Read Chapter 25: Descent

The cold of the deck plating woke him first. Then the humming.

Jack's eyes snapped open. The bunk above him was empty—Snake's rack, still made from three days ago. But Snake wasn't the problem.

They stood in a loose semicircle around his bed. Six of them. Sam at the foot, her face slack, eyes open but not seeing. Beside her stood the cook, the engineer's mate, two technicians whose names Jack had never learned. And Dr. Voss.

Her eyes caught the low emergency light and threw it back at him—that faint, pearlescent shimmer he'd seen before. Not a trick of the light. Never was.

They chanted. The sound was low, almost subsonic, vibrating in his sternum more than reaching his ears. The syllables stacked and folded into each other, an impossible phonetics that made his teeth ache. Jack couldn't parse a single word, but his skin crawled anyway. He'd heard something like it once—in the wreck of the *Meridian*, through the hull, when the shape in the dark had tried to teach him its name.

Sam's lips moved in perfect unison with the others.

"Sam." His voice came out cracked. "Sam, wake up."

She didn't stop chanting. None of them did. They just stood there, swaying slightly, a tide pulling them in place.

Jack swung his legs off the cot. Nobody moved to stop him. He stood, and the semicircle parted—just enough, just exactly the width of his body—creating a corridor toward the door.

A corridor. Like they wanted him to leave.

He didn't argue. He moved.

The corridor sealed behind him as he passed through the hatch into the main passageway. The chanting didn't stop. It followed him, not through the air but through the deck plating—that subsonic thrum climbing up through his bare feet.

The station was darker than it should have been. The emergency lamps cast long shadows, and every few meters a fresh symbol had been gouged into the bulkhead. Fresh—still weeping condensation, edges raw. Some of them looked familiar now. The marks on Dr. Voss's wall chart. The shape burned into the specimen container. Guides, she'd called them. A path for the new consciousness.

*Which consciousness?* Jack thought. *Whose path?*

The radio room was three compartments aft. He kept his pace brisk but controlled—no running. Running was what prey did. And whatever those things were standing around his bed, they weren't hunting him. Yet.

The radio room door was dogged shut. Jack worked the wheel with shaking hands, the metal biting cold against his palms. The door swung inward.

Empty. He'd half expected another semicircle, another chant. But the room was as he'd left it—dead panels, dark screens, the guts of the transmitter lying in pieces across the bench where he'd been jury-rigging them for days. Useless. All of it useless without the tower.

He crossed to the auxiliary comm panel and pressed the transmit key anyway. The boat channel. Old habit. Maybe a surface vessel in range, maybe a passing submersible, maybe—

Jack keyed the mic. "This is Mercer, Atlantic Star Two. Any station, any vessel, please respond."

Static. Then, a click.

His own voice came back. Distorted, stretched at the edges, like a recording played through water. But unmistakably, horribly *him*.

"Mercer," it said. "Mercer. Mercer."

The hair on the back of his neck stood up. He keyed again, thumb shaking. "Who is this?"

Another click. The voice didn't answer his question. It just repeated his name, layering it over itself until it sounded less like a word and more like a prayer. On the third repetition, the pitch dropped—an octave lower, then another, sliding down into something that should not have come from a human throat.

"*You have been chosen, Jack.*"

The voice wasn't his anymore. It was the thing he'd heard in the abyss, the shape that had spoken through the *Meridian*'s hull six years ago, the reason he'd left the deep-sea salvage work. The reason he still woke in the middle of the night with his heart slamming and no memory of his dream.

Jack killed the transmit key. The voice cut off. The silence that followed was worse.

He stood in the dark of the radio room, gripping the edge of the bench, breathing through his nose. Slow. Counted breaths. The way he'd learned in the therapy sessions he'd never told anyone about.

When he turned to go, the corridor was full of them.

More than six now. Twelve. Twenty. A crowd of station personnel packing the passageway, shoulder to shoulder, their mouths moving in that same silent chant. Their eyes caught the lamp glow and threw back that wet shine. And at the front of them, Sam.

She stepped forward. Just one step. Her face was slack, but her eyes were wet with something that might have been a tear and might have been the film sliding over them.

"Jack," she said. Not the chant-voice. Her own voice. Thin and frightened and still her. "Jack, you have to run."

Then the crowd surged.

Jack didn't think. He went out the far hatch of the radio room, into the maintenance crawl, pulling himself through the narrow tube as hands caught at his ankles. He kicked free. A hand caught his foot—grip inhumanly strong—and he twisted, drove his heel into a face he couldn't see, heard the crack of cartilage and felt the grip loosen.

He dropped through the access shaft into the lower deck. The sound of the chant had stopped, but the humming hadn't. It was coming from the walls now—the bulkheads vibrating around him, the deck shivering under his feet. The whole station was singing.

Jack pressed his palm flat against the hull plate. Through the metal, through the insulation, he felt it pulsing. Warm. Alive.

The mark on his hand was warm too. Not the cold burn of before. Something different. A resonance, like a tuning fork struck nearby.

*Dormant, not destroyed.*

The voice in the radio wasn't reaching out. It was calling home.

Jack looked down the corridor toward the aft lock, where the descent line to the Scar still hung. Where Dr. Voss had made her last stand. Where the thing in the sediment had reached out and almost taken them all.

The humming deepened.

Jack Mercer, survivor of the *Meridian*, began to run—not toward the lock, but away from it. Toward the core of the station. Toward anywhere that didn't hum.

Everywhere hummed.