VII. INCUBATOR.

On the first day, Lana saw that the lab was completely devoid of living things. Through half-shut eyes and a layer of tears that she knew would never go away, the first thing she noticed was that the containers – containers, capsules, coffins – which had once lined the walls were now overturned and pushed against the entrance in a kind of crude barricade, forming a crawling mound that looked less effective at keeping people out than the ring of shattered glass on the ground that surrounded it. The lights above her still flickered on occasionally, and when they did, Lana had no choice but to stare at the mutants who, for one reason or another, failed to escape. Many of them never had the option; those were the ones that lacked legs and feet or had bodies that were so atrophied that movement was impossible in the first place. The others, particularly the ones at the door, for reasons that Lana could not understand, had been burned.

Lana Lopatin was once a human. God, how long ago that had been.

After some time – a few days, perhaps – the lights stopped flickering, and Lana was left alone in a darkness so completely and utterly empty that her eyes would never adjust to it, so all-encompassing and heavy that she may as well have been blind. She could not hear, could not smell, and the liquid in the tube that contained her, by its nature, trapped her like a fly in amber and rendered her unable to move.

When the pale creature dropped her in the tube, it made sure to leave the hatch wide open above her.

After the first week, Lana abandoned the foolish notion that she would ever be found. Something had shifted on the ship – not that she could ever hope to explain it because her mind had vanished the instant she recognized the intentions of the pale creature once they entered the lab for the last time. She could no longer feel the gentle hum of the currents beneath them, and the ship no longer reacted to the waves which should've battered it every night. Wherever she was, Lana accepted that no human being could ever find it.

What hurt more than anything, however, was that Lana was aware of the fact that she was being kept alive. The pale creature didn't feed or water her because it didn't have to; the perpetually-replenishing liquid which contained her crossed through her skin effortlessly, injecting every necessary nutrient into her body. Those nutrients were meant for the pit in her chest, the growing pit in her chest, which, in turn, supplied Lana with the barest minimum of the substances she needed to live. But none of that mattered. She was only alive to bear witness to the growth of the pit.

The pit. The seed.

After a month, Lana started seeing the creature from the sky in different corners of the room, a small circle of darkness that was somehow heavier and fiercer than the void that surrounded it. At first, she wondered if it was a result of her malnourishment, but after another month of paranoia and doubt, she realized her sightings of the dark creature had less to do with her deteriorating health and more to do with the absence of the pale creature, which had all but vanished. Had it crossed the barrier into the real world? Was it hiding in another one of the Earth's basements, or was it reveling in the destruction its presence must be causing? Lana was once afraid of the world that had been created on the ship, but now she wondered: did anything remain beyond it?

But now, four months after she awoke, the dark creature was hovering just outside of the tube, motionless. Lana could feel that it was processing something, trying to make a decision. It'd taken months for it to appear so close to the tube. Did it recognize her? Was it the same creature from Novokuznetsk? There was a moment of mutual silence, mutual understanding – not that they necessarily knew one another, but it was something nonetheless.

The pit, and all of its roots and branches and leaves that occupied Lana's body, was shifting. It was almost done growing.

Without warning, the dark creature extended a part of itself toward her, and the world, with all of its useless boundaries and limitations, fell away entirely. Lana was nine, hiding in a field with a lobster tail. She was twenty-three, nursing a pistol. She was thirty-five, penning an article that she knew would kill her, even if it didn't. She had no name. She had visions of a life better than her own: one where she was never born, where it was her father who died when she was a child, where she had two parents, where she didn't follow her father into the field that night, where she refused to follow the men who broke into her house, where she killed herself after Belarus, where she overdosed on a drug she'd never tried, where her bosses, or anyone, for that matter, killed her out of pity, where she took a butcher knife and carved out the pit herself and set it on fire before it would eventually consume her. She saw her father, trapped in a void, starving to death; she saw a gray-eyed child crying over its dead self thirty years in the future, wondering where it had all gone wrong; she watched as a beam of white light burst from the chest of every person on Earth until the planet resembled a neutron star; she saw a city on fire; she saw the pale creature floating in the sky above a black ocean; she felt a black branch spring out from the pit in her chest and screamed silently as it tore her body to shreds and climbed up her throat. She saw Death itself and had no arms to embrace It with.

As it passed through the tube, the dark creature whispered, its voice, undefined and invisible, somehow carrying above the endless breaking of glass: there is no light here.

Then, as Lana's mind unravelled, it told her a story.

000. CREATURES OLDER THAN SIN AND MAN.

That night, for the first time in years, she dreams.

Darkness so thick and permanent it registers as heat. Mountains in the distance, impossibly tall and jagged like the microscopic edge of a ruined obsidian knife. Surrounding her. Trapping her. So far in the distance – that endless, godless distance. They flicker in and out of the air, utterly terrible and completely still. Something solid and smooth beneath her: stone. It's all stone. It's all stone and nothing moves, not even the sky, which feels so close to her that she thinks she can reach out and stroke it if she had arms yet so far above her that it might not exist at all.

She can't see a thing, but it's all there, wavering and present. Alive, somehow, yet motionless for reasons she wishes she will never have to understand. The stone beneath her twitches imperceptibly, and she has a horrible thought that the titanic mountains are hollow.

And in front of her. The moaning anomaly.

A chasm in the stone of a meaningless size and depth because distance has been forsaken here. For all she can tell, it stretches infinitely in every direction it cares to occupy, oozing a fluctuating dissonance from its core that she can't recognize as mechanical or organic. Multiple tones rising and falling in pitch, never in tandem. A pulsing gust of wind from another planet. The heartbeat of a lost cosmonaut. The ache of a prebiotic leviathan. All of it translated into sound and woven together. And something else, too. Guilt?

Not a chasm, she decides. It's a rift.

The dissonance rises in frequency. And then it, rises, rises. The swirling horror of a cosmic Shepard tone. Rises. Another twitch in the stone. That thick darkness. Rises. Unreal mountains. Rises.

And then it vanishes just as it becomes unbearable. No echo. No evidence for its existence except for the clouded eye at the – bottom? – of the rift. Still invisible. Blinking and blue and blind. How large it must be all the way down there.

Behind her, a mountain cracks in half without making a sound.