Read Chapter 19: The Sacrifice

The flooded corridor bent at a forty-degree angle where the habitat’s spine had buckled, and Jack’s helmet lamp carved a weak cone through the murk. Voss moved ahead of him, the flare launcher clutched against her chest like a talisman. Every few seconds she stopped, listening, her gloved fingers twitching on the trigger guard.

“Thirty seconds,” she said over the comm. “Once I hit that access hatch, you get their eyes on you. No heroics after that. You run.”

“I know the plan,” Jack said. The mark on his wrist had gone from heat to something like a second pulse, beating out of sync with his own. The entity’s voice had quieted, but that only made it worse. Silence meant it was waiting.

They reached the partial collapse. A tangle of conduit and torn plating had turned the passage into a crawlspace, the ceiling sunk low enough that Jack had to drop to his knees. Water sloshed around his chest plate. Voss went first, squeezing through a gap where a bulkhead had twisted away from its frame. Her fins caught, and Jack gave her a shove.

“Go,” she said, already moving again.

He followed, the pressure suit groaning. Five meters of rubble-scattered corridor opened ahead, the far end choked with a wall of sediment and shattered polymer. And there, half-buried in the debris, was the access hatch to the telemetry tower. A rust-rimed circle, the wheel handle still intact.

Voss pulled herself toward it. Jack scanned the corridor. Nothing moved. No shapes in the gloom. No glow of helmet lamps.

“They should be here,” he muttered.

“They are,” Voss said. She reached the hatch and began cranking the wheel. It shrieked. “They’re just letting us think we made it.”

The voice came then, not inside his head but through the ambient hydrophone—low, resonant, layered like a choir underwater.

*We see you, Jack. We see the shape of your fear.*

Jack spun. Two figures emerged from the sediment wall ahead, not walking so much as unfolding from the muck, their suits torn and patched with a glistening black film that moved of its own accord. The engineers. Their helmet visors had been peeled back, faces exposed to the cold, their eyes gone flat and white. One was a woman—Peters, from life support. The other was the big man, Hendricks, who’d once fixed a valve with a wrench and a curse.

They did not advance. They stood, blocking the path back the way Jack had come.

“Thirty seconds,” Voss repeated, quieter now. She stopped cranking. The wheel hung at half-turn.

“Keep going,” Jack said.

“They’ll take you before you get two steps.”

“I’ll give you the two steps.”

Voss hesitated. Her faceplate was fogged, but he could see her expression shift—something breaking behind the glass. “You know I lied to you, Jack. From the first transmission. I chose you because you were expendable. Good with your hands, bad with your head.”

“I know.”

“You’re not supposed to forgive me.”

“I’m not forgiving you.” He pulled a pry bar from his harness, gave it a spin. “I’m buying time. Go.”

She turned and threw her weight against the wheel. It moved with a groan that echoed through the collapsed section. The engineers heard it too. Peters tilted her head, and Jack felt the attention snap toward him like a physical blow.

*You run from us, Jack. But your body already belongs to us.*

His right hand moved without his permission, the infection mark flaring white-hot. The pry bar swung toward his own temple. He caught his wrist with his left hand and fought, muscles locking, a grunt tearing out of him.

“Not yet,” he snarled.

Voss fired the flare.

The corridor erupted in magnesium white, searing through the murk, and the engineers screamed—not human screams, but a wet, grinding sound, the black film on their suits peeling back in strips. Hendricks stumbled, clawing at his own face. Peters dropped to her knees.

“GO!” Voss roared.

Jack ran. Not toward the hatch—toward the engineers. He had to hold them long enough. Peters lunged, and he swung the pry bar low, connecting hard with her knee. She crumpled. Hendricks came next, blind but enormous, one arm catching Jack across the chest and driving him into the bulkhead. Stars burst behind his eyes.

The flare sizzled in a pool of seawater. Voss had the hatch open now, a vertical shaft of dark water rising beyond it. She should have been inside. She wasn’t. She was beside him, driving the flare launcher’s butt into Hendricks’s face.

“I said go!” Jack shouted.

“I said the organism lies,” she said. She shoved him toward the shaft. “So did I. I wanted you to walk into their ambush. But you didn’t. You walked toward me.”

Hendricks staggered back. Peters was rising too, the black film regrowing, knitting over her ruined face.

Voss stood between them and the shaft.

“The transmitter is at the top of the tower. Replace the burnt fuse. Reroute the signal. Don’t come back for me.”

“You don’t have a suit enough for them, Voss.”

“I have enough for thirty more seconds.” She raised the empty flare launcher like a club. “Go, Jack. Let me be the one thing I claimed to be.”

The entity’s voice rose again, vibrating his teeth. *She is yours to lose, Jack. Stay, and we will keep you both whole.*

Jack dove into the shaft.

The hatch slammed behind him, and the dark pulled him up.