The hatch groaned as we opened it.
Not in the way doors complain from rust, but like it was waking up, after years of silence. The air rising from below was wrong. Cold, dry, but humming. It didn't smell like air at all. It smelled like history.
Zelith went down first. I followed. Then Rowen and the others, one by one swallowed by the hole in the earth.
The ladder was iron, and slick with something I didn't want to name. When my boots finally hit the stone below, I felt it — that shift. That... tension. Like the tunnel had just realized it had company.
"Lights," Zelith whispered, and we clicked them on.
The beam cut through smoke-thin dust and landed on the bones of a long-dead station. Broken rail lines snaked into darkness. The walls were smeared with ash and faded spray-paint. Graffiti like warnings scratched in panic:"No clocks here." "The hourglass is bleeding." "If you hear the ticking, run."
I didn't want to ask what any of that meant.
We moved forward slowly, our lights catching fragments: a shattered helmet, a boot still laced. Burned paper stuck to the wall like wilted leaves. Every inch of this place whispered something — but not in words. In feeling.
"This is where they hid," Rowen said under his breath.
"No," Zedith corrected. "This is where they planned."
We reached a chamber, part natural cavern, part machine-forged — and everything changed.
Consoles lined the walls. Dead screens. Burnt wires. But one glowed faintly. Zedith touched the edge, and static shimmered across it, resolving into a flickering sigil.
The winged hourglass.
My breath caught. "That's his. That's my father's."
I reached for the screen.
It blinked.
And then: a voice.
Warped. Glitched. Playing on loop.
"Gate incomplete. Sequence pending. Lightless key... detected." "Sequence pending... pending..."
Zedith's hands flew over the interface. "It's running something. A program maybe. But it's fractured."
Rowen pointed to a glowing slot near the wall. "That shape. Same size as your cube."
I pulled it from my pack before I could stop myself. My father's last message. His mystery. His ghost.
The moment the cube touched the console, the tunnel exhaled.
Lights down the corridor flickered to life one by one, cold and blue, forming a path.
The console chimed.
"Gate accepted. Descent unlocked."
A section of the chamber wall rumbled open.
Behind it: stairs.
Downward.
Spiraling, endless, carved into black stone with silver veins that pulsed like veins.
I stared down into them. Into the real Underworld. Not stories. Not whispers.
Reality.
"We're not going to like what's down there," Rowen muttered.
"No," I said, stepping toward the stairs.
"But I think it already likes us."
VOUS LISEZ
The Escape Code
Science-FictionIn a city designed to trap its people, where every turn is a dead end and every shadow watches, Lira Wren is running for her life. Branded as a Ravent-a rebel against the system-she's hunted at every step. With her mother gone and her little brother...
