Read Chapter 27: Snake's Debt

The chamber went dark in a single, violent instant—not the gradual dim of failing bulbs, but a hard cut, as if someone had ripped the light out of the world by the roots. The entity’s hum, which had been building to a skull-rattling crescendo, snapped off into silence. For one terrible second, there was nothing but the hiss of my own breath and the distant groan of metal settling.

I couldn’t see. The darkness was absolute, thick enough to taste, cold and metallic on my tongue. My wrists were still bound to the examination table, the straps cutting into flesh I’d long since stopped feeling. Somewhere in the black, I heard Voss shriek—not in terror, but in fury. A sound like glass breaking.

“What have you done?” Her voice was a blade. “Who cut the power?”

No one answered. But I heard it: a faint scuffle, a grunt, the wet smack of a body hitting the floor. Then Snake’s voice, rough and ragged, cutting through the dark like a lifeline.

“Run, Mercer. *Run.*”

The straps on my right wrist went slack. I felt the cool bite of a blade—his blade—sawing through the webbing. Then he was gone, swallowed by the chaos of shouting crew members and blind stumbling.

I didn’t hesitate. My body moved before my mind caught up, rolling off the table, hitting the deck hard on my shoulder. The pain was a welcome shock, grounding me in the here and now. I scrambled on all fours, blind, my hands sweeping the cold floor for anything—a weapon, a handhold, a direction.

“He’s loose!” someone shouted—a voice I didn’t recognize, stripped of its humanity by the thing crawling inside it. “Find him!”

Footsteps pounded toward me. I rolled, fetched up against a wall, and felt the familiar shape of a maintenance panel beneath my fingers. The same one Snake had sabotaged. I didn’t need light to know this station. I’d spent years crawling through its guts.

I hauled myself upright and moved by memory, one hand trailing the wall, heading for the door. The crew’s chant had broken into individual voices—calls and commands, some in English, some in that liquid, alien tongue that made my teeth ache. They were disoriented. Good. That was my only advantage.

I found the doorframe and slipped through just as a body slammed into the wall where I’d been standing. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t afford to.

The corridor was a black tunnel, but I knew every step. The radio room was forty feet ahead. The med bay, twenty to the left. The airlock, a hundred and fifty feet down. But none of that mattered now. What mattered was the hand I grabbed in the dark—a thin wrist, a gasp of surprise.

Dr. Voss.

I yanked her toward me, spinning her so her back hit my chest, one arm locked across her throat. She struggled, but I was bigger, and I was done being the prey.

“Reverse it,” I growled into her ear. “Right now.”

She laughed. A dry, brittle sound that felt wrong coming from a human throat. “Reverse it? Jack, you can’t reverse a birth.”

I tightened my arm. “You made me. You put that thing in me. You’re going to take it out.”

“You still don’t understand.” She clawed at my forearm, but her voice was eerily calm. “I didn’t put anything in you. I simply opened the door and let it step through. It’s already inside you, Jack. It’s been inside you since the moment you touched that chamber. The ritual was only ceremony. The merge is already underway.”

My blood ran cold. My hand—the one with the mark—throbbed in the dark, a deep, resonant pulse that seemed to answer her words.

“You’re lying.”

“Ask your hand,” she whispered. “Ask it whose name it knows.”

I didn’t want to answer. But the mark was burning now, warm and familiar, and in the darkness I could feel something stirring at the edge of my mind—something vast and patient, pressing against the inside of my skull like a hand against glass.

I shook it off. “There has to be a way to kill it. Flood its core. Vent the chamber to the sea. You told me the sample was alive—so kill it.”

Voss went still in my grip. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then, slowly, she spoke.

“You’re a clever man, Jack. The fail-safe valve. The main flooding mechanism is located in the maintenance annex, just outside the central hub, accessible via the exterior hatch.” A pause. “The access key is on my belt.”

I didn’t trust her. But I didn’t have a choice. I reached down, felt for her belt, and found a cold metal card clipped to the webbing. I pulled it free.

“Swim out,” she said, her voice soft, almost kind. “Open the valve. Flood the Scar. The water will drown it.”

“And me?”

“You’ll be outside. The intervention chamber will take the brunt. By the time the current reaches you, it’ll be dead.” She hesitated. “Or you will be. I can’t promise which.”

In the dark, I heard the crew’s footsteps growing closer. The chanting had resumed, low and steady, a rhythmic pulse that made the walls vibrate. The mark on my hand flared in answer.

I shoved Voss away from me. She stumbled, caught herself, and didn’t move.

“If this is a trap,” I said, “I’ll make sure you’re the first thing the water takes.”

She said nothing. Just stood there in the dark, breathing.

I turned and ran for the airlock, Voss’s key card cold and heavy in my fist.