“I do not know.”
We came upon the crumpled form of Dr. Hassan and I knelt at his side, pressing my fingers against his neck. His chest rose and fell under my other hand. “His pulse is strong,” I said. “It doesn’t look like anything’s broken.”
“His limbs should be intact. I caught him, as I did you.”
Looking up at Asten over my shoulder, I asked, “Weren’t you hurt by the fall?”
“I am not bound to the earth in the same way as you. The power of the starlit ibis grants me the ability to control the speed at which I rise and fall.”
“Hold on. Are you saying you can fly?”
“Yes. You have seen this.”
“No. Not as a bird. I mean, can you fly as a man?”
In answer, Asten raised his arms slightly away from his sides and his body lifted into the air. Motionless, he hovered several feet off the ground and then slowly lowered.
Shaking my head in wonder, I turned back to Dr. Hassan. “So if you caught him, then what’s wrong?”
“I do not know. Perhaps he is simply unconscious.”
I slapped the doctor’s face lightly. “Osahar? Can you hear me? Wake up!” I shook his shoulder, but he remained unconscious. “Can you carry him?” I asked as I picked up his beloved fedora and shoved it into my bag.
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“As long as is necessary.”
“Okay, good. Let’s try to find a way out of here, then.”
Asten crouched down and scooped up Dr. Hassan, throwing him over one shoulder like a suit coat. “I will follow you, Lily. Where would you like to go?”
“I guess…we should try to go that way.” I pointed ahead.
We wandered for what felt like hours, though I had no real sense of time. The only excitement was finding my backpack. Asten turned his nose up at the bruised banana I offered to share, so I shrugged and gagged down the mealy fruit, happy to find anything to fill my empty belly. As we walked, I scratched and rubbed at the itchy grime coating my body and attempted to wring it from my hair.
I began to despair. Every pebble we came across looked the same, and when I made a little pile of them to resemble an arrow pointing in the direction we went, it had completely disappeared when we doubled back not a few moments later.
Dr. Hassan finally stirred. He moaned, and Asten set him down. I trickled some bottled water into his mouth and wiped away as much of the crusted sand from his face as possible.
“What? What happened?” he asked. “Where are we?”
“We don’t know.” I wet a strip of fabric Asten had torn from his already too-short skirt and bathed Dr. Hassan’s face. “We fell through the quicksand into this place. There’s nothing here but us.”
I pulled Dr. Hassan’s once white, now filthy and crumpled fedora from my bag, brushed away some sand stuck to its brim, and handed it to him. He gave me a kind smile and took the hat.
“Ah, this was given to me in honor of my first real archaeological find—an exceedingly rare stone carving of Bast.” The band on the fedora broke as he tried to reshape the hat. “Well, perhaps it is time to set the past behind me and focus on the future.”
“I’m sorry, Osahar,” I said.
“Think nothing of it. We were lucky to escape with our lives.”
“Yes, but we haven’t exactly found a way out.”
“Lily is correct. There does not appear to be an end to this dungeon,” Asten said. “But it might be possible for you to be able to see something I cannot. Would you agree, Hassan?”
A meaningful glance passed between the two men, but I couldn’t figure out what they might have meant, and honestly, I was too tired to care. Dr. Hassan struggled to his feet with Asten’s help.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said cryptically.
Slowly turning in a circle as he perused the darkness, Dr. Hassan muttered absently to himself. After a few moments, I had begun wondering if he’d hit his head on a rock and was having a mental lapse, when he turned to us and said, “I am afraid we are trapped in an oubliette.”