Seeing Constitution struggle to stand, I offered my hand again before remembering how silly that gesture was. Her armor's joints emitted shrill creaks, jammed up with salt.

  "Your hand," I said. It still looked horrible, criscrossed with Pang venom and beginning to drip blood again.

  "It's not healing?"

  Her eyes found somewhere else to look. "Hit my limit," she said. "For now." She scanned the horizon, rapidly orienting herself.

  We stood on a particularly rocky beach in the twilight. The sea was boisterous, but not violent now. In the far distance I could see the peak of the ridiculously named Strongmont through troughs in the currents. Her head stopped, and I followed her gaze to the great floating trapezoid over the horizon.

  "I thought we were in a tower," I said.

  "In a way," she allowed.

  "But it's all... labyrinthine. Is that the word?"

  "Not my area, hon," she said.

  "I'm sorry for your whole, uh, problem. If you hadn't suffered for me, would you be better now?"

  She waved me off. "Don't worry your little head about me," she said.

  "Your selflessness is not healthy, Connie."

  She held a conciliatory hand out. "You just focus on your job, okay? And let me do mine."

  "That's your job? Taking care of me? And Strength?"

  "Taking care of everybody," she said. "For him, ya know." She gestured upward, and all around. "I like my job."

  "So then... everyone *is* a part of him? Even the crew of the *Barbaric*? Even the captain? And the passengers? Even that hot dark elf?" Oops. Her eyebrows went up, and she grinned a little. It felt like being busted by a friend's mother, watching something we shouldn't have been watching. Embarrassed, I kept going, in an attempt to chang ethe subject as quickly as possible. "What part? Us, I get. What are the sailors? What is the kid? His conscience? What's the captain? His circulatory system?"

  "Not everything is like that," she said. "Everything is part of him. Yes. How could it not be? But what part... that is personal, individual, ya know. You can't just ask people that stuff. It's rude."

  "Why? How?"

  "'Oh, hello there Mr. Guy I Just Met,'" she impersonated a straw man. "'What value do you contribute to the world, hmm?' You see? Not very friendly."

  It was a fair point.

  "So did we save the people or not? What happened to the hit point?"

  She shook her head. "I don't know. I'm sure Strength is fine. We'll ask him back at the Observatory. The people... the rest will be okay. It looks like it's all settling down now, ya know." She was right. The waves were calming, ushering in a gentle night. I could see the lights of rescue ships heading toward the disaster site on the sea. Hopeful gulls broke away from the cloud to bother the newcomers.

  "It's time to go," she said. She produced the vial I had been seeking when we were both about to drown.

  "WHERE DID YOU HAVE THAT?" I demanded.

  She paused, a question on her face. "I was looking for it when you were drowning." I felt an overwhelming need to continue explaining. "I wasn't, like, going through your..." I cleared my throat. "I was trying to save us. You were unconscious. I thought, whatever it was, it might help."

  "It wouldn't have," she said. "Probably. Not in the water, anyway." She thumbed the cork out with a pop of suction, and emptied it onto the sand.

  Unnaturally orange smoke began to billow up, a freakishly high-visibility hue, like construction worker orange. The opaque pillar reached up into the air.

  It was an incongruously modern-looking sight. The smoke hissed with a chemical reaction I couldn't guess at, filling the air with a nostril-searing smell that reminded me of Fourth of July fireworks.

  "So."

  She glanced at me, her unharmed and gauntleted fist on a hip. "Ya?"

  "They're sending someone for us? How long does it-"

  Blinding starlight washed out sand and sight. The opaque aura squished Connie in to a thin crack of darkness, then became all. It was too much to look at, even through closed eyes.

  It lasted a moment. Green and purple spots refused to blink away immediately, gradually giving way to dressed stone and an array of storage compartments--the ready room.

  Nobody was there to greet us. Constitution began tugging at strips and loosening ties that held greaves against her legs. Plates fell and rang against the stone floor with the sound of cymbals. She slapped a gauntlet against her back and grunted, still extending her wounded arm safely away.

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  "Hon," she said. "Would you mind, ah..."

  "Mind what?" I said, feeling blood rush into my cheeks.

  "There's a release loop just... right out of reach here. If I had both hands... but..." She tinked at the plated small of her back with a massive metal thumb. I had no doubt Teo knew every term for every piece of armor here, but I had nothing.

  I could see the loop, a wound strip of soggy twine, but it was tucked back under the armor. "I'll have to, y'know."

  "It's fine," she laughed. "We're all colleagues here."

  "Okay," I said, an slid my hand in, angling my fingers to try and get traction on the little loop. Her back straightened, shoulders snapping back in surprise.

  "Your hands are cold!"

  "Sorry! Sorry about that."

  "Just get it."

  I fished for leverage, found it, and tugged outward. Something came untied, and the rear plate sagged. "There we go," she said, shivering. "If you'll just... pull that off, I don't think I can get the front, either."

  I did my best to stay professional while helping this titaness out of her battle gear, clearing my throat approximately once every thirty seconds, and remembering with some small amount of relief, that she was clothed beneath.

  "What about your hurt arm?" I said, once we'd gotten everything off that we could.

  Air whistled through her lips. "I'll handle this in my chamber."

  "You've got a chamber?" I asked. "Do I get a chamber?"

  "If you think you'll be here a while," she said.

  I had no idea and no response.

  With her one good arm, she dragged the tangle of armor scraping over the cold stones in the floor, into the echoing hall.

  "Can I help you with that?" She was such a pitiful sight, bearing her own burden--and, really mine, and Strength's, perhaps. Who knew what injuries had been meant for whom, but they all wound up carved into Constitution's body.

  "You're sweet," she said, not even considering it. "But no, I've got this." She had to bend forward and drag sideways like a crab, cautiously walking ass-first with her bad arm stuck out like a hitchhiker. She thwacked it on a corner as she retreated, and I sucked in air at my teeth.

  "You good?"

  "I'm good," she creaked, before vanishing around a corner.

  "Okay," I called after her, several long seconds after she was gone. "I'll just, y'know." My voice bounced back to me, the acoustics harsh against stone. "Look for... something."

  I was pretty sure I could find my way back, anyway. I was wrong, of course, because I didn't understand then that the insides of the ziggurat constituted an actual labyrinth, a maze meant to prevent easy traversal by outsiders and punish the curious. I'm not sure how whoever built it expected anyone to get here anyway, with the airborne slab floating and detached from anything terrestrial.

  It hadn't been long when I'd followed Strength from the Observatory to the outer walk, and from the outer walk to the ready room. At least, that's how I remembered it. It had been something like left, right, anotehr right, past the multilevel chamber, then... something. I did not remember it terminating in a dead end with no doorways. Who builds that? Literally user-hostile design, right there. Teo wouldn't do that to us, of course, not unless it we were meant to find the dead end and be intimidated.

  Oh.

  Well, fine. I was lost, well and truly. I could handle this a couple of ways. I could either just try to feel my way through and see where I wound up, or be systematic about it and take every left turn. It might take forever, yes, many times longer than the actual distance I needed to go, but it was about ruling out dead ends and wrong turns. If you only took left (or only took right) turns, you had to wind up somewhere eventually. Right?

  So I tried it. I saw passages and turnbacks that I knew I would shortly be passing again. I put out my left hand and dragged my fingers across the cool stone. With no hard decisions to make, my mind wandered even more freely than my body.

  Who was Chris, and why did he disappear? Who the hell was the octopus shapeshifter made of light? These are thoughts one hopes not to be confronted with in the near-pitch dark, lost in a maze.

  My eyes defocused and I shuffled awkwardly, occasionally stopping when I thought I could hear something. At one point, there was a rumble of bass through the stones above. At another, I was certain I caught the complaint of iron plate armor against the floor. Was I close to Constitution's quarters? How badly did I not want to accidentally walk in on her personal space after everything?

  Indulging in that sense of embarrassment opened the floodgates. The memory of where I was, which I didn't technically understand, washed over me, spiking my anxiety and making the hairs on my arms stand on end. Not only should I not be here, but I shouldn't be who I was. And to top that all off, I was the least powerful Attribute or whatever we were calling that, and had had to be saved several times by the ones who could actually do things. I should have been a demigod like Constitution and Strength, but instead I was a guy who couldn't find the on/off button for a lantern.

  That gave me an idea. The lantern had clued me in on information unavailable to others, perhaps. I wonder if it would lead me through a maze?

  I opened my hand, palm toward the floor, and closed it around the ring of light. An aura flooded the close space here, bringing daylight to the dark passage.

  One direction still looked as forbidding as the other. The lantern's glow brought me names, readouts of durability of the individual stone. It highlighted the structural weakness of the mortar in between, even listed that some of the stones were original and others added during successive works.

  I dismissed them. "I don't care about that," I whispered, sibilants lashing back from hard corners. "Where do I go?"

  The lantern's glow did not respond, other than to dim slightly to a more manageable, diffuse glow that did not hurt my eyes. Shadows moved as I moved. At the game table, this would have been the part where I said something like "Isn't there a Plato thing about this?" and Teo put his face in his hands.

  Well, at least I could see. Would it hurt Strength to light up these dumb orbs that dotted the hallways?

  A sort of anti-flow state settled over my mind, as one bad feeling invited another. Memories came to me unbidden. Getting yelled at during my pointless summer job. Failing Psych 1101 and having to tell my mom. Her and the current year's stepdad getting into an argument about it right in front of me. All the things I wanted to control, and couldn't.

  "Why can't they just put signs up to the Observatory?" I asked.

  As if in response, the lantern dimmed significantly in all directions but one. A right turn in the T-junction ahead of me brightened. It was unmistakable.

  "Yeah?" I asked. "Is that it? I just didn't say where I was trying to go, huh? Smart-ass." I wasn't sure if I was mad at the lantern, or the labyrinth itself, or an array of other concerns.

  It stayed consistent, a clear brightening of the direction I needed to go. Soon, I heard the sound of another person, a fast and semi-whispered "hoo, hoo, hoo." It recalled TV lamaze classes, but it was a distinctly male voice behind it, or at least very deep. Strength's, almost certainly.