Read Chapter 10: The Scar

The ladder ended in a narrow vertical shaft that smelled of rust and cold iron. Jack’s boots hit the grating with a clang that echoed down a corridor so dark it seemed to swallow the sound. He killed his headlamp for a moment, let his eyes adjust, and wished he hadn’t.

The walls here weren’t metal anymore. Not entirely.

A faint bioluminescent film clung to the surfaces in patches, like mold made of moonlight. It rippled as he breathed, slow and synchronized, as if the station itself had learned to breathe with him. He clicked the lamp back on and the film shrank from the beam, withdrawing into the seams like startled slugs.

Deck 7. The lowest manned level. Below this was the geological sampling bay, the drill shaft, and the Scar itself.

Jack’s palms were slick inside his gloves. The iridescent sheen on his forearm seemed darker now, a dozen shades of oil-slick purple and green beneath the bruise-colored light. He pulled the sleeve down over it, though he wasn’t sure why—there was no one left to hide it from.

He moved forward through the corridor, stepping light, every sense straining. The hum he’d felt vibrating through the deck plates for the past hour was louder here. Not a sound so much as a pressure, a bass note playing against his teeth and the soft tissue behind his sternum.

The bulkhead at the end of the hall had been welded open. Crude, but effective—someone had wanted this door to stay that way. Through it, the space opened into the sampling bay.

Jack stopped at the threshold.

It was bigger than he’d expected, a cathedral of industry built to pierce the seafloor. The central rig dominated the space, a tower of hydraulics and drill pipe that descended through a sealed borehole in the deck. The drill head itself was still in place, its massive cutting teeth dull with use, caked in sediment and something darker that might have been organic.

But the walls—the walls were the story.

The luminescent growth was everywhere now. It hung in veils from the ceiling, stretched across the equipment like a fungus that had been left to bloom for years instead of months. It pulsed in waves, rolling from the far end of the room toward the drill rig and back again, as if the chamber were the chest cavity of something breathing.

Jack’s headlamp caught the far wall, and he froze.

A containment pod stood there, its door open. The interior was lined with cryo-collars and sensor arrays, a secured housing designed to hold something the size of a basketball in suspension. The pod was empty. Not just unlocked—gutted. Cables hung loose from the housing, some of them cut, others torn.

He crossed the floor slowly, boots sticking slightly where the growth had spread too thick. The pulsing quickened as he approached the pod, and he felt a pull behind his eyes, a drowsy warmth that suggested he should sit down, rest, let go.

He bit the inside of his cheek until it bled.

The pod’s label plate was intact: *SPECIMEN ABYSSALIS—CORE SAMPLE 7-B. CONTAINMENT CLASS 4. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.*

Below it, printed in a neat hand on an adhesive strip: *Dr. E. Voss.*

Jack looked from the pod to the drill shaft. The borehole was wide enough for a man to descend if he didn’t mind the dark and the squeeze. The growth around its lip was thicker than anywhere else, a collar of organic tissue that looked almost fleshy, almost deliberate, like a throat waiting to be swallowed by something.

Then he saw the glove.

It lay crumpled at the base of the drill rig, crushed under a fallen toolbox as if it had been dropped and abandoned in a hurry. The name tag was stitched into the cuff, pale yellow lettering on dark fabric. He knelt and worked it free, the material still flexible despite the pressure.

*Dr. E. Voss.*

The glove was empty. No hand, no bones. Just a faint residue inside that shimmered in his headlamp—the same iridescence that marked his skin.

He stood, turning the glove over. There was something hard in the index finger. Something that didn’t give when he squeezed. Jack slid his own hand in and came out with a thin wad of plastic tubing, rolled tight and sealed at both ends with what looked like wax.

He held it to the light and squinted. Something dark was inside. Something that moved.

Then the light in the room shifted.

Jack spun, dropping into a crouch, the tubing clenched in his fist. The growth on the walls was brightening, rolling in a single pulse from every direction at once, converging on the drill shaft. The hum rose until it vibrated in his jaw, his temples, the marrow of his bones.

He looked down at his forearm. The iridescent patch was spreading. It crawled over his wrist now, up the back of his hand, threading toward his knuckles like lichen colonizing stone.

And he didn’t feel it.

That was the part that scared him most. Not the spread—it was that he hadn’t felt anything at all. No itch. No burn. No sensation of foreign matter breaching his skin. He’d been carrying this thing for hours, maybe longer, and his body had simply accepted it.

*Your brother is waiting below.*

Snake’s voice. Charlie’s voice. Voss’s voice. They were all the same voice down here, weren’t they? The station spoke with a thousand mouths but one mind, and Jack was beginning to understand that he wasn’t crawling toward it.

He was being pulled.

But the glove was cold evidence in his palm. Voss had been here, had opened the containment pod, had dropped the glove when something went wrong. There was a story in that, a sequence of events that had turned a scientific expedition into a tomb. If he could read it, maybe he could find the flaw, the break, the way out.

Jack pocketed the tubing and looked around the bay once more. The growth had dimmed again, retreating into sullen patches along the ceiling. The drill shaft waited, its dark circle like an open eye.

He moved to the edge and looked down.

The shaft descended maybe twenty meters before opening into a wider chamber—the excavation site where the core sample had been cut from the seafloor. He could see the glow from below, soft and green, pulsing in a rhythm that felt familiar in a way that made his stomach turn.

It matched his heartbeat.

Jack grabbed the maintenance rail and began to descend.

The walls of the shaft pressed close, and the growth here was more organized—ribbed, almost muscular, like the inside of a throat. He didn’t touch it. He didn’t need to. Every few feet he checked his arm and found the mark spreading further, faster now, the sensation of his own skin betraying him.

He dropped the last few meters onto the floor of the excavation chamber and killed his lamp.

The Scar wasn’t a scar at all.

It was a wound, yes—a broad excavation where the sampling equipment had torn into the seafloor—but the growth had colonized it completely, filling the chamber with a web of tissue that pulsed and shimmered with its own internal light. In the center, where the drill had punched deepest, the tissue formed a shape that was almost organic, almost human, a mound that rose and fell with the same breathing rhythm Jack had felt through the deck plates.

His headlamp came back on without his permission.

Not his headlamp. His skin.

The iridescence on his arm had spread to his shoulder, and it was glowing—softly, warmly, like a child’s nightlight. He watched, detached, as the pattern spread across his chest, his neck, blooming beneath his jaw.

Somewhere above him, in the station proper, a voice called down through the shaft.

*“Jack.”*

It was his brother’s voice.

And for the first time since he’d descended, Jack felt the desire to answer it.