For a blissful moment, she thought it was death. Then she understood that if she was thinking, then she was still alive, and it all came back to her with the brutal force of a guillotine blade—the fire, the demons, the wall of rot and ruin.
I’m in hell, she said to herself, the last, blissful remnants of sleep scattering. Her throat was red raw, and she wondered if she’d been screaming.
“Easy,” said Marlow, confirming it. “Easy, Pan. I thought you were going to wake the dead. And I’m not even joking about that here.”
She finally let her eyes open, squinting against the light. Marlow was there, lifting a hand and waving. She didn’t wave back, just sat up to check her leg. Her jeans were ripped to shreds and the skin beneath was almost as bad, layers of muscle visible in the mess. There was pain, she could feel it as a dull ache, but it didn’t seem anywhere near as bad as it ought to be.
“Cleaned it as best I could,” said Marlow. “Which wasn’t easy given that there’s no water here.”
“Please tell me you didn’t pee on it,” she said, cupping a hand to her brow and looking at him.
The smile he gave her was almost as bright as the sun.
“It’s day,” she said. “How long was I out for?”
He shrugged, sitting down next to her. She looked past him and saw that they were under what might have been an overpass at one point, or a bridge. She was leaning against a vast brick pillar and fifty feet or more overhead grew a stunted arm of concrete and steel. The rest of it had broken off and lay in pieces on the ground around them, halfway to dust.
“It’s hard to tell,” he said. “You’re right, time is weird here, the night comes and goes pretty quick. A few hours, though. You passed out when we hit the ground; I got you here.”
“Here?”
He shrugged, looking out across the ash-strewn wasteland. She thought she could see a familiar shape through the haze, a high-rise.
“Yeah, we’re only a couple hundred yards away,” he said. “You’re heavier than you look.”
“They didn’t follow?” she said, easing herself into a more comfortable position.
“The demons? No, they had plenty to keep them going. By the time I’d dragged you here—”
“Dragged?” she said. “You mean you didn’t even carry me?”
“Like I said, you’re heavy.” He shook his head. “Anyway, by the time we were here the fire, up there, it was going out. The demons kinda just vanished with it. Then it was dark.”
He frowned.
“What?”
“There was something else out there, though. Something big. It was calling your name.”
She bit her bottom lip, trying to make sense of it all.
“The Engineers,” she said. “Marlow, they were hung up there like … Like I don’t even know. What happened to them?”
“This place happened to them,” he said. “Did you hear them, when we were running?”
“Screaming? Yeah, sure, but—”
“Laughing, Pan,” Marlow said, rubbing his eyes with dirty fingers. “They were laughing, like it was some huge joke.”
She tried to swallow, her throat sandpaper dry. The sound of it was still in her head and she understood that Marlow had been right—those had been shrieks of lunatic delight, something right out of bedlam.
But then who could blame them?
“A hundred thousand years,” she said.
“Huh?”
“A hundred millennia. That’s what I heard, when they were talking about how long they’d been here, that’s what one of them said.”
“That’s impossible,” Marlow said, but he was wrong, wasn’t he? Pan thought about Meridiana, trapped inside time, building an Engine out of her own cloned body. Time had no meaning there, and why would this place be any different? This was hell, after all, and Ostheim had always told her that hell was eternal.
She pressed a hand to her face, pushed into that darkness as if she could hide there. An engine of panic roared inside her, filling her head with noise, and she tightened her grip, pinching her cheeks, the pain grounding her.
“It can’t be,” she said. “It can’t be like this.”
“It isn’t,” said Marlow. “I mean, there has to be a way out, a way back. Meridiana said it herself, she said people have come back.”
Pan looked at him, at that expression of goofy optimism on his stupid face.
“She said that?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, not like actually said it, but her ghost did, or whatever was in our blood right before we died. You know, that voice thing.”
He tried to convince her with another smile but she just scowled at him. Meridiana had been a crazy old witch who’d known enough to get them killed, and get them sent to hell. And it dawned on her, right there, that maybe that had been Ostheim’s plan after all. He’d been one step ahead of them since all this began, he’d known exactly what they were going to do. It was almost more than that, though. It was like they were puppets who’d carried out every last piece of his plan. Why wouldn’t this be exactly what he had wanted? He’d sent them to Meridiana’s lair so that they would destroy her and end themselves in the process.
“Bastard,” she said, wanting to spit but finding no scrap of moisture to do it with.
“Hey, I’m just saying what I heard,” Marlow said, hands held up in defense.
“Not you,” she said. “Not you.”
They sat in silence for a moment, the air perfectly still. It was hot, like NYC summer hot, and it was almost peaceful.
“You see anything else?” she asked after a moment. “When you were dragging me here?”
Marlow shook his head.
“It’s like you said, this place was a city, once upon a time. There’s nothing left, though, apart from the bones. Even the metal is crumbling in places. I mean, how long does it take steel to decay?”
Years, she thought. Thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
“So where, though?” she asked, prodding the wound in her leg and wondering why she could barely feel it. “I mean where is this place?”
Marlow shrugged again.
“Look, it doesn’t matter,” she said, almost choking on the words. “Forget the Engineers, forget everything. We’ve got to try to find our way home, right?”
He shrugged a third time and she almost punched him for it. He must have seen the emotion there because he nodded.
“Yeah, we have to try.”
“So let’s try. Here.”
She held out her hand and he took it, hauling her to her feet. There was still no real pain in her leg but it was stiff, and weak, and for a moment she wasn’t even sure it would hold her. She took a step—the loose skin flapping—then another, lurching like she was drunk. She wouldn’t be running any marathons, but at least she could move.
Marlow kept his hand hovering there, ready to catch her. She slapped it away.
“Don’t worry yourself, Marlow, you won’t have to drag me.”
She walked out of the shadow of the column, squinting into the day. Her mind was a rowboat on an ocean of terror, she could feel the force of it beneath her, the depth of it, and its power, roiling on the very edge of every thought. It wouldn’t take much, she knew, for her to sink and never recover. It was only the thought of those Engineers, beaten by time into quivering shadows of their former selves, that kept her afloat.
She wouldn’t be like them.
She would not be like them.
“Which way?” she asked, feeling the warm, sandy ash between her toes.
Marlow scratched his bare chest.
“I don’t even know what we’re looking for,” he said. “But there’s that.”
He nodded to the horizon, to the pocket of darkness that sat there, like somebody had taken a pair of scissors and cut a slice out of the day. Pan looked at it for as long as she could, until it felt like her eyes were in a nutcracker.
“Him,” she said.
“Who?” Marlow asked, one knuckle between his teeth.
“The Engineers. They were talking about somebody else. Him.”
He will not find you here.
She had no idea who he was, and what he’d do to them if he found them. But what if they wanted to be found? What if that was the only way to get answers? It had to be worth the risk. It had to be better than the alternative.
Right?
“Let’s go,” she said to Marlow before she could answer herself. “We’ll find him, whoever he is, sooner or later. We’ll figure this out.”
That was the one good thing about hell, she realized.
They were never going to run out of time.