Read Chapter 12: The Lost

They came out of the water like things born from it. Not swimming, not wading—just rising, bodies slick with the same iridescent sheen that now painted Jack’s own forearm. Six of them. Maybe seven. He counted faces he recognized from the mess hall, their eyes no longer blank but bright, focusing on him with a terrible clarity that the communion had lacked.

Reyes gripped his arm, her breath catching. “They were supposed to be topside.”

“They moved faster than we did.” Jack pulled her toward the junction ladder, but a shape dropped from the pipework above, landing between them and the rungs. The woman’s mouth opened, and a sound came out—not speech, but a harmonic hum that vibrated in Jack’s teeth. His mark flared hot, a pulse of warmth crawling up his wrist.

He swung the pry bar before the thought finished forming. The woman folded sideways, her skull connecting with the bulkhead with a wet crack. She didn’t scream. She just twitched, then stood again, slower, her head at an angle that made Jack’s stomach turn.

“They don’t feel pain,” Reyes hissed. She was already backing toward the service tunnel, her eyes wide. “Voss’s notes said the network dampens individual sensation.”

The group advanced in unison. No one broke stride. No one flinched when Jack swung again, catching a man across the jaw. The man’s head snapped but his feet kept moving, arms reaching, fingers brushing Jack’s chest plate before Reyes yanked him sideways through an open hatch.

The door was heavy, rusted. They threw their weight against it, and it slammed with a clang that echoed through the flooded junction. Something thudded against the other side. Then another. Then a rhythm, synchronized, until the metal began to groan.

“Lock,” Jack gasped.

Reyes fumbled, slapped a manual latch. It caught with a click. The pounding continued, steady, patient; then stopped. Silence filled the shaft. Jack pressed his ear to the cold steel and heard nothing but the drip of water and the distant thrum of the station’s failing heart.

They moved blind through the access crawlspace, Reyes navigating by memory, Jack trusting her because trusting anything else meant trusting the voice that whispered his brother’s name. When she stopped, they were in a narrow corridor lined with locked storage. She tried a handle—open. She pulled Jack inside and sealed it behind them.

The room was small. Shelving units held faded boxes labeled with supply codes, their contents long expired. A motion light flickered on, harsh and white, and Jack saw the body.

It was a man, strapped to a maintenance table in the center of the room. His suit had been removed, his chest bare. The iridescence had consumed him—a filigree of shimmering veins that spread from his sternum to his throat, his jaw, and over his eyes, which were closed, though the lids themselves carried that same faint glow.

But he was dead. Jack knew it from the stillness, the way the chest didn’t rise. A transformation that had failed. Or perhaps one that had been rejected.

Reyes circled the body, her flashlight playing over the table’s edge. “This is the other biologist. Tanaka. Voss said he volunteered for the first exposure.”

“So this is what happens when it doesn’t take.”

“Or when it takes too fast.” Reyes paused, and her voice came quieter. “Look at the hands.”

Jack followed her light. Tanaka’s right hand was clenched around something—a rectangle of black plastic. A keycard. The kind that opened the underwater vehicle bay.

“He was trying to leave,” Reyes said softly.

Jack pried the card from the dead man’s fingers. The motion made the wrist of his gloved hand ache, and he saw the sheen had climbed past his knuckles, reaching now toward the second joint. The numbness was no longer just skin; it had stiffened his tendons, making his grip clumsy. He flexed the hand and felt something beneath the flesh twitch that wasn’t his muscle.

“It’s getting worse,” he said, not looking at Reyes.

She was silent for a moment. Then: “Can you still dive?”

“I can still move my fingers.”

That wasn’t an answer. They both knew it.

Jack examined the card. The magnetic strip was scratched but intact. The bay was two levels up, accessible via the main elevator banks—but the transformed crew had claimed those corridors. The service crawlspaces ran parallel, but many were flooded.

“There’s an air duct,” Reyes said, reading his hesitation. “Runs from the supply room two doors down straight into the vehicle bay’s maintenance loft. It’s tight, but you’re built narrow.”

“We’re both going.”

She shook her head. “I’m not. The network doesn’t just physical—it hooks into your thoughts, your memories. I watched it take the mess hall crew because they opened their minds trying to fight it. I can keep my walls up, but in that duct, with the water pressure and the dark, you’ll be fighting three battles at once. You don’t need a second voice in your head.”

Jack felt the mark pulse, as if listening. He looked at Tanaka’s body, at the peaceful stillness of his face. There was no horror there—only release.

“The entity, does it keep him? After death?”

Reyes was quiet. “I don’t know. Maybe it just lets them go.”

He tucked the keycard into the chest pocket of his suit. “Then we make sure it lets the rest go too.”

He moved for the door, forcing his stiff hand to grip the latch. Behind him, Reyes spoke, her voice barely above a whisper: “Jack. If you see Voss—whatever’s wearing her face—don’t listen. Don’t read what it writes. Just remember it lies.”

He looked back at her. In the harsh light she seemed smaller, a woman holding herself together with borrowed confidence. He wanted to say something true, something that would make the silence between them less final. But the thud had resumed in the corridor beyond—distant, but approaching.

He opened the door and slipped into the dark.