Page 69 of Spelunking Through Hell

It ached. It ached and it burned, even through the bromeliad haze. The pain was enough to make the fog less dense, and I surfaced a bit toward unwilling sobriety, flashing him and Sally a quick smile as the pulling and pressure finally faded away.

“That’s not so bad,” I said.

“That was just the first layer,” Thomas replied, expression going grim. “It may have beenlessof a torture to remove it all on one go.”

Meaning the flensing Naga had been doing might not have been the worst possible option. I forced myself to relax again, this time keeping my eyes open and staring up at the ceiling. It was covered in a mosaic pattern of abstract shapes and chunks of colored glass, and I couldn’t quite understand it, but I was still effectively high enough from the sap that I justknewthat if I did, everything would make sense.

“Again,” said Thomas, and squeezed my hands.

This time the pain was more immediate, and substantially moreintense, like he was peeling the skin off of a fresh sunburn. By the time he stopped and the pressure passed, every inch of me felt like it was on fire, and the comforting haze of the bromeliads was completely gone.

I lifted my head and stared at him. “Are we done?” That still hadn’t been so bad. I’d gone through a lot worse. I could—

“No,” he said, sorrowfully. “I am so sorry, Alice, but I need more, or we’re not going to be able to open a door out of here. Attacking this barrier is like trying to bore through solid steel with a needle.”

“Always thought magic would be flashier,” said Sally. “Not just you scrunching up your face like you’re constipated while you break a woman’s fingers.”

“Can’t all be glamorous, I guess,” I said, trying to sound flippant, and not like I wanted to call the whole thing off. “How many more layers we got?”

“Quite a few,” said Thomas. “I’ve peeled off as much as I could get from any five other arrivals. I could stop now; I could restore all the barriers, rebuild my shield around what’s left of the membrane, and still power this world for a year off what I’ve gathered.”

“Or you could pull the pin like we both know you need to.” I smiled. “Come on, buddy. I want my little red wagon.”

“I love you,” he said, voice soft, and leaned in to kiss my forehead before he pulled again.

The pain was immediate, and as big as any pain I’d ever felt before in my life. It made being skinned alive seem like child’s play, and in a flash of sudden, horrifying clarity, I understood that while Naga had absolutely been torturing me, it probablyhadbeen the most merciful way to go about things. My head snapped back, eyes open and staring at the ceiling, and the picture came into sudden, horrible focus.

Snakes. The shapes around the outside of the design were snakes. Snakes with the upper bodies of humans, because I was looking at a frieze of Naga’s people.

This must have been their original world. They had started here, in this dead place, before moving to Empusa, which explained why they were so interested in dimensional travel and the way worlds could interact and intersect. Which meant Naga’s real crime wasn’t hurting me; it was how long he’d persisted in doing it. He’d known this place existed all along. He could have sent me here the first time I asked him for help. Or maybe he hadn’t known. Maybe it was lost information, or his people thought their dimension had died so long ago that it had surely rotted into nothing by now.

But he’d been so firm on the idea that I couldn’t go this way, thatthe worlds I’d find in this direction wouldn’t support life. Had he been trying to keep me from this world in specific, or had he believed its decay would have spoiled more than just Cornale? Had he been trying to protect his investment?

Everything was starting to take on a new context, and I didn’t like any of it. And then I couldn’t think about any of it anymore because the pain was too intense; every nerve was on fire, and my heart was hammering harder than I had ever felt it before, pounding against the inside of my chest like it was hoping to escape. I couldn’t breathe.

The pain slackened off for a moment, and I tasted peppermint. Forcing my eyes open—when had they closed? I didn’t remember closing them—I blinked blearily through stress-induced black spots on my vision at Thomas, who was holding a tube of peppermint glucose gel to my lips, forcing it into my mouth.

“Just breathe and swallow, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re doing fantastically.”

“No, she’s not,” protested Sally. “She looks like she’s about to have a heart attack. Are you trying to become a widower? Like, you got so used to thinking of yourself that way that now you need to make it true?”

“I would prefer not to kill my wife,” said Thomas, removing the empty tube and dropping it to the floor. “But she made it very clear that I was to do whatever I had to in order to get us out of here, and that at least one of us had to make it home.”

No,I thought.I changed my mind. We can stay here until the ground dissolves under our feet, we can rotate in the void together, we can be stardust, but I don’t want to die.

Sadly, humans aren’t mind readers, and I couldn’t speak. I closed my eyes again as Thomas stepped closer, and the pulling sensation resumed, followed, in what could have been an hour or could have been an instant, by the searing, all-consuming pain.

It wasn’t burning. I’ve been burnt before, and this wasn’t that. It wasn’t freezing, either. It was like... rotting and being roasted by the sun in the same moment, the harsh, tingling blaze of radiation ripping through my body, and it was agony, and if trauma leaves scars no one can see, this was going to leave a scar the size of my entire body. Assuming I lived that long. Assuming this didn’t kill me. Please don’t let this kill me. Thomas was as traumatized as I was, just in different ways, and he didn’t deserve to start his journey home by killing me, not when he’d waited this long.

Not when we’d both waited this long. The universe doesn’t actuallylisten to prayers, and while I’ve been to plenty of dimensions I would call hells if pressed, I’ve never seen a single heaven; I don’t know if there’s a god, or more than one god, or anyone listening beyond forces like the crossroads, who we really wish wouldn’t listen at all. I still prayed as I lay there burning but not burning, rotting on a cellular level, coming apart and collapsing in on myself like a black hole.

I prayed to no one and nothing and everything. I prayed to the gods the mice had always so fervently believed my ancestors to be. And I prayed for three things.

I prayed that we’d get out of here.

I prayed that I would survive this.

And I prayed this was the journey that finally ended with my family in one piece, after so many years of being broken. Setting a bone doesn’t heal it. It gives it a chance. It creates the possibility of healing, and I wanted that possibility more than I wanted anything else in the world. I didn’t want Thomas to kill me trying to save us all, as much because I didn’t want to die as because I didn’t want him to carry the burden of having killed me. I wanted us to go home together, and to see him see our family.

---