I skittered up the column and reached the top, sweating like a pig.105 I unlocked the hatch with my hotel key and opened it.

The smell that poured over me was like that from a decades-old bug collection. Dry and musty, with a light organic funk. Decay, yes, but old, dusty decay. Unpleasant. Not enough to completely turn the stomach, but highly dead.

I climbed through the hatch and stood on the metal floor inside the shield. Aside from the light that came up from the column, it was pitch black. I chinned on the helmet lights, which cast a white beam down the shield’s inner length toward the distant bulkhead. Unlike all the other shields, there was dust. And the smell. Something had been here. I lowered the hatch door back down into the floor. The latch clicked, and a row of amber lights came on, illuminating its perfectly square outline.

I recognized it immediately. Not just because it matched the marmalade-topped reflections of the Aszerat I’d built, but because it was yet another example of my living room sculpture manifested in real life. A grey door framed in amber singles – my secret LEGO cookie cabinet. The Chime’s final resting place. It had been spelled out in plastic blocks atop my coffee table for the past year.

Ignoring my sudden desire for a cookie, I cast the helmet beams far into the darkness. The smell was considerably stronger now, and my footfalls kicked up clouds of dust that lay in a heavy scrim over the floor. It was like churning up silt in a pond with a casting reel – one little dab of the lure on the bottom and the whole thing goes murky. I tried to be gentle with my steps to not kick so much up. Didn’t work.

The space tightened farther in, following the shield’s arched shape. A glint of light reflected from up ahead. I stopped and tried to find it again with the beam. Another glint, this time from a different spot. Panning the helmet, I followed along a span of material, something that stretched from the wall on one side of the space across to the other. Another step. Another glint. Keeping the light steady, I paced forward, tracing the sinuous strand from within the darkness to the wall high above my shoulder, where it terminated.

There was no mistaking the black resin. It had covered every inch of the Timelance and the voidscull before that. Hardened Scythin space mucus. More of the stuff stretched across the floor like black glass, solidified after being strewn while molten. I had to duck beneath a thick cable of it, then step over and slip through a gap between two more spans.