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and smells of rotting worms and musky dirt. The floor is gritty beneath my feet. Cold water drops from the ceiling, down my neck. “What is this? Where are we?” My heart jumps when I realize where he could be leading me. This could be it. The end. My throat closes off, parched.
    The guard flings open a heavy wooden door across from the stairs. It creaks back madly. The sound drums up my spine. I brace myself, expecting to be blinded by the shock of twilight. Instead, darkness consumes me like a blanket thrown over my head.
    “In here.” The guard casts me through the door and down a short corridor, then shoves me into a hole. I smack my head on something hard and fall to the stone floor. I struggle to stand, hitting my head again on the room’s low ceiling, and end up on my backside. “What is this place? Where am I?”
    “Purgatory.” The guard reaches up, and through the wisps of my shadowy vision I see him pull a chain. An iron gate falls to the ground in front of me, its poker-sharp ends driving deep into the stone floor. They would have impaled my feet had I not pulled them in.
    “They say you ’ad a visitor up there.” The guard breathes through the bars. The smell of his breath makes me gag. “Brought you some sort of fancy message.” He loops chains around the metal gate and secures them with a lock. “We’ll see how yuh fare down ’ere in the ’ole. Ain’t nobody lasted more than three days in solitary. But then again, they tell me you’s special .” The guard triggers another lock. Turbines grind and shunt, and then there’s silence. “We’ll see ’ow special yuh are.”
    My heart seizes, hearing him step away.
    “Wait! You can’t just leave me here? Not like this!” I raise my arms behind my back, hands still in chains.
    “Sorry, mate, orders.”
    The guard’s boots turn, twisting on the grime-topped stones. He slams the thick wooden door behind him as he exits, and the room gets even darker, as if dunked in a well of ink.
    I slide on my shoulder down the wall to the floor, listening to his footsteps fade with each loop of stairs he climbs until he reaches the top. A door groans open, then swings shut. A lock drops with a clank. The hole I’m in falls eerily silent. I rest my head against the cold stone wall, press my face between the rusty iron bars of my new fortress, and shiver.
    “Oh, Eyelet, if you’re able, please come quick.”

Two
    Eyelet
    I stumble through the weeds, struggling to take in enough air to keep me going. The mask I found in the wreckage at the Core is severely damaged and had less than half a tank of oxygen. I’ve been travelling long stints without wearing it, trying to conserve the air that’s left, but the Vapours are becoming too overwhelming, too thick to ignore, their stench too explicit, and I’ve had to resort to wearing the mask continuously.
    “How much farther!” I shout to the sky, forgetting that I sent Pan on ahead. I thought it best, if I became delirious under the power of the Vapours—which I’m seriously starting to consider might happen—that at least Pan make it to the Compound to tell the others and hopefully send someone out to retrieve me.
    I bend at the waist, gasping, trying to slow my breathing, reminding myself that air is scarce. I have to stop gulping the supply. I check the gauge: less than an eighth left. I need to make it to the Compound soon, or I’ll never make it.
    My mind runs briefly over the idea of the Infirmed, and my heart jerks in my chest. Flashbacks of their previous attacks mingle with new fears of them materializing again, and my knees turn to syrup. I twist my head in both directions, thinking I see their swarthy bodies in the mist—imagining I hear their chants.
    I suck in a deep breath. “I can’t let this get the better of me.” I bring my hands to my forehead, cradling it. The pungent odour of the Vapours has caused a migraine.
    I’ve got to stop this worry now . I’ve got to think of Urlick.