Read Chapter 39: The Truth

The corridor smelled of bleach and something faintly sweet, like rotting flowers left in a vase too long. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting everything in a sterile, flat white that made the walls feel closer than they were. A nurse in pale blue scrubs walked me past a series of locked doors, each with a small window, each revealing a different kind of stillness.

Voss sat in a chair by the window. Her hair, once cropped and sharp, had grown uneven, sticking up at odd angles. She wore gray sweatpants and a matching top. Her hands were folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on the horizon beyond the frosted glass, where the Atlantic churned grey against a grey sky. She did not look at me when I entered. The nurse left, and the door clicked shut.

I pulled a plastic chair across the linoleum and sat across from her. She was thinner than I remembered. The hollows of her cheeks had deepened. Her eyes were open, but whatever was behind them had gone somewhere else.

"Voss," I said.

No response.

"Doctor Voss. I need you to talk to me."

Her lips moved. A whisper, barely audible. I leaned forward.

"It was a door." Her voice was dry, like old paper. She repeated it slowly, each word measured, as if she were reading it from something invisible in front of her. "It was a door."

I waited. Her eyes stayed locked on the sea.

"Door to what?"

She blinked. Once. Twice. Then her head tilted slightly, a birdlike motion, and for the first time her gaze slid to me. Something flickered there — recognition, maybe, or fear. "You opened it," she said. "When you flooded the core. You didn't kill it. You opened the door wider."

My chest tightened. "The entity. It's dead. I felt it die."

"You felt it stop screaming." Her voice was still distant, but precise. "That's not the same." She turned back to the window. "It was never a creature, Jack. It was a signal. A beacon. It spent twenty years calling. When your brother's ship came, it didn't attack. It copied. It learned. It waited." She paused. "The signal didn't stop when you flooded the station. It started broadcasting from somewhere else."

I gripped the arms of the chair. "From where?"

"I don't know. But it found the network before you smashed it. It had already sent fragments through the cables. Fragments of itself. Seeds." She laughed — a dry, hollow sound that was worse than tears. "We didn't quarantine a pathogen. We quarantined a radio tower. And the tower just got bigger."

I sat back. The room hummed around us. Outside, a gull wheeled across the grey sky and vanished.

"You said it was a door," I said slowly. "A door for what?"

Voss's hands twitched in her lap. "For them." She spoke the word like it hurt. "The signal wasn't the entity. It was the *invitation*. The entity was the doorbell. And we — I — helped it ring." Her voice cracked. "I thought I was saving it. Preserving consciousness. But it was just a relay. It was passing the signal along. Amplifying it."

I thought of the watch, of its frozen hands at 3:33. Of the signal that had pulsed from the seabed for twenty years. Of the dark shape I'd seen moving in the flooded corridor before the bulkhead sealed.

"There was something else," I said. "In the water. After you left. Bigger than a man."

Voss's lips pressed into a thin line. "What did it look like?"

"Dark. Fast. I couldn't see it clearly. Just a shape."

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet. "Then it's already here. Or close. The door is open wider than I thought." She reached out and grabbed my wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong, her fingers cold. "You have to stop it, Jack. You can't kill a signal. You can only stop listening. Or stop broadcasting." She looked at me with an intensity that cut through the haze. "Find the other stations. The other silence zones. There were more. I saw files. Thirty years of anomalies. I thought they were all dead ends." She shook her head. "They weren't. They were *nesting*."

The nurse knocked on the window. Time was up.

I stood. Voss's hand fell away. She looked at the horizon again, her voice fading to a murmur.

"Take the watch. It still ticks now because the signal is moving. It will stop again when it's close."

"What does 3:33 mean?"

But she was gone again, her eyes empty, her lips moving silently around words only she could hear. The nurse entered and gently guided me toward the door. I looked back once. Voss didn't move. She was a shell, and I had the bullets that had gone through her.

The corridor felt colder on the way out. The front doors of the facility opened onto a parking lot that overlooked the sea. I stood there for a long moment, the wind pulling at my jacket. My brother's watch was heavy in my pocket. I pulled it out. The second hand was sweeping — smooth, steady, alive.

For the first time in years, it was counting forward.

I looked at the Atlantic, grey and endless and patient. Somewhere beneath its surface, the door was still open. And the invitations were still going out.