Chapter 10 Chapter 10

The escalator kept going down.

Leo stood between Maya and Denise. His knee hurt on every step. His hand was still bleeding but not that much. His tongue ached where he'd bitten it. He was tired in a way that had nothing to do with his muscles and pain anymore.

Maya had her wrapped arm pulled tight against her chest. She'd gone pale. She kept looking back up toward where they'd come from even though there was nothing up there now. Just dark eating dark.

Denise didn't move at all. Her eyes were looking straight forward. Her scar looked almost white under the dim light coming off the handrails. She didn't blink. Didn't shift her weight from one foot to the other. She just stood there like a person who'd already made peace with whatever was at the bottom.

Nobody said a word.

Just the hum. The soft steady squeak of the rubber handrails sliding under their fingers.

Leo looked down. Still no floor. Just more dark going further down than made sense.

"How much further?" he asked, looking confused.

Maya shook her head. "No idea."

Denise said nothing. She didn't even act like she heard the question.

The escalator kept going.

Leo watched the walls pass on either side. No doors. No numbers on anything. No carpet. Just raw concrete like a basement, like a tunnel, like a place that was never meant to be found by anybody.

The mall had no basement.

He kept coming back to that. What Denise had said earlier. The mall has whatever it decides to have.

Then the escalator started to slow.

He felt it in his feet before anything else. The steps getting slower. The hum dropping lower in pitch. The handrails dragging like something was pulling against them.

"Almost there I think," Denise said.

There was something underneath how flat her voice was. Something small and wound up tight. Leo recognised it because the same thing was sitting in his chest too.

The escalator finally stopped. They were at the bottom now.

Leo looked around.

It was a small room. The wall was rough. The ceiling was so low he could almost reach it with one hand if he tried. One bulb hung down on a cord from the middle of the ceiling. Its light was yellow and very weak, flickering every few seconds like it couldn't decide whether to stay on or not. The light it gave off was not much. It didn't reach the corners. Those corners stayed completely dark.

It had one door on the far wall. There was no handle on it.

Leo walked over to it. His bad knee sent pain shooting up into his hip on every step he took. He stopped in front of the door and looked at it properly. He looked very confused.

“No handle. No keyhole. No mark of any kind. Nothing. There's nothing to open it with," he said.

Maya came and stood beside him and looked at it too. Then at the walls on either side of it.

"So how do we get through?" she said. “There must be a portal somewhere. I haven't seen this before actually.”

Denise had already walked past both of them. She wasn't looking at the door at all. She was looking at the wall to its left.

"Come look at this," she said.

Leo turned.

There was a mark on the wall. Lines and curves and shapes that didn't belong to any alphabet or symbol system Leo had ever come across in his life.

The sigil.

The exact same one from Grand Street Station. The same one he'd put his hand on in the railyard and had pulled him down into the dark and dumped him here in the first place.

His stomach turned.

"I know that," he said.

Denise looked at him. Her green eyes went narrow.

"Where from?"

Leo swallowed. His mouth was completely dry. "There was one on a wall in a subway station. I touched it. That's how I ended up here."

Denise looked at him for a long moment. She wasn't blinking. Her fingers drifted up to the scar on her cheek without her seeming to notice they were doing it.

"You touched it on purpose?" she said.

"I didn't know what it was."

"But you touched it."

"Yes."

She looked back at the sigil. Then back at Leo.

"Everyone I've known in the last three days who told me they touched something like this…is dead," she said. " And now you. Maybe me. I don't really know the exact thing I touched that brought me here."

Maya had moved closer to the sigil. She had her head tilted and her eyes were going slowly across every line in it.

"It looks like a door," she said.

Leo looked again properly. She was right. Once you saw it that way you couldn't unsee it. The lines were all wrong and the angles made no sense but it was trying to be a door. Like someone who had never seen one in their life but had it described to them once, and this was what came out when they tried to draw it.

"Maybe it opens something," Leo said.

"Maybe it opens the door with no handle," Denise said, nodding toward the white door behind them.

Leo looked at the white door and looked at the sigil. Then back at the door again.

"There is only one way to find out," he said.

He raised his hand toward the wall.

Maya grabbed his wrist. Her fingers were cold.

"Wait," she said.

He looked at her. Her face had gone tight. Whatever was in her eyes was more than just worry.

"What if it takes you again to start from the beginning?" she said. "Like the first time. This is uncertain. Its outcome is 50/50."

"Then I end up somewhere else. That's better than staying down here."

"Or you end up dead."

"Maya." He looked at her straight. "I have to try. Please don't stop me."

She held onto his wrist for another second. Then she let go and stepped back.

Leo turned back to the sigil. He lifted his hand. His palm was still dark with dried blood, brown and cracking around the edges of the cut.

He pressed it flat against the wall.

The room went completely silent.

Not quiet. Silent. The flickering light stopped moving. The last trace of the escalator sound disappeared. Everything disappeared. Leo couldn't hear his own breathing. Couldn't hear Maya behind him. He couldn't hear a single thing in the world.

Then warmth moved through his hand. Not heat, not the burning kind. Warmth. The kind you feel when you put your cold hand into warm water and just leave it there.

The sigil started to glow. A soft blue light. The lines lit up one at a time starting from where his palm touched the wall, spreading outward slowly the way rings spread across water when you drop something into it.

Leo tried to pull his hand back.

He couldn't move it.

It wasn't stuck like tape or glue. It was more like something had a hold of it gently. Something warm and patient that wasn't hurting him at all but wasn't going to let go either.

"Leo?" Maya's voice reached him from far away. Like she was calling from the far end of a very long hallway.

"I'm okay," he said back.

He wasn't sure that was true.

The blue got brighter and brighter. It filled the room slowly. The dark corners pulled back from the walls. The shadows shrank away fast.

Then the light went into him through his palm. It went through the cut, through his skin, into his hand. He could actually see it under the surface. The blue lines were traveling just beneath his skin, moving up his arm toward his chest.

He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.

The light hit his chest and stopped there. Then it disappeared.

The sigil went dark. Leo pulled his hand away from the wall. His palm was warm. The cut was still there but something had changed around it. A small blue mark sat just above it now. Tiny and faint. The same shape as the sigil but shrunk down to about the size of a thumbnail.

He just stood there in amusement just looking at it.

"What just happened?" Maya said.

Leo didn't have anything to say to that.

Words came up in his vision. Class Assigned: Urban Anchor.

He stood there and read it.

"What is it?" he said quietly. "What does that mean."

Maya stepped up close to him. She looked at his face and at his eyes. One of her eyebrows was slightly raised that the other.

"What did you see?" she said.

"Nothing. I just…heard something first. Like a bell going off inside my head. And then…words."

"What words?"

"Class Assigned. Urban Anchor."

The color drained out of Maya's face. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"I've never heard of that," she said. “Has the game changed? She put her hand on her chin. Her eyebrows raised lightly.

Denise pushed past both of them and stood in front of the sigil. She looked at it for a while. Then she looked down at Leo's palm and the small blue mark sitting above the cut.

"Urban Anchor," she said. She said the words slow, like she was turning them around in her hands and looking at every side. "That sounds like it means something."

"I don't even know what it is," Leo said.

Denise reached out toward the sigil.

Leo grabbed her arm. "Wait. You don't know what it's going to do to you."

She looked at his hand on her arm. Then she looked at his face.

"I was asked to go to the anchor room. If it says urban anchor, then this must be the way to the anchor room ," she said.

She pulled her arm free and pressed her palm flat against the wall.

The blue light came again. The lines lit up. The warmth spread out.

But it wasn't the same as before.

Denise didn't go still the way Leo had. She shook. Her whole body started shaking hard, teeth knocking together, and her eyes went back in her head.

Maya grabbed her by both shoulders. "Denise."

Denise didn't respond.

The blue light moved up her arm. Right under her skin, visible the same way it had been in Leo's arm. But faster than it had moved through him. Much faster. Like something that knew where it was going and didn't want to waste time getting there.

It hit her chest.

“Ahhhhhhhhh.” Denise screamed not from fear or surprise. This was pain and it came from somewhere deep and the sound it made wasn't like a scared sound at all.

Then it just stopped.

The light went out. Denise pulled her hand off the wall and dropped straight down to her knees. Both hands flat on the concrete floor. Her chest was working hard to pull in air.

Leo got down beside her. "Are you hurt? Talk to me. What happened?"

Denise looked up at him. Her green eyes had tears sitting in them. They ran down the side of her face and followed the line of the scar.

"I saw something," she said.

"What did you see?"

She shook her head slowly. "A room. A desk. Something sitting behind the desk. It was tall. It was wearing a suit."

Leo went cold from the inside out.

"The Interlocutor," he said.

Denise stared at him. "You know what that is?"

"I've seen it in my dreams. Before I ever came here."

Denise sat back on her heels. She looked at her palm. There was nothing there.

"It didn't give me anything," she said. "It just showed me that thing sitting behind that desk and then let me go."

Another chime inside Leo's head.

New words came up.

Ability Unlocked: Threshold Memory – Level One

He already had that one. He'd gotten it in the closet. From the handprint on the wall and the kid who'd left it there.

He looked at Denise. "Did you hear anything? Like a bell sound?"

"No."

"Any words coming up in your eyes?"

"Nothing."

Maya helped Denise get back to her feet. Denise stood up slow and brushed the dirt off her knees. Her hands were still shaking a little.

"What exactly did it give you?" Maya asked Leo.

"Two things. A class name first. Urban Anchor. And then an ability. Threshold Memory. You know about that." He thought about how to put it into words. The boy in the closet. The way the vision had hit him was like walking into a wall. "When I touch something that has a strong memory stuck to it, I can see what happened there. Not like a dream. Like… I'm actually standing inside it while it's happening."

Maya went quiet. She looked at him for a moment longer than felt comfortable.

"What?" he said.

"That's not what people normally get," she said. "Usually it's something you can use with your body. Faster, stronger, better hearing, more endurance. Something that helps you run or fight or survive." She paused. "You got the ability to see the past. That's very new. Is he trying to do something with you.?”

"Is that even useful here?"

Maya looked at Denise. Denise looked at Maya.

Neither of them said anything back.

The white door clicked.

All three of them spun around fast.

The door with no handle. It had made a sound on its own. One clean click, like a lock sliding back by itself.

Leo walked over to it. His knee hurt the whole way across the room. He put his hand flat on the wood.

It was warm. Not the cold wet feeling of everything else down here. Warm like a wall that's had sun on it all afternoon and held onto it.

He pushed it and the door opened.

On the other side was a hallway. Long and narrow. White walls. Clean tile floor. Not the same tile as the mall, not the cracked and stained surface he'd been walking on since he got here. This was clean. The kind of floor that looked like somebody had been keeping it clean. There were no mannequins.

"What is that?" Maya said. She said it quiet, almost to herself.

Leo shook his head. He didn't know.

Denise stepped up on his left and looked down the length of the hallway. Her eyes went all the way to the end and came back.

"That's not the mall," she said.

"How can you tell?"

"The mall has this feeling underneath everything. This wrong feeling that just sits there no matter where you go in it. You get used to it after a while but it never goes away." She paused. "This doesn't have that."

"So what is it?" Leo asked.

Denise looked at him. "Like the way out," she said.

Leo looked back at the hallway. He stepped through the door.

His boot came down on the clean white tile. He took another step. Then another one after that.

Behind him Maya came through. Then Denise.

The door swung shut behind them.

Leo didn't look back at it.

He just walked toward the light.