Chapter Three: Patterns on the Wall
Dawn broke over Arcmire like a fever, painting the broken towers in sickly shades of amber. Leta’s scream shattered the morning quiet, sending birds scattering from their roosts in the arena’s higher reaches. The sound pulled Raven from her watchpost before she even registered moving.
She found Leta in the converted gladiator quarters, now home to several market families. The woman stood in the doorway of her son’s room, hands pressed against the rough stone frame as if it was all that kept her standing.
“He’s gone,” Leta whispered as Raven approached. “Tam’s gone.”
The room was small, barely large enough for the salvaged cot and wooden chest that held the boy’s few possessions. The blankets lay twisted on the floor, but there was no sign of struggle. No sign of anything except absence.
“When did you last see him?” Raven kept her voice steady, though her hand had already found the grip of her crossbow.
“Last night when he was hearing the voices. He was…” Leta’s voice cracked. “He was afraid to sleep. Said the voices wouldn’t let him rest. I should have stayed with him. I should have…”
Raven caught the woman as her knees buckled. Over Leta’s shoulder, she saw Marcus appear in the doorway, his face grave. Other residents were gathering, drawn by Leta’s scream and the familiar sense of impending tragedy that had once been Arcmire’s daily bread.
Koric’s fingers traced the fresh marks in the tunnel wall, their pattern maddeningly familiar yet disturbing in ways he couldn’t name. The lamp at his belt cast jumping shadows that seemed to move independent of its flame.
“These weren’t here last night,” he said, more to fill the silence than to inform the others. Echo, one of the younger guards, held a torch higher, revealing more marks stretching into the darkness.
“They look like the ones the boy was drawing,” Echo said quietly. “Before he…”
Koric’s hand went to his locket. Yes, they did look like Tam’s frantic scratches from the night before. But these were carved deep into solid stone, as if the rock itself had chosen to bleed geometry.
The tunnel air felt thick with memory. How many times had he crawled through spaces like this, marking paths for his fellow tunnel rats? How many had followed his signs to freedom, or to death in the Wastes beyond? And how many had simply vanished into the deeper dark, where even The Fat Man’s guards feared to follow?
A sound echoed from deeper in the tunnel—perhaps a voice, perhaps just stone settling. Or perhaps something else entirely.
Raven organized the search parties with mechanical efficiency, falling back on arena discipline to keep the fear at bay. Teams of two, each with weapons and light. Regular check-ins. No one to venture past the second sub-level without direct approval.
“We’ll find him,” she told Leta, who sat wrapped in a borrowed blanket, staring at nothing. “Koric knows these tunnels better than anyone.”
“It’s not the tunnels I’m afraid of,” Leta whispered. “You heard him last night. The voices. The hunger. Something’s wrong in this place. Something’s…”
A child’s cry cut through the morning air. For a moment, hope flared—but no, this came from above, from the market level. Raven was moving before the sound faded.
She found a group gathered around one of the vendor stalls, their silence heavy with dread. They parted as she approached, revealing what had drawn their attention.
Tam’s belongings lay arranged on the sand in a precise pattern—his wooden cup, his favorite stone, the small knife he used to help his mother clean mushrooms. But the pattern they formed…
Raven’s hand went to her scarred eye as recognition hit. The items mirrored exactly the marks appearing in the tunnels below, forming a diagram she’d seen carved into the walls. But that was impossible. No one could have known…
The deeper they went, the more Koric’s memories blurred with present reality. Had that corner always been there? That twist in the passage? The stone felt different under his fingers, almost warm, almost alive.
Echo’s torch sputtered, and in that moment of deeper darkness, Koric could have sworn he heard the roar of an arena crowd. But there was something else underneath the phantom cheers—a deeper sound, like the earth itself drawing breath.
“Sir?” Echo’s voice shook slightly. “Should we turn back? Get more help?”
Koric started to respond, but movement caught his eye. There, in the shadows beyond their light—was that Tam? A flicker of familiar clothing?
“Tam?” he called, fighting to keep his voice calm. “Tam, is that you?”
The figure didn’t respond, but it moved deeper into the darkness. Koric took a step forward, then another.
The marks on the walls seemed to pulse with a light of their own now, forming patterns that tugged at his memory. He’d seen these before, hadn’t he? In the deepest tunnels, in the days before his arrest, before the arena…
Echo’s torch went out.
In the sudden darkness, Koric felt stone shift beneath his feet, heard Echo’s startled cry turn to terror. He reached for the younger man but found only empty air where he should have been.
When Koric’s lamp finally sputtered back to life, he was alone in a tunnel he didn’t recognize. The walls were carved with patterns that perfectly matched the arrangement of Tam’s belongings in the market above, though he had no way of knowing this yet.
And in the distance, growing fainter by the moment, he heard what might have been a child’s laughter, might have been stone grinding on stone, might have been Echo. He couldn’t be sure.
The game, it seemed, had only just begun.