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ORBIT was awakened not by a sound but by an inexplicable silence. Adrenaline flooded his body and spit flooded his mouth, flavored with bile; panic without a reason consumed him. Had he slept through the lights coming on, through breakfast, the gong, everything? Production wouldn't have let him sleep in so late-- even if Si-won *would* have, he thought unkindly-- not so late that it would delay the final shoot, surely?
He opened his eyes to utter blackness. For a moment he thought he'd gone blind. It didn't *get* this dark in their living quarters. Even at the night the lights in their shared spaces were merely dimmed. But no matter how he blinked, the room was pitch black, utterly dark. He reached reflexively for his phone on the nightstand, then remembered for the millionth time that it wasn't there, that they'd all left their phones outside.
A power outage? Just his luck. If something like this had to happen, why couldn't it have happened the first night, when every room had been full and no one had been eliminated yet? Not now, when the cast had been whittled down to just himself and Si-won.
Across the hallway, somewhere, he heard a thumping fall and a strangled cry of pain. Fumbling forward, keeping one hand on the bed, ORBIT pushed aside the curtain and opened the door to his room. It was no lighter outside. "Si-won?"
"I tripped over my suitcase!" Si-won shouted through her closed door.
"I'll come to you," ORBIT called back, hanging onto the doorframe of his room with one hand, and reaching out for the railing on the other side of the walkway. It wouldn't do to charge forward and go headfirst down the stairs. "Hello?" he called out. "Set medic?" No one answered.
He could hear sounds of movement from Si-won's room as he made his way slowly towards her, hanging on to the railing or the wall at every step. Her bed creaked as she leaned on it; her suitcase shifted roughly across the floor. It helped having something to navigate towards, but it also heightened his sense that something was very wrong. He'd spent the past six days and nights on camera, always watched, never alone. Now when they *needed* someone-- where had everyone gone?
"Is this part of the game?" he muttered, then lifted his hand and rapped with his knuckles on the door of Si-won's room. If it was, he didn't like his chances. Si-won was the sort of person who easily recovered from these sorts of unexpected setbacks, leaving betrayals and mistakes behind as easily as a snake shedding its skin. ORBIT wasn't like that.
On the other side of the glass, she laughed sharply. "Come in! No-- stay there, I'll come out!"
Si-won moved silently through the room and pushed the door open without warning. He had already moved aside, but he still flinched as the airflow around him shifted, a breeze slithering over his face.
"There you are!" Si-won said breathlessly. He still couldn't see a thing. The darkness was total, as if he had a black hood over his head. Still he had a sense of her body near his, so she must be standing quite close, and he could picture her expression with startling clarity, those cold and curious eyes, that wary smile. "I woke up and I thought: it's the main match and no one woke me! I'll be late and I won't know the rules!"
"They wouldn't delay a whole day's shoot just to get a dramatic shot of you getting dressed in a hurry."
"Hm, I notice you didn't say *you'd* wake me up," Si-won said, and ORBIT startled hard, the tense muscles of his neck clenching painfully as she reached out and poked him in the chest without warning. "But of course the prize match is first. It doesn't benefit you if I'm late for that," she added, with just a hint of venom.
He didn't want to fight with her, not now, so he changed the subject. "Do you think this is part of the game?"
Si-won made a soft noise in her throat, unsure. "We've no idea what time it is. I didn't hear the gong..."
ORBIT inhaled. "Ah. Of course. 'The dog did nothing in the night time; that was the curious incident.'"
"What?" Si-won said, and then "oh, I see. It wasn't the gong that woke us--"
"It was the gong, *not* going off." The speakers all throughout the set had come on audibly, broadcast nothing but silence, then shut down before playing any sound. But even asleep, even subconsciously, he'd heard the slightest crackle of the speakers and come alert, ready to be summoned--
"I don't think it's part of the game," Si-won said, and ORBIT nodded, then felt silly, realizing she couldn't see him. "How tacky would that be! Even on 'Single's Inferno' they don't film the contestants with night-vision cameras."
ORBIT cleared his throat. "Should we try for the front door?"
"And what then? Do you think you can find your way out of the building?" Si-won said doubtfully. "Through that tangle of wires and cables...?"
"Any maze can be solved," ORBIT said firmly. "Find a wall, and follow it. Here..." He took Si-won's hand, curling it around his upper arm as they approached the top of the stairs. "Slowly. One step at a time," he said as they began their careful journey. The only sounds were the soft pads of their bare feet against the flooring.
They descended. He could smell Si-won, the scent of her hair and whatever cleanser she used on her face, a light citrus scent. Once or twice they stumbled, going down the stairs and her grip tightened, fingers pressing in sharply. He imagined how it would look when the lights came on. Little half-moons from her fingernails, the curved marks pressed into his skin like the bite of an animal. Finally they reached the bottom, the smooth floor under their feet.
"All right... the couch is this way..." Si-won said, groping for it and finding it. "This way. So, Sherlock Holmes, are there two steps or three up to the doors?"
"Three," ORBIT said confidently, then doubted himself. Were there only two? But he slid his foot forward carefully and yes, there it was, a third step. Si-won was already past him, and he heard a solid 'clunk' as she pulled at the doors, trying to open them.
"What? Do these even lock? Why would they?" Si-won tried the door handle again, rattling it.
ORBIT reached past her, his hand brushing hers, and tried as well, pulling hard. The door remained stubbornly shut. "This seems unsafe, don't you think?" he said critically. "What if there were a fire?"
Si-won went still and quiet, taking a few quick, deep breaths, and ORBIT wondered if he'd frightened her. But she just said "No. I don't smell smoke. Besides, fire alarms run on batteries. We'd hear something."
"Hm," ORBIT said, a little annoyed that he hadn't thought of that.
Si-won turned to face him again, pounding her fists theatrically on his chest. "Honestly! What a thing to say when it's already so scary!"
He exhaled, not sure how to respond. There had been times during the competitive tasks where he'd had to turn away, not look at her, try to pretend that she wasn't getting to him. But she had-- she always had. "I didn't say there was a fire. I said 'what if.'"
Si-won turned away, and he felt unbalanced, suddenly, as if he were going to take a step back and topple right off the landing. A mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam-- the Carl Sagan quote flew through his head. Would he hit the floor, or would he fall forever, the bottomless darkness swallowing him whole? He almost reached out for her again, but then he heard her lean back against the door with a soft thump and slide down it, sitting facing out into the darkness. Carefully, he eased his way down and sat next to her. His elbow touched her side, and it was enough to keep him grounded.
They waited for a very long time.
Next to him, Si-won trembled, then stilled, then trembled again. He didn't mention it. Was she just cold, or did she also sense the intangible menace waiting for them in the empty shell of this place? He didn't want to know.
"They've done research," he said quietly, "a Frenchman spent months in a cave with no daylight, no indication of outside time passing... he turned the lights on when he thought it was daytime, and turned them off again at night. His body clock shifted, his sleep-wake cycle went from eighteen up to fifty-two hours. Eventually it shifted to a twenty-six hour day."
Si-won hissed under her breath. "Science. You think there's a reasonable explanation for this?"
Of course there was, ORBIT thought but didn't say. There had to be. Perhaps the crew had all taken a break outside-- perhaps the warehouse doors were on electronic locks, so when the power cut out, they couldn't get back in. That was a simple enough explanation. He noted it down mentally and kept thinking, theorizing. What else?
Maybe this was some kind of... prank, or set-up? What if the whole show, everything so far, had been fake, all the games fake, all the struggles and conflict and betrayal just to get them in the right mindset for... whatever this was. "Could it be some kind of psychological test?"
"What would they be testing for? To see if we're scared of the dark?"
"It's just the dark," ORBIT said.
Si-won exhaled, hardly a laugh. He could picture her eyes narrowing. That slow blink of contempt when she thought you'd said something so unbelievably stupid that you couldn't really mean it, that it must be a deliberate lie. "Sure," she said. "Just the dark."
Perhaps he was dreaming. Was it possible to dream without the visual aspects? Hadn't he read about a study where vision-related electrical activity was detected even during the dreams of blind people, blind from birth? He opened his mouth to say it aloud, then shut it again. During the day it wouldn't have mattered so much, but right now-- no, he didn't want Si-won to hiss again.
"We could check to see if the fridge was restocked," Si-won said eventually. "Yu-min came down one morning and someone in the kitchen startled her. She said it was about five-thirty. If the fridge is full, then it's later than that."
"Are you hungry?" ORBIT said. Neither one of them had eaten well last night. He'd felt too sick to eat after Dong-joo left, eliminated because of his own stupid mistake. He wondered where she was right now. In a hotel, with the rest of the eliminated contestants? Or were they keeping them separated from each other, like planets hurtling solitary through the emptiness of the void?
He tried to picture a hotel room, Dong-joo's suitcase at the foot of the bed, the faint blue morning light coming in through the curtains. He blinked into the dark and the quiet and he couldn't quite picture it. Did any of that still really exist?
"I'm not hungry," Si-won said. "I'm-- I'm not hungry." She took a long, slow breath, and he could sense her turning her head to look past him, towards the fridge. She sounded as though she were trying to convince herself.
Time passed. ORBIT told himself not to count breaths to keep track of how long it had been. Then caught himself doing it anyway, and purposely cast his mind out and away to distract himself.
They were out there somewhere. Of course they were. He had lost his grip and they had spun away, all of them, out on their different parabolas, but they were all right. And where did that leave him? How could you solve for x if there were no other integers in the equation? It would be unsolvable. Just a symbol without meaning.
He could hear Si-won shifting next to him, uncomfortably, swaying her head from side to side to crack her neck. Was she cold? He wasn't even sure what she was wearing. A t-shirt and short shorts, maybe? Well, she was an actress. Of course she would want to show off her legs.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked.
She made another low noise in her throat, a dangerous hum that made his skin prickle all over, like a rattlesnake's warning.
"The villain edit."
"The-- villain edit?"
"I have to think about what happens after the game too, you know? Do you ever think about that? Do you think it's going to be easy, when they make me-- into that? When I become--" She gasped softly and stopped.
Maybe we're dead, ORBIT thought. Maybe there is a real devil's plan, and Si-won and I failed the test, and here we are. He knew how he had failed, of course, but he wasn't sure about Si-won. She hadn't wanted to talk about Seok-jin's elimination, even though there was no strategic reason to keep secrets about the prison stage any more. Had she betrayed him somehow, was that what she was worried about?
She had seemed different since coming back from prison alone-- pale, shaken but tearless. LIke a thermoplastic, hard but brittle.
"Si-won," he said, and his voice sounded dry and hoarse. How long had they been waiting here...? "About Seok-jin..."
"I don't want to talk about that!" Si-won said, raising her voice. "Not now. Especially not now!"
"Down there," he persisted, "there's a door out, isn't there? If we could--"
"No!" she said, a strangled cry. "No, you didn't-- you didn't see what's-- no."
He let the silence take him for a long while. This must be what space is like, he thought. Just emptiness... sometimes a fellow traveler moving close enough to see, just to get a glimpse of, and then swinging away again, out into the night...
Was Si-won getting farther away, or was she getting colder? She kept shifting, sliding her leg against the ground... or was she? What was that sound?
"You said you wanted to survive..."
"And I will," Si-won said. "I will," she said, her voice lower and hoarser than ORBIT had ever heard it.
He could feel her breath on his neck as she leaned in close. The darkness made it difficult to think straight. He had never been very good under pressure. He tended to make foolish mistakes.
"Your heart's racing," Si-won said softly.
"Are you absolutely sure they're not filming us?" he said in reply, his voice barely above a whisper. She was so close, and the darkness was so big, so cold and so hungry. Putting his arm around Si-won's long slack body, he bent her back and pressed his mouth to hers.
Her skin was very cold.
Her teeth were very sharp.