Read Chapter 37: Breath

The water hit him like a wall of ice. Jack gasped, the breath torn from his lungs as the flood surged through the junction compartment, tossing him against the bulkhead like a rag doll. His suit alarm shrieked in his ear—pressure, temperature, integrity—all going wrong at once.

He kicked, fought, found the orientation of the blast door he'd pried open minutes ago. The manual override had done its job. The core was flooding. The entity was dying. And so was he, if he didn't find air.

The compartment was nearly full now, the last pocket of air compressed against the ceiling. He swam for it, lungs burning, and broke the surface with a gasp that tasted like rust and diesel. He sucked in the foul, humid air, coughing, treading water in the dark.

His headlamp sputtered, then steadied. The beam showed him a nightmare: the junction compartment was a chaos of twisted pipes and floating debris, the water black and thick with sediment. The bulkhead behind him was sealed—the escape pod had launched, and the station was now his alone.

He had maybe a few minutes of air in this pocket, and it was shrinking as the water continued to rise.

Jack forced himself to think. The core was below him, through the blast door he'd forced open. The blast shield around the core itself was a massive steel housing, designed to contain a catastrophic failure. If there was any space left in the station that might hold air—trapped, sealed, protected—it would be behind that shield.

"That's the stupidest idea you've ever had," he muttered, his voice echoing oddly in the small space. "And you've had a lot of stupid ideas."

He dove.

The water was cold, cold enough to seep through the compromised seams of his suit and wrap around his chest like a vice. He swam blind for a moment, then his lamp found the blast door, hanging crooked on its hinges where he'd forced it. He slipped through the gap, into the core chamber.

The core was dead now—he'd flooded it himself, watched the meters climb before sealing himself out. But the entity's last remnant, that thing of flesh and light that had been growing in the heart of the station, was gone. Destroyed. Dissolved in the rushing water.

He thought he could still feel it, though. A pressure at the back of his skull, like a headache trying to form. Or maybe that was just the cold, or the fear, or the knowledge that he was, in all likelihood, about to die alone in the dark.

The blast shield loomed ahead of him. A massive steel dome, its access hatch still dogged shut. He grabbed the wheel and spun it, his gloves slipping on the wet metal. The wheel resisted at first, then gave with a groan that vibrated through his arms.

The hatch swung inward. Water poured past him into the space beyond. Jack followed it, pulling himself through the opening, and—

Air.

There was air in the shield housing. A pocket, maybe a few feet deep, trapped above a residual sump that hadn't been fully flooded. He dragged himself into it, pulled the hatch shut behind him as best he could, and surfaced into darkness.

He lay there for a long moment, chest heaving, water sloshing around him. The air was thin but breathable. The cold was gnawing at him, but he was alive.

He was alive.

"That's something," Jack said, his voice breaking. "That's something, Jack."

He found a ledge, hauled himself out of the water, and sat there shivering in the pitch black. His lamp was dying, its beam flickering like a candle in a draft. He turned it off to save the battery. The darkness was absolute, complete, so thick he felt it pressing against his eyes.

The entity screamed.

It wasn't a sound, not really—none of it had ever been. It was a pressure, a psychic shriek that tore through his mind like a rusted blade. Jack clutched his head, teeth grinding.

*You cannot kill me,* the voice howled. *I am the deep. I am the dark. I am the endless—*

"Shut up," Jack gritted. "You're dead. You're drowned. You're gone."

*I am eternal—*

"You're soup. You're fish food. You're a bad dream that's over."

The voice faltered, and Jack felt something strange in that faltering—not rage, not cunning, but confusion. The entity had never been challenged like this, never met a will that refused to break. In his mind's eye, he saw it again: the massive creature in the core, part flesh, part machine, its tendrils woven through the station's systems, feeding on the crew's despair, their memories, their longing.

His brother's face surfaced unbidden. Tom, grinning at him from the deck of a boat, holding up a fish twice the size of anything Jack had ever caught. *Bet you can't beat that, little brother.*

"Get out of my head," Jack said.

*I am already gone,* the entity said, and there was something almost like wonder in its voice. *Where am I going?*

The pressure in his skull eased, then vanished entirely. The silence that followed was so complete, so pure, that Jack almost wept.

He sat in the dark and waited.

Time lost meaning. He had no chronometer—his wrist was bare. He kept expecting to hear something, the groaning of the station's hull, the hiss of escaping air, the distant rumble of the core's death throes. But there was nothing. Just the slosh of water against the shield housing, and his own breathing.

He must have dozed. When he woke, his teeth were chattering so hard he could barely think. He forced himself to move, to check his surroundings. His lamp flickered back to life, a dim amber glow that showed him the housing's interior. It was a small space, barely large enough for him to stretch out, and it was half-filled with water.

But the water wasn't rising anymore.

Jack studied it, frowning. The surface was still, dark, unbroken. He'd equalized. The flood had reached its limit, matched the pressure outside. Which meant—

He could swim out.

He checked his air supply. The tank was nearly empty, a few more minutes at best. But if the pressure had equalized, he wouldn't need the tank—he could swim to the surface.

Above him, through the dying station's twisted ruins, was open ocean. And somewhere up there, maybe, Snake was waiting with the submersible.

Or maybe not. Maybe he was swimming to a slow, cold death in the Atlantic.

"Only one way to find out," Jack said.

He slipped back into the water. It was colder now, if that was possible, a bone-deep chill that seemed to reach into his core and squeeze. He swam through the blast door's gap, through the junction compartment, up through the maintenance tunnel he'd crawled through hours ago—or was it days?—and found the outer hatch.

It was open. The sea was there, dark and vast and waiting.

Jack pushed through.

The ocean swallowed him. For a moment, he was blind, disoriented, the cold stealing the strength from his limbs. He kicked, fought, surfaced—and gasped.

Stars. A sky full of stars, cold and brilliant, and a moon riding high above the swells.

He floated there, alone in the middle of the North Atlantic, the station's death a faint echo below him. The suit was nearly useless now, its heater dead, its seals leaking. He had minutes, maybe, before hypothermia took him.

He thought about his brother.

Tom had died on a mission like this one. A deep-sea operation gone wrong, the details buried by the company, the whole thing swept under the rug. Jack had spent eight years chasing that ghost, trying to find out what had happened, why Tom had never come home.

He'd thought the watch might tell him. Tom's watch, frozen at 3:33, the moment he'd died. Jack had carried it through every dive, every job, every half-baked scheme to find the truth.

And then the entity had shown him the truth, or what it wanted him to believe: that Tom had died screaming, alone, forgotten. That his brother's last moments had been terror and pain. That the watch was a monument to that horror.

But the entity had been lying.

It had fed on his grief, on his rage, twisted his memories to keep him fighting, to keep him from seeing what it was really doing. The crew of the station, Voss, the entity itself—it had all been a web of lies and pain, and Jack had walked right into the middle of it.

"You weren't scared," Jack said to the stars. "You were brave. You were always the brave one."

His brother's watch was gone. He'd given it to Voss, trusting her to send a signal. Maybe she had. Maybe she hadn't. Maybe it didn't matter anymore.

The cold was taking him. His limbs were numb, his thoughts slowing, drifting like leaves on a pond. He thought about how quiet it was out here, how beautiful. The station was gone, the entity was gone, the grief was gone. All that was left was the sea, and the sky, and the slow, steady rhythm of his own heart.

It was enough.

Jack let his eyes close. The stars blurred above him, and he let himself go.

*The submersible came for me,* he thought, hope stubbornly lingering in his chest. *Snake said it would. Snake doesn't lie.*

He faded into the black.