key.

There was a 20 on the floor plate nearest his left foot. He closed his eyes and stepped squarely onto it, all the time feeling indefinably foolish. After all, it was a little too much like a bad science fiction movie to take seriously.

But if this was somehow the Dark Man's attempt at aid, perhaps influenced by a flagrant misinformation about humans, it just might get him out of here. However contrived the means.

As he stepped on it, he stooped, tapping the back of his hand to the plate. It was warming beneath him as his weight pressed on it. The corridor was swimming at the edges as he searched out the next plate, a 26. He stepped onto it and that, too, began to heat.

He traveled the rest easily, though every step dimmed his eyesight and cost him with a vicious flare of pain in his head. 18, 22, 16, 22, 14, 18, 12, 18, 10, 14, 8. As he stepped on the 8, he glanced about the walls expectantly, waiting for a mysterious door to glide open or a siren to betray his presence outside of that first impossible cell.

As the 8 warmed, the floor disappeared from beneath him. No movement, no sense of swooping away or dissolving into nothing. It just vanished.

He fell heavily into the black below.