The air shifted the moment Thea's foot touched the moss-covered step. It wasn't just colder—it felt older, like the silence had weight, history, and judgment. Igor followed close, flashlight in hand, its beam cutting through the thick dark like a scalpel. The stone walls of the stairwell seemed to breathe—slightly damp, faintly pulsing, as though the entire place had a heartbeat.
"Is it just me," Igor muttered, "or do the walls look like they've been sweating guilt?"
"Definitely not just you," Thea replied, running a hand along the mossy surface. Her fingertips came away with… not moss. It was soft, stringy. Fibrous.
Hair.
She wiped it off on her jacket, face hardening. "Someone built this level to mess with our heads."
"Oh, excellent," Igor said. "Psychological torment plus underground fungus salon. Five-star rating, would escape again."
At the bottom of the stairs, the path split into three tunnels. Each arched opening had a flickering sign overhead:
TUNNEL A: "Echoes Lie."
TUNNEL B: "Truth Bends."
TUNNEL C: "Memory Decays."
"Well, this is cheerful," Igor said. "Should we flip a coin or just follow the path that smells least like childhood trauma?"
Thea stepped forward, examining the thresholds.
Then the whispers began.
Soft. Disjointed. Fragmented sentences in voices they knew too well.
"Thea, where were you when the alarm went off?"
"Igor, come home, it's not safe out there…"
"You said we'd never split up again."
Voices from dreams, memories, nightmares.
Thea looked at Igor. "It's bait. They want us emotionally disoriented before we choose."
"Classic manipulator move," he nodded. "Like those escape room guys who pretend they're not just sadistic librarians with a budget."
Thea squinted into Tunnel B. The air shimmered faintly. A flicker of blue light blinked at the far end, like static on a forgotten TV screen.
"We go middle," she said. "Truth might bend, but it still leaves a trail."
They stepped into the tunnel.
The air grew thick with static electricity. Their hair lifted slightly, and Igor's flashlight flickered in protest. The walls around them changed—stone became metal. Moss became circuit panels. Screens embedded in the walls flashed bursts of data: video clips from their past.
Thea saw herself—six years old, in a hospital hallway. Screaming. Alone.
Igor stopped at a clip of himself at age ten, clutching a suitcase, watching a door close as a man walked away.
They moved faster.
The tunnel curved sharply, and the blue light grew brighter until they reached a domed room—circular, like a planetarium. Screens wrapped around the entire interior. No visible door. Just them and 360 degrees of surveillance.
Then the room spoke.
"You made it past the surface layers. Congratulations," it said in a robotic tone that tried too hard to sound human. "This next trial requires recalibration. Please remain still for biometric adaptation."
The floor glowed beneath their feet. A countdown started on every screen:10… 9… 8…
Igor grabbed Thea's arm. "Recalibration sounds suspiciously like lobotomy-lite."
"We interrupt it," she said, eyeing the panels. "Find the circuit link."
7… 6… 5…
Igor kicked the nearest wall. The screen cracked.
A hiss sounded from the ceiling.
4… 3—
Thea yanked open a panel, revealing wires and glowing nodes. She pulled the brass key from earlier—now glowing faintly—and jammed it into the main slot.
2…
Sparks flew. The countdown froze.
The room flickered. Then it shifted.
Suddenly, they weren't in the dome anymore.
They stood in a long hallway—identical doors on each side, stretching into infinity. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Every door had a nameplate with a name they didn't recognize.
Except for one.
Room 7G: THEA QUINNELLRoom 7H: IGOR ZELINSKY
"Oh come on," Igor muttered. "They're assigning us dorm rooms now?"
Thea frowned. "Something's off."
They tried to open the other doors. Locked. Silent.
Thea looked at her nameplate. "This is another test. Separation."
"Let me guess," Igor said. "We go in, face our deepest fears, and probably end up battling our own shadow selves armed with spoons and unresolved trauma."
"Probably," Thea said. "Still better than high school."
They braced themselves and opened the doors simultaneously.
Inside, no monsters. No mirrors. Just… themselves.
Thea entered a soft-lit replica of her childhood bedroom. Posters of plants, old school trophies, a cracked window with fake sunlight filtering through. On her bed: a cassette player and a note:
"Play Me to Begin."
Meanwhile, Igor stepped into a sterile office—whiteboard, metal desk, a single chair. On the wall, the phrase "TRUTH IS A MIRROR THAT LIKES TO SHATTER."
A camera blinked red in the ceiling.
His chair slid back on its own, invitingly.
"Yeah, hard pass," he muttered, sitting on the floor instead.
Back in Thea's room, she hit play.
Her own voice crackled from the cassette:
"You always ran. From answers. From endings. But now there's nowhere left to run."
She stood still. The cassette continued, layering voices: teachers, strangers, her own mother—each asking her to choose safety over curiosity.
She turned the player off.
"No thanks," she said. "Curiosity's the only reason I'm still breathing."
Igor, meanwhile, had flipped the chair upside down to check for traps, then climbed onto the desk just to feel petty.
Suddenly, both of them heard it—faint but rising: an alarm.
The walls of their rooms began to tremble.
Then: CRASH.
The walls between their rooms exploded outward—revealing the illusion. It was a single shared chamber all along, divided by simulation.
Dust hung in the air. Thea coughed, shielding her eyes.
Igor stumbled out, holding a broken leg of the desk like a weapon. "Please tell me that was symbolic and not foreshadowing."
"No more illusions," Thea said, brushing herself off. "We know now. They want us divided. Easy to manipulate."
"Joke's on them," Igor said. "We share one brain cell and it refuses to be split."
They walked forward together, past the broken "doors," toward a new hallway that had appeared—black walls, blinking blue lines, and an arch with the words:
ZONE 6: THE REWRITERS
As they stepped through, a final screen flickered behind them, showing footage of them arguing at age thirteen, one frame looped over and over.
A deep voice murmured from unseen speakers:
"Test Subjects 071 & 072 continue to exceed cohesion projections. Recommend escalation. Insert Decoy Protocol. Phase II."