Chapter 4: The Inverted Bar

The archway Sunglasses had indicated was a maw of darkness that swallowed sound. Nyx stepped through, and the world went sideways. Or rather, upside-down.

Her mind, a machine built for observation and pattern recognition, stalled for a full second, trying to process the flagrant violation of physics before her. She was standing in a cavernous, rectangular room, but the floor was a featureless expanse of dark, polished concrete stretching up into the gloom above her head. The ceiling, where she stood, was covered in scuffed, mismatched tiles. Bolted to this surface, their legs pointing uselessly toward the true ceiling, were scarred wooden tables and mismatched chairs, frozen in a tableau of a bar fight that had happened in another dimension.

And hanging down from the distant, dark concrete above, like a monstrous wooden stalactite, was the bar.

It was a magnificent, heavy thing of dark, polished mahogany, complete with a brass foot rail and liquor bottles locked into glowing, upside-down racks. People were scattered throughout the impossible space, their posture an act of defiance against gravity. Some sat cross-legged on the tiled surface Nyx stood on, nursing drinks. Others leaned against thick support pillars that ran from floor to ceiling, their presence the only stable vertical axis in the room. No one seemed to find it strange. Their nonchalance was more disorienting than the inverted furniture.

Nyx’s gaze swept the room, cold and methodical. This was another test, another part of the game Sunglasses had warned her about. A filter for the mind. Anyone who couldn't accept this, who succumbed to vertigo or disbelief, didn't belong here. She forced her equilibrium to settle, her boots feeling strangely heavy, as if magnetized to the tiles. She was looking for one thing: a pair of black sneakers with white rabbits on the heels.

They weren't here.

Disappointment was a dull, familiar ache, but it was quickly superseded by calculation. This room was a way station, an antechamber. Rabbit was deeper inside. The muffled, bone-deep thrum of a bassline vibrated through a second archway at the far end of the room, promising a greater chaos beyond. To get there, she needed to cross this space. And the only nexus of activity, the only logical place to gather information, was the inverted bar.

She started walking, her steps deliberate. It felt like walking on the ceiling of the world, a fly in a giant's house. As she neared the bar, she saw that patrons were served by a small, motorized dumbwaiter that lowered drinks from the bartenders working high above. And tending that impossible bar were two figures, moving with a silent, unnerving grace.

They were twins. Identical in every way, from their sharp, symmetrical faces to the severe black vests they wore over crisp white shirts. Their dark hair was slicked back, and their movements were a mirror image of one another. As one reached for a bottle, the other polished a glass. As one poured, the other capped a shaker. They worked without speaking, a single mind operating two bodies, their faces placid masks of professional indifference.

Nyx stopped beneath them, craning her neck to look up. One of them—it was impossible to tell which—glanced down, his expression unreadable in the dim, ambient light.

“What is your thirst?” he asked, his voice smooth and devoid of inflection.

“Water,” Nyx said. It was her standard choice in places like this. Simple, clean, hard to tamper with. A drink for someone who wanted to keep their wits about them.

The twin didn’t move. His mirrored counterpart paused his polishing and also looked down at her.

“A shallow thirst,” said the second twin, his voice identical to the first. “The river is wide, but the well is deep.”

“Does your thirst seek to quench,” the first one continued, “or to cleanse?”

It was another riddle, just like at the gate. The question of the moth and the flame. These were not bartenders; they were priests of a strange sacrament, and every order was a catechism. They were testing her intent. A thirst to quench was simple, biological. A thirst to cleanse was something more. It was a desire for change, for initiation. They were offering her a choice, though she didn't yet understand the options.

Nyx remembered the warning from Sunglasses. This whole place is a game. She was an owl, a predator. A predator doesn't just drink; it adapts to the hunting ground.

“I want to see in the dark,” she answered, her voice low and steady, pitching her words up to the inverted figures.

For a moment, there was only the sound of the distant, pounding music. The twins looked at each other, a silent, instantaneous communion passing between them. Then, the first one nodded. He took a clean, heavy-bottomed glass, plucked a single, perfectly clear cube of ice from a basin with a pair of silver tongs, and placed it inside. He then filled the glass not from a tap or a bottle, but from a simple, unmarked crystal decanter.

The dumbwaiter whirred to life, lowering the glass of water. It came to a smooth stop in front of her. It looked utterly mundane. Just water. Clear, cold, pristine. But Nyx knew, with absolute certainty, that it was a lie. This was the most dangerous thing she had encountered all night.

Her hand was steady as she took the glass. The cold of it seeped into her fingers. She brought it to her lips, the faint, clean scent of ozone and minerals reaching her. There was no going back. The shoes were in this labyrinth, and to hunt the rabbit, she had to descend into the warren. She drank.

The water was crisp and shockingly cold, with no taste at all. She drained half the glass in one long swallow and set it down. For a few seconds, nothing happened. The twins above watched her, their faces impassive. Then, the world dissolved.

It didn't begin with a woozy disorientation or a euphoric rush. It started with the sound. The muffled bass from the next room slammed into her ears with the force of a physical blow, each beat a precise, concussive thump against her sternum. It wasn't just a sound anymore; it was a texture, a landscape. She could suddenly hear the whisper of a conversation from the far side of the room as if it were spoken into her ear. She could hear the faint, high-frequency hum of the inverted lights, the soft slide of fabric as someone shifted their weight, the microscopic fizz of carbonation in a drink twenty feet away.

Then her vision sharpened. The dim light bloomed into a thousand distinct shades of gray and amber. She could see the fine web of scratches on the glass she held, the individual threads in the shirt of a man leaning against a pillar, the subtle twitch of a muscle in the jaw of one of the twins above. The air was no longer empty space but a thick medium, filled with swirling dust motes, each one a glittering, individual star in a private galaxy.

Her sense of touch ignited last. The black band on her wrist, previously just a snug weight, now pulsed with a faint, rhythmic warmth, a low-level energy that seemed connected to the beat emanating from the next room. The tiled floor beneath her boots felt alive, vibrating with a network of unseen energies. She could feel the subtle shifts in air pressure as people moved.

This wasn't a drug that dulled the senses. It was a key that unlocked them. It had recalibrated her, tuned her to the frequency of this impossible place. She had wanted to see in the dark, and the twins had granted her wish. They had given her the eyes of an owl.

With her senses screaming, the archway at the far end of the room was no longer just a dark opening. It was a wound in the fabric of the building, bleeding raw, overwhelming sensory data. She could smell it now—a complex miasma of sweat, perfume, ozone, and something else, something sharp and feral. She could feel the kinetic energy of hundreds of moving bodies, a churning, chaotic tide of heat and motion.

The Inverted Bar was just the shallow end. That archway was the drop-off into the abyss.

And somewhere in that raging sensory storm, she felt a pull. A faint, singular thread in the overwhelming tapestry. A calm point in the hurricane.

Rabbit.

Her hunt was no longer guided by sight alone. It was now a primal, intuitive chase. Nyx left the half-empty glass of water on the dumbwaiter platform, gave a curt nod to the silent twins above, and turned. She walked towards the archway, her newly sharpened senses her guide, her obsession a burning compass needle pointing straight into the heart of the frenzy. She was ready for the next level of the game.