He knelt at the edge of the lake, palms braced on the cold stone, letting the cool air roll over him in slow waves while the damp mist gathered on his gloves. Each breath came a little easier as the raw scrape in his throat softened under the shock of real hydration.

  He cupped another handful, watching the droplets cling to the seams of his suit before drinking again. The taste was sharp and electric, cutting through the metallic dryness that had been grinding him down for hours. His heartbeat found something close to a rhythm that wasn’t pure panic after the Auto-Pick failed.

  The chamber around him refused to match his sense of relief. He noticed it in small pieces at first: the absence of vibration beneath his knees, and the way the air clung to him without any hint of the faint hum that had pulsed through earlier chambers like a heartbeat under stone. Even Harold’s quiet background static was gone, leaving the world cocooned in a silence so complete it felt curated rather than natural. CelestOS processed environmental readings in clipped intervals, the soft flicker of holographic diagnostics painting the air in front of him. Nothing reacted to anything he did. The space behaved like a room waiting for instruction, and the longer he stayed, the more he felt the attention of something unseen.

  He scooped more water and let it spill through his fingers just to hear the sound. As the ripples spread out across the lake, he sat back on his heels and rubbed a shaking hand along the seam of his helmet. The ripples should have faded evenly; instead, they lingered in concentric rings, their edges dragging a beat behind the movement that made them. They followed his movement, yet were completely out of sync with it. Each ring pulsed outward in slow waves as though translating his actions into a different language.

  He leaned forward and narrowed his eyes at the water. When he adjusted his weight, the ripples froze, holding shape longer than they should have, then released in a sluggish wave that felt delayed. It was as if the water was watching his movements and then responding after it had time to think about them. The wrongness almost made his throat close again. He reached out a hand, hovering his glove above the surface. The lake stilled completely before he touched it. Not a flicker nor a shift disturbed the flat pane of dark liquid that swallowed the light from his wrist lamp.

  CelestOS ran another passive scan, the diagnostic glow stuttering across the mist. Ethan waited for the AI’s usual monotone, the clinical reassurance or cautionary barb, but nothing came for several seconds. Even CelestOS seemed to pause, as if calibrating the strangeness. When its voice finally returned, it was quieter than usual.

  CelestOS: Ambient vibration levels have dropped below detectable threshold. Hydrological stability is atypical. Recommend caution.

  Ethan’s jaw tightened. “Caution? Pretty sure we crossed that line when the walls started breathing.”

  He shifted again, and the lake’s surface answered with a ripple that appeared a fraction too late. A tap echoed through the water, faint as a fingertip drumming on glass, followed by another. A slow, uneven beat that crawled up the back of his skull and settled behind his ears with cold familiarity. He had heard that rhythm before. Down in the red-lit place where the resin sang. In his own pulse when he was infected.

  A third tap rolled through the water, deeper this time, and the lake returned to perfect stillness.

  Ethan exhaled, the breath shaking in his chest, and finally whispered, “Something down there knows I’m here.”

  idly, he considered making his way back to his base, but he continued filling up his canteens. He wouldn’t let himself get thirsty again.

  Ethan edged back from the water, not far, just enough to brace one hand on the ground and steady himself as a stronger tremor moved through the lake. The surface didn’t break; instead, it shivered. A long, low undulation slid from one edge to the other, creating a motion too smooth to be natural and too controlled to be a random current. His breath caught in his chest as the wave faded into stillness again.

  His wrist lamp cast a narrow beam over the water, and he tracked it like a lifeline, sweeping it from left to right. The light barely penetrated a meter deep. Everything beneath that was heavy with silt-dark haze, a murk that swallowed the beam as though it were eating it. For a moment he swore he saw something below: a darker darkness, wide and patient, drifting beneath the foggy water like a submerged continent shifting in its sleep.

  He lowered the lamp, trying to steady the tremble in his hand. “CelestOS… analysis?”

  A soft cascade of diagnostics shimmered across the corner of his vision. CelestOS took longer than usual to respond, its processors humming in a low, uncertain way that made Ethan’s skin crawl.

  CelestOS: Hydrological thermal patterns indicate circulating mass beneath the surface. Estimated diameter is an insufficient data point.

  “Insufficient isn’t exactly comforting.”

  CelestOS: Comfort isn't a priority metric.

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  He huffed an unsteady laugh and leaned closer again despite every instinct screaming not to. The lake held perfectly still, too still. Even the usual micro-ripples caused by airflow or subtle hand movements refused to appear. The surface was smooth enough to be glass, a single unbroken sheet of black that reflected his wrist lamp in a wavering, pale halo. It had the unsettling quality of something holding its breath.

  He extended two fingers, stopping just above the surface. The water twitched. A single ripple nudged outward, as if nudged from underneath. Ethan jerked back. The tremor settled into silence again.

  Something huge was under there. This huge thing was moving with the quiet confidence of something that had never needed to rush before.

  His mind was screaming at him to turn and run, but his armor made him feel glued to the lake’s edge. He swallowed hard and scanned along the shoreline for any sign of life, any pattern, any breath of movement other than the occasional ripple.

  Another shift rolled beneath the water, a subtle shift, like a prodigious body repositioning itself. The surface dimpled slightly, then relaxed. Ethan flinched, his hand rising instinctively toward the sidearm he didn't have anymore. In fact, his lack of weapons was something he desperately needed to fix.

  A beat passed, then a second, and then the tapping returned.

  This time it came from deep below, a thudding pulse that resonated through the water and into the stone beneath him. It wasn't loud, but it had weight, as though someone were knocking slowly on the underside of the lake with a fist the size of a boulder. The rhythm matched the off-kilter cadence he’d heard before. The resin’s heartbeat. The infection’s whisper. Fuck.

  CelestOS: Warning. Subsurface anomaly rising toward the surface. Elevation rate is increasing. Recommend immediate relocation.

  Ethan backed up one step, the spell of his suit finally broken, then another, yet he was still unable to pull his eyes away from the water. The tapping grew louder. The lake began to flex, the surface tightening like muscle preparing to contract.

  “Yeah,” he breathed, voice thin. “Time to move.”

  The water bulged.

  The lake began to rise.

  The surface of the lake rose in a slow, convex swell, stretching upward as if something enormous pressed from below. Ethan staggered back, boots slipping on the damp stone, but his eyes stayed locked on the water. A sound rolled out from inside the swell, a deep, hollow groan that reminded him of ship hulls deforming under pressure; except, this came from inside a living thing. The tapping rhythm dissolved into a single, resonant thud that vibrated through the cavern floor and up into his bones.

  The swell broke.

  Water exploded upward in a geyser of dark spray as the monster came surging through the surface, shedding waves in every direction. Ethan threw an arm over his face, blinking through the shock as droplets stung against his cheeks. When his eyes refocused, the thing was already rising higher, blotting out the far wall with a shifting mass of resin-slick plates and wet, pulsing membranes.

  It had too many limbs to count, each one jointed at angles that made his stomach twist. Some ended in hooked talons, others in paddle-like structures more suited for propulsion than walking. Its skin glistened like polished chitin, streaked with veins of deep red resin that pulsed in the same arrhythmic cadence as the tapping. Every pulse sent a faint tremor through the stone, as though the creature’s heartbeat was out of sync with the world around it.

  Ethan stumbled back another step, heart hammering. He expected a roar, a shriek, anything to match the violence of its emergence, but the monster only exhaled. A long, low, bubbling breath seeped from the vents along its sides, fogging the air with metallic vapor. Its head (or what he had to assume was its head) lifted above the water. The jaw split open down the middle, unfolding into two glistening halves lined with uneven plates that writhed like teeth thinking about growing.

  It studied him.

  He felt it unmistakably. The creature’s gaze, if it even had eyes, didn't fix on the cavern or the breach, but directly on him. The hairs along the back of his neck prickled so sharply they hurt. He’d seen resin-infected things before: thralls, twisted animals, corrupted drones. Nothing like this, though. Nothing so deliberate or so aware.

  “CelestOS.” His voice cracked. “Please tell me this thing can’t leave the water.”

  A soft diagnostic flickered across his vision.

  CelestOS: Insufficient data. Terrestrial locomotion potential is unknown.

  “Fantastic,” he said. “Truly inspiring.” He continued moving backwards, unable to get off the ground.

  The creature moved.

  Not by swimming, but by lunging. It surged forward with terrifying acceleration, sending a tidal wave of water rolling across the shore. Ethan leapt back as the wave smashed into the stone and swept across the cavern floor. One of the creature’s limbs struck the edge of the lake, cracking the rock with a sound like bone snapping under immense weight. Chunks of stone tumbled into the water, swallowed instantly by the churning black beneath.

  The jaw-halves snapped together with a wet clack, spraying resin-tainted droplets across the ground. Ethan ducked as one struck his shoulder plate and sizzled faintly before sliding off. The creature lunged again, dragging itself partially out of the water, limbs scraping against the cavern floor with a grinding shriek. Its plates flexed outward like gills tasting the air.

  He bolted for the breach. The monster erupted forward in pursuit, water hammering the stone behind him. The ground shook beneath the force of its movement, and Ethan felt the wall-organism react: a full-body tremor that rippled through the corridor ahead.

  What the fuck had he been thinking? It was like the suit had trapped him to the spot, but then, he’d been free and he still hadn’t run. Fuck fuck fuck.

  Ethan didn't look back, and he couldn't afford to. The sound behind him was too big, too wet, too wrong: a thunder of limbs dragging stone and water in a single monstrous cadence. His boots hammered the ground in frantic, uneven strides, each footfall punching through the rising ache in his legs. He sprinted toward the breach he’d torn earlier, the wound in the living wall where warm fibers still sagged from the trauma.

  But at the last second he was forced to dive away as the monster smashed a tentacle or limbs or whatever the fuck it was collapsing the wall and his escape route. And then to make matters worse, Harold’s light went out.