Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth

22



The gunshot made Drake flinch even as he tried to dodge the killer’s knife. But the hooded man fell short, his lunge losing momentum, and he crashed to the rocky ledge at Drake’s feet and twitched once, then went still.

Jada stood behind him, gun in hand, looking like she might throw up. Her weapon was still holstered; she had managed to pick up his Glock. Amid the chaos of gunfire and voices, bloodshed and brutality, he darted forward and snatched the gun away from her. A hooded woman—one of the first females he’d seen among them—raced up, metal climbing claws like brass knuckles on her hands, ready to slash him to ribbons. Drake held his breath when he took aim and shot her in the chest.

They had no time for hesitation, but it would haunt him. Even in self-defense, killing haunted him. Almost always, he thought. Corelli might have been an exception.

With a glance around, he spotted Olivia up against the wall of the ravine, gun held out in front of her, firing at the hooded killers still swarming up from over the ledge. But Perkins and Garza were nearby, and they had firepower to spare. The semiautomatic weapons’ fire ripped at the air, the echoes punishingly loud.

Drake grabbed Jada’s hand and dragged her back into the tunnel that led back up to the torture chamber. For a moment, they were out of sight of both sets of killers. Drake turned to her, put a hand under her chin, and forced her to look up at him. Her gaze was far away, and he worried that she was in shock.

“Jada, listen to me.”

“I shot that man.”

“If you hadn’t, he’d have gutted me,” Drake said. “You saved my life. But we’re both on borrowed time here. Whoever wins out there, they’re going to kill us, so we’ve gotta run for it.”

She blinked as if coming awake. “If we try to go back, they’ll catch us. We’ll never make it to the surface.”

Drake shook his head. “No, no. I don’t want to go back.”

Jada glanced at the end of the tunnel and saw one of the hooded men straddling a mercenary on the ledge, slashing at the ex-soldier’s throat with a curved blade. Arterial blood sprayed in an arc.

“We can’t walk down the cliff paths. We’ll never get past them, and even if we did—”

“There isn’t time,” Drake said, his heart like a tiger trying to smash free of its cage. He thought his chest might burst, it was hammering so hard. “There’s only one way we’re surviving the next hundred seconds or so.”

One of the hooded men slipped into the tunnel, spotted them, and cocked back a hand in which he clutched a throwing knife. Drake shot him twice. Twelve shots left in the Glock’s magazine before he’d have to reload. The killer and his blade hit the rock floor at the same time. The man dragged himself to his knees, blood raining from his chest, and reached for the knife.

It was Jada who put the third bullet in him.

She had her own gun out now, the two of them staring at that opening, waiting for more of the killers to come for them. But through the opening, they could see the flashlight beams slashing the darkness, and enough of that light bounced off the walls that they could make out the dim outline of the tunnel across the ravine.

Jada stiffened and then spun toward him. “You can’t be serious. If we fall short, we’re dead.”

Drake holstered his gun. “We don’t jump for it, we die anyway.” He shoved his flashlight into his backpack, working fast, zipped it, and slipped it back on. “Sully’s waiting for us, kid.”

Jada swore, snapping her gun back into its holster. She kept swearing over and over again, the profanity like a mantra as she jammed her flashlight into her backpack and then turned to look at him defiantly.

“It’s gonna be—” he began.

Jada punched him in the arm. “Just shut up and run.”

Drake felt a strange, mad surrender then. Not to death but to fate. An old song floated into his mind, one Sully played from time to time: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. He’d never understood just how true that was until this moment. Free, exhilarated by his terror and hope, he took Jada’s hand, and they ran to the tunnel’s end and onto the ledge. Their hands unclasped just as they reached the edge, and then they launched themselves full speed across the twelve-foot gap.

For an eyeblink, Drake felt weightless, with the jagged rocks below and the slivers of moonlight high above. Then gravity took hold, and they began to fall. He windmilled his arms to keep balanced in the air, and then he slammed into the far wall, cracking his head against it. He slid to the ledge, then spun around and saw Jada land on her belly, legs hanging out over the yawning darkness below. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase and found none, and he knew she was going over, knew she would die broken and bloody.

He caught her wrist, throwing himself backward so he wouldn’t be pulled along with her. He slammed the heel of his boot against the remains of a support that once had held up this end of the missing bridge. The rocky ledge scraped his back and legs as he dragged her up on top of him, and for a moment they lay there, hearts racing together. Then a stray bullet struck the wall above them, sending tiny shards of rock flying, and they were in motion. Drake rolled Jada off him, and the two got to their knees and turned to look at the scene playing out across the ravine.

Half a dozen hooded men were still scaling the wall below the opposite ledge. Many lay dead, crumpled in bloody heaps around the mercenaries and protectors who were still trying desperately to murder one another. Olivia remained pinned against the wall, with Perkins putting himself between her and the hooded men. At least five of the mercenaries were down, wounded or dead—he figured probably the latter. The Protectors of the Hidden Word didn’t seem like the wounding kind.

Henriksen let out a primitive, furious roar and grabbed hold of the hooded man who’d been trying to cut him open. The big Norwegian, a blond silhouette captured in the illumination from someone else’s flashlight, slammed the hooded man against the wall twice, then a third time. The echo of cracking bone mixed with the sounds of death and battle, and then Henriksen hurled the man into the ravine.

Then he spun and stared right at Drake.

“He’s looking at—” Jada started.

“Us,” Drake agreed, standing up and waving. “Jump! It’s your only shot!”

“What are you doing?” Jada demanded.

But even as she spoke, Henriksen stooped and snatched the gun from a dead mercenary, slung it across his back, and retreated a couple of steps before sprinting for the edge.

Olivia screamed and pushed past Perkins, taking aim and firing while Henriksen was airborne.

The Norwegian crashed into the wall and almost fell backward into the ravine before Drake steadied him. Only then did Drake realize that Olivia had missed. Across the gap, she shrieked in anger and started shooting at the three of them. There were still hooded men trying to get to her, to cut her throat, but she was more concerned with trying to make sure they died first.

Perkins knocked her back against the wall, saving her from a blade that whistled through the air and would have caught her in the chest. But the action cost him, and as he turned to take aim, two of the hooded men descended on him, their blades rising and falling, blood spattering the lens of his flashlight so that its beam was darkened with spots of shadow that had been his life, now extinguished.

Still, the odds had changed. Assault rifles tended to have that effect. The last few hooded men came over the ledge and were shot before they could make it a handful of feet. The mercenaries were going to win this, but either way, Drake knew that he, Jada, and Henriksen needed to be gone.

“We can’t stay here,” he said.

Henriksen risked one last hate-filled glance at Olivia, and then all three of them rushed for the tunnel entrance near the supports of the long-ruined bridge.

“Go get them!” Olivia screamed at someone. “Get over there and kill them!”

As Drake ducked through the tunnel entrance, he thought it was Massarsky’s voice he heard behind him.

“You’re out of your mind, lady. No one’s jumping that. You’d have to be crazy or out of choices, and we’re neither. They can’t get out without going past us.”

There was more, but as Drake, Jada, and Henriksen hurried into the twisted knot of tunnels on the other side of the ravine, the voices were muffled and they could hear only gunshots.

Henriksen had no flashlight, but Drake and Jada lit the way ahead. They made wordless progress, coming to junctions and doors, narrow passages and dead ends, as they had before, but they had become veritable experts in navigating through labyrinths by now, and when they chose the wrong direction, it was never for very long.

Soon they had left the echoes of gunshots and murder behind, but Drake knew the danger would catch up to them eventually and hadn’t a clue what they would do when it did.


In another piece of hell—these torture rooms like the chambers of this diabolical labyrinth’s heart—they stopped to catch their breath. Drake and Jada leaned against the edges of the entry passage while Henriksen walked around the hideous cavern, plunging unwisely into the shadows.

“Throw some light over here?” he asked.

Jada ignored him, so Drake raised his flashlight. Henriksen had his back to them, staring at an enormous mechanism composed of a huge stone wheel with hooks jutting from the rock. The wheel had been stained dark with ancient blood, yet Drake thought he detected the scent of copper in the air. He wondered if pain could have a ghost, if the stink of human suffering could haunt a place when even the most tenacious souls had long since departed.

He wanted out of the fourth labyrinth. Out of Diyu. He didn’t care about gold or treasure. From the moment Sully had been dragged off, this job had been about getting his best friend back alive, but the sense of adventure and the promise of gold had maintained a certain secondary allure in the back of his head. No more.

“Hey,” Jada whispered.

Drake looked over at her. In the glow of their flashlights, he saw that magenta strands had come loose from her ponytail. To someone who hadn’t been at her side these last days, she might have looked fragile, but to Drake, she seemed as strong as if she’d been forged in fire.

“Thanks,” she said.

He didn’t feel deserving of her gratitude. What had he done for her thus far except be by her side while people died around her, while she took a life for the first time, while her godfather had been stolen from her and her stepmother betrayed her? He couldn’t bring her father back to life.

The best he could do was finish the job they’d started.

“Any time,” he said, grinning. “I wouldn’t want to go on a suicide mission with anyone else.”

Jada pushed off from the wall and went to punch him.

“Enough!” Drake said, holding up his hands in surrender.

Jada smiled. “Tough guy.” Then she walked toward Henriksen. “All right, Tyr. Time to tell us what the hell that was all about back there.”

Henriksen turned, still in the pool of Drake’s flashlight. He hung his head, shadows gathering under his eyes, and it made him look a century older.

“I never thought she would go so far,” he said. Lifting his head, he turned his sorrowful gaze upon Jada. “Tonight I have blood on my hands for the first time.”

“Join the club,” she said. She tried to sound cavalier, but Drake heard the pain in her voice. “But you’re not exactly an innocent. Your whole career has been about doing whatever it took to get what you wanted. If you never killed someone or had anybody killed, I’m willing to bet people have died because of you before.”

The words scuffed the walls, but they were nothing compared to the screams that once had reverberated here.

“She’s got you there,” Drake said.

Henriksen glanced at him and managed to look almost ashamed. “You are not what I expected, Mr. Drake.” He nodded toward Jada. “Either of you. You are survivors, and you have my admiration.”

“Yeah, well, considering we thought you were pretty much the devil when this all started, I guess you’re not what we expected, either,” Drake said. “But we don’t have time for group therapy, Tyr. I’m going to bet there are still some spooky ninja guys—”

“And girls,” Jada put in.

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Drake said. “My point is, no matter how many Protectors of the Hidden Word were killed by Perkins’s goon squad, I doubt they’re all dead. If I was calling the shots, I’d have held some of my people back. They’ve got Sully and Ian Welch somewhere, and maybe others. Never mind the gold. There could be one or two right around the next turn. So we’re not going another step until you tell us what it is you’ve been holding back.”

Henriksen frowned. Jada aimed her flashlight at his eyes, and he squinted, turning away.

“Come on,” she said. “No more secrets. If the three of us are going to make it through till morning, we need to work together.”

Several seconds ticked by in the silence of the torture chamber. Its gruesomeness struck Drake anew, and he became more impatient than ever to be gone from there, to find the heart of the labyrinth and make an end to things.

“Tyr—”

“Knossos,” Henriksen said.

Drake shrugged. “What about it?”

“The labyrinth there is in ruins,” Henriksen went on, his gaze shifting from Drake to Jada. “But I’ve had theories about Minos for years, and I’ve had teams going through the ruins, doing small excavations, all through museums and universities but with my people running it. One of those excavations turned up the wreckage of a chamber.”

“A worship chamber,” Jada said, her voice low.

Henriksen nodded. “I brought your father in after my people had translated fragments of several tablets and the writing on a shattered sacramental jar we had recovered. I had been keeping track of progress at Crocodilopolis for a while, but once your father confirmed my suspicions that Daedalus had designed both the labyrinth at Knossos and the one in Crocodile City, it became my priority. I’d hoped to find a complete worship chamber there, and of course we found even more than that.”

“But there are things you knew already,” Drake said, studying his face. “Things you learned from the fragments from Knossos.”

“Bits and pieces. Suppositions,” Henriksen said. “The first Mistress of the Labyrinth was Ariadne herself. Her beauty and gentleness kept the Minotaur calm—”

“There’s no such thing—” Jada began.

“But there was!” Henriksen snapped. “You don’t understand.”

He took Drake’s flashlight and shone it upon the wall, where a gruesome painting in the ancient Chinese style represented the Mistress of the Labyrinth tipping a cup of honey into the mouth of a slave whose back was streaked with scars from the lash. Others awaited the same communion. One of them, off to the right, was hunched over, having already received the cup. Horns jutted from his head, and his features were contorted, almost savage.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Drake rasped, staring. “The honey? What, it turned them into monsters?”

“Not with horns,” Henriksen said, waving his disbelief away. “Those were an affectation, something to frighten the others, I think, and to perpetuate the legend that Daedalus had so carefully built. The skeleton we examined in the labyrinth of Sobek—the one you found on the stairs under the altar—had the horns of an actual bull. They were probably tied to his head with some kind of leather strap.

“There are conditions that could explain many of the Minotaur’s legendary features. The chemical composition of the honey might have triggered hypertrichosis, causing the growth of thick, shaggy hair all over their bodies, their faces included. I also suspect they attained their monstrous size through slave labor and the honey’s activation of the pituitary gland’s growth hormones. It’s even possible that one or two grew cutaneous horns, prompting the legend to begin with and leading Daedalus and his inner circle to use fake horns to perpetuate the monstrous image of the Minotaur in order to keep people too terrified to attempt to explore the labyrinth. But the key element is strength and aggression. Savagery. Perhaps an edge of lunacy.”

Jada’s flashlight beam wavered. “What are ‘cutaneous horns’? Is that even something real?”

“They’re not actual horn. In rare cases, people have seemed to grow horns on their heads or faces or hands, but it’s a buildup of keratotic material, like hair or fingernails. Sometimes there’s cancer involved …” Henriksen waved the topic away. “This is not important.”

“Agreed,” Drake said. “And it’s pretty gross. How the hell do they do it? What’s in the honey?”

Henriksen smiled slightly, as if he couldn’t help it. “The white blossoms you’ve seen? Much of what we learned from the fragments discovered at Knossos concerned them. White hellebore.”

Drake turned his flashlight back on the wall painting of the slaves being given honey in a ritual presided over by the Mistress of the Labyrinth. Images of those flowers were mixed amid ancient Chinese characters and portrayals of hellish torture.

“But those flowers aren’t white hellebore,” Jada said. “We’ve established that.”

Henriksen arched an eyebrow. “Tell me what you know about Helleborus.”

She shrugged. “Only what your research team turned up. The ancients thought there were two species, white and black, both poisonous.”

“In the legends, black hellebore was a cure for madness,” Drake said.

“But the flower they thought was white hellebore back then—” Jada began.

“It’s still called white hellebore—” Drake put in.

“—isn’t white hellebore at all. It’s a different species. Like Nate said, they still call it that, but it’s something else.”

Henriksen nodded. “But what if, in ancient times, true white hellebore did exist? What if the flower they call by that name today, knowing it isn’t the same species, is not the same flower the ancients called white hellebore? What if true white hellebore has been all but extinct for more than two thousand years—except inside this labyrinth, where it had continued to be cultivated all down through the ages?”

Drake stared at him. “You’re telling me this whole thing has been about flowers?”

“More than you can imagine,” Henriksen said.

“Why?” Jada asked. “You want to create an army of Minotaurs or something?”

Henriksen’s expression hardened; whatever camaraderie they had built through their mutual survival was shattered.

“I don’t,” he said. “But I’m sure there are more than a few governments that would love that.”

“Oh, my—” Jada started.

“I don’t think it’s that simple, though,” Henriksen said, forging onward. “Look at that painting. There are six or seven slaves being fed that honey, but not all of them are Minotaurs. What we’ve translated suggests that creating the Minotaurs was a happy accident, a by-product of the intended purpose of the white hellebore and the honey made from it. Daedalus—and later Talos—wanted slaves, and the primary effect of the distilled essence of the white hellebore was to make those who ingested it suggestible. Controllable. In theory it’s not unlike the manner in which Haitian ‘witch doctors’ were once supposed to have used tetrodotoxin from puffer fish and other species to induce a trance state, but without the motor and mental impairment associated with those toxins. In small doses, Daedalus’s honey left his subjects none the wiser, and in larger doses it either turned them into mindless drones or triggered the physiological and psychological changes that created Minotaurs. At Knossos, the honey had another name. In English, it translates as—”

“The hidden word,” Drake interrupted. “The word they all had to obey.”

Henriksen nodded. “Precisely.”

“You’re saying the hooded men aren’t protecting Daedalus’s treasure,” Jada said. “They’re protecting the white hellebore.”

“This is where Olivia and I disagree,” Henriksen replied, his voice echoing off the torture chamber’s walls. “I believe that all references to treasure in the ancient records are really references to the flower. Mr. Drake, if you’re the expert you claim to be, you must know that historically, white hellebore has also been reputed to be one of the key ingredients used—”

“In alchemy,” Drake finished for him. He shook his head, waves of disbelief washing over him. He just had to make sure he didn’t drown in them.

“I don’t think alchemists turned base metals to gold any more than I think you can pull a rabbit out of a hat,” Henriksen said. “I think all the great alchemists did was get their hands on some white hellebore and use it to influence the minds of those around them to control their perceptions and make them believe they had seen something they had not seen.”

“There’s no treasure,” Drake said. “No gold?”

“Oh, I’m sure there must be something, or there was once upon a time,” Henriksen said. “Do I think that Daedalus paid his workers with gold from inside the labyrinths? No. At Knossos, I suspect he paid them in stones or nuts before he realized that it would be much easier to simply take over their minds entirely and enslave them, which is what he likely did while building the labyrinth of Sobek.

“Olivia disagrees. She believes that Daedalus must have accumulated vast wealth, and perhaps she’s right. But we won’t know until we reach the center of the labyrinth. If she cared only for the white hellebore, she’d have turned around the moment we found it as we entered Diyu. But she wants that gold.”

Drake scowled. “While all you want is to sell mind control to whichever government is the highest bidder.”

Henriksen shrugged. “Someone’s going to profit from this. I’d rather it were me.”

Jada took a step backward. “This is what my father wanted to stop,” she said, staring at him.

“I have no doubt,” Henriksen agreed. “But I’m not some James Bond villain, Jada. It’s not as if I’m going to try to take over the world. I’m only a businessman.”

“Do you have any idea what this could be used for?” Jada demanded. “Think of the espionage applications. Dosing world leaders so you could control their decisions. Never mind the military uses. You know that soldiers would be experimented on. And what about dictatorships that want more pliable people?”

“As I said,” Henriksen replied, “someone’s going to do it.”

“Unless we destroy the white hellebore,” Jada said. “Burn it all.”

Henriksen clenched his fists. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”

“Whoa!” Drake said, dropping his hand to the gun on his belt. “Let’s all take a breath, okay?” He shone his flashlight at Jada and saw the emotions wracking her features. “Henriksen might not be a world conqueror, but right now, we have no idea what Olivia has in mind.”

“Oh, make no mistake,” Henriksen said. “If whoever she hires for the science can synthesize the chemicals, there’s nothing Olivia would like more than to have presidents and despots as her puppets.”

Drake glanced back and forth between them. “Our goals haven’t changed. I’m here for Sully.”

“I’m here for my father,” Jada corrected him. “I love my Uncle Vic, but I’m here to stop Henriksen—or my stepmother—from getting what they want.”

“Just hang on!” Drake snapped. “Do not fight this fight right now. We have two choices, all three of us. We go forward or we go back. If Sully’s really still alive, I’m not leaving here without him, and I’m guessing both of you need to know what’s at the heart of this place, yes?”

“I’m not going back,” Jada said.

Henriksen’s eyes blazed with his own intent.

“Then let’s get going,” Drake said. “One fight at a time.”


They had lost time with revelations and argument, and as they renewed their exploration of Diyu, Drake felt constantly aware of the darkness they’d left behind. Every shadow and crevice breathed with menace because they had no idea how many hooded men might remain, but the longer they went without being attacked, the more his main concern became Olivia and the surviving mercenaries. It had sounded like Massarsky had taken charge when Perkins had been killed. He’d seemed okay for a guy who used his military training as a soldier for hire, and maybe a killer for hire if the price was right. But Drake had a feeling they wouldn’t be having a beer together anytime soon.

They moved swiftly, making fewer wrong turns, working half on instinct now. Jada froze Henriksen out as if he weren’t there at all, and that sat just fine with Drake. If the two of them weren’t talking, it meant he didn’t have to worry about breaking up a fight. Having to walk through three additional torture chambers—they were more plentiful down in the twisted bowels of the maze—only put more of a damper on any idle conversation. No one was feeling chatty except for Drake, and even he stopped trying to fill the silence after a while.

When they discovered the living quarters of the Protectors of the Hidden Word, they drew their guns and didn’t holster them again. Yet amid the stone chambers—filled with wooden frame walls and floor platforms, as well as blankets and makeshift beds from a variety of eras—they met no resistance. Drake tried counting rooms and beds but decided the quicker they left the place, the better.

“Nate, do you hear it?” Jada whispered, her breathing low and even, her gaze shifting about with a new degree of skittishness.

Drake nodded. They could hear the sound of running water, but not from pipes. He led the way with his flashlight, and at the rear of the warren of rooms that made up the living quarters, he found a small door that led into a natural fissure. The smell hit him even before he entered, and he knew he’d found what passed for a bathroom. Twenty feet below, a narrow river sliced through rock, rushing along an underground course it must have followed for centuries, even millennia.

“That’s disgusting,” Jada said.

“But necessary,” Henriksen said. “Somewhere they’ll have a kitchen. They must hunt for their food and gather greens in secret. They might even go into the city to find—”

“We don’t care about their culture,” Drake said, giving him a hard look.

Henriksen nodded. Interested as he was, he understood this wasn’t why they had come. It wasn’t an anthropology study.

Drake threaded back through the rooms, ducking through doorways until he had led them back to the tunnel they’d diverted from to investigate the quarters. The river had him thinking, wondering if the ravine they’d jumped also once had had water at the bottom. He had a feeling they had almost reached their destination, so he was surprised when the contortions of the labyrinth began to take them upward.

The sound began as a dull roar.

“What is that?” Drake asked.

They backtracked along a dead end turn and then started along a zigzag tunnel that had started as a natural cave and been smoothed and widened by human efforts. The sound diminished and then built again, growing ever louder, until the hissing roar filled the tunnel around them.

When Drake’s flashlight beam picked up the gleam of moisture on the tunnel wall ahead, he knew what they had found.

The cavern was longer and wider than either of the others they’d encountered thus far. The river came rushing in from the right and over a ledge, creating a forty-foot wall of crashing water that filled the vast cavern with a damp chill and a deafening white noise. Their tunnel ended on a plateau at the top of the waterfall.

“It’s beautiful,” Jada said in surprise, raising her voice to be heard.

Their flashlight beams strobed the walls, picking out faded characters and symbols painted in some places and engraved in others. Far above, slits of moonlight provided no real illumination but a glimpse of eyelet crevices that would allow the tiniest bit of sunlight in on a clear day. Long strips of moss ran down the far wall and covered the rocks on either side of the waterfall, both there on the plateau and in the lower half of the cavern below them, and vines of white hellebore, long since adapted to this bizarre subterranean hell, were plentiful amid the moss.

Though the flashlights were powerful, they could make out few details below. But Drake saw at least one tunnel leading away from the area around the bottom of the waterfall, and he suspected that what looked like deeper patches of darkness beyond all but the dimmest glow of their lights might be other such tunnels.

“This is it,” he said. “Down there somewhere.”

Jada scanned her flashlight beam across the other side of the rushing river, then ran it along the plateau toward the edge of the waterfall. Drake saw the stairs the same moment she discovered them, carved into the wall beside the waterfall, descending into the lower cavern. They gleamed with spray, and he knew they would have to watch their step.

The violence began so quickly, Drake barely knew what was happening. Henriksen grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, reaching for his wrist. Drake held his gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, and for several heartbeats he thought that Henriksen was attacking, making his move now to eliminate them to save the white hellebore. He cracked the man across the skull with the barrel of the Glock, and Henriksen staggered back, dropping to one knee, blood welling on his forehead.

But he was waving his gun the other direction along the plateau, toward the dark cave mouth from which the river spouted.

“There!” Henriksen shouted. “Turn the bloody light over there!”

Drake swung the flashlight beam. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jada just beginning to turn.

Then he saw them, five shadows rushing along the river’s edge into the pool of light. Only five, Drake thought, which had to mean that their numbers were thinning badly. Their odds of surviving to see the sky again were improving.

One of the figures broke away, picking up speed. Henriksen raised his gun, steadied his aim, and fired. The killer crumpled, but forward momentum brought him rolling along the rock shelf toward them, and in the circle of Jada’s flashlight beam, he tumbled to a halt and lay dead, gazing up at them with hollow, lifeless eyes.

Ian Welch.

Sick dread clutching at his heart, Drake directed his light at the others. Henriksen was taking aim again.

“Don’t shoot!” Drake shouted.

His flashlight found four faces, but only one of them was not half hidden beneath a black hood. Drake swore.

“Sully, stop!”

But Drake could see in his eyes that Sully did not know him. The Sully who had been his best friend for nearly twenty years did not live behind those eyes anymore. Sully did not know him.

For half a second, Drake wondered if he could shoot him just to wound, but he wasn’t that good a marksman and they’d never be able to carry him out of the labyrinth if he couldn’t walk on his own.

It was half a second too long.

“Sully, it’s me!” Drake yelled.

Then Sully barreled into him with enough force to knock the flashlight from his hand and the air from his chest. Drake staggered backward, only just managing to hold on to his gun as Sully put both hands around his throat and squeezed.

Struggling, trying to retreat, Drake felt his boot slip off the plateau’s rocky edge. Jada screamed his name, and then he and Sully were falling. They plunged into the cold, roaring river, Sully still with his hands wrapped around Drake’s throat. Drake’s mind was screaming for oxygen, his chest tight and burning after Sully had knocked the air out of him, and he wondered if Sully or the river would do him in.

Then they were spilling over the waterfall, falling, punished and dragged downward, and he realized it would be the fall that killed him.