Chapter 114: The Lie
I tell Oliver and the others to step back.
I need to see what’s inside. With my own eyes. The answers Boris said I’d find here—if they exist, they exist past this door, and I’m not asking anyone else to walk through first.
A small hand grabs mine.
I look down.
Lola has my fingers. Hard. A grip I haven’t felt from her since the first weeks, back when she still thought I might disappear if she stopped checking.
I meet her eyes.
She shakes her head. Slow. Side to side.
’No.’
I don’t bother hiding the confusion on my face.
"If Uncle goes in there," she says, almost too quiet to hear, "you don’t come back."
Her voice cracks on the last word.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this version of Lola. The version that knows something the rest of us don’t.
She was right every time danger closed in during the battle royale. She was right about the gatekeeper, and she knew exactly where to head after the Tide Worm before I even had a clue.
Her instincts have been wrong exactly zero times in front of me.
That makes them my last and best card.
I take a step back from the door. Kneel down to her eye level.
"Why wouldn’t I come back?"
"The tower isn’t what it looks like."
I turn the words in my head. Nothing connects.
"Then what is it?"
Lola doesn’t answer. Her chin drops. She turns and walks past me into Rhayne’s side, burying her face in the cloth there. Rhayne wraps an arm around her on instinct and looks at me over the top of her head with no answer in her eyes either.
Oliver is already past us, moving along the wall on the right side of the door. Running his palm along the coral.
"Boss. Look at this. Runes. Old ones. I can barely read them."
I take one more look at Lola.
She’s not looking back.
I walk to Oliver.
The runes are cut into the coral around the door—shallow grooves filled with something darker than the surrounding stone, arranged in a vertical column on the left of the frame and another on the right. I crouch and bring my face close to the bottom row.
The shock lands fast. Wrong-shaped. Bad news arriving early.
"These are ancestral. From the civilization that came before us."
"Before us?" Oliver asks.
"Before humans."
Oliver’s silence behind me lasts a beat too long.
"Before humans?" he says.
I nod without looking up. That’s all the answer I have time to give.
I’m already reading... Or trying to.
The shapes are familiar from old archives—the ones the Hadal Institute keeps locked behind three layers of clearance I never had—but the syntax is broken. The runes aren’t sentences. They’re loose words. Verbs without objects. Nouns without verbs.
Hunger. Open. Below. The. Tongue. Wait. Chosen. ???. Control. Beyond. Lies. We. Stays. What.
It’s going to take time.
I straighten up.
"Oliver. Girls. We’re making camp here." I point at a slab of coral that bulges out from the base of the tower, casting a slanted shadow that would shelter a tent on one side. "Right against the wall."
"On it, boss." Oliver heads for the slab and starts unpacking.
He looks back once. Trying to figure out what I’m doing. He doesn’t ask.
I turn back to the runes.
The words don’t connect. Not in any reading order I try—top to bottom, bottom to top, left column then right, alternating. Hunger. The. Open. Wait. Tongue. Below. Garbage.
I press my thumb against the bottom-most rune and push a thin thread of OXI into it. The basic runecraft trick—any ward, any seal, any old enchantment will respond to a touch of OXI if it’s still alive. Even half-dead ones twitch.
This one doesn’t twitch.
It turns.
The rune lights up under my thumb, soundless, a pale blue glow that pulses once. Then the shape rotates a quarter turn in the stone, smooth as a key in oil, and settles into a different rune entirely. A different word.
Void.
Huh.
"It’s a puzzle." I say it out loud, mostly to myself. Oliver doesn’t hear me—he’s hammering tent stakes into the frost ten feet away.
I look at the columns again with the new information. Thirty-some runes. Each one rotatable. Find the combination that produces a sentence that makes sense, and the door behind me—the door that already opened once, on its own—will presumably do something I want it to do.
I get to work.
Time bleeds. I’m not tracking it well.
The cold settles in deeper than I expected. My fingers stiffen on the runes. My breath fogs constant now, white plumes drifting up against the coral. Every time I get a pair of words to make sense—Open below. Wait tongue.—the next rune I touch undoes the meaning of the last one.
It’s not just a puzzle. It’s a puzzle that punishes you for partial solutions.
Behind me, Oliver has the tent up and a small fire going. The flames look thin against the dark.
Out past the firelight, beyond the perimeter of whatever the tower is doing, I can see them.
Eyes.
Pairs of them. Low to the ground, then higher. A slow drift of pale yellow and dirty green and the wet blue of something with a swim bladder it shouldn’t have on land. They aren’t approaching. They’re orbiting—holding a line maybe sixty feet out, watching us, but unable or unwilling to cross.
The tower keeps them off.
Whatever the tower is.
Lola is sitting cross-legged by the fire, the frozen bear in her lap. She hasn’t said anything since the door. Rhayne sits behind her with her chin on the top of Lola’s head, both arms loose around her shoulders, eyes on the eyes in the dark.
I work the runes.
An hour passes. Maybe two. I didn’t count anymore.
Wait below. Tongue open. Garbage.
The hunger waits. Closer. But the next rune breaks it.
The hunger waits door. No. Wrong...
The cold starts to win.
My hands are clumsy now. I miss runes. The thumb-and-OXI gesture takes two tries to land. The frost creeping down from the ridges above us has reached the top of my hair and I can feel it crunching when I move my head.
[OXI: 475/1,600]
[Status: Hypothermia (Stage 1) - Accelerated Drain]
Damn...
I’m thinking about the fire. About stepping back, warming my hands, eating something, regrouping. Just for a few minutes.
That’s when the top of the tower explodes.
High—half a mile straight up, where the coral helix twists into the false sky—a flash of white light blooms outward in total silence, expands, and then the sound hits a half second later. A concussive crack that punches the air out of my chest and rolls down the curve of the tower like a wave coming home.
I drop to one knee. Cover my head.
Frost shakes loose from the wall above us in sheets and rains down across the camp. The fire gutters. Lola is in Rhayne’s arms before I can turn to check on her.
I look up.
Something is falling from the explosion point. Slow. Too slow. Falling on purpose.
And as I watch it descend, the runes at my back—every single rune in the column, all thirty-some of them—light up at once. Pale blue. Steady. Not pulsing.
Everything I thought I knew about this place was a lie.
The tower isn’t a tower.
It’s a mouth.
And it just opened.