His head hit the metal walkway with a hollow clang, and the impact split the ruined skull wide open along the entry wound. It split apart like rotten fruit. I saw the inside of his head for one terrible, endless second—dark red and glistening, caved in where the spear had landed, the brain matter already discolored and dead, threaded through with something black and web-like that I’d never seen in any anatomy diagram.
Blood ran between the grated floor and dripped to the level below in slow, heavy drops. The sound they made hitting the concrete underneath was the only noise in the building.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
I stood there breathing hard, the speargun still raised, staring at what was left of him.
My cheek was wet. I wiped it with the back of my hand, and my fingers came away dark.
His blood was on my face.
We don’t know how itspreads.
The captain’s words hit me like ice water. My whole body went cold. I scrubbed at my cheek frantically, dragging my sleeve across the skin until it burned, but I could still feel it.
Stop. Stop it. You don’t know. You don’t know if that’s how itworks.
But I didn’t know that it wasn’t.
My hands were shaking so badly now that the speargun rattled. I crouched and wiped the shaft against Jason’s shirt, trying to get the worst of it off. The fabric was already so saturated with old blood and fluids that it barely made a difference.
I stepped around the body carefully, pressing against the far railing to keep as much distance as possible from the spreading pool beneath his head. It was wider now and creeping toward the edges of the walkway. The dripping below had become a steady, thin stream.
Every few steps, I stopped and listened, waiting for another snarl. Another shuffle of feet on metal.
The building stayed quiet, save for the generators and water.
I worked my way through the rest of the aquarium with the speargun up, checking every corner, every shadow, every doorway. My eyes burned from not blinking. Every dark shape made my heart lurch—a mop bucket against a wall, a wet suit hanging from a hook, the silhouette of a trash can at the end of a corridor. Each one stopped me dead for a horrible, breathless second before my brain caught up.
The spiral walkway groaned softly under my boots as I descended the last level, and every groan sounded like one ofthemmoving in the dark.
When I reached the staff hallway, my pulse was hammering.
The door Jason must have come through sat at the far end of the corridor. The hallway stretched out in front of me, long and narrow and dim, and I couldn’t clearly see the last ten feet of it.
Anything might be standing down there.
Anything might be pressed against that door, waiting.
I made myself keep walking. One foot in front of the other. Speargun raised. The blood on my cheek had dried now, tight and itching, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The door materialized out of the dimness.
Shut.
The indicator light glowed a steady red.
I stared at it for a long time. My breathing slowly steadied.
The door would have stayed open for several seconds. That was how these magnetic locks worked—I knew because I’d programmed them. Five seconds of clearance before the auto-lock engaged.
Five seconds.
Long enough for Jason to drag himself through on that destroyed ankle.