Finn looked back into the forest. It was almost dark. He gestured ahead. "Whatever is here, it has to be safer than the jungle at night. Let's find a place to sleep."
They walked on, catching sight of a towering spire ahead, jutting out from the low buildings and stunted trees, and covered with twisted foliage. The sky was the shade of bruised plums, a sickening purple and black that barely lit the way ahead. The rain was gentler, but the ground was muddy underfoot and the wind a biting chill, as they walked on towards what had to be their haven for the night.
Finn dropped back to walk beside Sienna. "They say this was once an institution for the mentally ill and a quarantine island for those with the plague Earth-side. There are even rumors of experiments done on those the world wanted to forget."
They passed huge ovens with crumbling brick walls and metal doors hanging off rusty hinges. Sienna nodded towards them. "I suppose they needed to bake a lot of bread to feed all those people."
Finn shook his head with a half-smile. "Those are not for baking bread. The guards would shovel the dead into pits here, and when they were full, they would burn the bodies. Many of them weren't even dead, merely a step away from the end. My father thought about using this place as some kind of outpost." He looked up at the bell tower ahead of them. "But no one would stay here."
The path wound towards the bell tower around the edge of a deep pit. Sienna walked closer.
Finn put a hand on her arm. "Don't."
But she couldn't resist her curiosity. She walked closer and stared over the edge. Skeletons lay tangled together, their skulls facing in alternate directions on top of a jumble of long femurs, spines and pelvic bones.
There were so many.
The pit stretched as far as she could see in both directions. She raised a hand to her mouth, swallowing down the bile that rose. But she couldn't look away. Who were these people? Had they been pushed over into the Borderlands during life or only after death?
As she gazed at the bones, she could see they had been lying here for a very long time. There was no flesh left on them, and the pit smelled only of earth. Sienna frowned and bent closer as she noticed one of the skulls had a brick shoved between its teeth. What the –?
Finn came and stood by her side, noticing what she looked at. "It's a shroud eater," he said. "Some thought them to be vampires that fed on the bloody cloth surrounding the dead and then spread the plague to bring more victims. The brick forced into the vampire's mouth supposedly stopped it feeding and starved it to death." He shrugged. "Or maybe that's why they started burning people. To get rid of the food supply."
"It's horrible." Sienna pointed into the pit. "There are children in there."
Finn sighed. "There are places here in the Borderlands your people on Earth-side chose to forget. But you can't write people out of history, no matter what you do. There are witnesses, but they lie dead over here."
Sienna saw a hunger for justice on his face and a search for some kind of truth in this brutal place. Perhaps not all witnesses were in the grave.
Finn turned, and they walked on towards shelter. As they approached, details emerged from the semi-darkness. The bell tower had cracks through the stone, gaping holes and glassless windows, exposed bricks and broken walls, lichen crawling up its side. The crumbled state of the buildings reflected the fallen state of the world. This place had once been alive and beautiful, and now it was decayed and forgotten.
At the bell tower, they pushed open an old door hanging off its hinges. Inside at least there were walls and a roof, shelter from the cold wind and the rain.
They walked through an entrance hall with bars on the windows to keep those inside from escaping. The place was a strange juxtaposition of medieval plague pit and modern psychiatric hell. Vines grew through every window, and ceilings had collapsed in most of the rooms, rotted beams dropping down with the pervasive smell of mold and rot. The empty ruins had only a faint echo of the life that had once walked here.
They passed one room where jagged holes and lumps of metal riddled the walls, the edges still sharp.
"What happened here?" Sienna asked.
"A group of prisoners got hold of a hand grenade," Finn said. "They gathered tightly around it and pulled the pin. Their bodies were blown apart and the shrapnel embedded in the walls around us. That's one way out of hell, I suppose."
They walked on and found a room with a row of bed frames stacked against peeling wallpaper. The window was intact, there was no draught, and it felt warmer than the rest of the building. There was even a fireplace with decorative blue and white tiles covered in dust and ash. Underneath, birds flew over an expanse of ocean.
"Home, sweet home." Perry crossed to the fireplace. He grabbed a piece of discarded metal from a bed frame and poked around up the chimney. "Looks alright. I'll get the fire going. Then at least we can warm ourselves."
There was plenty of wooden furniture in the rooms around them. They collected rickety old chairs, breaking them against the walls to make smaller pieces. Perry conjured a flame, and soon they were warm and drying themselves in front of the fire. Perry got out his travel kettle and began boiling water. "Anyone else for tea?"
Sienna sipped the hot drink, considering how much better everything seemed to be inside a shelter with warmth. Perhaps things weren't so bad, after all.
As the others huddled around the fire, she suddenly had an acute desire to get away, craving some solitude after what had been a confusing and crazy twenty-four hours. Had it only been yesterday when she had heard of her grandfather's death?
She stood up. "I'm going to take a look around."
"I'll come with you," Mila said, standing up and dusting off her cargo pants.
"If you don't mind, I'd just like some space."
Mila paused and then nodded. "Of course, but don't go too far. Holler if you need us."
Sienna stepped outside the room and walked a little way in the semi-darkness, listening to the voices of the team fading behind her. She pulled her pack open and found the torch. Mila said it was only for emergencies, but she wouldn't be long.
She walked down the corridor, her footsteps an echo of the past, clouds of dust rising in her wake. She shone the torch into the rooms on either side, catching glimpses of broken furniture, desks and chairs, and then in one, the light glinted off a metal cage.
Sienna stepped into the room, playing the light over the structure. As she walked closer, she saw a skeleton curled at the bottom, its arms wrapped around its head, a defensive posture it must have died in. She had read enough about the history of psychiatry to know about the atrocities committed in the name of science, but the cage was still disturbing.
A scratching sound came from the corner and Sienna spun around, her torchlight catching the thick tail of something furry as it scurried into a hole in the wall. A rat. Much bigger than anything she'd seen before. She shuddered to think of the food supply that would have sustained creatures here.
There was a door near the cage, and she opened it to find a small padded room beyond, the cushioned walls covered in lichen and mold. Rain dripped through a hole in the ceiling. Although the space was clearly man-made, it felt like nature was reclaiming this asylum, one room at a time. She shut the door and went back out to the corridor.
She turned to see the rosy glow of the fire coming from a doorway far back up where she had walked from. She considered returning to the team, but she was relishing this time alone. Sienna walked on and found a huge ballroom with a wooden floor that must have once been polished to a shine. Painted panels of flowers and fruit covered the walls. A pile of old suitcases in faded primary colors lay covered in dust and broken masonry from the partially caved-in ceiling.
A piano stood against one wall. She touched a key, and a dull note echoed in the room. A skittering noise came from within the instrument. She backed away and turned towards the end of the ballroom where another door led away from the main corridor. Sienna walked on into the heart of the institution.
In the middle of the next room, a dentist's chair sat, fully reclinable, but with thick leather straps for the wrists, ankles and head. A sink in the corner overflowed with ferns and moss, verdant life in the ruins. Next to it, a metal table with drawers covered in thick cobwebs. Sienna used her sleeve to brush them away and pulled the drawer open. A syringe with a thick needle lay next to a series of scalpels, the blades glinting in the light. The edges still looked sharp enough. She picked one up and wrapped the end in a piece of rag, slipping it into her pack before walking on. It made her feel better to have a makeshift weapon.
The next room had once been a morgue, the thick doors open wide to display racks of shelving behind. There were nine slots tapering into darkness and Sienna couldn't help thinking of who might have lain here last. They must have been important to avoid the grave pits outside.
Around the walls, there were racks of shelving with glass jars and test-tubes arrayed upon them. The jars were covered in dust, but there were shadows inside. Sienna reached up and brushed the front of one then recoiled as the side of a diseased face turned towards her in the liquid.
A rustling sound came from behind her.
She turned as a rat burst out from the shadows, running across the floor towards her. Sienna jumped, a gasp escaping her throat. The rat was big as a dog, its teeth bared as it approached, red eyes fixed on her.
Then out of the shadows, more emerged.
They moved as a pack, black-bristled fur over muscled bodies and thick pink tails like rope. The biggest rat darted in, teeth snapping. Sienna backed away and climbed quickly onto a gurney against the wall, pulling her feet out of its way just in time.
The pack ran forward, furry bodies clustering around the gurney, moving it on squeaky wheels as they swirled around the metal legs. A stench of feces and rotting flesh rose up from the pack and Sienna gagged as she looked down into the vortex of bodies. They looked up at her with the fixation of hungry animals desperate for a meal.
"Help!" she cried. "Finn! Mila? Anyone?"
She thumped on the gurney sending a metallic ringing sound out into the corridor. But there was no sound of running feet, no voices. She had wandered too far.
She was alone.
Sienna thought back to how she had sat in the stacks of the Bodleian, lost in the books, not knowing which way to go. Back then, she had to use someone else's map to escape, but Mila had said anything could be a map for a Blood Cartographer. She could create her own map and walk through it.
She looked down at the stinking rats with their sharp yellow teeth.
It was worth a try.
Sienna pulled the scalpel from her pack and looked at the blade, then down at the rats. She could use it as a weapon and try to get out of here. She could wait for someone to rescue her, or she could see what she was capable of.
She winced in anticipation of the pain. "It won't hurt, it won't hurt," she whispered, then sliced into her forearm.
It did hurt, and she didn't even want to consider the diseases she might have given herself with the dirty blade. But it was better than getting eaten by giant rats.
As blood welled up, she used the fingertips of her other hand to dab a little of the liquid and then started to paint on the wall. She visualized the asylum and the corridors she had walked through, sketching the lines of the area where the team waited.
She drew the dimensions of the room and the pathway to the outside where skeletons lay in their eternal rest. She sensed the orientation of the building on the earth beneath and drew her compass rose beside the sketch, with its true north an echo of what she felt inside. It was like a magnet pulling her closer and Sienna gasped as she glimpsed the intoxicating power of her blood.
But would it be enough? What if she couldn't make it work?
The rats snarled below, bumping against the gurney. As she rocked from side to side, she closed her eyes and placed her hand in the middle of the rough, bloody map.