Mira's POV
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I snatch my hand off the wall.
My heart is going so fast I can feel it in my throat. I stare at the spot where my palm just was. The wall glows the same as before _ steady, faint, blue. Nothing moves. Nothing changes.
I press my hand back against it.
Nothing.
Just warm rock.
I pull my hand away and look at it like it belongs to someone else. Then I shake my head hard and turn to face the tunnel because standing here touching walls is not a plan and I need a plan. Or at least a direction. The tunnel only goes one way _ down _ so down is what I have.
I walk.
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The tunnel is not quiet.
That is the first thing I notice. I expected silence. Instead there is a low sound everywhere, like the whole underground is humming at a frequency just below what my ears can properly catch. I feel it more than hear it _ in my back teeth, in the base of my skull, in my sternum. Steady and rhythmic and everywhere at once.
I keep my hand on the wall as I go down because the path curves and the light from the gate is already gone behind me. The glow from the rock itself is enough to see by but only just. Enough to see the next few feet. Enough to keep going.
I think about every story I have ever heard about the Dungeon of Hollows.
Most of them end the same way. Person goes in. Person does not come out. The ones who survived long enough to send back information _ and there have been very few _ said the mutants weren't like animals. They were organized. Intelligent in a way that was scarier than mindless hunger because you can't predict intelligence the same way you can predict a wild thing.
I think about that and keep walking.
The humming gets stronger.
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The tunnel ends without warning.
One more step and suddenly there is no wall on either side of me and the ceiling is gone and I am standing at the edge of something so enormous my brain takes a full second to understand what it is seeing.
I stop breathing.
The space is vast _ the size of a city, maybe bigger, stretching out in every direction under a ceiling of rock so high it vanishes into dark. But the dark isn't empty. It glows. The walls, the ground, the strange tall structures rising up everywhere _ all of it lit from within in blues and greens, pulsing softly like something alive. Towers built from rock that looks melted and reformed into shapes that have no human name. Bridges connecting them. Paths carved between them.
And movement.
Everywhere, movement.
Figures in the shadows. Tall, some of them. Some not shaped the way humans are shaped. Moving between the structures with purpose, with direction, like this is simply where they live and they are going about their day.
Not one of them attacks me.
They stop.
Every single one I can see just _ stops. And looks at me.
I stand very still. My every instinct is screaming at me to run but there is nowhere to run and running would only tell them I am prey and I have spent twenty-four years refusing to be the smallest thing in any room so I straighten my spine and I look back.
We stare at each other.
Thirty seconds. A minute. The whole enormous space holding its breath.
Then, one by one, they go back to moving. Not quickly. Slowly. Like they are deciding something. Like I passed a test I didn't know I was taking.
I breathe out.
-
I find a flat rock near the entrance of the main space and I sit on it because my legs have decided they are done performing bravery for the moment and need a break. I pull my knees up and press my back against the wall and I watch.
I watch them move. I watch the patterns _ where they go, how they interact, what the space feels like. My brain does what it always does when I am frightened: it turns everything into information because information is something I can hold.
They are not mindless. That is the most important thing I clock in the first ten minutes. The way they move, the way some of them seem to be directing others, the way there are clear spaces and clear paths _ this is a society. Strange and alien and built from rock that came from somewhere not Earth, but a society.
Which means there are rules here.
And if there are rules, I can learn them.
The buzzing at the edge of my mind _ the thing I noticed when I first came through the gate _ is stronger now. Layered, almost. Like multiple signals coming from different directions, overlapping. I press two fingers to my temple. It doesn't hurt. It is just there, constant, like a radio stuck between stations.
I don't know what it is.
I don't know why it feels like it is coming from them.
I pull my ring out of my pocket and put it on my finger. My ring that I found. My ring that I chose. I press my thumb against it and focus.
You are still here. You are still standing.
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One of them comes closer.
Not aggressive _ no raised posture, no sound. Just a gradual approach, the way you might walk toward a bird you don't want to scare off. It stops about six feet away and looks at me.
It is smaller than the others. The feeling it gives off is _ I frown. What is that. It isn't hunger. It isn't aggression. It feels almost like_
Curiosity.
I feel its curiosity. Clear as a bell. Clear as if it said the word out loud.
My mouth goes dry.
The buzzing in my mind sharpens and focuses and suddenly it isn't buzzing anymore. It is specific. Directed. It is this creature's emotion hitting me like a signal that my mind is somehow built to receive.
I didn't imagine it at the gate. This is real. This is a real thing happening in my real brain right now.
The creature tilts its head.
I tilt mine back.
It makes a low sound _ short, questioning.
And then from somewhere far above and deep inside this underground place, a different sound rolls out. Low and vast and carrying a weight that makes the air feel heavier. Not a question. A command.
Every creature in the space goes still.
Including the one six feet from me.
It looks up. Then it looks back at me.
And the feeling it gives off changes completely.
Not curiosity anymore.
Fear.
It is afraid _ not for itself.
For me.