text: As I was drawn towards the door, I made one final check of the cavern around me. Behind us the floor trailed off into a pile of rock and debris that looked unmoved for centuries. To our right, the small stream continued running a rivulet across the floor until the concrete stopped, and the water disappeared down a hole much too small to enter. The only way forward was the door. The corners showed finely made metal hinges. Panels were welded together with perfect precision, not a single mistake in their execution. It had rusted over the years, copper undertones slowly seeping through to the surface. There was no way this was the work of Stetguttot Heath. This was from the old world. I held my hand against the metal handle. “We enter, right?” I turned to Alessia, checking for a final confirmation from her. She nodded and I pushed down hard on the metal bar. It creaked and it was stiff, but the handle hadn’t rusted to a locked position. This door had been opened some time recently. I peered into the lightless space, only making out the vaguest of shapes. Squinting, I stepped over the threshold and immediately four small bulbs in the corners of the room hummed on, an orange-hue cascading across the room. Ahead, small red lettering appeared intermittently on the wall behind a glass case. *AUXILIARY POWER* “What the...? How’d you turn that on?” I asked. “I didn’t,” Alessia said, her mouth flat and her eyes wide. “You didn’t do anything?” “Didn’t touch a thing,” I said. Alessia merely shrugged, and so I turned back to inspect. It was a large room, maybe some ten metres square. Across the outside walls sat a mixture of desks and large contraptions I had no hope of understanding. In the middle of the room there were desks too, these had large glass squares encased in plastic. The glass was black, lifeless. Long cables ran from the back of the machines, disappearing into the desks. In front of many of the screens sat buttons; the letters of the alphabet jumbled up. Elsewhere, there were other switches that simply read "Start", "Stop" or some other instruction. Moving closer, I could see that several of the glass squares were broken, sharp fragmentation lines contrasting against the obsidian surface. The desks too were damaged. The buttons had been pounded in, the casings recessed into the desk. Letters would be missing or disjointed, strewn across. I noticed that while a layer of dust coated the surfaces it was fine, not coated deep like that in the library. The centuries of grime and dirt that should have built up in here had been moved whenever those tables were hit and the glass squares broken. As I tracked across the room, I saw faded painted lettering against the rear wall. I couldn’t make out all of it, but I tried to read what I could. N RS R Then underneath in smaller lettering Seismology Research, K ell r I walked closer, trying to see if I could spot any more letters in the faded paint, when I jumped back suddenly, my peripheral vision recoiling as I noticed the skeletal remains lying in the corner. The bones lay approximately in the shape of a human, with the head, neck and ribcage in a small pile as though the body, many years ago, had once been slumped against the wall. The bones were slowly decaying, the whiteness sucked from them leaving them bronzed and brittle. Slowly, what remained was breaking away, cracked open, hollow fragments becoming dust. I walked backwards away from the body when I was distracted by a loud fizzing noise. “Ow! Shit!” Alessia cried out. “What are you up to?” I called out to Alessia, my eyes feeling guilty for abandoning the skeleton. “You know anything about electrics?” “No.” “There’s a whole cupboard of wires down here. I’m just sort of ramming shit together, trying to see what does what. But looks like our *friend* decided to try and damage as much stuff as he could on the way out.” “Not natural you don’t think?” “Nah. I can see where some of this stuff has been ripped out from,” Alessia said. I walked over to find her on all fours, her entire front half lost in a cupboard. “At least we know where his money came from now.” “What?” “There’s a bunch of wires missing. And the ones that are left are made of good materials: gold tipped and stuff.” “Reckon he would’ve made enough?” “Add to that the instruments he probably stole and sold as artefacts? Oh yeah, plenty. You should’ve robbed this place instead of Kadear.” I could sense Alessia sticking her tongue at me from behind the cupboard door. “Okay. But no idea why he destroyed thi-” There was a brief clicking noise, and the room became marginally brighter. I turned around to see a few of the glass squares light up. They flickered in broken greens and blues, trying to display something, but nothing coherent appeared. Alessia crawled back out the space and stood up, looking round the room. A voice appeared from the walls around us. “Playing bootup message.” We looked at each other for a moment, as another voice spoke. This time it was a woman’s. The voice was calm and scripted. But it hid something, as though a more natural, more raw message was being overridden. “Hello. My name is Dr. Tenshi Ito. I was on duty here...” the speaking briefly cut out, vague vowels and consonants played out for a few seconds before normalcy resumed. “...recording to play on the event that the laboratory was rebooted, so that I could relay to you all we know. I am sure I do not have all the information available, but I hope this message will aid in your understanding. At around thirteen-twenty on Wednesday twenty-eigth of June, twenty-seventy-three we detected...” The recording stopped again. This time complete silence took over. The glass squares returned too to their apathetic blackness. I looked at Alessia as our eyes searched the room, praying for the voice to return. Then a smell caught my nose. Faint at first, but as I sniffed the air it became more distinguishable. Smoke. Alessia and I turned back to the closet where she had been fiddling with the wires and pulled open the doors. Grey plumes bellowed out from the space, catching the back of my throat. I bent over, coughing hard, my lungs retching with the acrid air. As soon as I recovered, I turned back to the cupboard and dived towards it, trying my best to blow air onto the flames. But as soon as one extinguished, another flick of yellow burst from another wire, and then another. The flames grew in number and strength, and soon my futile attempts to blow them out seemed to merely fan them. I reached out, trying to snuff them in my hands, gritting my teeth as the heat burned my palms. But still, I was fighting a losing battle. “We’re not gonna win this,” Alessia said. She pulled me back and slammed the cupboard doors shut. There was peace for a second before hints of grey smoke began to appear around the edges of the cupboard. “Shit,” she muttered. I pulled my sleeve up to my mouth, trying to filter the air through the fabric as I spoke. “We need to get out here.” We turned and headed to the exit door. We pushed on the metal frame hard, but the door didn’t budge. We pushed again, and once more the door remained firm. I could feel the room getting dimmer as the deathly air began to blur the orange lights. My heartrate spiked, the sudden realization of the moment catching up to me. Alessia tried pushing once more. A desperate grunt, as she thudded against the metal slab. The door gave out an unsympathetic thud but didn’t heed. I looked at the door, tracing my eyes across the surface, and then it hit me. “Out the way,” I said, pushing past Alessia. “We’re being stupid.” I turned the handle and pulled. The door opened towards us. I ran out into the cave, feeling the temperature of the air drop, as I let out another hacking cough; my lungs clearing themselves of the toxins and gasping in replacement oxygen. Alessia pulled the door behind us. The great metal slab creaked on its hinges, before finally sealing shut with a furious bang. “You okay?” I asked. “Yeah.” She bent over, taking a few long deep breaths. “I may never recover from not realizing I needed to pull the door, but...” She lifted herself back up and her lungs wheezed as she laughed out the smoke from inside her. “We’re never going to hear that message are we?” I sighed. “No. I’m certain that Sannaz heard it. But until we find him, we won’t know what it said...” “You think that’s what led to him murdering Deer Drum?” Alessia paused ,then shook her head. “Not entirely. But... maybe the final push. Heard something that made him take that final step.” I looked back at the door, imagining the slowly fanning flames the other side. “So now what? Dead end?” “First, let’s get out of here,” Alessia said, her lips turned upwards but her shoulders slumped. “That door will hold back most the smoke but not much room down here, don’t fancy chancing it.” I agreed and we started heading back up the narrow passageway towards the sinkhole. We trekked our way back through the caves until we could look up and see the afternoon sky above us. We reattached ourselves to the harnesses, and pulled on the ropes to send the signal. We waited for a minute or so, but eventually I felt the tug on the line, the rope straining as I was lifted up into the air. It was a slow, frustrating few minutes, watching the cave disappear as I reascended. We were supposed to find answers to what Sannaz Lytta was after. What we found was more questions; hints at a bigger mystery, but without anything concrete. Instead of being closer to the truth, we just found the world was much larger than we first thought. We ascended in silence as I tried to think of what our next move should be. Tracing my memory for some small lead that could get us closer to Sannaz. I came up with nothing. Eventually we emerged topside. My knees found the ledge of the hillside and I was able to pull myself up to the ground, the strain on my waist finally releasing. I untied myself and walked over to Cameron and the team of three people who had helped pull us up. “You better still have that bag,” Cameron said walking over towards us. Alessia smiled, and took the rucksack off her shoulder. “You did your job. Thank you.” Cameron walked over, squinting, with slow movement as he took the bag from Alessia. He took a couple of paces back and opened it up, making sure the book was still there. “I said we’d give it back. Just, try to do some good with that thing, okay?” Alessia said. “I intend to make enough money to not have to go down the mines for a year or two. That good enough?” Alessia chuckled. “Not what I had in mind, but... you do you.” Cameron redid the clasps on the bag and walked off towards the town. I waited until we were alone and turned to Alessia. “We still have no idea where he is, why he did it, nothing,” “We know a bit more. But it will take time,” Alessia said. “We need to find out where he went next.” “He could’ve gone anywhere.” “True,” Alessia nodded, looking at the town in the distance. “So what now?” “Best chance? There’s an island about four days south of here. Talin Barier.” “I know it,” I said quickly, before a flicker of hesitation crossed my face. “Well, I’ve heard of it. From the traders at Kadear. Major trading hub, one of the largest in the Archipelago.” The corner of one of Alessia’s lips raised. “Yeah. There’s plenty of places the boat he got on could’ve gone, but... best chance is there.” “Seems like a stretch,” I said, my teeth braced. “It is.” Alessia said. “But even if he didn’t go there, so many traders go through that island there's a good chance *someone*‘ll have heard something. Word travels fast at sea. Stay there, speak to enough people.. We’ll find him” I looked at the settlement at Section F. In the distance, I could make out Cameron disappearing between the buildings. To the far left, I could see the mine entrance, now barren and empty. A quick breeze blew past, stirring the thistles and grass by our feet, and sweeping the dust along the paths in front of us, clearing our route back to the harbour. Slowly, we began our trek.