The opening Adam and I had accessed would have been invisible from above, but that didn’t explain how nobody else had ever stumbled across it. In the past, expeditions had traversed the major canyons. Could it simply have been blind luck no one had explored that particular stretch of the maze? Or—and my skin prickled with the thought—perhaps some of them had found it. Perhaps they’d even ventured inside and found their way this far into the interior, only to have been destroyed by whatever awaited them in that huge, dark building.

Christ, I wished I had a gun. Even a sidearm would have done, as long as I had something to grip and draw reassurance from. Yet, no matter how hard I desired one, no weapon appeared. All I had were my hands and feet, and the skills I’d learned in the military. But what use would hand-to-hand combat be against a race capable of building all this? What hope would my chimpanzee fingers have against creatures with the ability to fashion suns?

As I drew inexorably closer to the ziggurat, I was able to discern the particular doorway at which the room aimed, and then watch it grow nearer. As far as I could see (and to my great relief), there didn’t appear to be anybody—or anything—waiting for me in the corridor beyond. However, dwarfed and humbled as I felt by the massive pyramid and the titanic cavern that formed its sky, this temporary reprieve proved to be of little reassurance.

With no appearance of haste, my flying prison slid to an apparently effortless halt. The glass screen gently kissed an identical barrier covering the opening to the corridor. The light overhead changed from white to blue, and the transparent door and its counterpart swished aside, disappearing into the wall. The dried, crumbly smear of Adam’s blood went with them. I braced myself for a change in air pressure, but none came. I was still encased in my personal bubble, and it remained as resolutely fresh as it had since I first wriggled from the wreckage of the ’dam.

The corridor ahead appeared identical to the one I had encountered three days before. It glowed with the same pearly light from its opalescent walls. Tentatively, hands gripping the edges of the doorway, I stepped from the room that had been my jail. I moved slowly, like a nervous butterfly pulling itself from the husk of its chrysalis. My legs were stiff, but the enforced inactivity had given them time to recover from their exertions.

Adam’s death needled me like an uncomfortable splinter lodged in the back of my mind, but I knew I could process the grief later. Right now, my priority had to be to find a way back to the surface.