“It’s the warden.”

IT SEEMS DARKER in here than it was in the passage, if that was even possible, and the air seems thicker to match. Enough that I’m tensing up, my mammal instincts expecting me to drown. You don’t get dark like this on land, or this pressure against your skull.

I shake myself out and try to swallow the weight in my throat, but the feeling won’t go away. I set my lamps as bright as they’ll go, supplement the feed with visor-overlays from the optics perched atop my helmet, but nothing seems to help.

A window wakes me up, forces me to focus. Geiger-ticks scratch at my ears.

“Radiologicals,” I send across the net. We all stop dead, watching the counters in our displays. “The read is non-lethal, but I’d dose anyway.”

My suit agrees. It’s already primed a line of DeClide and Pepper Blue, and at a blink it drops them in through my shoulder, the autoinjector finding my skin. I can see Hail flinch as her systems do the same.

“Where’s it coming from?” She shivers. “Even with the Pepper, it makes my skin crawl.”

Salt aims his headlamps on a silver pearl set into the wall just ahead of us, smaller than a fingertip. “There’s another over here,” he says, pointing to a second bead, crackling in my visor. “Too small to do any damage, unless we stay here overnight.” He cocks his helmet. “What are they supposed to be?”

“It’s another warning,” says Hail, surprise in her voice.

“In case we didn’t understand the things they carved into the doors?” he asks. “Or all the dying that had to be done? Might as well make it enough to kill.”

“If you made it this far, you could probably beat anything they put in to stop you,” I say. “This is them trying to reason with you. To force you to spend a second thinking about what you’re doing.”

“Turn back,” whispers Hail. “No good will come of this.”

“Spelled out in a language nearly anyone could understand.” I look back the way we’ve come. “It’s all they had left.”

And it doesn’t last long. A few more steps, and the glow cuts away to background sound, absorbed by the same strange metal as the massive slab up front.

A few steps more, and we find the cell waiting for us. There used to be several doors, but they’ve been pulled from their hinges and mangled. The room behind them is all hard angles and featureless stone, shaped in a way that any con knows.