Adria’s father used to tell her stories, back when an evening pint or two put him in a storytelling mood, before they became afternoon pints and morning pints and he could no longer remember the stories that had once danced through his mind.
“Ad, did I ever tell you about the labyrinth under the botanical garden?” He began the story—The Beast of the Labyrinth—one night when they sat together under the stars in a darker, quieter part of the city, watching the starlight glitter off lapping waves of the canals. Adria has always assumed it was mostly his fancy. She’ll find out soon enough which parts are true.
Back then, Adria had lain awake for hours while he unspooled threads of legend into the night. Now, snatches of memory flicker back as she approaches Sevenwood—or, rather, the barnacle-encrusted ancient stone walls that support the island the botanical garden occupies.
Three stories above, foot bridges arch gracefully overhead. She’s crossed them herself. At high tide the water glimmers barely a meter below the bridges, sometimes blooming with schools of jellyfish, sometimes flashing with minnows, sometimes haunted by darker, swifter shadows.
Tonight, the bridges sketch dark lines against the moon-bright sky. The jellyfish and minnows have retreated to safer waters; the darker, swifter shadows remain on the fringes of Adria’s vision, slipping through the reveling crowd to find their marks.
Adria slips through the crowd, too, skirting the island of Sevenwood, following that thread her father set adrift in her mind so many years ago. My roots run deeper than you know, as tangled a maze as my branches. She doesn’t know where the rest of the game’s participants have gone, and she’s not sure she recognizes any of them among the crowd here; Sevenwood’s stewards are hosting a sort of educational program to discuss the garden’s history.
“How do I get in?” she mutters under her breath, but if the ashes in her pack can hear her, they certainly can’t answer.
But, there: a door rusted with centuries of salt, chained shut but so tide-battered that one side has been prised free from its hinges and shoved askew, just wide enough that Adria can slip through if she takes her pack off.
Tide-battered? Or simply battered; Adria notes the dents seemed hammered into the door from the inside, deep gouges scoring metal and stone. The animal part of Adria’s mind sends out warning. The higher-evolved part does that uniquely human risk calculation I admire, the one heavily—and falsely—weighted with naive hope for the best.
Adria pushes through the door and does not look back.
Last year, Adria sprang for a pair of eye implants after a particularly good payday, and upgraded them to include a night vision mod when she heard about this game. But she didn’t spend much time getting used to them and it’s not as simple as turning night into day. The flat colors, sizzling greens, blazes of heat—she whips her head around to follow a flash of movement and finds a crab scuttling into a dripping cranny. Her boots splash in shallow puddles reeking with tidal silt. In the darkness, something is tapping, rhythmic. Adria hopes it’s dripping water, but still she pulls the pearl-handled knife from her pocket and flicks open the blade.
Another step, another puddle splash with driftwood shifting under her boots, but the path is sloping gently up and Adria is soon out of the water and walking the path of—oh. Not driftwood, then.
She suppresses a shudder.
She’s in a sort of catacomb, the bones long washed from their nooks and covering the floor in a knobby carpet of femurs and ribs. She can’t decide if it’s better or worse that the catacomb’s builders removed the skulls and cemented them to the walls—she won’t have to step on them, but they’ll be watching her tread on their discarded skeletons, their bones bleached clean long before the sea swept into the city and filled the passageways.
Adria keeps walking, looking for her next clue. Riddles are inscribed over funereal niches, but they’re all ancient, mere epitaphs of names and dates in outdated script and lost languages. One of the niches catches her eye: a stone chalice carved into the cave wall, surrounded by carved stone fruit. It’s ridiculous, and she imagines her father laughing at the cornucopia of bananas and pomegranates and figs.
Her old father would have laughed, at least. She’d never known how the man who finally died of drink would react.
When the water returns he’ll get a chance to explore the entire system of catacombs on the eddying currents of churning waves, but this is a fitting place to start the journey. Adria unzips her pack, unlatches the box, hesitates. Fitting, the ashes in the catacomb? Or is it too on the nose? Should she scatter the whole box? Or save some to carry with her out of the City so he can see more of the universe than this choked corner?
She finally decides that her father would find the idea of ashes in the catacombs amusing—and that if he wanted to take his own adventure down in the City-beneath-the-City he would have found a way to sober up enough to live to this night.
She tips a handful of ash into the carved chalice, latches the box once more, and keeps walking with her step slightly lighter. Metacarpals skitter off the scuffing toes of her boots, but their echo is eerily out of rhythm with her own footsteps. Adria pauses, listening. She’s not the only one stirring up old bones tonight.
The passageway widens into a small room, and something shifts in the corner. A gentle huffing sound, no sea creature she’s ever heard of; Adria whips around to find the source of the noise amid the smear of electric pea green. Before she can, the thing charges.
Hulking, leaping, hooves splintering bone—the Beast of the Labyrinth knocks Adria to the ground and pins her between its horns. Its breath sears from its snout, fetid and rotting and metallic with fresh kill.
Adria lies perfectly still, trying to breathe as little—and as quietly—as possible.
The Beast snorts again, pulls back. Tosses its head. Speaks:
“Why are you here?”
Adria swallows: dry tongue, parched throat. The Beast is human, she realizes. Metal horns and protruding facial implants and a neck thick with braided wiring. A Tech gone so machine she’d think them a construct if not for the warmth of their body.
“Why are you here?” the Beast demands once more.
“My father told me stories about you,” she says.
“And that didn’t make you stay away?”
“I didn’t think you were real.”
“I bleed as real as you do, don’t I?” And at that, the Beast sits back. Pulls the pearl-handled knife from their thigh with a grunt, wipes it on their robes and hands it to her, handle-first. Adria hadn’t even realized it was still in her hand when the Beast charged.
“I’m sorry,” she stammers. “I didn’t mean—”
The Beast huffs away her apology. “Choked with coral, tonight we breathe.”
“What?”
“Your next riddle, little human.” The Beast clambers into a crouch, hoof-feet crunching bone, the golden ring through their nostrils sparking in Adria’s night vision.
“Wait,” she says, when the Beast turns to leave. “What’s the point of all these riddles?”
The Beast twitches tattered priest’s robes over furred haunches. “Pandora will tell you,” they call over their shoulder. “If you can find her.”
Adrenaline kicks in as soon as the Beast vanishes through another open passage, and Adria scrambles over silt-slick tibia and scapula to her feet. She snatches up her pack and runs panting back to the entrance in case the Beast changes their mind and decides to gore her anyway. Pulls her way through the door shaking and sweating, and not until she’s back in the fresher air of the rotting tides does her mind register what the Beast told her.
Choked with coral, tonight we breathe.
She climbs a set of stairs worn soft and rounded, slippery with ancient grime, and perches on a balcony with her back against a serrated mat of barnacles. Lets her heart rate ebb, and opens her pack.
It was all part of the game she tells herself, and she pulls the tool roll out to explore the contents more fully while her mind mulls over the words.
Choked with coral, tonight we breathe.
The cheap plastic lighter: maybe she should have used that in the labyrinth, maybe she would have if she hadn’t had the night vision implant.
The leaden disc: she turns it over in her fingers, searching for an etching, a sign. Nothing.
The shimmering vial: ah. It suddenly strikes her what this is. Zephyr, a hallucinatory drug. Daredevils use it for the rush of breathing underwater, it floods your veins with enough oxygen to keep you alive and enough of a drug cocktail to give you an incredible high—the sensory experience and hallucinations are apparently amazing. If you keep your wits about you and get out of the water in time.
What the fuck, Adria thinks. What the fuck.
For what won’t be the first time tonight, she thinks she should quit the game, just explore the City-beneath-the-City and scatter some ashes and buy a twist of candy floss and watch the street performers with the rest of the crowds. But, as bizarre as the labyrinth was, the Beast didn’t actually try to hurt her.
It is only a game—a game which became something much more as soon as she saw that note:
I know who you really are.
At least someone does, thinks Adria, and if they do, she needs to find out, too. And besides. Her mind, mulling these past minutes while she rested, has unknotted the answer to the minotaur’s riddle.
She picks her way down the stairs, then melts into shadow as she sees the wolf pack arriving, led by their fiercely braided leader. The pack pry open the door and file in as she barks orders. Are they just now solving the riddle of the labyrinth below Sevenwood, or have they been to another stop before this? No way to tell if each player was given a unique sequence of stops, so Adria starts to jog, picking her way through the maze of streets and revelers and pick-pockets and secretive crabs and traumatized anemone and dying minnows.
She’s heading to the reef.
Excellent.