Ethan wedged himself through the hatch, shoulder first, his cracked armor scraping against the rust-bitten rim. The metal screeched like a blade across glass, the sound reverberating in the narrow shaft as flakes of corrosion fell away in dull showers.

  He held his breath without meaning to, forcing himself sideways until his boot slipped past the lip and he dropped into the shaft proper. Gravity did the rest, pulling him down a ladder slick with condensation. The ladder rattled under his weight, vibrating faintly as though the entire structure wanted him gone.

  The air hit him first when he landed. Thick, wet, metallic. It clung to his mouth like a damp cloth, every breath a drag through water. A faint buzzing threaded through the dark, too steady for insects, too alive for machines. It made the hairs on his arms stand on end.

  Harold dropped down after him with a light plop. The light on the end of his turret swept the tunnel in sickly arcs, revealing streaks of discoloration along the walls. At first they looked like rust blooms, then he realized the texture was wrong. Dark stains, jagged at the edges, seared into the metal like burns. He touched one with a gloved finger, and the surface flaked away in brittle crusts, leaving only a black smear. Dried blood.

  Something small shifted beneath his boot. He jerked back, nearly losing his grip on the ladder, then realized it wasn’t moving at all. A carcass the size of a small dog lay crumpled on the step, shriveled to skin and bone. Crystalline filaments sprouted from its body like veins frozen mid-burst, glowing faintly red in the beam of Harold’s light. Dozens more dotted the floor below, littering the corners like forgotten offerings.

  Harold stirred against him, the drone’s servos clicking in nervous rhythm. Ethan reached up to steady the drone, more for himself than for the machine.

  “Yeah,” he said, voice low. “Creeps me out too.”

  Why had Maria sent him here? The hatch alone would have kept anyone sane out, and this shaft was more grave than corridor. Doubt gnawed at him as the buzzing grew louder in the dark below, a steady reminder that some part of this place was still alive. He continued forward anyway.

  The shaft spat him out into a corridor that felt more like a wound than a hallway. His boots struck metal, but it wasn’t clean plating anymore. Whole stretches of wall had been overtaken by resinous growths, the crimson veins of red resin lacing through the bulkheads as if the structure had been rewoven from the inside out.

  The buzz he’d heard earlier resolved into a chorus of broken lights, some still clinging to the ceiling, others dangling on cables like gutted lanterns. They flickered in uneven intervals, casting jagged shadows that shifted with every step.

  Harold’s light caught on a half-rotted sheet of plastic bolted to the wall. For a second, he thought it was just another hazard sign, but then he made out the faded Celestitech logo and the safety slogan stenciled beneath it. Resin had eaten away most of the letters, leaving only fragments behind. Enough to read:

  “Safety is our third highest priority.”

  Ethan let out a short, humorless breath. “Yeah. Figures.” His voice was swallowed almost instantly by the corridor.

  Further down, glass cages lined one wall; test enclosures long since cracked open. Inside, skeletal husks of small, alien mammals lay collapsed in their bedding. Each body was riddled with the same crimson spines he’d seen upstairs, their bones threaded through with crystalline filaments that had grown outward, curling against the glass. It was as if the resin had kept feeding long after death, sculpting new patterns from their remains.

  The stink hit him then, a rot thinned to a metallic sweetness, the way blood smelled if left too long in the sun. It made his filter rasp.

  He forced himself forward, again. The corridor angled slightly downward, and the walls pressed closer the deeper he went. Every drip of condensation echoed like a tick of a clock.

  The corridor ended in a widening glow ahead, and for a breathless moment Ethan’s chest seized with hope. The light was steady, not flickering, a warm electric hum that bled through the darkness like a promise. He broke into a jog, boots clanging on the grating, every jolt rattling the cracks in his armor.

  The chamber opened before him. Wide. High-ceilinged. He stopped on the threshold, heart pounding, every muscle braced as if Maria herself might be standing in the spill of light across the far wall.

  “Maria!” His voice rang out, desperate, raw.

  The only answer was the echo. He’d been here before. The desperate ache of longing and fear that she’d never be okay.

  He scanned the room, forcing his eyes to take it all in. A cathedral of ruin stretched around him resin scaffolds crisscrossed the walls, binding beams together with pulsing red filaments. Machines sat half-digested in their embrace, consoles hanging sideways as if waiting to be swallowed whole. This was where Dr. Miro had transformed.

  The floor bore the detritus of life: torn ration wrappers, upended crates, a mug lying on its side with the residue of long-congealed coffee staining the concrete. She had been here. People had been here.

  “Maria…” His voice broke the second time, thinner, weaker.

  The hum came from the far side, where a workstation still glowed. Its monitor was the only intact light in the place, bright, steady and unyielding. His legs carried him toward it, slow at first, then faster, his chest tight with something between dread and longing.

  Halfway across, the ceiling groaned. A long crack sheared through the silence. Ethan froze, gaze darting upward just in time to see a slab of plating shudder and split from the ceiling.

  “Shit!” He threw himself sideways.

  The collapse hit like thunder. Metal and resin alike slammed into the floor where he had stood, shards ricocheting in every direction. The impact sent a tremor through the entire chamber, raining dust and pebbled resin fragments. One shard glanced off his shoulder plate, knocking him sprawling, his breath driven out in a sharp gasp.

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  For a moment, he lay there, coughing into the taste of rust and stone, ears ringing with the echo of destruction.

  Slowly, the sound died. Only the low electric hum remained, the monitor still glowing in the distance like an eye watching him. If that sound didn’t bring unintended guests, nothing would.

  Ethan rolled to his knees, chest heaving, and spat a dry curse. The air tasted worse now, clotted with grit. He dragged himself upright, wincing at the grind of his battered suit.

  “Not stopping me,” he said. Not when she’d been here. Not when her trail was still within his grasp.

  He fixed his eyes on the workstation, heart pounding harder than the collapse itself, and limped forward into the glow.

  The monitor flickered, stabilizing under Ethan’s repairs. For a second, only static, then a face swam into view: pale, haggard, rimmed in shadow. Dr. Miro. Ethan recognized him, though the man in the recording looked barely human anymore.

  Blood vessels spidered across his skin like red roots, converging on eyes that burned crimson in the monitor’s glow. Veins throbbed visibly at his temples, pulsing in rhythm with his words. He was seated in front of the workstation, shoulders slouched, fingers twitching compulsively against the desk as if he couldn’t stop moving.

  Miro: “Doctor Aris Miro, recording… timestamp irrelevant. I don’t… I don’t even know what day it is anymore. Time’s lost meaning in here.” He gave a harsh laugh, lips cracked and dry. “But I’ve found it. I’ve found everything.”

  He leaned closer to the camera, and Ethan flinched involuntarily.

  Miro: “The ore. The Veslayan ore. It’s not just metal. It’s… it’s alive, or something beyond alive. It doesn’t just conduct energy. It produces. Out of nothing. Ex nihilo.” His mouth lingered on the Latin as though savoring the taste. “Do you understand? We don’t have to burn or mine or even work anymore. It creates. This is why Celestitech sent us here.”

  He wielded the ore in his hand and flaked a small amount of the ore off and then touched the metal to a bar of iron. In an instant the metal duplicated. He pounded a fist against the table, rattling the camera. His breath came ragged, eyes wide.

  Miro: “Entropy is the law, they say. The inevitable slide into heat death, into dust. The collapse of order into chaos. I believed that once. We all did. But this. This is the antithesis. The opposite of entropy. Syntropy. That’s what I’ll call it. Syntropic Ore.”

  He whispered the words like a prayer, then repeated them louder, faster. “Syntropic Ore. Syntropy. Creation, order, renewal! The world doesn’t have to fall apart, no, no, it doesn’t have to rot!”

  The video jumped, cutting ahead. Static hissed for a heartbeat before resolving again, and Miro reappeared. He looked worse. So much worse.

  His skin sagged and glistened, as though slick with fever-sweat. The veins across his temples had thickened, branching deeper, darker, crawling down his throat like roots digging for soil. His lips trembled as he leaned into the camera, words spilling fast and sharp.

  Miro: “Entropy. Entropy, entropy, entropy… I can feel it. It’s not out there, it’s in here. In my veins. In my teeth. The Resin eats. Eats away, away, away.” He clawed at his own arm, dragging nails down flesh already swollen and red. “You can’t stop it. It needs. It wants. It craves. It destroys. All things, all people, all light. It will take the bones of the world and grind them down to dust, then swallow the dust too.”

  His voice broke into a shriek, then laughter, then both at once. He slapped the desk hard enough to leave streaks of blood behind.

  Miro: “Do you hear it? It’s whispering. Not words, no, no. Hunger. Just hunger. The universe isn’t silent. It’s a wild animal chewing. Chewing us apart, one second at a time. Every tick of the clock is a bite. Entropy chewing. Entropy swallowing. Entropy laughing while you bleed out on the floor.”

  He pressed both hands to his face and screamed into his palms, a raw, animal howl that made the speakers crackle. When he lowered them again, blood ran freely from his nose and eyes, weeping down his cheeks in resin-dark streaks. His pupils were nearly gone, drowned by that impossible red glow.

  Miro: “But it’s not just hunger. No, no, it’s promise too. The Resin says decay isn’t the end. It says… ahh, it says…. if you let it eat you, it will use the scraps. It will build with what’s left. It will wear you like a mask, make you stand when you’ve fallen, make you walk when you’re dead. You don’t stop being food. You become the teeth teeth teeth”

  His jaw snapped open unnaturally wide, tendons straining, spit flying. He lurched back, raking both hands through his hair until tufts came free. His words devolved into guttural muttering, one refrain repeated endlessly, over and over, louder and louder:

  “Entropy. Entropy. ENTROPY. ENTROPY.”

  The camera shook with the violence of it, the workstation vibrating under his fists. Blood burst in vessels across his skin, weeping fresh crimson threads that pulsed and spread like vines under glass. His body convulsed, seized, then stilled.

  The video cut again, static swallowing the feed for several seconds before it steadied. When Miro came back into frame, he was barely sitting upright. His body sagged like an empty shell, every vein alive with crimson light. His chest hitched as though every breath was an argument his lungs were losing.

  A bulging rhythm beat across his chest growing big and bigger and his climbed his torso crawling through his skin as though there were no resistance. Instead of pain, ecstasy flowed on Dr. Miro’s face. And then the bulged slammed into Miro’s head with the weight and speed of a fright train

  Miro didn’t even flinch. Instead, he laughed.

  Miro: “Yes… yes, I hear you. I am yours. Use me.”

  In one impossible motion, something yanked his head back and severed it clean from his body. Blood and resin geysered across the lens, the sound wet and final.

  Ethan staggered back from the monitor as if the blade had been swung at him.

  But Miro’s head didn’t die. It didn’t even stop moving.

  The camera caught the impossible: the head still blinking, still gasping, still mouthing words. Veins of alien resin sprouted from the ragged stump of his neck, tethering it by a dozen vines to the creature rising from his corpse. His body lurched upright like a puppet jerked on strings. Resin cords had wrapped around its limbs, pulling them into motion with jerky precision.

  Miro’s head lolled in the monster’s grasp, lifted high like a trophy. His mouth opened, blood bubbling at the corners, but the voice that came out was stronger than before, swollen with the alien’s cadence.

  Miro: “Entropy is the feast. Entropy is the path. But Syntropy… Syntropy is the throne. And once its secrets are mine. There will be no end to my feast.”

  The resin-thing jerked his body toward the camera, its stolen hands clawing the air. The head dangled from its grip, still alive, still screaming; its laughter and agony twisted into one sound.

  The video distorted, the image shaking as the monster drew closer. For a fraction of a second, Ethan thought it was staring through the feed, those crimson cords quivering as though aware of him.

  Then the transmission collapsed into black.

  Only the hum of the monitor remained.