Read Chapter 15: Fragment

The maintenance module hummed with the low thrum of dying batteries. Jack sat cross-legged on the grated floor, the data slate balanced on his knee, his good hand swiping through Voss's encrypted files with the desperate speed of a man racing a timer he couldn't see.

The entity's pull had faded to a dull ache behind his eyes, like a headache that hadn't quite decided to arrive. His left hand rested in his lap, the glove still on, the mark beneath it throbbing in a rhythm that almost matched his heartbeat. Almost.

He'd cracked Voss's personal files two minutes ago. The encryption had been simple—she'd used her daughter's birthday, and the date was in her personnel file. What he found behind it made his stomach clench.

*Not a microbe. Not a parasite. A consciousness.*

The first document was raw field notes, timestamped eight weeks before the station went dark. Voss's voice came through in shorthand fragments, the kind of notes a scientist took when she was too excited to write complete sentences.

*Core sample 7-B retrieved at 4,200m. Structure resembles fossilized neural tissue. Carbon dating places origin at approximately 3.7 billion years. Pre-Cambrian. Pre-everything.*

*Initial assays show no metabolic activity. No reproduction. No response to stimuli. Declaring inert.*

*Day 14: Activity detected. Low-frequency oscillation. 0.3 Hz. Similar to theta wave patterns observed in mammalian sleep states.*

Jack scrolled faster.

*Day 21: The oscillation has synchronized with the station's power grid. Cannot determine if accidental or intentional. Reyes suggests interference. Reyes suggests a lot of things.*

*Day 30: I exposed a culture sample to synthetic neural medium. The oscillation increased by 400%. It's feeding. Or communicating. Or both.*

The notes grew more fragmented after that, the handwriting in the accompanying scans becoming looser, more hurried.

*Day 44: It's not alive. Not in any sense we understand. It's a recording. A fossilized consciousness that cannot die because it refused to. It absorbed minds to survive its own rebirth. This is not infection. This is absorption. Integration. The self does not survive contact.*

Jack paused, his finger hovering over the next entry. The hum of the module seemed louder now, pressing against his ears.

*Day 51: The crew is showing elevated neural activity. Synchronization patterns emerging across unrelated individuals. The entity is building something. A network. A gestalt. It wants to rebuild itself using our minds as components.*

*Day 52: I've isolated a possible blocker. A synthetic peptide sequence that disrupts the synchronization frequency. Tested in vitro with promising results. In vivo testing requires a live subject. The ethics committee would never approve. The ethics committee is currently humming along to a frequency I cannot hear.*

Jack read the next line three times before it sank in.

*I am going to test it on myself.*

Voss's next entry was timestamped the day before the station went silent.

*The blocker works. I felt the connection fray, just for a moment. Just enough to know it's possible. But the entity noticed. It's learning. Adapting. It seals sections off when I get close to the sample. It's funneling me. It knows what I'm doing.*

*I've hidden the formula in the last place it won't think to look. In the body. Tanaka's body. The failed integration. It discarded him because he couldn't hold the connection. But his tissue still remembers the frequency. I've encoded the peptide sequence into his cellular structure.*

*If you're reading this, Jack, I'm sorry. I didn't mean for you to have to carry this. But you're the only one who came. The only one who didn't listen to the song.*

*Find Tanaka. Cut into his chest. The fourth rib, left side. The bone marrow contains the sequence. You'll need to synthesize it—the equipment in the medical bay can do it, but you'll need a clean power source and a steady hand.*

*And Jack—*

The next words were underlined so hard the stylus had torn the screen.

*THE ENTITY LIES WITH WRITTEN WORDS AND FAMILIAR FACES. TRUST NOTHING YOU READ UNLESS IT BLEEDS.*

Jack sat back. The slate's screen flickered, battery nearly dead. His left hand twitched beneath the glove, fingers curling into a fist without his permission.

He looked down at the hand. The movement had been involuntary. Automatic. Like a muscle memory belonging to someone else.

He pulled off the glove.

The mark had spread.

It climbed past his wrist now, a latticework of fine lines that pulsed faintly with that same 0.3 Hz rhythm he'd been feeling for hours. They had reached his forearm, tracing patterns that looked almost like neural pathways. Like a map of something trying to connect.

He thought about the crew. About Reyes, alone somewhere in the station. About Keane's voice crackling over the damaged comm, insisting they weren't infected. They were remembering.

Voss's notes confirmed it. The entity didn't attack minds. It *absorbed* them. Rebuilt itself from the memories, the thoughts, the selves of everyone it touched. The crew weren't being consumed.

They were being collected.

And Voss had found a way to stop it. A peptide sequence hidden in the marrow of a dead biologist's chest. Tanaka had been transformed, failed, discarded. His body had been left in that storage room where Jack and Reyes had found it.

Jack hadn't taken anything from the corpse. He'd been too focused on the keycard in Tanaka's hand, on the escape route it offered. He'd left the body behind.

The entity's pull intensified suddenly, a sharp mental tug toward the munitions deck below. Toward the fail-safe. Toward the explosives that would collapse the Scar and sever the entity from whatever ancient relic sustained it.

*Trust nothing you read unless it bleeds.*

Voss had written that. But Voss had also written that the entity lies with written words. If the entity could imitate familiar faces, could it imitate familiar handwriting? Could it have corrupted Voss's notes after she was taken?

Jack stared at the screen. The last line glowed in the dim light.

*The formula is in Tanaka's body.*

The medical bay was on Deck 3, forty meters above the munitions deck. He'd been heading down, toward the fail-safe, toward Reyes's plan. But if Voss's notes were genuine—if the blocker existed—then there was an alternative to severing the crew. An alternative that didn't require killing them all.

The left hand twitched again. This time, it moved against his will, reaching toward the slate as if to knock it from his grip.

Jack grabbed the wrist with his good hand and held it still.

“No,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice steadied him.

The entity didn't want him to find the blocker. It wanted him to destroy the fail-safe, or to give in and join the gestalt. It had been funneling him this whole time, sealing corridors, ghosting messages, pulling him toward the site where the transformation was strongest.

But if Voss had found a way to block the connection—if the peptide sequence was real—

Then Jack had a choice. Continue to the munitions and kill every transformed crew member, including Reyes and Voss if they were still alive. Or climb back up to Deck 3, dig into a dead man's chest, and hope the monster wasn't lying to him through a dead scientist's words.

The comm link crackled. Static. Then a voice, thin and distant, nearly drowned by interference.

“Jack? Jack, are you there?”

Reyes. Her voice was ragged, raw.

“I'm here,” he said.

“Don't go to the munitions.” Her words came in gasps, like she'd been running. “I've been trying to reach you—the entity's been blocking channels, but I used an emergency buoy—Jack, I found something. In Voss's lab. Behind a false panel.”

Jack's grip tightened on the slate. “What is it?”

“A sample. A live sample of the peptide blocker. She didn't test it on herself. She hid it.” A pause. “But it's on Deck 4. The old medical bay. And there's someone there. Someone who's not transformed. A tech named Sam. He's hiding, and he says Voss is alive.”

The static swelled, nearly swallowing her words.

“He says she's in the sealed section. The cold storage unit. She locked herself in three days ago. He says she knows how to sever the connection. She knows how to save them all.”

The transmission cut out.

Jack sat in the humming dark, his left hand trembling against his will, the mark pulsing in rhythm with a consciousness older than life itself. Voss had hidden the formula in a corpse. Reyes said she'd found a sample in the lab. Sam said Voss was alive in cold storage.

Too many sources. Too many voices. The entity lied with written words and familiar faces. But it also lied with coincidence, with opportunity, with the shape of rescue that appeared exactly when he needed it.

He looked down at the slate. At Voss's final warning, scratched into the screen with desperate force.

*Trust nothing you read unless it bleeds.*

Tanaka's body wasn't far. The storage room was on this level, just down the flooded corridor. He could be there in five minutes. The chest was exposed—the corpse had been torn open by the failed transformation.

The fourth rib. Left side.

He pulled the glove back on, flexing his fingers. The mark resisted, the skin tight and warm beneath the fabric.

Then he stood, gathered the slate, and moved toward the access hatch that would take him back up. Not down toward the munitions.

Not yet.