Read Chapter 36: Run

The wrench was still in his hand. Jack didn’t remember carrying it out of the core room, but the weight of it grounded him as the station groaned around him like a dying animal. The deck tilted under his boots, and somewhere below, water hammered through compartments with a sound like distant artillery.

Voss was slumped against the console, her head bowed. He’d have to leave her. He knew that. But he couldn’t make himself move until he saw her chest rise once, twice—shallow, but alive.

“Voss.” He dropped to one knee, grabbed her shoulder, shook her hard enough to rattle her teeth. “Voss. The flooding sequence is running. Do you hear me? The station is going under. I need to know if there are others still breathing.”

Her eyes swam into focus. For a moment she looked at him like she didn’t know him. Then something sharp cut through the fog. “The habitat ring. Deck three, starboard. The ones who were… who were still themselves, before they stopped answering.”

The ones who hadn’t been turned into those shuffling, hollow-eyed things. Or the ones who had, and were now just slumped against walls somewhere, waiting for the water.

“How many?”

“Four. Maybe five. I don’t—I stopped counting.” Her voice cracked. She looked at her hands, at the blood dried under her nails that wasn’t hers. “I stopped counting a long time ago.”

Jack stood. The station shuddered again, harder this time. A bank of overhead lights stuttered and died, leaving only the red emergency wash. “Get to the escape pod bay. The launch tube on the port side—the one with the green canopy. That’s the only one rated for the depth pressure.”

Voss blinked at him. “What about you?”

“I’ve got people to find. Go.” He turned, and the station screamed.

It wasn’t metal. It wasn’t steam or the groan of stressed bulkheads. It was a sound that came from inside his own skull, a frequency that vibrated behind his eyes and scraped along his spine. The entity. Still alive. Still screaming.

Jack clapped his hands over his ears, a useless gesture, and ran.

The corridor outside the control room was already ankle-deep in water. He splashed through it, the wrench clanging against a bulkhead as he pushed off a wall for speed. The deck tilted further, and he had to brace himself against the handrail to keep from sliding into a yawning maintenance shaft that had opened up on his left. Below it, darkness. A distant splash that took too long to arrive.

He counted hatches. Three. Two. The habitat ring door was jammed halfway open, its hydraulic piston bent like a broken finger. Jack squeezed through sideways, the wrench scraping sparks off the frame.

The ring was quieter. The emergency lights here were still on, casting everything in a dim, amber glow. Bunks had been overturned. A tray of cold food sat on a table, untouched, a sheen of mold across its surface. The air was thick—not with smoke, but with something else. Something biological. It smelled like a wound that had been left to fester.

He found the first one in the common area. A woman he didn’t recognize, curled into a fetal position beneath a table, her hands over her ears. She was rocking, very slowly, her lips moving without sound. When Jack crouched beside her, she flinched away from him, and her eyes—clear, too clear—found his face.

“Is it dead?” she whispered. “Please. Please tell me it’s dead.”

“Not yet,” Jack said. “But it’s dying. I need you to come with me.”

She didn’t argue. She just took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. Her fingers were cold, and she was trembling, but she followed.

The second was a man in a maintenance coverall, crouched in a supply closet with a pipe wrench of his own clutched across his chest like a talisman. He looked at Jack and the woman and didn’t ask questions. He just stood and fell into step behind them.

The third was a woman Jack recognized. Her name was Delgado—she’d been in the mess hall on his first day, had laughed at something he’d said, had told him to stay safe down there. Now she was standing in the middle of the corridor, staring at the wall with her palms pressed flat against it, as if she could feel the station’s pulse through the metal.

“Delgado.” Jack stopped short of touching her. “Delgado, we have to go.”

She turned. Her face was slack, but her eyes were wet. “He’s in the walls,” she said. “He’s in the water lines. He’s in the air.” She swallowed. “He’s in my head.”

Jack took her by the arm. “Then let’s get you out of his house.”

She came. Reluctantly, but she came.

They made it back through the jammed hatch just as the station’s lights cut to a deeper red. The flooding had reached the control level. Water was sloshing up the companionway, waist-deep in places, and the tilt of the deck had become pronounced enough that Jack had to hold onto the handrail with one hand and Delgado with the other.

The escape pod bay was forward. He could see the green canopy of the pod beyond the pressure door, the indicators on its hull flickering a steady amber in prelaunch warm-up. Voss was there, waiting, her hand on the manual release. She had a gash on her forehead she hadn’t had before—she must have fallen on the way.

“Four,” Jack said, pushing the others toward her. “That’s everyone left. Get them in.”

Voss did. She counted heads, steered Delgado and the others into the pod’s cramped seats, and began strapping them in with hands that only shook a little. Jack watched them go, one by one, until it was just him and the empty frame of the pressure door.

“Jack.” Voss was looking at him from the pod’s threshold. Her face was pale. “The manifest. There are six seats. You’re the fifth.”

He shook his head. “The flooding sequence needs a manual override at the bulkhead junction. If I don’t seal it, the pod will launch into the path of the backwash and you’ll get thrown against the wall. You’ll be dead before you reach the surface.”

“Then we wait.” She stepped toward him. “Seal it and come back. We’ll hold the launch until you do.”

“The seal is on the other side of the compartment. Once I engage it, the bulkhead closes. There’s no way back through.” He said it flatly, the way he’d said his brother’s name when they asked him what had happened on the Titan Rig. “There’s no waiting.”

Voss’s jaw tightened. She looked at the people in the pod—the trembling woman, the man with the pipe wrench, Delgado, who was already closing her eyes like she was praying for sleep. Then she looked back at Jack.

“I told you,” she said. “I don’t deserve to get out of here.”

“Neither do I.” Jack reached into his pocket, pulled out his brother’s watch. The hands were still frozen at 3:33. He held it out to her. “Take this. If I don’t surface within a week, give it to the sea. It’s where he belongs.”

Voss took it. Her fingers closed around the cold metal. She looked at the frozen hands, then at him, and something in her face shifted—not pity, but recognition. Two people who had made terrible choices and were still alive because of them.

“I’ll send the signal,” she said. “The navy’s got a relay buoy forty miles out. I’ll make sure they know where you are. I’ll make sure they come.”

“Good enough.” Jack grabbed the pod’s hatch, pulled it shut, and spun the lock. Through the small porthole, her face stared back at him for a moment, and then the pod’s engines roared, and the launch tube filled with light.

The escape pod shot out into the dark water, and Jack was alone.

He turned, and the corridor was gone. The compartment had collapsed behind him, a wall of twisted steel and roaring water where the passage had been. The only way forward was the junction.

He ran.

The water caught him at the knee, then the hip, then the chest. He swam the last ten meters, the wrench still in his hand, his breath burning. The junction box was there, its manual override wheel gleaming in the red emergency light. He grabbed it, hauled himself toward it, and twisted.

The wheel fought him. The pressure was immense, the metal warped from the shock of the collapse. He threw his whole weight against it, felt something tear in his shoulder, and the wheel gave.

A deep clang. The bulkhead door began to close behind him, a slow, grinding descent.

Through the gap, just before it sealed shut, Jack saw something move in the water. A shape, long and dark, sliding through the flooded corridor with an ease that made his stomach drop. Not a piece of the station breaking loose.

Something else.

The bulkhead slammed shut. Jack was sealed in the junction compartment, chest-deep in black water that was still rising, with nothing but the wrench and his own ragged breathing.

And in his head, faint as a distant radio signal, the screaming stopped.

Silence.

Perfect, waiting silence.