Read Chapter 6: Debt Collecting

The bulkhead slammed behind him, and Jack pressed his back against it, gasping. The hum on the other side didn't stop. It didn't fade. It passed *through* the metal, vibrating in his sternum like a second heartbeat. He pushed off and ran.

The maintenance corridor bled into a storage bay—a cavernous space stacked with crates, cable spools, and the skeletal frames of ROV units. Emergency LEDs pulsed along the floor, casting long, wavering shadows. Jack ducked behind a pallet of ballast bricks, chest heaving. His suit's oxygen readout flickered at 34 percent. The emergency lights on his wrists threw only a weak halo. He killed them.

Silence. Then the hum came again, closer now—a low, choral thrumming, like voices buried in sand. It moved through the vents overhead, a soft skittering of nails and fabric. Jack held his breath.

A shape dropped from the vent system above, landing without a sound on the deck twenty feet away. Another followed. Then another. They rose in unison, heads tilted at that unnatural angle, their eyes catching the LED glow with that sickly luminescence. Three of them. Maybe more.

Jack reached for his utility knife. Useless. He scanned the bay—a toolbox, a fire extinguisher, a rack of wrenches. Nothing that would stop something already dead.

The nearest figure stepped forward, and the hum coalesced into a word, drawn out like a sigh. *"Jack."*

He froze. The voice was wrong—too smooth, too layered—but the cadence beneath it was familiar. The figure stepped into a pool of light.

It was Snake Dubois. The scar across his left cheek was unmistakable, the crooked nose from a bar fight in Reykjavik. But his eyes were milk-glass, filmed over with that translucent shimmer. His skin had a waxy sheen, and something moved beneath it, faint and rhythmic, like a tide under ice.

Jack almost laughed. Of all the faces in the deep, it had to be the one man who still owed him—no, the one man *he* owed. A debt from two years ago. A fishing job gone wrong off the Shetlands. Snake had pulled him from the water when the winch cable snapped. Jack had spent six weeks in a Bergen hospital. Snake had never asked for anything in return. Until now, standing in a tomb of a station six hundred feet down, asking for something Jack didn't want to give.

"Snake." Jack's voice cracked. "What the hell happened to you?"

Snake smiled. It was too wide, and the corners of his mouth didn't quite obey the rest of his face. "Happened? Nothing happened, mate. We got *more*."

"More what?"

"The gift." Snake gestured to the others behind him, who swayed in place, humming that low, shared note. "The water down there—the Scar—it's not dead, Jack. It's been waiting. It knows us now. All of us. And it wants to know you."

Jack's jaw tightened. "You're not making sense, Snake. This isn't you."

"Isn't it?" Snake took a step closer. The others didn't move, but their hum deepened, a shift in key that made Jack's teeth ache. "You remember the North Sea, Jack? You remember how it felt when the water closed over your head and the dark got *heavy*? That moment where you thought—just for a second—that maybe you weren't alone down there?"

Jack's heart hammered. He remembered. He remembered a lot of things he'd buried.

"That's what it's like," Snake continued, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "All the time now. No more lonely. No more borrowed time. We're all one thing, and the veil between us and the deep is thinning. You can feel it too, can't you? You've been feeling it since you docked."

"No." Jack shook his head, forcing his voice steady. "I feel cold, and I feel scared, and I feel like I'm going to die in this tin can. That's what I feel."

Snake tilted his head. The gesture was almost pitying. "That's the fear talking. It'll pass. It passes for everyone."

"You killed the crew? Voss? The commander?"

"Killed?" Snake laughed—a wet, gurgling sound that didn't match his face. "No one's dead, Jack. They're just *waiting*. Everyone's waiting for you. The way's not easy, but it's open. You've got someone down there you want to see, don't you?"

Charlie. The name burned in Jack's chest. He didn't answer.

Snake took another step. The others began to move, slowly, circling outward—not surrounding Jack, but forming a corridor. Leading somewhere. The storage bay's far wall had a service hatch, dark and open, leading into the lower decks. The hum pitched upward, almost eager.

"Come on, mate," Snake said. "Let us show you. Let it take the weight off. That debt you owe me? We'll call it settled."

Jack looked at Snake's outstretched hand. The film over his eyes rippled, like something beneath the surface had shifted. The hand was steady. Human. Snake's hand, the hand that had dragged him from the cold Atlantic and saved his life.

Jack reached out. Snake's smile widened.

Jack grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall bracket and slammed it into Snake's face.

The impact sent Snake staggering back, a guttural screech tearing from his throat—not pain, but *surprise*, like the thing inside him hadn't expected resistance. The other figures surged forward, but Jack was already moving, sprinting low between the crate stacks. He heard the humming fracture into noise behind him, ragged and hungry.

He dove through the service hatch and slapped the release. The door didn't move. Emergency lockout. He drove his shoulder against it, and it groaned—then slid shut with a wet, grinding sound. Something thudded against it from the other side. Then silence.

Jack pressed his forehead to the cold metal, panting. His hands were shaking. Somewhere behind him, the hum resumed, fainter now, working its way through the vents. They weren't chasing. They didn't need to.

The words echoed in his skull, no matter how hard he tried to shake them. *You're already carrying it.* And Snake's voice, layered with too many others: *You've got someone down there you want to see.*

Jack pushed off the door and stumbled into the dark, looking for somewhere to breathe.