Read Chapter 16: The Prisoner

The water didn’t clear as Jack swam deeper. It thickened, grew warm against his faceplate, like pushing through a body of someone else’s breath. He kept his dive light low, running it across the corridor walls, and the mark on his left hand throbbed in rhythm with a pulse that wasn’t his own.

He didn’t need Voss’s notes anymore to know he was being led.

Deck 3 was nothing but flooded hallways and buckled bulkheads. The station had been built for science, not war—thin metal, cheap seals, walls that groaned when the pressure shifted. Jack kicked through a doorway that hung half off its hinges and came into a long, narrow room that hadn’t been designed for habitation. Air scrubbers, still humming. Racks of sealed medical supplies, their labels bleached illegible by saltwater. A single cot, bolted to the floor, and on the cot a body strapped down at the wrists and ankles.

Jack cut his light to a sliver. The body didn’t move.

He swam closer, weapon—a heavy pipe wrench he’d found in the maintenance module—raised, ready. The straps were frayed but taut, standard station issue, the kind you used for cargo, not people. The figure on the cot was young. Twenty-two, maybe. A thin face turned toward him, cheek pressed to the wet mattress, eyes open.

“You’re the diver,” the young man said. His voice was hoarse, almost gone, but there was a clarity in it that made Jack’s gut tighten. That was the difference, he realized. The crew he’d seen transform didn’t speak so much as repeat. This one was talking *at* him, not through him.

“Sam,” Jack said.

The young tech blinked. “You know my name.”

“Reyes told me. Through the comm.” Jack pulled the regulator from his mouth, letting his tank hang. The air here was thin, but breathable. He could talk without the mask. “She said you were hiding in the old medical bay.”

Sam tried to nod, but the straps held his head in place. “I was. This is where they brought me.” His eyes dropped to Jack’s left hand. “You’re marked.”

Jack didn’t hide it. “Most of the crew are. Some are worse than others.”

“Some are gone,” Sam said. “Some are just… listening.”

Jack moved closer. The cot was half-flooded, the boy’s jumpsuit wet and clinging to his narrow chest. There was no mark on his visible skin—no dark veining on his neck or cheeks. But that didn’t mean clean. Jack had learned that the hard way.

“Why are you strapped down?”

“Because I tried to leave.” Sam’s voice cracked. “When it started, I ran. Got all the way to the utility access before they caught me. But it wasn’t them. It was *me*.” He swallowed. “I didn’t want to go. I thought I did. But my hands—they wouldn’t follow. My feet wouldn’t follow. It was like being underwater, trying to swim up, and your brain keeps telling you the bottom is the surface.”

Jack felt the claw in his own chest tighten. He knew that pull. He’d felt it when he’d turned his back on the munitions deck and found himself angling toward Deck 3 instead. He hadn’t consciously chosen it. He’d just… gone.

“They brought you here to turn you,” Jack said. “Why didn’t they?”

Sam’s eyes moved past Jack, toward the back wall of the medical bay. It was solid steel, welded, a recent patch job. “Because she made them stop.”

Jack followed his gaze. “Voss.”

“She’s in there. Sealed section. I don’t know what she’s got in there with her, but she wired it herself. Ledges, barriers, emergency blast seals.” Sam’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She was in the cold storage when it started. She knew what was going to happen before the rest of us did.”

“She wrote about it. I found her notes.” Jack’s throat was dry. He’d read enough of Voss’s logs to feel like he knew her. A bitter, brilliant woman who had watched her crew slowly become something else and had spent her last coherent hours building a jail cell for herself. “She said it was a fossilized consciousness. A gestalt. It borrows minds, reshapes them.”

“She said more than that.” Sam strained against the straps. “She said she found the way out. Not a way to kill it—a way to cut the line. She isolated herself because the entity was getting close, and she didn’t want to let it read her. She said the answer was in her old lab files, hidden where the entity wouldn’t find it. Biological material.”

Jack went still. “Tanaka’s bone marrow.”

“I don’t know who. I don’t know where.” Sam’s raw voice cracked further. “She only said the key was in a body. She said if anyone got to her, they needed to bring a body with them.”

The cold of the water pressed against Jack’s suit. His hand twitched, the mark crawling toward his ring finger. He’d left Tanaka’s corpse behind in the storage room. The creature had been half-formed, twisted, teeth grown through its own cheeks. He’d taken the keycard off it and run. The marrow was still back there, if the transformed crew hadn’t already eaten it or moved it.

“Can you get me to her?” Jack asked.

“I can’t get to anything,” Sam said, rattling the straps. “That’s the problem. They didn’t strap me down because they wanted to hurt me. They strapped me down because I’m *immune*—or close to it. I don’t feel the pull. They kept me here to study, to figure out what makes me different. And the whole time, she’s been in there, knocking on the wall, telling me she’s close.”

“Close to what?”

Sam’s voice broke. “Close to the signal. She says the entity broadcasts on a frequency, like a radio, and that if we can broadcast back—a discordant one, something that doesn’t match—we can break its hold. But she can’t do it from down here. She needs the surface. She needs someone to transmit from the comm tower who knows the exact frequency.”

Jack’s mind raced. The surface. Keane. The director’s voice with its strange, soothing calm: *They’re not infected. They’re remembering.*

“She’s monitoring you,” Jack said. “Voss. She’s listening right now, through that wall.”

Sam nodded. “She knows you’re here. She asked for you specifically.”

The cold pressed harder. Jack looked at the welded steel panel. Behind it, quiet and patient, was a woman who had sealed herself away from her own crew, who had written warnings that contradicted everything Reyes had told him, who had said—in encrypted notes that he’d barely decoded—that the entity lies with familiar faces and reassuring words.

But she had also left him Tanaka. She had left him the peptide blocker. She had planned, even as the entity took her mind, to give him a way out.

“What does she want me to do?” Jack asked.

Sam’s eyes were dry but wide. On his chest, beneath the thin fabric of his jumpsuit, something moved—a slow, undulating ripple, like a muscle shifting under the skin. Jack’s breath caught.

“She wants you to break the seal,” Sam said. “And then she wants you to go back and get the body. The marrow. The peptide. Because without it, the signal will burn through you like a wire without insulation.” He paused. “And she wants you to know that the time you’ve spent talking to me—the entity has used it.”

Jack’s hand shot up to his temple. The pressure behind his eyes spiked, a hot, expanding fire. The mark on his wrist flared, veins blackening along his forearm. He stumbled back against the wall, and somewhere, far above him, he heard a voice—Keane’s voice, calm and even:

*Jack. You don’t have to do this. You can come home.*

He shook his head, forcing the words away. Sam was watching him, and Sam was afraid.

“She’s waiting,” Sam whispered. “Please. *Please* hurry.”

Jack turned from the cot and swam toward the seal, the voices in his head growing louder with every stroke.