She growled. Violence wasn’t her first resort. She was faster with her mouth than fists, and faster with her feet than either. But staying angry helped.

“Hey! What’s happening? Can anyone explain this? Is anyone…here?”

Her voice faltered as she looked around. But no one answered. The oppressive silence began to weigh on her. Slowly, the intruder spun around once more. But everything was so organized. So similar.

“I guess…I’ve got to do something.”

That was her only conclusion. So the young woman began walking. Left, not that the direction mattered.

The walls of the tomb indicated it was a very long, horizontal area, whatever that meant. So she walked left—which was right by another frame of reference—between the endless, identical rows of graves.

How had she entered this world? She walked and tried to figure out how she had come here. To find a logical answer. It was that—

Or scream.

——

Four hours later—the visitor stopped. She looked around.

“Fuck. This place is big.”

It wasn’t the most…astute of observations. But after four hours of walking—running—shouting—she was convinced it was accurate.

Everything looked the same. At first, she’d been convinced she’d find something after only a while. But the tomb hadn’t changed.

It was so large. Who could make something like this? After four hours, the intruder, for she was both visitor and intruder, had a few observations.

“This floor isn’t right.”

She squatted down and stared at the floor, narrow-eyed. It was too…rough. If that made sense. Not rough, rough, like crudely hewn stone. It didn’t have that smooth look that would result from power tools carving their way through stone. There were blocks making up the floor, and each one seemed—

hand-carved.

“But that would be insane.”

The actress from Ireland swept her phone’s flashlight across the floor—and then turned it off. She was running low on battery. Well—she actually had 55% power. But she had started with 71% and she was suddenly conscious that she was probably far from a charging port. Let alone her apartment.

The darkness was absolute when the iPhone turned off. But she was no coward.

Okay, if someone snuck up on her she’d probably need new pants and ten years of therapy, but she could at least handle being in the dark.

Okay, she was just barely able to keep from screaming.

Fine, she’d screamed for a few minutes but her throat hurt too much to keep it up. And besides, no one had come to help her.

And she needed to keep her iPhone alive. So—that brief inspection confirmed what she had noticed.

She ran her hands across the ground, feeling where chisel marks had tried to create near-smoothness.

“Hand-carved. And that’s one block. How…? And how?”