We zipped down the corridors so fast that, if Mircea hadn’t been leading me, I’d have been utterly lost. There were no signs down here; no guideposts of any kind. I didn’t know how the people who used this place navigated, but it wasn’t in the usual ways.

Of course, we weren’t doing that, either. Mircea was using the ongoing, horrible wail as a guide, although how he was, I didn’t know. It echoed confusingly, a long, continuous cry of anguish that reminded me of an air raid siren, a spine-tingling sound on its own that also activated warning signals in the brain.

And so did that, I thought, as we spilled out of the latest tunnel into a much larger space. A cavernous one with a high ceiling and maybe a football field’s worth of floor space. Only it wasn’t rectangular, but vaguely round, although it was hard to tell with all the liquid-filled tanks in front of the walls.

Big tanks, with big things in them.

“Mircea—”

“One moment.” He let go of my hand and moved closer to the nearest tank. It was ceiling height and as big around as a tanker truck stood on end. It contained a few inground pool’s worth of bluish liquid, or maybe it was the light that was blue, spilling upward from some source at the bottom to highlight the contents and splash the rough brown walls.

It contained something else, too.

“Mircea—” I could hear the fear in my voice and didn’t care. Wanted out of here; wanted out now.

Because the tank had an occupant, suspended from the top in what looked like a cocoon or a giant womb. It was semi-transparent with a whitish skin and pulsing blue veins. Inside, something huge was moving around, only no, that wasn’t right. Something was writhing, and flailing and kicking with its undefined limbs, while every once in a while, a huge eye pressed against the membrane, as if attempting to see out.

It wasn’t alone. There had to be… I didn’t even know. I looked around the room, trying to count the tanks, most of which were smaller than this one, some only about my size. But that didn’t really help much with the creepy.

“Mircea, let’s go.”

“In a moment—”

“No! Not in a moment. Now!”

And then the strange, alarm-like cry abruptly cut out.

The absence of sound was almost worse than its presence, which I’d started to become used to. Now, past the dying echoes, I could hear everything: my heart beating loudly in my ears; Mircea’s footsteps crunching on the pebble-strewn soil as he approached the big tank; the thrum, thrum, thrum of some kind of engine in the background, maybe the one powering the lights, although why mages would need such a thing, I didn’t know. Like I didn’t know what we were still doing here!