CHAPTER 3: THE HOLLOW MAP
The sub-tunnels didn't smell like sewage and damp concrete anymore. They smelled like old paper and the dry dust of a library that hadn't been opened in a century.
I hit the floor hard. The impact jarred my teeth. Above me, the hatch slammed shut. The chains of frozen screams rattled once, then went silent.
It was dark. Absolute, crushing void.
I reached for my tactical light. Six years on the same belt clip. My hand brushed empty leather.
[Variable Detected: The Forgotten Light.]
[Description: You traded the memory of your tenth birthday. You lost the memory of where you bought your gear. If you can't remember buying it, it doesn't exist in the Nightmare.]
My pulse spiked. If I forgot how I got my knife, I'd be unarmed. If I forgot where I learned to fight, I'd be prey. The Red Ledger wasn't just taking my past—it was stripping my inventory.
I forced my breathing to slow. Panicking burns oxygen. In a tunnel that feels like a throat closing up, oxygen is the only currency that matters more than memory.
I moved by touch. My left hand trailed along the obsidian wall. It was smooth, vibrating with a necrotic hum. I stood still, trying to reconstruct the map. Left at the junction. Forty paces. Service ladder.
But the harder I focused, the more the paths twisted. Tunnels that should have been parallel felt perpendicular. Dead ends appeared where I knew there'd been throughways.
The Quiet Man's warning: You've forgotten the layout you spent three years mapping.
I'd mapped these tunnels. I knew them better than I knew my own face. But the details were static now. The skeleton of the map remained, but the flesh was gone.
I kept walking. If I couldn't trust my memory, I'd trust instinct.
A sickly blue pulse bled through the darkness ahead, rhythmically illuminating the obsidian walls like a failing neon sign. It wasn't a light source; it was a silhouette. A woman stood in the center of the tunnel. Her skin was translucent. Her eyes were two pits of flickering azure fire.
An Echo. The Spell was recycling my own waste—taking the pieces of Zima I'd traded away and stitching them into a puppet wearing her face.
"I'm as real as the birthday you just sold," the Echo said. Her head tilted at an unnatural angle. "The Nightmare fills in what you forget, Ani. I'm here because you can't remember me anymore. Not clearly."
I took a step back. My hand was white-knuckled on the Ledger. "Where's the beast?"
The Echo smiled. Her teeth were needles of blue light. "Closer than you think."
Behind me, far down the shaft: Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
The Vex-creature wasn't roaring. It was hunting.
"It can scent your thoughts," Zima's Echo whispered. Her form began to dissolve into blue smoke. "Every time you remember a way out, you leave a trail. Every time you think of a secret, it gets faster. And you have so many secrets, don't you? Like the capacitors."
She leaned in. Her breath smelled like ozone. "In the real world, the real Zima is being tortured by Rust right now. He thinks you betrayed him. If you survive dawn, you'll wake up to a death sentence."
The Echo vanished into a cloud of blue soot.
I looked at the Red Ledger. It was glowing in the dark. The pages turned on their own, catching on the draft of the tunnel.
[New Trade Available: The Silence of the Mind.]
[Price: The memory of your mother's voice.]
[Effect: For thirty minutes, your thoughts will leave no scent. You will be invisible to the beast, but you will be unable to remember your own purpose.]
The math was getting uglier. If I took the trade, I'd lose the only thing I had left of her—the sound of her singing about birds. But if I didn't, the beast was already following the scent of my map directly to my throat.
I tore the page.
Silence. Not the absence of sound—the absence of context. I was holding a book. I was in a tunnel. I was walking toward something.
I didn't know why any of it mattered.
I started walking anyway.