Read Chapter 9: The Hive

The hum was louder here. Not in his ears—in his bones, his teeth, the fillings he’d forgotten he had. It pulsed up through the deck plates and down through the conduit walls, a second heartbeat that didn’t belong to him. Jack kept low, one hand on the bulkhead for balance, his headlamp sweeping a thin cone across the corridor ahead.

He’d been descending for what felt like an hour, though the station’s clocks were meaningless now. Every junction he passed looked like the last one—same scuffed paint, same faded safety decals, same faint film of moisture on every surface. The air had changed, though. Thicker. Saltier. And underneath the industrial reek of hydraulic fluid and ozone, there was something else. Something sweet, almost floral, like rot trying to be perfume.

The hatch at the end of the corridor hung open. Beyond it, light. Warm, amber light, the kind the station’s fluorescent banks shouldn’t have been able to produce. Jack killed his headlamp and edged forward, his rebreather cycling slow and quiet.

The room opened into what had once been a mess hall. Tables bolted to the floor, a serving line along the far wall, a moth-eaten recreation flag drooping from a pole. But the tables had been shoved aside, cleared into a rough circle at the center of the room. And in that circle, they sat.

Eight of them. Crew. Hands joined in a ring, sitting cross-legged on the cold deck. Their faces were slack, mouths slightly open, eyes rolled back to show only the whites. The same luminescent film Jack had seen on the woman coated their skin, faint shimmering threads running across their cheeks, their arms, their joined hands—a webbing of pale light that connected them one to the next.

They weren’t moving. At least, not in any way Jack could track. But the hum was louder here, resonant, and he realized with a cold wash of dread that they were generating it. Every skin-to-skin point in that human chain was a conduit. The light pulsed along the webbing in slow, synced waves—like blood moving through veins, if veins were made of starlight and bad decisions.

Jack flattened himself against the deck, breath held, watching.

He counted. Nine, no—eight. Two in lab coats, one in a cook’s apron. A marine tech he recognized from the manifest photos. They sat in perfect stillness, but there was nothing peaceful about it. Their chests rose and fell in unison. Every breath at the same moment. Every pulse of light along their linked hands in the same rhythm.

Communing, Snake had said. Or something like it. Dr. Voss’s voice echoed in Jack’s memory: *Shared cognition. The organism doesn’t consume the host—it cooperates. It wants a network.*

This was the network. Or part of it.

Jack should have moved on. The corridor on the far side of the mess hall led deeper below, toward the levels where the Scar waited. But something held him in place. Not his body—that was fine, that knew exactly what to do, crawl past this horror show and never look back. It was his head. A pulling sensation behind his eyes, a warmth spreading from the base of his skull down into his neck. The hum stopped being a sound and became an invitation.

Sit down. Rest. Stop carrying the weight alone.

He blinked, and for a moment the tableau shifted. The crew weren’t tranced-out husks—they were at peace. Their faces were relaxed, not slack. Their breathing was easy. They looked like people who had finally stopped running, who had found a place where the endless noise of being alive could quiet down to something bearable.

Jack’s fingers uncurled. He hadn’t noticed them clenching into fists. His knee shifted, starting to push him upright. Toward the circle. Toward the empty space between the woman in the lab coat and the wiry man with the cook’s apron.

Just for a moment. Just to feel what it was like to set the weight down.

His boot scraped the deck.

The sound was small—a whisper against steel—but it cracked the room open. Every head in the circle turned toward him in perfect synchronicity, eight sets of milky, filmed-over eyes finding him in the dark. The light along their joined hands flared once, bright as a camera flash, and then dimmed.

The pull vanished. Jack’s head snapped clear like a rubber band breaking, and he was himself again—heart hammering, mouth dry, skin cold.

He didn’t think. He moved.

The crew rose as one, hands still linked, lifting into a standing ring with an economy that was utterly inhuman. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. The hum shifted, deepening, and Jack felt it vibrate through the deck plates beneath his boots.

He lunged for the far corridor. The nearest crew member—the cook—stepped forward, breaking the ring. Light guttered at the break points, filaments of shimmering substance stretching thin between his fingers and the next person’s palm before snapping with a wet sound Jack heard across the room.

Cook’s mouth opened. A low note came out, not quite a word, not quite a cry. The others took it up, a chord building behind him.

Jack hit the hatch at a run, shoulder-checking it open into a dark stairwell. He took the steps three at a time, not looking back. Behind him, the hum chased, pulsing up through the handrails, through the concrete of the stairwell, through the ringing in his ears.

He didn’t stop until the sound faded to a murmur, until his lungs burned and his legs screamed and he had to brace himself against a wall just to stay upright.

The corridor he’d landed in was older than the ones above. The paint was chipped down to bare metal, the light strips flickering, half of them dead. A faded sign read: DECK 4—GEOTHERMAL ACCESS. Below that, in fresh marker, someone had scrawled: *IT REMEMBERS YOU.*

Jack stared at the words. The marker was recent, the ink glossy. The handwriting was neat. Familiar.

His own handwriting.

He didn’t remember writing it. He looked at his hands, at the grime on his gloves, at the smear of something pale and iridescent he hadn’t noticed across the back of his left wrist. That sheen wasn’t there an hour ago. He was sure of it.

The pull was still there, faint now, a thread tied to his sternum, tugging down. Deeper. Toward the Scar. Toward the thing that had his brother’s voice and his mother’s kindness and the memory of every name he’d ever failed.

Jack Mercer wiped the back of his hand against his thigh. The shimmer didn’t come off. It just spread, a little wider, a little thinner, a veil settling over his skin.

He didn’t have time for this. He didn’t have time to figure out when he’d been marked, or what the writing on the wall meant, or why the hum felt less like a threat and more like a welcome.

He’d chosen to descend. Fine. He was going to finish the descent.

Jack left the marker-scrawl behind and pushed deeper into the dark, toward the place where his brother and his fate both waited.