• After a dozen years—twelve long, cold, bitter years spent digging around in the dirt of a long-dead civilization for scraps of worthless material—Amery Neilson had almost made one single, crucial, fatal mistake. For all his knowledge and experience, and for all his efforts to distill caution and preservation skills in those that looked up to and respected him, he—the Amster—had almost just now overlooked the most basic of safety hazards. If such a thing had happened—if Amery had allowed himself to be tripped up by one single tiny mistake such as this—his death would not only be painful, but embarrassing, too.

    Luckily, Amery had avoided stepping on hollow ice. He hadn’t avoided it because of any due precautions that he should have taken. No, Amery had merely tripped and fell short of it, while his tool pouch flew on ahead, landing on, breaking, and falling through the ice to a place unknown. With the tool pouch, his rations, his radio, a back-up flash torch, and the entire mission data had vanished as well. Now Amery was trapped in this cold, hostile building.

    His partner Brigit happened to be twelve floors above him. She would not come and get him just because he had been stupid enough to lose his survival equipment. This was how many-a-rookie recruit perished in their first year on the job; a twelve-year vet like Amery had to now work up the initiative and the ingenuity required to escape alive and intact. His reputation was already irrevocably tarnished, but maybe by showing the rookies how to follow-up such an error safely would keep him in the blue.
    Covered in a thin layer of soft snow from the fall, Amery began to brush himself off with thickly gloved hands. He already felt colder than just a few minutes before. The flash torch that he hadn’t lost was now spewed across the floor, directing its powerful beam of light uselessly into an empty corner.

    Careful of any other iced-over sections of flooring, Amery slowly made his way to the flash torch and retrieved it. A quick examination proved that the device was hardy as ever, and without a scratch. Brushing the lens only served to add more snow, and not to clear it as Amery had hoped.
    A more careful examination of his surroundings gave Amery his bearings back. Thus oriented, he carefully returned to where he had been standing before he’d fallen.

    Amery was standing near the center of a square room, facing the door he’d intended to go through earlier. Along one side of the room, buried by a pure wall of snow, rectangular windows admitted no light. Similarly, the single light fixture on the ceiling above had burnt out or otherwise lost power. The floor was concrete, with whatever carpeting or floor material that had once been there now rotted away and decomposed. The walls and ceiling were concrete as well, and in some sections showed the steel beam supports that rested within. The walls, floor, and ceiling all appeared dark gray, because paint had long-ago weathered away, and there was a decided lack of bright light.

    Now, focusing the flash torch more closely on the ground before him, he saw the telltale signs of ice. When exploring old, semi-collapsed, buried-beneath-the-snow buildings like Amery was doing, water from burst pipelines could more than likely have frozen over deceptively innocuous-looking floors. What the ice could hide at times, were the holes, cracks, or otherwise lack-of-flooring that spelled death traps for all but the weariest of excavators.

    Amery had walked into something like that. His fast reflexes, he was forced to conclude, had been what had saved him from walking directly out onto the ice. Instead, he’d thrown his feet back and tripped in place, sending equipment flying and giving his hands a bruise that would show up nastily in the morning.

    Behind him, the doorway he had come through beckoned like a panic route to safety. That only led to the elevator shaft, Amery knew, because he had climbed down it with his tools to get inside the building. His only hope was to find a set of climbable stairs.

    No, he told himself. There could be any number of ways back out of the building, if he had the patience to find them. Since the entire building was under a hundred feet of ice and snow or more, he couldn’t very well poke his head out of the window and yell for help.

    Amery grew silent as the floor beneath him groaned. Not directly beneath him, he realized, but possibly two floors below—Unless, of course, sound was just traveling around. Another groan emitted from the floor, and Amery started a cold sweat. It could just be his own weight, he knew. This structure hadn’t had any shifts in weight for over a hundred years, easily more. He was disrupting it. But Amery was sure that he hadn’t shifted his weight to cause that first groan….

    At any rate, going forward was impossible. The floor here had deteriorated away, somehow, and all that was left was fragile ice. So, holding his last flash torch steady, Amery backtracked into the previous room. It was a restroom, and he had broken through the wall with a pickaxe to get through. The pickaxe was possibly deeper in the earth now than any man would ever go.

    Cracked tile covered the wall and tile-like linoleum blanketed the floor. A pair of bathroom stalls lined one side of the room. Equally disused, the same number of sinks lined the opposite wall. If there had been mirrors in this restroom, they had been long since removed. The ceiling light fixture, like the one in the floorless room and like all the others in the buried structure, was out.

    Amery proceeded back into the room before this one.
    Now, he was surrounded by junk. Desks, filing cabinets, overturned chairs, plastic pens, computer accessories, the occasional shoe, and the contents of many waste paper baskets littered the floor. Paper had deteriorated long ago into nothingness, but most everything else was still around.

    Earlier, speaking into his recorder, Amery had noted how the remains gave the appearance of a hasty escape by a large mass of people. The profound quietness of everything was still biting deep into his bones, more than the ravenous cold ever could.

    Ignoring the other bathroom and the door that led to the hallway, and thus to the empty elevator shaft, Amery walked along a different wall, making sure to skirt around objects instead of tripping over them. The powerful beam of his flash torch swept slowly across his field of vision. Amery was jumpy.

    He came across a few separate office rooms, but found nothing of interest in any of them. Desks, filing cabinets, and similar things were all present, but empty. Amery did make a mental note to come back and possibly snag one of the computers, after he’d found a way out. They weren’t much good now, but there was always the chance that Kendall could dissect one for a part or two back at home base, later.

    Amery heard another groan. This time, it had very distinctly come from the hall he had left alone. He felt the hairs of his neck rise up cold, and was not consciously aware of holding his breath in or of standing up on his toes. A dead quiet remained, gloomily complimenting the dark atmosphere. Hesitantly at first, Amery slowly raised his right hand. The light followed, illuminating the empty doorway thirty meters away, and the back wall of the hallway behind it.

    Leaving it to face the doorway and illuminate it, Amery set the flash torch down on a filing cabinet. Now free-handed, he crept around the nearest support column, stepped carefully over spewed debris, and was soon standing near the illuminated doorway, just out of the light. Amery was being paranoid, he knew, but then he was just childish like that.
    Reaching for his spare flash torch, Amery suddenly remembered that it, along with his food, was gone. He didn’t even have a pickaxe to wield in self-defense.

    This is a very stupid idea, Amery told himself succinctly, but I won’t turn my back to walk away, either.

    Thus committed, Amery summoned up his courage very briefly, before taking a breath and entering the frame of the light. He dutifully poked his head through the doorway, looked left, looked right, and retracted out of the hallway. Amery had seen nothing new; only what had been in the hallway earlier. Not convinced, he wanted to look farther down the hall. But to even do that, Amery would need to retrieve his flash torch from across the room.

    The solution presented itself as a mirror, setting on the floor nearby and propped up against the wall. It was small and square. Amery snagged it, and then entered the hallway. Holding the mirror close to his chest with both hands, he slowly turned until the mirror began to reflect the bright beam of light down one side of the hallway. This worked only half as well as Amery had figured it would. But he could just tell that nothing was in the hallway—in this direction.

    He turned his head, first, then followed by the rest of his body and the mirror. In Amery’s peripheral vision, the hall became dark, while ahead of him, the other direction was vaguely illuminated. Once again, Amery found nothing extra in the hallway. He blinked and sighed, frowning and disappointed. Obviously, his search had been going to prove fruitless all along; now this expectation was fulfilled.
    Amery retreated to where he had set the flash torch. It was still setting exactly where it had been left, shining on and framing the empty doorway into the hall.

    The evidence of rapid, panicked escape from the building once again inserted itself into Amery’s mind. He pushed the thoughts away, but they pushed back. Without warning, Amery suddenly jerked back, nearly dropping the flash torch again. Apparently, it had been for nothing; he must be getting even jumpier than before.
    Turning, Amery continued his search of the closed office rooms.



    Some eight minutes later, an escape route had become clear; Amery would have to climb the inside of a stairwell. This path seemed shaky at best, but no better alternative could be found.

    “Typical,” Amery muttered in a haggard sigh. His throat was beginning to feel somewhat rough; just between scratchy and sore. His voice came back to him in an echo, followed by more unnerving silence, and he then wished that he hadn’t spoken at all.

    In front of Amery, a pile of intact cardboard boxes occupied one small corner of an otherwise cleaned-out storage room. Sweeping the room with the flash torch had only revealed one other thing: the ventilation.
    Thinking, Amery moved closer to the ventilation shaft that had caught his eye. The opening was located on the ceiling, still covered by a long-rusted grate. Before he’d even reached it, Amery could tell that the shaft would be too small for his body. With tired dismissal, he then turned to examine the cardboard boxes.

    They broke apart immediately when Amery touched them. Two boxes just fell into pieces, leaving behind large contents of paper and files. Other boxes would probably contain similar things, so Amery chose to ignore them.

    It was time to go. Amery turned to leave the room, and backtracked to the stairwell nearby. It was located in the same hall that connected with the elevator shaft, but those two methods of descent were nearly on opposite sides of the building.

    The stairwell was square in shape and, unlike the rest of the building, not gray in color. The actual stairs were a very faded light green, and the handrail was metallic and rusted to a dark orange. The stairs revolved around a large central pillar which made jumping and falling to the death impossible.