The voices are loud now. My side throbs. The skin around it is black and puffy – tendrils of infection, some red, some the color of wine, spread out beneath the flesh. My breathing has gone shallow but the voices promise me I’m close, so close to what I seek. Here the ground slopes at a hard forty-five degree angle. I can barely stay upright as I walk downward, my calves burning, my hands raw from bracing against the rock wall. The voices now are deafening in my ear. They’re showing me something: tubes in the wall made of a fine crust, and within those tubes, a slow crawl of golden sap creeping. Is this Ochre? I believe it must be. They tell me what to do. I break one of the tubes off gently. I hold it in my hand the way a prophet holds a scroll containing the Word of God. And I break it against the ground and marvel in the howling pit that is created.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

It’s like falling through a hole in a layer cake. Speckled schist, black stone, pale sand, white pebbles like loose teeth, blue slate – they all hurtle past, down to up, no ground beneath, for what seems like an eternity. Tree roots, glimpses of skulls embedded in rock, glowing fungus in crooked striations. The flash of a milk-spider scuttling. A face in the rock. A vein of electric blue Cerulean. All whipping past.

Mookie has not lost his daughter. He holds her close with his one good arm. He hears her pulse in her neck, in her chest. He feels it in her wrist. But he is wet with her blood. And he feels her eyelids fluttering against him. Hears her soft moans of pain.

But he knows they’re going to die. This fall cannot end well. He doesn’t know much about science, but he knows enough about terminal velocity to suggest that whatever they hit – rock, water, a big room full of pillows and stuffed animals – they will die.

He hears a keening windy wail followed by a vacuum pop–

Then there’s a blinding golden flash.

The world rushes up to meet him.

But it’s not like falling and hitting ground. It’s like he has been in the same place all along, cradling his daughter, and now he and the world are… syncing up. Brought together and made whole again.

He scrambles to stand–