Alex stood in darkness. Not a single speck of light lit the area around him. Looking around, he couldn''t tell if his eyes were open or closed. Only the sound of breathing, quick and labored, remained.


    His chest burned as he heaved in and out. It was like he was instantly taken from sea level to the top of a mountain. The air felt dangerously thin. Except, that wasn''t entirely true. He wasn''t suffocating. Something was missing in the air that was usually there. Something he had grown so used to since coming to the nightsea.


    "Shades." A woman''s voice hissed beside him, and he assumed it was the captured thief. "There''s no aether here."


    That was it. Aether was something that was in every part of the islands in the nightsea. Everything was infused with aether, from rock and stone to trees and animals. It made everything more resilient than it should be. It powered things like Alex''s Path of Step, allowing him to move short distances quickly. Aether even flowed out in the nightsea, forming trails of light that went between islands.


    Yet, wherever they were, there was no aether to be found.


    Alex reached out his hand and felt cold stone beneath his fingers. His hand grew colder and colder as he touched it, like the stone was leeching away the heat of his body. A slow, dull pain prickled across his skin, and he realized the problem. The stone ate away at the aether as well.


    "What the hell did they make this out of?" Alex wondered and heard the woman scuffle across the ground at his voice.


    "Who''s there?"


    "The person you got caught up in all this," Alex grumbled, tapping his staff against the ground until it hit the wall.


    The stone surrounded them, but he had to figure out what the room looked like. He opened his gate inside his chest, but it didn''t respond. He closed his eyes and focused, but the gate remained closed. Even his curse needed aether, not that he ever had the opportunity to test that during his time on the nightsea. It had always just worked.


    He heard the woman shuffling away, attempting to be quiet, but he wasn''t about to let that happen.


    He reached out and grabbed toward the sound, finding what he thought was a wrist or ankle, and dragged it toward him. He couldn''t see her in the darkness, but she gasped, and something hit him hard across the chest. Alex grunted but didn''t let go. He was going to get some answers, one way or another.


    Slap.


    "Stop fighting," Alex said as the echo of her slap rang out in the room around him. "I''m not going to hurt you, but I won''t let go either. You got me stuck in this situation, so we''ll help each other get out of it."


    "I don''t want to get out," she said but stopped hitting him. "My plan was working fine. If your friend hadn''t stopped me, I would have been caught, and you wouldn''t be here."


    So, she had seen what happened. Alex nodded but didn''t let go of her wrist. Not that she could see him, same as he couldn''t see her. All in all, neither was in a good situation when reading the other person.


    "Why would you want to be here?" Alex asked.


    "None of your business."


    Fair. Alex had to give her that. It was indeed not his business. At least, it wasn''t until he had stepped in to save Hubert. Now, it was his business. He sighed but didn''t know what to do. He couldn''t force her to tell him if she didn''t want to.


    "You have a light?" he asked.


    "I might if you let me go."


    Alex tightened his grip on his staff, debating what to do. If he let her go, she might try to run off again. He was reasonably confident he could catch her, deprived of aether or not. He wasn''t a slouch regarding physical strength or speed, so he thought he could catch her if she ran.


    "Alright," Alex said, letting go of her wrist.


    The only sound he could hear was breathing and her sifting through something, probably a sack or bag he hadn''t seen. He heard her set something on the ground and take something else out of the bag.


    Click. Clack. Click. Clack. Click. Fwoosh.


    Alex had thought to cover his eyes an instant too late. Sparks on the ground caught the torch alight, and an orange flash cut through the darkness. Spots speckled across his sight as he brought up his arm between himself and the torch.


    "Aah!" Both of them cried out at the same moment.


    "Stupid darkness," the woman said as Alex waited for his eyes to adjust to the world around him.


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    The orange light from the torched seemed to dim as the woman raised it, and Alex guessed that the walls were absorbing the heat and light of the torch much the same way he thought they absorbed aether. Whoever had designed the room around them had to have been diabolical. It made whatever they were in the perfect prison to keep anyone in, powerful or not.


    "It''s a maze," the woman said beside him, and Alex looked down at her. "A maze beneath the arena that holds all the fighters before they get called up. The only way to get in is to get caught doing a crime. The only way out is to win your fights."


    She had taken the hood off her green cloak, and he could see her at least dimly in the torch''s light for the first time. She was pale-skinned, and her face was covered in dark freckles. Her short black hair was messy. Dark green eyes stared up at him as she also looked him over.


    "I''m Alex." Alex nodded at her.


    "Erin," she said.


    Alex felt like he recognized her, but he didn''t know where from. He pushed the thought aside. It didn''t matter right now. Thanks to her antics, he was stuck in a maze that leeched at the only things he knew could get him out of tight situations. All that mattered was getting out and gathering information about Glory Plateau.


    "So, it''s a maze?" Alex asked. "That means there''s an exit?"


    "No one''s ever found it." Erin shrugged, holding the light forward.


    Alex could see a turn along the flat wall ahead, the light casting shadows at an angle down it. Erin didn''t move forward first but held out her torch to light the way. The intention was clear: he would lead the way.


    "Alright, I get it." Alex sighed, stepping forward. "Just make sure to keep it close. I don''t know what''s out there."


    "Neither do I," Erin said but kept close behind him.


    They crept down the hallways slowly, and it felt like hours of exploration. Time and time again, the hallways cut left and right, each time at a perfectly cut right angle. The entire thing was like a massive square maze puzzle, and Alex had to stop and think about it.


    "What is it?" The torch was dimmer than before as Erin came up next to him.


    "I don''t think just wandering it is going to work," Alex said, looking at the torch. "And it looks like we''re about to do this in the dark unless you have another one of those."


    "Only two more." Erin shook her head.


    "I thought you were ready for this?" Alex grinned.


    "Shut it." She frowned at him. "So what''s your plan?"


    Alex looked around him again, but all he could see were advancing shadows as the torch grew dimmer and dimmer. Again, he thought about the maze puzzle he saw as a kid in papers and on the back of cereal boxes.


    "So." He sighed. "What we do is follow one wall, and no matter what, we don''t leave that wall. Assuming this is a static maze, eventually, we will go through all of it. Light or no, it will take us through the entire maze, and if there''s an exit, we''ll hit it eventually."


    "And starve to death along the way." Erin shook her head. "The arena is as big as most of the island, and we''re right underneath it."


    Alex had to admit, she had a point. Due to what had happened to him in the lab, he could go longer without eating than most people. However, he wasn''t alone, and even he would eventually drop dead from hunger or thirst.


    "Randomly choosing won''t work either," Alex said.


    If only he had access to his gate, he could at least sense the magnetic fields around them. Everything gave off a magnetic field of some kind, and it would let him see in the darkness and around corners as they walked. However, without aether, his gate remained closed.


    Thump.


    Something fell hard in the distance, and Erin turned the torch behind them. The dim light did nothing to illuminate the further parts of the hall. Her breath quickened, and Alex closed his eyes to listen, ignoring both of their breathing as he tried to understand what was out there.


    Thump.


    Something hit against the stone in the distance again. Alex opened his eyes and took a deep breath. He had an idea. It might have been an incredibly stupid idea, but it was better than any of the options they had right now.


    He picked up his staff and tapped it against the stone floor.


    Knock.


    "What are you doing?" Erin hissed in a whisper.


    "Trying something." Alex shrugged his shoulders.


    Thump. Thump.


    Knock. Knock.


    Alex replied immediately to the sound as it gave two thumps in a row. Someone or something out in the maze was trying to communicate, and he was willing to give it a shot. He could see Erin''s face go a ghostly pale as she looked between him and the end of the hall.


    Thump. Thump. Thump.


    Knock. Knock. Knock.


    Alex started forward toward the source of the sound without thinking. It hadn''t seemed to move closer, so he thought that maybe it couldn''t. The torchlight faded behind him momentarily as he walked out of the dim orange light.


    "Wait, where are you going?" Erin whispered after him before the light came closer behind him. "You don''t know what that is. It could be a monster!"


    "Maybe." Alex stopped and waited for her to catch up. "But it is something down here. Anything is better than just waiting around in the dark."


    He started off again before she could object, and he could hear her walking after him, her boots clapping against the ground fast to keep up with his stride. She managed to keep him at the edge of the torchlight so he could only barely peer ahead as he knocked on occasion and listened for the return thumps. After some time, the thumps grew loud enough that he could guess how far ahead they were, and he quickened his pace down the hall.


    If he focused, he could hear talking echoing down the walls. The voice was muffled, and he assumed that the walls consumed sound much like they consumed everything else. The more he learned about the maze, the more sure he was someone with an island core constructed it. No naturally occurring rock he could think of had all of these properties. He was sure the lab he had escaped from on August would have been built out of it if there was.


    "Brother, you must hang on," he heard a man crying in the hall before him and stopped, letting Erin catch up. "Someone is coming. Just hang on."


    As Erin came up behind him, her torchlight pushed back the shadows of the maze, and two men were revealed next to a wall in a bend. One knelt over the other, dressed in a deep blue robe that covered him from head to ankles. Much of the robe was soaked dark purple with blood. Beside him was a long sword that started straight and then curved outward like a backward sickle. Alex had seen something like it before in his old world history classes. It was like an Egyptian khopesh, even having a hooked end on the back of the sword. As the light came over man, the man looked up to Alex and Erin, tears running down his eyes and snot falling into his bushy black beard.


    "Please, help him!"