Remember More

Chapter 24

REMEMBER MORE

CHAPTER 24

Yan threw her hands in the air. "Man! What are we going to do?"

John waved her off. He stepped over to the spot where they were before, the spot where there used to be a fork in the path, with one passageway leading right and another leading left. Now the spot had morphed into a dead end, with only one way out. He stared down this remaining path.

Yan edged up to him. "What do we do?"

John shrugged. "What can we do?" He began lumbering down the path. "Let's go."

Yan followed after.

Down the wavering tunnel they went, a slender, transparent finger of a corridor that let in the glowing redness from all around. In the distance, John thought they were coming to a dead end but he wasn't sure. The two picked up their pace. They hurried to get to the end.

They were thirty feet away when John heard the humming again. They stopped.

And this time, they saw it happen right before their eyes.

There was a tiny shimmering in the walls, a flickering, a shudder.

And then everything changed. All around them.

One minute, they were approaching a dead end in the distance. The next, they were facing a series of passages, a total of five paths that all led in different directions. The humming stopped.

They approached this new area. "Okay." John held his hand up. "Let's stop for a second."

Yan was shaking her head. "This is the craziest place." She turned to him. "So that must be what the humming was all about…"

He nodded. "That the place was about to change shape."

Yan bent her head. She tapped her finger on her chin. "So this place must be like a…like a…" She popped her head up and met his gaze. "…like a maze!" She pointed her finger at him.

"Yes…" He nodded without looking at her. He allowed his gaze to wander over the new tunnels that had opened up in front of them as if by magic.

Taking a minute, the two put their heads together and tried to lay out everything they knew so far about their present situation.

So the structure they were standing in was a maze. That much was obvious. And the two of them, right now, were like two mice trapped inside of it, like in a lab in a university basement somewhere.

What they knew so far about this maze, was that it was traditional in a way, because it had a starting point—the original stone tunnel through which they had gotten into the cavern in the first place, and then presumably an endpoint—the chamber with the table, three displays and a key in the middle of it that John was seriously hoping would be on the other end of it all.

The only thing that made this maze different from your regular, average maze in a lab was that this one would change its configuration every thirty seconds or so, throwing everything out, wiping the slate clean and forcing you back to square one again to start all over.

"Well, can you see the way out? Or in? What about all those magnetic lines that you were seeing everywhere before?" She rubbed her chin.

"No. There's nothing to see here. It's all the same. It's all water. I'm looking out into the cavern and the magnetism looks all the same in everything." He shook his head. "This is one time, I think, my eyes are not going to give me any help at all. It's almost as if they had designed this whole…"