She breathed slowly, deeply. Much as she hated the idea, it was pointless to try and find Hubbs. She couldn’t track him which meant the only way she would find him was by stumbling over him, something which could conceivably take weeks in this mausoleum if not months.

Okay then. Survival.

Her onboard navigator beeped, telling her she was moving in the wrong direction if she wanted out. Which was crazy, because not ten minutes ago, it had pointed her this very way.

She didn’t have time to think it over. She went back the way she came, moving back down the tunnel, her lights casting crawling shadows all around her. The tunnel split. Yes, she remembered that. The navigator indicated the right branch and she followed it along, moving slowly but steadily. She came to the end of it before long and its mouth was thick with some sort of slimy, wavering sea grass that almost looked like cilia.

The navigator wanted her to keep moving.

She exited the tunnel into another huge chamber, her lights filled with swirling sediment. A long, ropy creature like something made of silly string passed by her. She thought it might be a giant siphonophore, another deep-sea creature. Like many of the life-forms in Lake Vordog, it had no business being in a freshwater lake. But there it was.

The navigator said the tunnel mouth she wanted was down towards the bottom, so Javy let herself sink into the encompassing blackness. At the bottom, she found herself in a forest of gigantic tube worms that grew around her in great profusion. There had to be hundreds and hundreds of them. They were a bloodless white with pink frills at the tops where their mouths were. They moved sluggishly, rising easily four or five feet above her. As she pushed gently through them, she felt like a flea moving through a forest of follicles on a dog’s back.

She knew she had never been in this place before.

The navigator was leading her in circles.

She was going to die down here.

You need to accept something, she told herself, refusing to lose her nerve. All of this may be hallucination placed in your mind to break you with fear and paranoia. Maybe the bogies themselves are doing it and maybe it’s this goddamn city itself.

She had to keep moving. That was imperative. She’d given up on the comm because all she was picking up now was static. The navigator assured her she was moving in the right direction. The tube worms brushed against her suit, bumping her view plate and sliding over her with vague rustling sounds. It was like being trapped in a crowded forest of dead trees that seemed to have no end, terrible and claustrophobic.