Reaching up, squinting in the glare. His head was above her now, halfway obscuring a potlight above. The resulting halo jamming itself painfully into her dilated pupils. Their arms came together, palm to wrist and palm to wrist. Hoisting her up, a grunt escaped the narrow space between his lips, clashing itself against the tunnel’s languid silence. They crouched there for a moment, looking down the wall from which they had just come.

The floor and carapace tunnel below was bathed in yellow light from low energy bulbs in the pot lights lining the walls throughout. Stark silhouettes of light, stood static, projected from bulbs sitting deep within plastic hoods, monks in prayer. The patches of empty blackness in between were restless. Seething and undulating, through some trick of the eye or psychological manifestation of fear.

To the right of them on the platform was a black ladder. That flat matte plastic look of budget fab materials, water-off dry and sticking out like a sore thumb from the ancient stone walls around it.