The lower corridor was darker and narrower; the emergency amber lights traded out for red. A coolant line had ruptured atsome point and been patched with sealant that hardened into a dark ridge along the wall, and the floor plating was wet in patches. The air down here had something in it, like a chemical that caught at the back of his throat.
A vent cover twenty feet ahead blew off the wall and hit the opposite side of the corridor with a clang that made Levi duck as Asher yanked him back against his chest. Steam or gas hissed from the opening for three seconds, then stopped. The cover sat on the floor, rocking gently on its curved edge.
“That was the ship,” Levi said. He glanced down at the arm banded across his torso and realized he was gripping Asher’s forearm with both hands, not to push him away, but almost as if he didn’t want to let go. He forced his hands to relax and pulled away. “Not the creatures.”
“I know.” Asher stepped over the cover without looking at it. “Keep moving.”
They were halfway down the corridor when Asher’s palm came up flat against his chest. Levi stopped and followed his line of sight to the far end that branched left.
It was one of the creatures moving away from them. That was what made it possible to stand there and look — the fact that it was moving away. The height hit him first, the head misshapen, almost flat, brushing the overhead strips. Then the arms, hanging too low, past where arms should end. Then the legs, and the joint below the knee that bent the wrong direction on each step — Levi’s eyes kept sliding off the movement, trying to correct for it as his mind insisted the leg should go one way and the leg kept going another.
Its whole body looked wrong, even at a distance, pale and nearly translucent with dark things running under its skin. One of its arms was outstretched, fingers with too many bent joints trailing along the wall, sounding less like nails and more like metal scratching metal.
Underneath the alarm, Levi felt a low hum in his sternum that was…rhythmic? Almost like the same pattern repeated slightly differently each time it cycled.
It turned the corner and was gone.
Levi’s palm was flat against the wall beside him. He didn’t remember putting it there. Asher grabbed his wrist and took the right branch.
The armory door was on a security corridor — a designation Asher either knew from Peterson or decided looked right, and the lock responded to his thumb on the panel. Inside sat racks and racks of weapons, tactical gear arranged along the walls, knives, and a few strange devices Levi had no reference for but wanted to avoid because several of them were wrapped in duct tape. Two lockers were already open, the racks inside empty. Someone had been here recently.
Asher moved through it without asking Levi anything. He tried checking the chamber on a gun, but lights activated on the side with a power readout instead. He seemed to find that satisfactory and set them aside, then he placed a pistol on the rack in front of Levi. “Point and pull.”
“I know how to—”
“Don’t think. Point and pull.”
Levi took it and clipped it to his belt. Then he looked at the rack and picked up a second, smaller one and slipped it into his pocket.
“Just in case,” Levi said.
Asher nodded. The two of them were gearing up in an armory, side by side, the alarm still blaring overhead, and Levi realizedif he squinted hard enough, thisalmostlooked like a functional relationship.
Don’t squint.
Asher picked up a rifle and turned toward the door. “We’re going back to the room, and we’re locking the door.”
“We’re already down here. The cargo hold is one section over, if we could just—”
Asher raised the rifle and pointed it at Levi’s head, his face deadly calm. Levi looked down the barrel, his hands raised in surrender, then at Asher.
“Okay.”
Asher lowered the weapon and leaned in, smirking as Levi flinched, and kissed him on the cheek. “Good boy,” he said.
The first sealed door was thirty feet from the armory.
It had been open on the way down — Levi was certain of it; they’d walked through this junction ten minutes ago. Now the door was shut, the panel beside it showing a red indicator, and when Asher pressed his thumb to the scanner, nothing happened. He hit it with the butt of his gun instead, and the panel cracked.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Levi mumbled.
Asher turned right without comment, heading for the parallel corridor. They made it maybe forty feet this time before hitting another sealed door — same red indicator, same dead scanner. The air was warmer than it had been minutes ago, and a section of overhead lighting had gone out entirely, leaving the stretch ahead in near-darkness that they had to cross with only the amber emergency strips along the floor.
A shrinking map.Funneling. Ethan called these a cheap way for the developer to force an enemy encounter because they didn’t trust the player to find it in an otherwise open-world game. He was usually right.
They found a maintenance stairwell that was still accessible and climbed. The upper landing opened onto a corridor where the lights were wrong — on, off, on, off, moving in a wave down the passage like something was testing each section in sequence.
“Is the ship doing that?” Levi asked.
