The two blinked as a thick black void passed over their bodies, trying to force the black fog out of their faces. Walking forward through the void became a near-impossible chore with each step taken past the struggling clockwork around them. They could feel the black membrane of the corridor struggling to contain them, to fight back and force them away from the inner confines of the torture chamber. Still, they pressed on, desperation to escape driving them as they began to feel the membrane tear and give way.

  Suddenly, the two stumbled forward, falling to their knees as the membrane split apart. Looking around as they stood up, they found themselves standing upon a metal gangway suspended by thick wires of corrugated metal. Looking around, they could see similar gangways and catwalks snaking and stretching out to form a metallic spiderweb without any discernable end.

  Nestled between the spiderweb of metallic walkways lay the corridor. Outside of it now, they could see the crumbling stone fa?ade stretched out in its true length. It lay not as one complete piece of architecture but an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, whose stone pieces lay discarded to the side in a clockwork tomb awaiting future use. This clockwork that the duo had forced their way through lay hidden from sight, buried behind the dark membrane.

  Most finer details of the duo's surroundings lay hidden in large shadows cast by the shifting pieces of the corridor. The only light came from large spotlights that hung on wires high above in the sky, blinking in and out of focus. High above the duo's head, nestled at the top of everything, they could see metallic strut after metallic strut straining and bending as they held the crumbling surface of the earth aloft. Breath hitching in his chest, Jake realized they now walked beneath the hollow core of the planet itself.

  No sooner had the two barely regained their senses after taking in the sprawling spectacle around them did alarms begin to ring, hammering out along the gangway. The two began to run as a horrid crunching and scrapping, no longer muffled in any way by the walls of the corridor, followed behind them. Glancing over their shoulders they saw the length of corridor they’d stood trapped in just moments before began to move. It chased after the pair, clear intent to crush and kill as gangway after gangway crumbled in the path of the moving hunk of stone and gearwork.

  Reaching a suspend staircase of metal which led up to more branching metallic bridges, the two desperately climbed with the rouge corridor hot on their heels. No sooner did they climb the last step of the staircase onto another suspended bridge did they hear a horrific crunching noise. The staircase shifted and crumpled in on itself, falling from its cabling into the spiderweb of pathing below as the traveling piece of corridor slammed into its side.

  “WHAT… WHAT IS THIS PLACE!” Alice shouted, trying desperately to be heard over the alarm and the ever-shifting bits of the corridor around her, as already more pieces of stone and gear moved to kill the pair.

  “I DON’T KNOW!” Jake screamed back as the pair ran blindly along the gangway, their destination unclear with their only goal being to survive the ever-shifting movements of the corridor. “IF I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE VOICE’S HEART, I THINK WE CLIMBED INSIDE IT!”

  “WELL, WHY DOESN’T IT JUST DROP US ALREADY, THIS IS GETTING OLD!” Alice screamed out, annoyed as a piece of corridor crashed down from above crushing the path they were following and forcing the two to turn right.

  “CAN YOU CONTROL THE VIENS INSIDE YOU? I THINK THE CORRIDOR IS ITS LIMBS AND WHERE RUNNING ALONG ITS BONES OR VEINS OR SOMETHING!” Jake screamed back when suddenly, a gangway to the left of them splintered and fell without warning, cascading down with thunderous noise into the crisscrossing spiderweb below.

  “OR I COULD BE TOTALLY WRONG, I DON’T KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING ANYMORE THAN YOU DO!” Jake screamed back as more bits of gangway blindly fell from the ceiling.

  “WHERE ARE YOU!” The voice suddenly returned, screaming over static discharge. Both Alice and Jake froze at the voice’s static-filled scream, looking around to watch the bits of crumbling corridor randomly crash into gangways as bits of metallic path detached themselves and fell through the hollow earth below. All random movements that acted in the vague vicinity of where the duo had been previously.

  “It can’t see us…” Alice finally said after a while of the two standing still watching the voice’s flailing attempts to kill them.

  “What should we do?” Jake asked, unsure how to proceed. He wasn’t sure what would alert the voice to their position, if general movement was enough of a giveaway or if they’d need to do something specific, but he was sure of one thing. They couldn’t stand still like this for long. Even now as the voice flailed around blindly, it was moving closer and closer towards them.

  “I’m… I’m not…” Alice began, unsure what to do next as she looked around in desperation, lost in the ever-blaring alarm, the crunching and crumbling of metal and stone, the ever-fading ticking around them. She froze then and there, straining her ears to listen, and sure enough, the ticking was faint, still ever present but now quiet, off in the distance.

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  “Maybe if we move toward the walls and scour the perimeter, we can find an exit, find a way back to the surface…” Jake said, looking around nervously as a bit of corridor rushed past destroying whole rows of gangway.

  “What good would that do? The voice would spot us the instant we stepped foot on the surface, and besides we’d still be trapped here. It’s still managed to control the sun somehow. We can’t leave, not till we hunt it down, kill it.”

  “How? We don’t even know what it really is and I mean look, it doesn’t seem to have a problem with tearing itself apart just to kill us! How are we going to kill that monster?”

  “You said the ticking was a heartbeat, right?” Alice asked, Jake responded in kind with a slow, measured nod. Alice pulled a knife from her pocket, dropped by Jake earlier during their reunion. “Then if we track the ticking, follow it back to the source, we find its heart, right? It may be willing to rip everything else apart but the worse the ticking's gotten the more everything's fallen apart. We rip that up, we kill the bastard permanently.”

  Jake looked around, a nervous look on his face as he watched the crumbling gangways and rushing bits of corridor before his face hardened into one of determination.

  “You're right,” he said with a nod, “besides, after all this, the bastard needs to die.”

  Small smiles formed across the pair's lips even as their nerves remained in a constant state of unease moving through the innards of the voice’s domain, the thought of revenge urging them forward. They moved quietly and carefully, trying desperately to keep their presence hidden. They knew not what sort of senses the voice had, they didn’t even know what the voice was, so their every movement was measured and careful.

  Neither spoke as they walked, their ears opened and primed to carefully try and hunt down the source of the ever-present ticking. They moved blindly down the many branching paths of the gangway, trying their best to move closer toward the faint sounds of the offbeat, struggling ticking. Their progress was slow, almost non-existent at first.

  Neither found they could agree on which direction the ticking was the strongest in, and often times they heard no signs of the ticking. Instead, they heard only carnage, destruction, and the blaring of the alarm. Yet the longer they skulked around the easier they found their search became. The centralized carnage of the voice’s blind destruction began to spread out wildly and blindly, as the voice would occasionally chime in with random screeches of static-filled rage.

  It seemed the continued failure to find and kill the duo was driving the voice mad and forcing it to widen its radius of destruction. How painful this was for the voice was uncertain to the duo, but the longer the destruction went on and the more that was destroyed in the corridor's wild shifting movements the more reluctant they noticed the voice seemed to carry out its bouts of random violence. Many a time occurred when hesitation or blatant refusal from the corridors to destroy chunks of gangway allowed the pair a chance to escape the voice’s path of destruction as well as an opportunity to hear the buried cry of the damaged ticking.

  With careful effort they were able to find paths where the ticking grew louder and louder, almost at times as loud as when they stood trapped within the corridor. Yet just when they thought they’d found the heart, the gangway would divert and shift away from the goal, forcing them to follow a winding, unending maze of gangway in hopes of finding the correct path toward the heart. Yet what they noticed each time they passed the heart, growing closer and closer to it, it was growing louder, the ticking more precise. The voice was fixing itself as the duo was lost blindly wandering the maze. They were running out of time.

  Passing by the heart again, they noticed a corridor branching off away from them that led closer toward the ticking of the heart instead of away as most paths tended to after a while. Quickly hoping to the path, they were stopped by the voice, which screamed out clearer than the pair had heard in a while,

  “FOUND YOU!!!”

  Suddenly the gangway the pair had stood upon just a second ago detached itself, falling to the abyss below without any sort of warning. Alice and Jake were already running, moving as soon as they heard the voices cry, not bothering to watch the gangway fall into the abyss. Behind them they could hear the sounds of loose cables ringing in the air as gangway after gangway fell into the hollow earth below, followed by the distant sound of crumbling rock and scrapping metal as the pieces of the corridor began to close in on the fleeing duo.

  Yet the pair did not stop to worry about the crumbling state of the pathway they ran across, nor stop to fear the bits of corridor closing ever closer behind them. The ticking was growing louder and louder, dead ahead. They could hear the voice screaming, panic clear in its tone as its words were lost on the duo. They paid the voice no mind allowing it to fade into the background with the ringing wires and crumbling stone.

  Soon though, the ringing of the wires stopped, and the ground beneath their feet felt more solid. Looking around as they ran they realized the path they walked upon now was not a feeble gangway suspended in the air but instead a firm hallway of metal and glass, bolted in place. Still, they did not allow their pace to slow for fear of the voice employing some other trick to kill them.

  Yet despite their fears, the hallway remained unbending and firm as they raced through it. Slowly all sounds faded into nothing, the crumbling of the corridor, the voices screams, the ringing alarm. All were lost now save for the ever-present ticking which grew stronger and stronger with each step the duo took. Soon a dim, florescent light appeared at the end of the solid hallway the duo ran down. It remained firm and constant, not blinking in and out like the light fixtures that hung from the hollow crust of earth high above.

  Once the pair reached the florescent bulb they found themselves standing within a large open space, circular in design. Pistons and gears larger in size than either Jake or Alize worked tirelessly around the two, uncaring of their arrival as the ticking sounded out, now louder than ever before. The two stood in shock and awe as they stared at the heart of the voice, now stretched bare before them.