Read Chapter 24: Cracks

The infirmary lights hummed at a frequency that set Jack’s teeth on edge. He’d been sitting in the same plastic chair for three hours, watching Voss’s chest rise and fall beneath the thin thermal blanket. Her vitals were steady. Her skin had color. She looked, by every measurable standard, like a woman who was simply sleeping.

But Jack hadn’t survived this long by trusting the measurable.

He leaned closer, squinting against the glare. The overhead fluorescents cast a sickly pallor over everything, making it hard to tell what was real and what was shadow. That’s what he told himself, anyway. That’s what he needed to believe.

Then she opened her eyes.

Not slowly, not groggily, the way someone does after a bad dream. Her lids snapped open like shutters, and for one electric second, Jack saw it. A faint opalescence, a pearlescent shimmer sliding across the surface of her irises, catching the light the way oil catches rainbows on water.

He recoiled, the chair screeching against the deck plates.

Voss blinked. Once. Twice. The shimmer was gone, replaced by her usual sharp, clinical gaze.

“Jack,” she said, her voice rough but steady. “You look like hell.”

“You’re awake.”

“Evidently.” She pushed herself up on her elbows, wincing. “How long?”

“Four days. You went down when the signal hit. I thought—” He stopped, the accusation clawing at the back of his throat.

Voss studied him for a long moment. “You thought what?”

“I thought you were gone,” he said, and it wasn’t a lie, just not the whole truth. He stepped closer, his hand hovering near her face. “Your eyes. Just now. There was a film.”

Voss’s brow furrowed. “A film?”

“Like the others. Like what I saw in Snake’s eyes before he tried to cave my skull in.”

She let out a short, tired laugh. “The light’s bad in here. You’ve been awake too long, Jack. You’re seeing things.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. I’m right here. I’m talking to you. I’m *me*.” She swung her legs off the cot, planting her feet on the floor. “If I were infected, would I be having a coherent conversation about your hallucination?”

Jack’s jaw tightened. He wanted to believe her. God, he wanted to believe her. She’d stayed behind to hold off the crew. She’d told him to go on. She’d been the one who lured him to this godforsaken station, sure, but she’d also been the one who pushed him toward the tower. Toward the signal.

“Maybe you’re not infected,” he said slowly. “Maybe you’re something else.”

Voss’s expression flickered. For a fraction of a second, something passed across her face—something that looked almost like recognition. Then it was gone, smoothed over by that same placid serenity he’d seen creeping across the other crew members.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I need food. Then we need to talk about what happens next.”

She stood, steady as a stone, and walked past him toward the door. Jack followed, his hand resting on the wrench clipped to his belt.

The corridor outside the infirmary stretched toward the mess hall, and Jack noticed it before they’d gone ten paces. A new marking on the bulkhead, just beside the junction box. A series of interlocking curves and angular notches, deeply etched into the metal as if burned in by acid.

He stopped. “Voss. Look at this.”

She turned, following his gaze. Her eyes widened—but not with fear. With something that looked disturbingly like *interest*.

“It wasn’t there this morning,” Jack said. “I walked past here four times. I would have noticed.”

“Maybe you missed it.”

“I didn’t.”

Voss stepped closer, running her fingers over the etched lines. “It’s beautiful.”

Jack’s blood ran cold. “It’s not. It’s them. It’s the same script we found in the lab, the same markings that were showing up before the crew turned.”

“No,” Voss said, and there was a certainty in her voice that Jack didn’t like. “Look at the pattern. The inflection points. The earlier samples were declarative. Static, like the creature was leaving a warning. This—” She traced the lines with her fingertip. “This is a path. A progression. It’s showing us the way forward.”

“Forward to what?”

Voss didn’t answer. She just stared at the etching, her lips slightly parted, her breathing shallow. Jack saw the shimmer again. It was faint, barely there, but it was real. It was *there*.

“Voss.” His voice came out harder than he intended. “You need to step away from the wall.”

She turned to him, and for a moment, he saw the old Voss—the sharp, sardonic woman who’d argued with him about protocol and procedure. “Jack. I’m fine. I’m just—” She shook her head. “I’ve spent my whole life studying the deep. And this thing, this *presence*, it’s not what we thought. It’s not a threat. It’s a communicator. It’s been trying to talk to us since the beginning, and we’ve been smashing its antennas.”

“It killed people.”

“It defended itself. We were drilling into its home. We were taking samples of its flesh.”

“It turned your crew into puppets.”

Voss’s eyes met his, and there was no hesitation in them. “It offered connection. We just weren’t ready to receive it.”

Jack’s chest tightened. He backed up a step, putting more distance between them. “You’re not her. The Voss I knew would never say that.”

“The Voss you knew was just as scared and just as desperate as you are. She just hid it better.” She smiled, and it was almost sad. “I’m telling you the truth, Jack. The transmission you sent didn’t destroy the entity. It did something else. It *opened* something. Can’t you feel it?”

He could. The mark on the back of his hand, the one he’d gotten when he touched the sample, was no longer cool. It was warm, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic heat that matched his heartbeat.

Or maybe matched something else.

He looked down at his hand. The discoloration had spread slightly, dark tendrils creeping toward his knuckles. He hadn’t noticed it before. Hadn’t wanted to notice it, maybe.

“I need to check on Sam,” he said, backing away from Voss, away from the etching on the wall. “I need to make sure he’s still okay.”

Voss watched him go, and she didn’t try to stop him. But as Jack turned the corner, he heard her voice drift after him, soft and knowing.

“The walls are talking, Jack. Soon you’ll have to listen.”

He walked faster.

Sam was where he’d left him, propped up against a stack of crates in the dry section of the flooded medical bay, his face pale but his eyes alert. He perked up when Jack entered.

“Boss,” Sam said, struggling to sit straighter. “The doc’s awake?”

“Yeah.” Jack dropped into the chair beside him, scrubbing a hand over his face. “She’s awake.”

“That’s good, right? That means she’s healing.”

Jack stared at his hand. At the dark tendrils spreading across his skin. At the gentle, rhythmic pulse that seemed to beat in time with something far deeper than his heart.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice hollow. “That’s good.”

From somewhere down the corridor, barely audible, a faint scratching sound began.

Jack looked up, his breath catching in his throat.

The scratching continued. Rhythmic. Deliberate.

Something was still writing on the walls.