Read Chapter 5: Breach

The sound came from behind him.

Not the vent. Not the smear. A footstep, soft and deliberate, close enough that the air displaced by it stirred the hairs on the back of Jack’s neck.

He turned, wrench raised, and caught a blur of movement—a shape peeled away from the shadows beside the crew quarters door. It moved wrong, limbs too quick, torso tilting at an angle that suggested the hips had forgotten how to hold a spine upright.

Then it was on him.

Jack got an arm up. The body slammed into his forearm, driving him back against the bulkhead with a clang that rang through the corridor. The wrench was still in his other hand, but he couldn’t swing—the thing was too close, its face inches from his, breath hot and damp and sour.

Not a thing. A person. A woman, gaunt, skin stretched too tight across her cheekbones. Scrubs, soiled, the ADRS logo faded on the chest. Her mouth was open, and the sound coming out of it wasn’t a scream. It was a low keening hum, like a tuning fork pressed against bone.

“Hey,” Jack managed. “Hey—I’m not here to hurt you. I’m crew. Relief diver. I’m here to help.”

Her eyes met his.

The pupils were blown wide, black as the water outside the station. But around the iris, there was a film—a faint, wet sheen that caught the corridor’s emergency light and threw it back silver, like oil on a puddle. Like the smear on the deck.

“Safe,” she said. Her voice was wrong, cracked, like she hadn’t used it in weeks. “It’s safe now.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s safe. I’m here to bring you up.”

She tilted her head. The motion was too smooth, too fast, like a bird deciding whether to strike.

“No,” she said. “You’re here to take us away.”

She lunged.

Jack didn’t think. He dropped, driving his shoulder into her sternum, using her momentum to shove her past him. She stumbled, caught herself on the bulkhead with a hand that bent further than it should, and turned.

The hum grew louder. Others answered it—voices, from deeper in the corridor, from the vents, from behind sealed doors that should have been empty.

Jack ran.

He didn’t look back. He hit the first junction and went left, boots sliding on the slick deck, counting bulkheads as he passed. Three. Four. The maintenance access was five meters ahead, a square hatch in the wall marked with a faded stencil: SERVICE—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Behind him, the hum shifted. Rose in pitch. Became something almost like a word.

*Stay.*

He hit the hatch at a sprint, got his fingers into the seal’s recessed handle, and wrenched. It didn’t move. He heard the footsteps behind him—not running, just walking, steady, unhurried. They knew he had nowhere to go.

Jack forced himself to slow down. He pressed the heel of his hand against the locking mechanism, found the release, and pulled. The hatch swung open on a pitch-black shaft barely wide enough for his shoulders.

He dove in.

The shaft was cold. Metal-runged, the sort of maintenance ladder that ran the full height of the station’s spoke sections. Jack grabbed the rungs and shoved himself upward, not climbing so much as scrabbling, the wrench still clutched in one hand.

Below him, the hatch stayed open. The hum grew louder, flooding into the shaft, and he felt it in his teeth, in his sternum, a vibration that wanted to settle into his bones and hum along with it.

He didn’t stop. He climbed.

Two levels up, he found a landing with a manual bulkhead wheel—one of the old-style pressure seals, redundant since the station’s refit, but still functional. Jack spun the wheel with both hands, muscles burning, as the hum grew closer below.

The wheel turned. The seal began to close.

A hand shot through the gap.

The woman’s fingers wrapped around the bulkhead’s edge, pale and thin, the nails cracked and black. She pulled, and the seal groaned, resisting. Her face appeared in the gap, one eye pressed to the shrinking opening, the film over her iris gleaming wet and hungry in the shaft’s dim light.

“It doesn’t want you yet,” she said. The hum threaded through her voice, made it resonate. “But it will. It always calls them back.”

“Who?” Jack said. He kept his weight against the wheel, feet planted wide. “Who does it call?”

“The ones who left. The ones who came back wrong.” Her eye tracked him, unblinking. “You’re already carrying it. You just don’t know yet.”

Jack’s hand went to his chest. Beneath the dive suit, the brass watch pressed against his sternum. Charlie’s watch.

The seal was three-quarters closed now. He had to lean in, put his whole shoulder into it, the woman’s fingers still wrapped around the edge, skin peeling as the seal bit into them. She didn’t flinch.

“He was here,” she said. “Your brother. He came down. He saw it. He almost made it out.”

Jack stopped pushing.

The seal held. The woman’s voice came through the gap, soft now, almost gentle.

“He’s still here. Down in the dark. Waiting for you to find him.”

The hum swelled. Jack shoved the wheel the last quarter turn with a scream that tore his throat, and the bulkhead clanged shut. The sound of it echoed through the shaft and died.

The hum continued on the other side. Fainter now, but present. Patient.

Jack leaned against the sealed door, chest heaving, and looked down at his hands. They were shaking. He’d killed his dive light somewhere in the corridor—he’d dropped it when she’d grabbed him—and the shaft was lit only by the faint emergency LEDs embedded along the rungs.

He reached into his suit and pulled out Charlie’s watch. The glass was cold. The second hand still swept, despite everything—Charlie had wound it the morning he’d left for his last dive, and it had never stopped.

“He’s not down there,” Jack said out loud. The words felt thin in the dark. “He’s not.”

The hum on the other side of the bulkhead shifted, almost like laughter.

Jack put the watch back, clicked the clasps of his dive harness, and started climbing.