Against Gravity

The rushing sound was growing louder, more frenzied.

And then McCowan was standing there in front of him, his face twisted in a grimace. "That's more like it," he growled. "Right, let's get the fuck out of here."

"What have you done to me?" Kendrick screamed. "What's this stuff getting inside my skin?"

"That stuff is me," Peter replied. "Trust me, I'll get you what you want. But first you're taking me to the Archimedes."

As Kendrick retraced his path, invisible wings assailed him. Yet when he waved a hand in front of him he found that there was nothing there.

"Just get out of here," he heard McCowan mutter. Behind them the gold was dying, fading, the silver seeping through it like dye in water.

"Not real," Kendrick muttered to reassure himself as he found his way back to a stairwell and began to climb. "Just in my head." He repeated the words over and over, like a mantra. He stopped at a door, thoughts whirling through his mind.

He realized that Robert Vincenzo must have been the source of the original nanite infestation. The augmentations had extruded outside his body, spreading uninterrupted through the corridors and dark spaces of the Maze over the intervening years, some echo of the boy's deranged mind still locked somewhere inside them. The same must have happened with McCowan and perhaps, somewhere out there, the corpses of other Labrats lay in mass graves with nanite filaments slowly infiltrating the surrounding earth. Perhaps their thoughts still flickered silently through dank, mossy soil even now…

Laughter, high and child-like, echoed from far away in the darkness.

In my head.

"It's not in your head, it's real." McCowan's voice spoke as if from right behind Kendrick's shoulder.

"Fuck this! None of this is real!" Kendrick pressed forward, his muscles numb with fatigue. He moved steadily up and through i

He was now out of the killing levels but still had a long way to go.

The densely packed networks of filaments – all silver now, wherever he looked – were begi

As he got closer to a smooth dome of silver, several inches in diameter and protruding from the filament-dense wall, a homunculus-like shape began twisting under its oil-slick surface. As if waiting to be born.

Kendrick backed away from it and something clattered to the ground by his feet. In my head, in my head. Panic swelled in him like a great black tide. More of the bubbles were forming all around him. He turned away and ran, adrenalin pushing him onwards, heading for the sunlight somewhere far above him.

Several minutes passed before he realized that he'd dropped the torch.

McCowan hovered, a constant invisible presence, just behind his shoulder.

"There were more than you two down here," Kendrick gasped. "What happened to them?"

"Robert subsumed them, swallowed them up like Jonah's whale. They weren't from Ward Seventeen -didn't have the strength, not like you and me."

Dragging himself up a stairwell, Kendrick found himself back in the Wards. A sound like a river rushing through the depths of the Maze swelled in the darkness behind him. He pushed through a door and slammed it shut. He grabbed a rusted bed frame and managed to wedge it against the door.

Almost there, almost there.

He hurried on into the corridor beyond, soon finding the central staircase leading upwards. Empty elevator shafts gaped like maws beside it.

As Kendrick put one foot on a lower step he glanced down the long corridor nearby, seeing a cloud of tiny, winged figures racing around each other like angry wasps.

Here, close to the surface levels, the walls weren't so thickly coated with the threads. But even as he watched, a patch of silver smoothed and rounded, budding within seconds. He gaped as the silver took on a sudden golden hue. The bud instantly faded back into the wall, as if never there at all.

Peter is doing this, he realized. Holding Robert back.

Kendrick staggered forward again, all sense of time lost. The corridors became infinite, stretching into darkened eternity. But something kept him going, his body just a machine transporting his awareness through the lightless depths.

The outside world lay somewhere ahead. A dim greyness became more than a hint of light, resolving itself into a faraway point glimmering at the centre of his universe.

"Almost there," McCowan muttered encouragingly in his ear. Except, of course, McCowan was now in him, not outside. Once they'd left the Maze, would they go on sharing his head? Or would there be an end to it?

Kendrick stumbled into painfully bright morning sunlight, shielding his eyes until his augmented vision adjusted. The sun was still low on the horizon, burning off moisture from the surrounding jungle vegetation. Fatigued and shaken, he sucked in air perfumed with a thousand scents…

… And stopped again. His skin tingled, everywhere across his legs and his back. Almost a burning sensation…

He spotted Buddy standing not too far away, on the crest of a low hill overlooking the plain on which the Maze stood. His arms were folded casually, like those of some tourist checking out the sights.

Buddy turned, as if subliminally aware of Kendrick's sudden presence. He started towards him, smiling widely. But Buddy's smile faded quickly, replaced by an expression of horror.

"Jesus Christ, Kendrick, your face-"

Kendrick looked down at his bare hands, at the lines and vague shapes he could now see writhing beneath his skin. Filaments slid through his flesh like fine subcutaneous webbing. He reached up, his fingertips tracking the same fine, thread-like lines slithering under his cheeks, his nose, his ears, over his skull. He made a sound like a whimper and fell to his knees.

Buddy ran over to grab him by the arm, but Kendrick waved him away, "Don't touch me."

"C'mon, Kendrick, we have to get you to a hospital or something."

Kendrick gasped. He wanted to burn his own flesh off, to hack it away, to tear it from his bones in great bloody strips. Looking at Buddy, he couldn't fail to see the revulsion that the other man couldn't quite hide.

Summer 2088 (exact date unknown) The Maze

The shield door froze halfway, forcing Kendrick to squeeze through a narrow gap. But it had opened, and he could hear voices: people talking excitedly, shouting.

Something thundered with a long, low vibration that rattled through the pipes and conduits lining the ceiling. He could see the shapes of other Labrats watching in the darkness. The gun turret near the shield door stood silent, motionless.

Static hissed from the ta

He stepped forward again. The gun turret remained dormant. A figure moved towards him from up ahead. After a moment he realized that it was Buddy.

"Kendrick, is that you?"

The others were coming closer now. He could sense them shuffling and moving and muttering around him in the dark, shadows against shadows.

"There's a way out," he told them, letting the gas mask drop from his fingers. Buddy gaped down at it, wide-eyed.

"Where did you -?"

"Sieracki's men didn't get everything. What happened here while I was down below?"

"We heard shooting over the ta