On one hand, that discovery relieved him a bit. He no longer had to guess whether Gaudemunda would survive or where to look for the fix. One mystery down.
On the other hand, a new problem: what happens if another cage comes down? Is Noah supposed to rescue every captive until the energy bill crushes him? And what if each rescued soul plays some crucial role in the parts of the cavern that he hasn’t uncovered yet?
Thinking that over and over, Noah kept hauling buckets up the stairs. Gaudemunda dutifully pumped them full, but her help was mostly symbolic. She couldn’t even budge an empty bucket on her own.
When the work was done and the tablet chimed its hundred-percent jingle, Noah finally felt the whole routine had taken too long. Much longer than he liked. It felt like a warning: move while the burden is still manageable. To hell with the cage and its inmates. He’d already spent over a month here; plenty of people had probably been liquefied in that time—he just couldn’t notice until he’d unlocked the black doors. And now that Gaudemunda was free, maybe it was time to open the other set of doors and see what lay beyond. Even if danger waited there. He had a partner now. And a butcher’s hook.
“Are you all right?” Gaudemunda asked, tentative.
Only then did Noah realize he’d been staring at her for almost a minute, plotting his next move. He even remembered how to feel embarrassed—almost.
“Sorry. I was… thinking what to do next,” he said quickly.
“Do you know what we’re supposed to do?”
Uh-huh. Calm down and stop running around like a headless chicken, he thought to himself.
Yes, the bucket chore had stretched to two hours, but it wasn’t the end of the world. He still had twenty-two hours—or, more precisely, twenty-one until the tablet pinged at five percent. Plenty of time to get to know Gaudemunda, and to test what she could and couldn’t do.
“First, we figure out your capabilities,” Noah said, reaching for the carrying pole and handing it to her. “Here—take this.”
She took it.
The pole didn’t fall from her hands or glue itself to the floor. Apparently, only the buckets were temperamental. She could hold the tablet, lanterns, and anything else not tied to refilling energy. In the other grotto, the butcher’s hook hadn’t felt too heavy for her either, so Noah decided to leave the tool/weapon in her care.
Gaudemunda didn’t look dangerous. If anything, she seemed too calm, given what she’d just been through. And she hadn’t been through much: woke in her own grotto, looked around, read the messages, decided to take a nap. Then Noah had woken her and immediately pulled her from a peril she barely understood. Now she waited, patiently, for him to explain.
But what could he explain? That they were inside one massive escape room and only needed to find the exit? Exit to where—back to the living world, or somewhere else entirely, full of unimaginable risks?
* * *
“Maybe… to heaven?” Gaudemunda ventured.
They were in the little room with the bed and table. Two oil lamps glowed—one on the table, one by the bed—enough to see each other’s faces. Noah sat cross-legged on the mattress; she rested on the chair. After what had happened, she didn’t want to touch the bed.
The tablet lay beside him, whispering music from some YouTube channel.
“You really think so?” Noah tilted his head. “Then this would be purgatory. Or something like it. But… isn’t purgatory under God’s jurisdiction?”
“I don’t know. I was never very religious,” Gaudemunda sighed.
Neither was Noah. Then again… what if that’s exactly why they were here? A penalty for lack of faith?
If so, a lot of things didn’t add up—like a tablet with Wi-Fi.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“There’s a snag with all these theories,” he murmured. “Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Valhalla, Gehenna, the Eternal Hunting Grounds—when you think about it, they’re just human myths. No one has seen the afterlife and come back to write the guide. If they had, you’d expect one or two places to repeat across cultures. But they don’t. Pick a few different cultures—you get a few different answers about what’s beyond. Or whether there’s anything at all.”
“You’re saying we should drop all our old assumptions?” she asked.
“At least be wary of the clichés, yeah,” Noah nodded. “Maybe all those legends are worthless, and we’ll have to discover everything from scratch. Look at the admins’ emails—they don’t call themselves angels or demons. They’re ‘Post-Mortem Administrators.’ Like they’re cracking jokes. Can’t say Christian myths are famous for their sense of humor. Islam even less.”
“That’s true,” Gaudemunda said.
They talked long enough to drift into first-name terms. When she asked about his old life, Noah shared a few harmless details—and noticed something odd: lying was hard. As if his mind had forgotten the very concept—or had lost the neural hardware that powered it.
Well… he had lost the hardware.
He could still lie, with effort, but what good is a lie when the listener sees right through it?
For the same reason, imagining hypotheticals was tough. His imagination ran on cached experience: video games, films, detective novels.
What waited behind those unopened black doors? If games were a guide, nothing good.
On the bright side, the lack of daydreams didn’t hurt his reasoning. If anything, his deductive thinking felt sharper here.
Gaudemunda, for her part, found an easier trick. When the talk turned to her life, she answered some questions honestly, and dodged the rest with a simple, “I don’t want to talk about that.” Noah suspected she’d said those words often while alive. She avoided talk of her family—especially her husband.
* * *
Later, after the talk and the excitement ebbed, Noah checked his channel. The latest video had gathered a few comments, even a couple of new faces invested in his saga. No new information, though. No surprise—why would the living know what waits after death? His plea for help was turning into a true YouTube serial.
Frustrated or not, he shot another clip. Gaudemunda was startled that it was even possible. When she heard why, she agreed to be recorded. The woman was striking on camera; Noah hoped that just showing her face would get more viewers. The interview was short—a few questions, short answers. He’d save the rest for later.
“So… what now?” she asked when they ran out of topics.
“We wait,” Noah said. “And hope nothing interrupts. In about six hours, the tablet will warn me I’m running low. We’ll refill, then arm up and try the black doors. We decide the rest based on what’s behind them.”
And pray another cage doesn’t descend with a doomed soul inside, he thought.
Noah couldn’t afford another “passenger,” not now. That’s why they stayed in the small room and not in the big-ass grotto—to see and hear nothing. He knew that was cruel. He didn’t tell Gaudemunda.
Still… he couldn’t shake the image of the cage going down.
After the mechanism finished doing its job and stopped, there was a gap—about twelve seconds—when they could have hopped back into the cage and ridden it into the lower abyss. He had no idea where it actually went. The big chains eventually stopped, and by timing, the descent wasn’t that deep—fifty meters at most. What happened next was unclear. Did the cages vanish? Return to some loading bay for the next prisoner?
Either way, it was another path to try—if every other option failed.
Watching the clock, Noah soon got the first comment on the new video, from one of the new enthusiasts:
@PrisonerNo502014 (less than a minute ago)
Pretty lady! What language is she speaking, though? I couldn’t understand a word, and auto-translate didn’t kick in. Still, the story was fun. Proceed.
Noah frowned. Didn’t understand a word? Hadn’t they been speaking English?
He remembered asking Gaudemunda his questions in English for the audience’s sake. And she had answered…
He suddenly realized he had no idea which language she’d answered in. He remembered understanding every word, every nuance—but was it English?
He opened the saved recording and hit play. The clip started with his quick recap from the big grotto. Then Gaudemunda’s segment. She looked great on screen—Noah felt a flicker of envy. Photogenic people have it easy…
The bed creaked beside him; Gaudemunda had forgotten her bed-phobia and leaned closer, frowning at the tablet.
“Was that you talking?” she asked, glancing from the screen to Noah. “But… why are you speaking English?”
Noah stared at her like she’d grown a second head—then looked down as her voice came from the speaker.
Gaudemunda wasn’t answering in English at all.
Nor in Lithuanian.
She was speaking Polish.