Read Chapter 17: Voss's Cell

The wall was worse than Sam had described.

Jack pressed his palm flat against the cold metal—a full bulkhead section, welded into the frame of what had once been the medical observation corridor. The seams were rough, amateurish. Someone had done this in a hurry, with a torch and a tremor in their hands.

He pulled the pry bar from his tool belt and wedged it into the gap where the weld had failed to take. The bar bit, metal screaming against metal as he leaned his weight in. His left hand shook. The twitch was worse now—fingers curling and uncurling without his permission, like something testing the controls.

*Stop,* he told it. The hand kept moving. He stopped watching it and put his shoulder into the bar instead.

The weld gave with a groan. He worked the gap open enough to slip through, dropping into a crouch on the other side. The air here was stale, recycled through too many filters, carrying the chemical bite of ozone and something else—something organic. Wet.

The quarantine cell was at the end of the short corridor, a reinforced hatch marked with faded biohazard stencils. But the hatch had been modified. Someone had layered the exterior with strips of lead sheeting, bolted through the frame, forming a rough Faraday cage over the door. The same material lined the corridor walls in patches, hastily applied, overlapping like armor.

Voss had been busy.

Jack approached the hatch and knocked. Three times, metal on metal. No answer. He tried the release mechanism—locked from the inside.

"Dr. Voss." His voice came out rough, dry. "My name is Jack Mercer. I'm a repair diver. Sam sent me. She said you need Tanaka's marrow."

Silence. Then, a crackle—feedback, a speaker being switched on.

"How do I know you're you?"

The voice was thin, frayed at the edges, but steady. Scientist's voice. Someone used to being in control and clinging to it.

Jack looked down at his left hand. It was still trembling.

"I don't know how you'd know," he admitted. "Ask me something only I would answer."

A pause. "What did Keane tell you, when you reached the surface?"

Jack blinked. "He—" The memory surfaced, gauzy, like a dream he'd been told about rather than lived. "He said the crew weren't infected. He said they were remembering."

The speaker crackled again. "And you believed him?"

"I believed something was wrong with that," Jack said. "That's why I'm here."

Metal scraped inside. Bolts being turned. The hatch swung open, and Dr. Voss stood in the gap.

She was smaller than he'd imagined—birdlike, sharp shoulders under a silver-mesh Faraday suit that covered her from neck to ankle. Her face was pale, streaked with grease and old sweat. Behind her, the quarantine cell had been transformed. Banks of equipment lined the walls—monitors, signal analyzers, a jury-rigged antenna mast extending from the vent toward the ceiling. And in the corner, half-buried under cables, a cot.

She was holding a welding torch in one hand. It wasn't lit, but the intent was clear.

"Show me your arm," she said.

Jack pushed up his sleeve. The mark had spread past his wrist now, crawling up his forearm in veins of black that moved like deep-water currents. Voss studied it, her expression neutral in the ambient glow of her instruments.

"Stage three," she muttered. "You've got maybe twelve hours before it reaches the elbow. Then it starts on your language centers. After that—" She gestured vaguely. "You'll remember things that never happened to you. And you'll believe them."

Jack pulled his sleeve down. "Sam said you were barricaded. Said you'd been hiding. For how long?"

"Twenty-two days." Voss turned and walked back into the cell, leaving the hatch open behind her. A test. A decision. Jack followed.

She sat down at a workstation cluttered with dataslabs and tangled wires. One screen glowed with a waveform—chaotic, jagged, spiking and falling without rhythm. Voss tapped it.

"This is the organism's signal. What you've been feeling—the pull, the voices, the twitching—it's not psychic. It's electromagnetic. A carrier wave in the low-frequency band, tuned specifically to human brainwave patterns. It doesn't speak to you. It broadcasts *at* you. And your brain, being a pattern-seeking organ, interprets the noise."

She pulled up a second waveform, layered beneath the first. This one was smoother, almost musical in its regularity. A sine wave with a harmonic wobble.

"That's me. You know what I did when I realized what I was listening to? I wrapped myself in a Faraday suit and built a cage out of lead sheeting. I've been running on batteries for three weeks, because the station's power grid carries the signal like a telephone line."

Jack's hand twitched again. He shoved it into his pocket. "Sam said there's a way to break the sync."

Voss nodded. "The organism doesn't control people—not the way you'd think. It *borrows*. It accesses your memories, your neural architecture, and uses them to rebuild itself. Each person it takes becomes another layer of its consciousness. But that synchronization takes time. It has to match your brain's baseline frequency, then override it. If you disrupt that baseline at the right moment—" She tapped the smooth waveform. "—the sync fails. The infection is broken."

"Dissonance," Jack said.

"Discordance, technically. A signal that's the exact inverse of the organism's carrier wave. Broadcast from outside the station, at sufficient power to blanket the entire habitat, it would sever the connection long enough for the crew to regain themselves." Voss turned in her chair, fixing him with a direct, tired stare. "I wrote the formula for that signal. I hid it."

"In Tanaka's marrow," Jack finished.

"In her fourth rib. I injected it there myself, the night before she tried to escape." Voss's voice wavered—just a flicker, then steadied. "She knew the risk. She was the only one who could get close enough to the edge of the entity's reach without being taken immediately. Her neural profile was stable under stress."

"She didn't make it."

"No." Voss looked away. "But her body did. That's almost as good."

Jack processed this. Six decks up, Tanaka's corpse was still lying in a storage room, keycard forgotten in her hand. Thirteen decks down, the munitions deck held the fail-safe that Reyes had wanted. Neither of those mattered now if the discordant signal could be built.

"What do you need?" he asked.

Voss stood and crossed to a steel locker, punching in a code. The door swung open to reveal a pressure suit—not the soft-shell utility models used inside the station, but a full hard-shell atmospheric suit, the kind designed for exterior hull work.

"You need to get that marrow to the surface," she said. "And I need to stay here, running interference. I can keep the organism's attention focused on this cell—it's curious about me. About the suit. It's been trying to figure out how to reach me for days."

Jack stared at the suit. "That's not a run to the surface."

"No. It's a run to the telemetry tower." Voss pointed to a structural diagram on her wall, where a high-resolution schematic showed the station's above-water profile. A needle-thin mast rose from the habitat dome, bristling with antennae. "The sonar transmitter. It's powerful enough to broadcast the discordant signal down through the hull and across the entire seafloor. But it's external. You'll need to suit up and climb the tower's service ladder."

"Through the flooding," Jack said.

Voss nodded. "The habitat's exterior is in critical condition. The organism compromised the hull seals during the initial takeover—it's been using the water pressure to reshape the station's layout. The tower's access point is in a section that's already partially collapsed."

"How partial?"

"Partial enough that the crew who tried to cross it didn't make it." Voss met his eyes. "There are two of them out there. Transformed. Waiting. The organism knows about the tower. It's guarding it."

Jack looked down at his left hand. The twitching had stopped. The fingers were still now, relaxed, holding his fist closed. He tried to open them. They wouldn't move.

*Not yet,* a voice said. *But soon.*

He looked up at Voss. "How do I know this isn't the entity talking?"

Voss smiled—thin, knowing, without warmth. "You don't. That's what makes it a leap of faith." She picked up the pressure suit's helmet and held it out to him. "Your choice, Mr. Mercer. Go up, or go down."

Jack took the helmet. It was heavier than it looked.

"Up," he said.