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I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him forwards. As soon as we were both through, I fumbled for the edge of the door and started to pull it shut. Some mechanism took over and closed it the rest of the way for me. I used my thumbs to flick the tears off my eyelids and tried to open them again. Still painfully bright, but bearable. I was just in time to see the door finish closing. Something looked wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Pitr beat me to it.
‘There are no buttons.’
He was right. There was no control panel to open the door again. There was no way to get back. Then I started to grin as that thought sank in. I turned to Pitr, still grinning.
‘I know. Good, isn’t it?’
He looked at me like he thought I was nuts for a few seconds, then got what I meant. He grinned back, but it didn’t look very genuine and he didn’t look relaxed.
‘Yeah. Everything you ever hoped for, I guess.’ He looked left, then right. ‘So where do we go now?’
We were in a corridor. Superficially, it was the same size and shape as any of the corridors back home. But that was about all that was the same. Even if the glowstrips in the ceiling had not been trying to blind me with blue-white light, the sparkling cleanliness of the corridor would probably have done the same job. I reached out to touch one of the walls. It was dry, and my fingers squeaked gently as I rubbed them along the surface. The slight sense of tackiness on just about every surface at home was missing. Even the air felt crisp in my lungs, and made the inside of my nose tingle.
I also looked both ways, but then I felt a frown dig itself into my face. Both directions looked the same and, after about ten metres, the lights faded then went out. I heard the hissing in my head, and the voice spoke.
‘Follow the blue line.’
The hissing stopped as soon as the message finished and I didn’t have time to ask any questions - like ‘what blue line?’. Pitr must have seen to look on my face and I told him what had been said before he could ask. He didn’t say anything, he just started to look around. I found it first.
‘Look,’ I said, pointing to the floor. At either edge of the corridor were two bands of multicolour ribbons and every metre or so each colour had an arrow marked in it. Pitr nodded, then looked off in the direction the blue arrows pointed.
‘How are we going to follow it once we get up there?’ he asked, pointing towards the dark.
I shrugged. ‘Let’s go find out.’
I was still carrying the bag. I hitched it on my shoulder so it was more comfortable and set off. A few steps after that I realised the darkness ahead wasn’t getting any closer. The lights in front were coming on as we got closer to them. I looked over my shoulder and saw the opposite happening behind. We were walking along in an island of light. Clever, but I wished someone would turn the brightness down.
‘How long have we been walking?’ Pitr asked later.
‘No idea,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t seen a timepiece since we started. ‘How long do you think?’
‘I just know my feet are starting to ache and I’m getting hungry.’
I realised I was hungry too. We stopped, sat with our backs against the wall of the corridor, and shared a food brick. Pitr had put some water bottles in the bag too, and we had a few swallows.
‘Garret?’
‘What?’
‘How are we going to get back?’
I looked left and saw Pitr was looking at me. He looked scared.
‘I ... uhh ... ’
‘We have to go back, don’t we? I mean, if this is a Duty, then we must be getting something or doing something for home. So we must be able to get back when we’ve done it, right?’
‘I guess so.’ I said. I had been so caught up in the excitement of the adventure that I had forgotten Pitr was not here for the same reasons. He was here because he thought he had to be, that maybe he had a job to do. I was here because I just wanted to get away.
‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘When we finally get to meet whoever this is talking inside my head, we’ll ask.’
Pitr nodded, but didn’t look convinced. I punched him on the leg then got up.
‘Come on,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘Let’s keep going.’
He took my hand and started to pull, then glared at me before letting go and making his own way to his feet. We started walking again. And kept on walking until the blue line turned into the middle of a double door. We pushed it, kicked it, and eventually got the doors to start sliding open even though something like a spring was trying to force them shut. We managed to make enough of a gap to get our fingers in between the doors, and then it got easier. We pulled the doors apart and looked inside.
It was a small, round room, about three metres across. The floor was three long steps down from the corridor and the walls were grey. The light inside was less intense, coming from small round panels on the wall, but it was still brighter than I liked. There didn’t seem to be anything else in the room apart from some rungs set into the wall to my left and four columns set in a wide square that came half way up my thigh. I leant farther in to see where the rungs went and nearly let go of the door. We were at the bottom of a shaft.
‘Ah, Pitr? You should take a look at this,’ I said, stretching out so I could hold both doors. He looked in, up, and I heard him groan.
‘It goes up for ever.’
I put my back against one of the doors and my foot against the other, then rummaged around in the bag until I pulled out a water flask. I put the flask between the doors and let them ease closed. The flask wedged between them and kept the doors apart by a few centimetres. I pulled them open again and told Pitr to go inside.
‘What are you doing,’ Pitr asked, sounding alarmed when I followed behind him and let the doors shut on the flask again.
‘I guess we have to go up,’ I said, ‘but we could both use some rest. It’s not so bright in here, and the flask will make it easier to open the doors if we need to.’
We shared another food bar, then made pillows out of our spare clothes before lying on the floor and trying to get some sleep.
I managed to nap for a few hours, and I don’t think Pitr did much better than me. It wasn’t cold, but the ground was hard and I was just too excited. I tried not to move around too much so as not to wake Pitr, but when I turned over I saw he was lying on his back, looking up the shaft. When he saw I was awake too, he pointed upwards.
‘Do they look like doors to you?’
I looked where he was pointing. ‘Could be. They look the same as the inside of these and they are all in a row.’
‘If they are the doors, how would we open them?’ Pitr asked. ‘Pulling these open was bad enough, but while we were hanging on the side? The ladder-thing is too far away.’
He had a point. I got up and started to look around, particularly at the insides of the door. After a while, I found two things. Well, I suppose you could have said three. Near the bottom of the door, at just about the perfect height for anybody standing on the lowered floor, were two recesses ideal for putting fingers in to pull the doors open. The other thing was a small square button, set in the wall below the doors, dead centre. I reached out to push it, then looked across at Pitr.
‘Should I?’
‘You’re going to anyway.’
I reached out, touched my finger to the button, and pressed lightly. There was a hiss, but from above us, then a soft ‘thunk’ and a gentle whirr. I heard Pitr say ‘uh-oh’. He was looking up, and had gone pale.
‘What?’
‘Get out of here,’ he yelled. ‘Now.’