“I’m so fucking stupid.”

  I muttered under my breath as we walked, our makeshift torches illuminating little of the endless tunnel. It felt like we’d already been walking for hours without stumbling upon anything at all, nothing to think about but my mistakes.

  “Tom would have noticed it,” I said. I shook my head. “No. That’s not true. Tom wouldn’t have even run into this situation. He would have made Hoyom his friend or something, convinced him to leave his life of crime, some stupid shit like that. Fuck.”

  Amaia was walking along the opposite wall of the tunnel so that we would be able to spot any changes - a door is what we were hoping for - but the tunnel wasn’t all that wide, and it was likely she heard at least some of what I was saying. Whatever the case, she hadn’t commented on it, which is perhaps what made me talk to myself as if she wasn’t there at all. That, or I was losing it, and just didn’t care.

  “See anything?” I asked Amaia. She grunted back in response, a grunt that I’d learned to mean “no.”

  “Me nei-“ I began, but the sentence didn’t finish before I’d proven it wrong. A door, built into the side of the tunnel, was just before me, barely within the small radius of my torchlight.

  “Found something,” I said, and Amaia rushed over to see. “A door.”

  The door was made of stone, and there were no gaps to peek through to get an idea of what was behind it, just a little handle. Amaia only stood there beside the door and looked at me, as if waiting for orders.

  “Nothing to do but go in, right?” I said. “Better than starving in this tunnel that never ends.”

  “Could be something inside,” Amaia said, and I wasn’t sure if she was warning me or being optimistic.

  “Let’s pray for an exit,” I said. “We’ve been walking for hours. At least, it’s felt like hours. Could be minutes, could be days.”

  “Hours,” Amaia confirmed. I didn’t ask how she knew - I assumed she was just guessing.

  I looked at Amaia a little while longer. The noises we still occasionally heard echoing through the tunnel were on my mind. There could be monsters behind the door. Part of me was tempted to say “ladies first” and let Amaia take the lead. But although she was probably more suited to that position, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not because of some stupid sense of chivalry, but just because I was too upset with myself to do myself the favor. If there was something deadly behind the door, then I deserved it.

  The door was heavy, and I had to push into it with my shoulder, Amaia eventually joining to help. The door scraped across the ground as it went.

  The interior was just as dark as anywhere else. I waited a moment and listened. Not hearing anything, I stuck my torch inside, then entered.

  It was an oddly shaped room. Only a few feet ahead was a dirt wall, but to either side the room stretched out like the tunnel in miniature, a long and skinny room like a hallway.

  A hallway to nowhere, it turned out. It ran a few yards in one direction and roughly the same distance in the other before both sides ended with dead-ends.

  The air was a little musty, but not unbearable. The only other things of note were that the long wall was of dirt instead of the stone and concrete of the tunnel, and that from that dirt grew whitish mushrooms, spindly and weak looking, their stems long and withered, their caps raised upwards for no discernible reason, pointing towards the ceiling as if it were the sun.

  Something about the fungus made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t think it was secretly a monster or anything like that. Perhaps some blood memory was telling me not to eat it, that some distant ancestor had see a relative eat this mushroom and die. Or a similar mushroom, I supposed, because it was unlikely to be the same as any type we had back on Earth.

  I was quite hungry, but wasn’t particularly tempted to try one. Maybe I’d be more desperate later, but we’d at least had our packs on us when we’d disembarked, and therefore some small amount of food to last us.

  “How about a break?” Amaia asked. “Eat, rest a bit.”

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  “How are you so unphased by all of this?” I asked. “Rest a bit? You’re actually going to be able to sleep down here?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a heavy door, and it’s out of the way. We close it, and it’s unlikely anything will even notice us in here, let alone break in.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said. I sighed. “OK, yeah, fine. Let’s eat.”

  Our dinner consisted of dried meat and hard biscuits, paired with that reddish drink we had been served by Naomi’s parents. It could have been worse, but it did make me miss the decadence of the manor. It didn’t help that the stagnant scent of the room had now been trapped in with us now that the door was shut. Every other bite tasted like stale mushrooms - if mushrooms even went stale. I didn’t know.

  The meal threatened to be one of complete silence. That left me alone with my thoughts a little more than I liked, so I took the initiative.

  “How are you doing, Amaia?” I asked. “I feel like we never talk.”

  “Trapped,” she said. “Tricked. Likely to starve down here, or be killed by some monster. Probably be extremely lost even if we do find our way out. Maybe never see Cadoc and Naomi again.”

  “OK, OK, I get it,” I said. “But that’s what you are doing, or what is going on, or whatever. I asked how you are doing.”

  She shrugged. “Pretty fine, really,” she said. “Been worse.”

  I laughed. “Really? You’ve been worse?”

  She nodded, and I expected the conversation to end there in normal Amaia fashion. Instead, she continued.

  “They locked me up for a long time,” she said. “Couldn’t even stretch my legs. I was still trapped, still lost, I guess, and still unlikely to ever get out of there. But I couldn’t walk around, and now I can, so yes, I have been worse.”

  I didn’t know what mood had gotten into her - maybe Mars was in retrograde or some stupid astrology shit like that - but I took what I could get. “Who locked you up?” I asked.

  She stared off into space for awhile, coughed, and then continued. “My father.”

  “What?” I asked. “Why the fuck did he do that? What an asshole.”

  She shrugged. “It was his job. Same as mine, basically.”

  “What, a bodyguard? What did you do, try to kill the person he was guarding? Hey, Amaia, you still there?”

  But she’d started to nod off, and before I’d even finished asking her, she was asleep. I rolled my eyes. I guessed she was tired. She hadn’t let it show.

  We hadn’t discussed sleeping in shifts, and I figured we’d be fine to both sleep at once. Anyone trying to open the door would wake us up with the noise. Besides, I was suddenly exhausted. Getting betrayed was tiring work.

  I settled into a semi-comfortable spot on the floor and, using my bag as a pillow, fell asleep.

  -

  I woke up once, or at least once that I remember. I was only half-awake, really. Somehow I’d ended up with my head on Amaia’s side instead of on my bag. I tried to move, but was too sleepy, and honestly, didn’t care. I thought I saw something else in the room with us, but couldn’t keep myself awake long enough to check.

  Then I was awake again. I felt drowsy and couldn’t remember how I’d gotten to where I was. We were walking again, Amaia on one side of the tunnel and me on the other.

  I assumed I was still dreaming, because I’d never actually gotten up and left the little room - at least not consciously. But I could still feel the pain in my hand from where Hoyom had stomped it. It was duller than before - likely because of a good night’s rest, if you can call it that - but still I could feel the pain, so I knew I must have been awake.

  I accepted it easier than you might think. I’d risen and sleepwalked out of the room with Amaia, and Amaia hadn’t even noticed I was still asleep. Crazy, but not impossible. I’d always heard sleepwalking comes from stress, and I wasn’t exactly having a relaxing vacation.

  The stranger thing about waking up like that was that I seemed to have done so in the middle of a conversation. Stranger still, it was a conversation with myself.

  “You know what your problem is, Miles?” I said to myself, voice barely above a whisper. “You don’t go all the way with things. You think that you’ve stopped copying Tom, but you haven’t. You still let his way of thinking control you.”

  “What do I mean by that?” I asked myself. The words had come out of my mouth automatically, and I had to consider why and from where they came.

  “Do I have to spell it out for you? Listen. Did Hoyom have a spark?”

  I thought about it for a moment, letting my mind wander in the darkness before us. “No,” I said finally. “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t think so,” the voice mocked. “No, he didn’t. He wasn’t special. He was an NPC, a nobody. Right?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “Right.”

  “So why did I - did you - treat him like a friend? Why did you ask him about his dreams, as if an NPC could ever follow a dream, as if someone without a spark could ever achieve anything?”

  I understood. “Because that’s what Tom would have done.”

  “Exactly. It’s what that fucker Tom would have done, because he probably doesn’t even realize that he has something that most people don’t. He doesn’t need to realize it. The world may as well bend around him. He can afford to treat NPCs like people, because his spark will let him get away with it.

  “I don’t have a spark either,” I continued, “But through some combination of spite, magic, and self-awareness, I’m faking it. I’m worse than Tom - hell, I’m even worse than Naomi, or Cadoc, or Amaia - but I’m better than Hoyom. Right? Right. Better than Hoyom. Better than Aster. Better than those women Lot took with him, better than all of these sparkless nobodies.”

  “At the top are the ones with sparks. They are real people. They make decisions, follow dreams, think, change, stand apart from the crowd. They have souls, real souls.

  “Then, at the bottom, there’s the NPCs. The golems. The fucking machine people. Nothing they do matters, nothing they choose has any substance or effect.” I thought of my dad. “They do what people tell them to do, or else they do the opposite for the exact same reasons. They laugh when the movie tells them to laugh, and they cry when it’s appropriate, but do they ever actually feel anything? Or do they just puppet lines from movies - the movies they’re shown of course - and only look like human beings?”

  “And then, in the middle, is me. Half-human. Half a spark. Half aware, and half a soul.

  “Alone.”

  I shook my head. “Not the point. The point is, fuck them. Remember the women with Lot? Remember how they faded to the background? How you didn’t even bother to learn their names? That was it. You had it for a second. That was how you need to act around these things. Ignore them. Leave them be. Lot can afford to help them if he wants - you can’t. You don’t have anything to spare.”

  “But what about me then?” I asked. “I don’t have a spark either, even if I am faking it. Can’t I follow a dream? Or am I just fucked?”

  “Save it with the pity-party. As long as no one notices - which they won’t - then you take what you can fucking get. Survival first, then revenge, then you can worry about your ‘dreams.’”

  “Right,” I agreed, nodding. “Dreams later.”

  And as if my words had summoned it, there was suddenly light before us, almost too close. An end to the tunnel, where it must let out into open air. I didn’t think about the fact that the brightness made no sense, that it probably should have been dark out. Maybe we’d slept a long time.

  “Look!” I yelled, and began running. I was ready to breathe fresh, outdoor air again.

  But Amaia didn’t follow suit. After all, she didn’t see the light. She was seeing something completely different.