Read Chapter 31: The Father of Lies

The voice had been silent for exactly forty-one seconds. Jack counted them on the ragged edges of his own breath, the key still clutched in his gloved hand, the valve access gaping open before him like a mouth waiting to be fed.

He should turn it. He should just turn it and be done.

But the words still echoed inside his skull, wearing his brother's cadence, his brother's half-smile hidden behind the accusation. *You left me. You watched me go under and you chose to stay on the boat.*

Except that wasn't what happened.

Jack squeezed his eyes shut against the black water pressing against his helmet faceplate. The current tugged at his legs, pulling him sideways off the structural ring, and he had to grab hold of the handrail to keep his position. Three meters. The valve was three meters from the core's structural ring. He'd repeated that to himself like a prayer on the way down.

His brother's watch was still stopped at 3:33. He'd checked it twice since leaving the airlock, and it hadn't moved. But the second hand was ticking now—he'd watched it sweep past the frozen minute mark three times before realizing what he was seeing. The watch had been dead for six years. Now it ran. And it kept time with something other than this world.

That was the thing the voice had used. The watch. The grief. The guilt.

Because there *was* guilt.

Jack's fingers tightened on the key. He remembered the boat. He remembered the gray Atlantic swell rolling under a sky the color of old bruises. He remembered his brother telling him to stay, to mind the line, to wait for his signal. And he remembered waiting. The line going slack. The slack going still.

But that was where the memory blurred.

The entity had filled in the spaces with something sharper, crueler. In its telling, Jack had heard his brother call out. In its telling, Jack had stood there with his hand on the winch and let the line run out. In its telling, Jack had made a choice.

But the truth was simpler. The truth was a radio crackle and a severed line and the water swallowing a scream that never came because by the time Jack reached the dive site, his brother was gone. No signal. No call. Just the line, cut clean.

The entity had taken that blank space and painted it with venom. That's what it did. That's what it had always done.

Jack opened his eyes.

The mark on his hand was still flaring, a dull red glow bleeding through the glove material. The entity was still touching him, still reaching, still trying to find the seam between memory and truth. But the voice had gone quiet for a reason. It had spent itself. It had shown him everything it had, and what it had shown him was a lie built on the foundation of a hole in his memory.

*Father of lies,* he thought. Voss had used that phrase once, back in her office, before all of this went to hell. He hadn't understood it then. He understood it now.

The station hummed through the steel beneath his boots. Even in the blackout, the structure itself was alive, conducting something foul through its pipes and conduits. Jack pressed the flat of his free hand against the hull. The vibration ran up his arm, through his chest, settling in his teeth. The entity was everywhere. In the water. In the air. In the crew's reshaped minds. In the silence that now pressed against his ears like thumbs against his eyes.

He thought about Voss. About the second key on the chain around her neck. About the way she'd looked at him when she'd handed over the fail-safe, like she was giving him a loaded weapon and hoping he'd point it at the right target.

He thought about Sam, breaking through corruption just long enough to tell him to trust the watch.

The watch that was now running but stopped at the hour of his brother's death.

The watch that the entity had *wound*.

Jack looked down at the key in his hand. The metal was cold. The teeth were worn. And the voice had told him it was a trap, that Voss's fail-safe was actually a locking mechanism, that the station was a prison, not a containment vessel.

But the voice had also told him he'd watched his brother die.

*One lie built on another,* he thought. *They stack. They layer. They look like truth when you're standing in the dark.*

And Jack was standing in the dark. The blackout had swallowed the exterior floods hours ago. His helmet lamp was the only light for a hundred meters in any direction, carving a thin cone through the murk.

He raised the key.

The mark on his hand flared brighter, throbbing in time with something he couldn't hear but could feel—a pressure at the base of his skull, a warmth spreading behind his eyes. The entity was pushing again, trying to reach him through the contact, trying to make him hesitate.

Jack hesitated.

One second. Two.

He thought about his brother. Not the version the entity had painted—the coward who'd stayed on the boat while his sibling drowned. But the man Jack actually remembered. The one who'd taught him to tie knots and read currents. The one who'd gone down that last time not for salvage or science but because something in the water had started pulling boats apart, and he'd wanted to stop it.

His brother had fought the thing. He'd lost.

Jack was still fighting.

He slammed the key into the valve and twisted it hard.

The mechanism caught. The key seated with a dull *clunk* that traveled up his arm. For one horrible moment, nothing happened. The valve resisted. The entity pushed harder against his mind, and Jack felt something hot slide down his cheek from beneath his helmet's seal—blood, or sweat, or something worse.

Then the valve gave.

The release was violent. The key spun free in his hand, and the valve jammed open, the shaft housing groaning as water surged past him toward the core. The current took him sideways, ripping his grip from the handrail, spinning him once, twice, before his suit arresters caught and hauled him to a stop against a maintenance strut.

Through the water, through the metal, through the layers of mist and pressure and darkness, Jack felt the station shudder.

Not a failure shudder.

A *feeding* shudder.

The core was beneath him now, and it was awake, and it was drinking.

Jack hung there in the current, watching the valve vent his hope into the abyss. The mark on his hand had gone cold. The voice was silent.

His brother's watch ticked on.

3:33.

Always 3:33.

But the valve was open. Whatever came next, he'd done what he came to do. And the lie, the beautiful, terrible lie, had not moved him.

He reached up and keyed his comm.

"Voss," he said. "It's done."

Static answered.

Behind him, deep in the guts of the station, something old and patient began to burn.