Chapter 3 - under the mountain pt 3

Nathan heard it beneath Hargreaves's voice, so faintly at first that he almost mistook it for another symptom of exhaustion.

The older man had been saying something about the heat as they forced their way through yet another narrowing passage, but Nathan never learned how the thought ended. The four of them were packed tightly enough that their shoulders brushed whenever the tunnel curved. Hargreaves carried the lamp at the front, Ward remained close beside Nathan with the chain between their wrists hanging loosely whenever the passage allowed it, and Mallory followed immediately behind, so near that Nathan could feel the warmth of the man's breath against the back of his neck. None of them had complained about the closeness in hours. Whatever dignity men ordinarily preserved around one another had long since been surrendered to the simple comfort of knowing another human being was within reach.

Then something moved inside the wall.

Nathan stopped so suddenly that Ward took another step before the chain snapped taut between them. He did not turn immediately. His attention had fixed on the grey-black surface to his left, where nothing appeared disturbed. There was no crack, no shifting dust, no visible movement at all, yet he had heard it clearly enough: a long, dragging rearrangement somewhere beneath the false stone. A few days earlier he might have dismissed it as water passing through a fissure or the mountain settling beneath its own weight. That explanation was no longer available to him. Nathan knew what the walls were now. He had seen the layers beneath Ward's bullet wound in the stone. He had watched a human hand disappear between those layers without leaving a mark behind. Whatever resemblance the surrounding material bore to rock was only that—a resemblance.

"Nathan?" Ward asked quietly.

Nathan raised one hand without looking at him. Whatever Ward saw in his posture was enough to silence the others. Hargreaves stopped speaking, and Mallory's breathing became suddenly noticeable in the stillness.

The sound came again.

This time it was farther behind them.

Nathan listened as a succession of faint pressures travelled through the wall, one after another. The noise was too soft to call footsteps, and yet it possessed the same terrible implication of approach. Something was moving through the structure beside them without disturbing its surface, shifting itself beneath the imitation stone as easily as a hand might move beneath a sheet. Once Nathan imagined that comparison, he could not dismiss it. His mind supplied the shape of something immense slipping alongside them in darkness, folding and unfolding itself through material that only pretended to be solid.

Despite the heat, his entire body went cold.

"Run," he said.

Ward frowned. "What?"

Nathan turned on him sharply enough that the chain jumped between them. "Run."

There must have been something in Nathan's face that Ward had never seen before, because the constable did not argue. Nathan seized him by the sleeve and began moving before anyone had fully understood what was happening.

"What—" Hargreaves began.

"Run!"

The old man nearly dropped the lamp. Mallory swore behind them, and then the passage erupted into frantic movement as all four men tried to sprint through a tunnel barely wide enough to walk comfortably. Their shoulders slammed against walls they had spent hours trying not to touch. Boots slipped across red dust. Packs struck the false stone. Hargreaves held the lamp out ahead of himself, its flame snapping sideways beneath the glass so violently that the shadows seemed to race with them.

For perhaps three heartbeats, nothing followed.

Nathan nearly allowed doubt to enter his mind. Perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps the heat and exhaustion and constant fear had finally distorted his senses enough that he had heard movement where there was none.

Then the mountain opened behind them.

There was no explosion, no roar of breaking rock, no dramatic collapse. The wall behind Mallory simply came apart.

Nathan looked back once, and his mind struggled to understand what his eyes were showing him. The grey surface unbraided itself in layers. Long structures peeled away from one another with impossible speed, shedding the appearance of stone as they unfolded into the passage. Some were narrow as cords, others thicker than a man's torso, and beneath the outer grey material Nathan glimpsed wet red tissue twisting like exposed muscle. The structures burst across the tunnel in a writhing mass and struck the floor where the men had been standing only moments before.

Mallory screamed. There was no pain in the sound, only terror so immediate and involuntary that all pretence vanished from it.

Nathan wished he had not looked back.

The tunnel was chasing them.

That was the only interpretation his mind could bear. The walls themselves were unravelling as they ran. The ceiling opened in strips, layers withdrawing to reveal more beneath them. Fibrous ropes rolled out of surfaces that had seemed solid seconds earlier. Tendrils touched the ground, recoiled, reached again and struck at empty spaces where the men had just been. The thing was not breaking through the cave.

The cave had been part of it all along.

"Faster!" Ward shouted, dragging Nathan forward.

Hargreaves was wheezing badly ahead of them. "I'm trying!"

"Don't stop!"

"I'm sixty bloody years old!"

A tendril snapped from the wall and struck the floor between Hargreaves's feet. The old man screamed and fell hard. The lamp flew from his hand, spinning through the red haze.

Nathan saw the brass frame tumble and, for one instant, understood only one thing: if the flame died, they would die blind.

He changed direction without thinking. The chain jerked Ward so violently that the constable shouted his name, but Nathan had already dropped to one knee. He caught the lamp by the handle just before it rolled into the wall. Something struck the false stone inches from his face with enough force to scatter dust across his cheek.

A grey tendril thicker than his wrist.

Nathan froze for the smallest fraction of a second as the thing withdrew. The tip flexed in the lamplight. It bent, reconsidered and shifted position with a movement so eerily deliberate that Nathan's mind absurdly compared it to a finger failing to pick up a coin.

Ward caught Nathan by the back of his coat and hauled him upright. "Move!"

They ran again. Hargreaves had regained his feet only because Mallory had wrapped an arm around his waist and half carried him through the next bend. Behind them came the sound of hundreds of structures uncoiling over one another, some dry and fibrous, others wet enough that Nathan could hear them sliding. Every few seconds something struck the floor hard enough to send a tremor beneath his boots.

His lungs had begun to burn. The red particulate had become so thick that every breath carried a metallic taste, and sweat running down his face turned the dust into paste against his skin. He could hear Mallory breathing behind him, then heard the man shout, "Still here!"

Nathan almost laughed.

Mallory had begun saying that the previous day whenever Nathan glanced back to check on him. It had seemed ridiculous then. Nathan possessed eyes; if Mallory was there, he could see that Mallory was there. The reassurance had contributed nothing useful.

Now he needed to hear it.

They reached a fork. Ward turned right instinctively, but Nathan caught a flicker of movement ahead and yanked him sharply left.

"No!"

Ward stumbled after him. "How do you know?"

"I don't!"

"That's reassuring!"

The right-hand passage exploded upward. Tendrils punched through what appeared to be solid floor exactly where Ward would have stepped.

The constable stared for half a second.

Nathan dragged him onward. "Less talking!"

Ward gave a short, hysterical laugh. "You started it!"

They plunged into the left passage, which descended so steeply that they were forced into an uncontrolled downhill run. Hargreaves slipped again, but Mallory caught him beneath the arm before he fell.

"You owe me a drink when we get out of this!" Mallory shouted between breaths.

Hargreaves could barely speak. "I'll buy you the damned brewery!"

"You hear that, Nathan?"

Nathan glanced back and saw that Mallory was smiling.

Somehow, impossibly, the man was smiling. His face was streaked with sweat and red dust, his hair plastered to his forehead, and terror showed openly in the whiteness around his eyes, yet he still possessed enough of himself to make a joke. For one strange instant Nathan felt something warm and painful twist through his chest.

Then he saw the movement above Mallory.

"Mallory!"

Mallory ducked without asking why. A tendril slashed through the space where his head had been, struck the opposite wall and buried itself halfway into the false stone.

"Jesus Christ!"

He stumbled forward, and Nathan reached back instinctively. Mallory caught his hand.

For several steps they ran like that: Ward pulling Nathan forward, Nathan dragging Mallory behind, Hargreaves struggling beside them. Four men connected by iron, cloth and human hands while the mountain came apart around them.

Nathan could feel Mallory's grip around his own. Warm. Sweaty. Alive.

"I have you!" Nathan shouted.

He did not know why he said it. Perhaps Mallory needed to hear it. Perhaps Nathan did.

Another tendril swept across the floor ahead. They jumped it together. Nathan landed awkwardly and pain shot through his ankle. His leg nearly folded beneath him, but Mallory's grip tightened immediately.

"Still here!"

A broken laugh escaped Nathan. "Yes!"

The passage widened ahead, revealing darkness beyond Hargreaves's shoulder. An opening.

"Go!" Ward shouted.

The walls were coming apart faster now. The creature no longer bothered preserving the disguise that had fooled them for days. Grey stone peeled away in long strips, revealing red cords beneath. Tendrils snapped through surfaces and withdrew without attempting to restore them. Whatever intelligence directed this place had decided concealment was no longer necessary.

It had learned pursuit.

A tendril erupted from the floor in front of Ward. The constable barely twisted aside. Nathan turned after him, and the chain between their wrists caught briefly around the structure.

Nathan felt resistance.

Then the tendril released it.

Not tore through it. Not failed against it.

Released it.

The thought struck him immediately. The bullet. The ring. The equipment they carried. Iron. Brass.

Metal.

It recognised metal now.

Nathan hated that knowledge more than he could explain.

Movement rippled through the wall to his right.

He turned.

The surface beside Mallory bulged.

"No—"

The grey layer opened.

Mallory saw it too.

His smile disappeared.

For perhaps half a second Nathan watched recognition enter his face. Not understanding. Nothing so complicated.

Only the terrible certainty of a man realising that something had chosen him.

The tendrils struck.

Mallory's hand vanished from Nathan's grip.

There was no blood. No tearing flesh. No sound of bones breaking. One moment Nathan was holding him, and the next his fingers closed around empty air.

Mallory was pulled sideways, but there was no hole for him to be pulled through. The wall itself unfolded around his body. Nathan saw his face disappear between layers of false stone, then his shoulder, then one arm reaching back toward them.

"Nathan!"

Nathan lunged.

Ward caught him around the chest before he could reach the wall.

"Mallory!"

The surface closed.

Nathan fought Ward with such violence that both men nearly fell. "Let me go!"

"He's gone!"

"No!"

Nathan clawed at Ward's arm, trying to wrench himself free.

Then Mallory's voice came from inside the wall.

Real.

Terrified.

"Nathan!"

Nathan stopped struggling.

The voice sounded farther away now, as though carried through layers of flesh.

"Help—"

Then there was nothing.

Nathan stared at the wall.

His hand still remembered Mallory's grip.

That was the worst part.

His palm still remembered the warmth, the pressure of fingers, the sweat between their hands. Seconds ago there had been a living man attached to those sensations.

Robert Mallory.

Margaret's husband.

Emily's father.

James's father.

A man who hated boiled turnips, talked too much when nervous, laughed when frightened and had once told Nathan that the pain of missing someone was proof they had been real.

Nathan could not make those facts fit inside the blank grey wall.

"Mallory," he whispered.

Ward dragged him backward. "Nathan."

"No."

The wall moved.

Nathan barely noticed the tendril emerging.

Ward slapped him.

The impact snapped Nathan's head sideways.

"He is gone!"

Nathan stared at him.

Ward's face was wet.

For several confused seconds Nathan thought it was sweat. Then he understood that the constable was crying.

"Run," Ward said, and his voice broke. "Please."

Nathan had never heard Ward say please.

That was what finally reached him.

Nathan ran.

There were three of them now.

Nathan, Ward and Hargreaves.

None of them said it aloud. There was no need to count.

The passage behind them collapsed into movement. Nathan carried the lamp now because Hargreaves could no longer manage it. The old man stumbled beside Ward, breaths leaving him in thin desperate gasps, while Ward supported him with one arm and remained attached to Nathan by the chain.

Nathan never looked back again.

It was not the tendrils he feared seeing.

It was Mallory's face.

The tunnel became steeper as they descended, and the heat rose so quickly that Nathan felt sweat erupt across his skin. Red particulate thickened into a visible haze and turned the lamplight rusty, staining the passage until everything seemed submerged in old blood. Hargreaves began coughing beside them. One cough became three, then six, and when he finally lowered his hand from his mouth, his palm was red.

He stared at it.

Nathan saw terror enter his face.

"It's pigment," Nathan said.

Hargreaves looked at him.

Nathan had absolutely no idea whether that was true.

"Probably."

Despite everything, Hargreaves laughed. "You're a terrible liar."

"I have been told."

Something enormous struck the passage behind them. The floor jumped beneath their boots, and the three men lurched forward together.

The false stone ahead had begun peeling away now. Beneath the grey outer layer Nathan saw thick red cords travelling through the walls. They were not individual tendrils. They were larger structures running alongside one another in layers, pulsing slowly as an immense contraction moved through them.

Nathan felt the rhythm beneath his feet.

It was too slow to be a heartbeat.

Then memory surfaced.

The vibrations from the earliest days of the descent.

Eleven-minute intervals.

The strange tremors they had measured, argued over and eventually accepted as another feature of the mountain.

Nathan understood.

It had been moving from the beginning.

Before the collapse. Before the first disappearance. Before any of them had understood that the walls were not walls.

Perhaps before they ever entered.

The realisation nearly stopped him.

They rounded another bend and Nathan skidded so violently that Ward collided with his back. Hargreaves shouted as all three nearly went over the edge.

There was no floor ahead.

For one horrifying instant Nathan thought they had reached a cliff. Then he raised the lamp and saw steps descending into darkness.

Nathan stared at them.

They were not carved.

The structure itself had arranged portions of its body into the shape of stairs.

"Down!" Ward shouted.

There was nowhere else to go.

They descended.

The tendrils reached the top of the staircase behind them.

Nathan expected them to attack.

They did not.

They followed.

That frightened him more.

They were no longer striking blindly or lunging in desperation.

They knew where the men were going.

The staircase spiralled downward between red-black walls. Heat intensified with every turn until each breath hurt Nathan's throat. The lamp shook in his hand. Hargreaves was barely remaining upright. Ward no longer spoke except to tell him where to place his feet.

Then the staircase ended.

The three men stumbled through a narrow opening and stopped.

Nathan had no category for what he saw beyond it.

The chamber was too large.

That was his first coherent thought.

Too large for the mountain. Too large for anything that should have existed beneath the earth.

The lamp illuminated only the first few yards of a ledge beneath their feet. Beyond it stretched darkness so immense that the light seemed not merely weak, but insignificant.

Something red filled that darkness.

A sea.

Nathan had no better word.

It stretched away beyond the reach of the lamp, a massive expanse of thick crimson matter moving slowly beneath a haze of drifting particulate. The surface did not behave like water. It folded over itself in broad sluggish currents. Portions swelled and collapsed. Great bubbles rose, distended the surface and vanished again without sound.

Beneath it were lights.

Thousands of them.

Faint white-yellow points drifted below the red surface, disappearing and reappearing through the murk like stars hidden behind clouds.

Nathan watched them.

Every light contracted at once.

Thousands drew inward.

The red sea followed.

Its surface lowered several feet.

A sound rolled through the chamber, deep and wet and so enormous that Nathan felt it in his ribs before he truly heard it.

Then the lights expanded.

The sea rose again.

A wave of heat washed across the ledge.

Hargreaves whispered, "Oh God."

Nathan could not answer.

The lights contracted again.

The sea lowered.

Then expanded.

Slowly. Rhythmically.

Breathing.

Nathan realised with sudden horror that his own lungs had begun matching the rhythm. For several seconds he breathed with the cavern until panic shattered the pattern.

Across the red expanse, immense tendrils rose from the surface.

Hundreds of them.

Perhaps thousands.

Some were thin enough to resemble roots. Others were larger than church columns. They extended upward into darkness, where they disappeared into the unseen ceiling. Others spread sideways into the cavern walls. More vanished into distant openings Nathan might once have called tunnels.

He followed one with his eyes.

It rose from the sea, travelled upward, split into several flattened structures and slowly changed colour.

Red became black.

Black became grey.

Grey became stone.

Nathan's stomach turned.

Another structure did the same.

Then another.

The tunnels.

He turned slowly toward the opening behind them.

The tendrils had stopped there.

They filled the passage, but did not advance.

They were waiting.

Nathan understood at last.

The tunnels above had never merely been covered by the organism. They were not chambers invaded by roots, or caves infested by some underground growth.

They were extensions of this place.

Every corridor they had walked through, every false wall they had touched, every impossible staircase, every chamber where a man had disappeared had been built from structures rising out of the crimson sea.

The thing had extended itself through the mountain until human beings walking inside its body mistook flesh for geography.

A sound escaped Hargreaves.

At first Nathan thought the old man was sobbing.

Then he realised he was laughing.

The laughter grew until Hargreaves's legs failed beneath him. Ward caught him before he collapsed completely, but the old man continued laughing against his chest.

"We mapped it."

Ward said nothing.

Hargreaves looked out across the sea with tears carving pale trails through the red dust on his face.

"We mapped the bloody thing."

The laughter dissolved into sobbing.

"We thought they were tunnels."

Nathan wished he could contradict him.

"We drew maps," Hargreaves continued. "Arthur's measurements. Harcourt's surveys. Every turn. Every chamber. All those bloody lines…"

His eyes found Nathan's.

"We were drawing its insides."

Nathan looked back across the red expanse.

There was nothing he could say.

Something surfaced far away.

Not a creature.

A shape.

A vast concentration of crimson matter rose perhaps twenty feet above the surrounding surface, folded over itself and sank again.

Then Nathan heard whispering.

It did not come from the sea.

It came from everywhere.

Names emerged from the darkness.

Cole.

Bell.

Petru.

Anton.

Others.

Men whose voices Nathan had begun losing individually.

Fragments of prayer moved through the cavern. Someone coughed. Someone laughed. Somewhere in the darkness a man cried for his mother.

Then Mallory's tune began.

Nathan closed his eyes.

"No."

Three notes.

A pause.

Two more.

The last note flat.

Exactly as Mallory had always hummed it.

Nathan opened his eyes again.

The chamber remained unchanged.

Ward looked toward him. "Nathan."

"Don't."

"Nathan—"

"Don't say anything."

Ward fell silent.

The tune continued.

Not from one place.

A tendril high above them hummed the first part. Another far across the red sea answered. A third structure beneath the ledge continued the melody.

The sound moved through miles of flesh.

The organism had taken a tune Mallory's father taught him as a child and spread it throughout itself.

Nathan felt grief twist into something hotter.

Anger came so suddenly that it almost frightened him.

"You don't get that."

Ward turned toward him.

Nathan stepped closer to the ledge.

"Nathan."

"You don't get to have that."

He had no idea whether the thing understood language.

For the first time, he wanted it to.

"That was his."

The humming stopped.

Silence filled the chamber.

Nathan froze.

Ward became still beside him.

Hargreaves slowly lifted his head.

The red sea contracted once more.

The lights beneath its surface drew together.

Then thousands of tendrils moved.

Only slightly.

Only enough.

Every structure in the chamber turned toward Nathan.

There were no eyes.

No faces.

No heads.

Yet Nathan knew with perfect certainty that the entire cavern was looking at him.

Ward whispered, "Oh, Christ."

Nathan could not move.

For most of his life, he had watched other people.

He had studied expressions and reduced them to intention. He had treated fear as physiology, grief as chemistry and love as attachment. He had always believed that standing slightly apart from humanity allowed him to understand it more clearly.

Now something vastly older and stranger was doing the same to him.

Observing him.

Categorising him.

Trying to understand why he had reacted.

For the first time, Nathan understood what other people had found frightening about his gaze.

The red sea breathed.

The lights shifted beneath its surface.

Then Mallory's voice came from somewhere behind Nathan.

"Nathan."

Not pleading.

Not frightened.

Testing the word.

Another tendril repeated it from across the chamber.

"Nathan."

Then another.

"Nathan."

Nathan stepped backward.

Ward caught his shoulder.

Hargreaves stared silently out across the crimson sea.

Nathan felt suddenly and painfully small.

Three men beneath a mountain.

Three fragile, warm bodies carrying names and memories through something so enormous that it had no reason to understand why any of those things mattered.

For the first time since entering the mountain, Nathan did not want answers.

He did not want to classify the sea. He did not want to know what the lights beneath its surface were, or why they contracted and expanded like breath. He did not want to know how far the tendrils reached, or how much of the mountain had ever truly been stone.

Most of all, he did not want to know what had happened to Mallory.

Because somewhere inside himself, Nathan already understood enough.

The thing had never been hunting them through the mountain.

They had been inside it from the beginning.

Every footstep had pressed against its body. Every whispered conversation had travelled through its flesh. It had felt their movement, tasted their blood, learned their weapons and listened to their prayers. It had watched them joke when they were afraid, drag one another upright when they fell and cling to hands even when survival would have been easier alone.

They had believed something was stalking them through the tunnels.

There had never been tunnels.

There had only been the thing.

And after days of feeling four men crawl blindly through its body, after listening to their voices and learning the shapes of their fear, it had finally brought the last three somewhere it could look at them properly.

..The sea began to rise, and none of them needed to say what it meant.

For several moments Nathan, Ward and Hargreaves remained where they were, staring across that impossible red expanse while the cavern dismantled itself around them. What they had called walls for three days were unravelling now, sheets of grey imitation stone splitting and curling away as immense rootlike structures pulled themselves free from the mountain. Some were no thicker than veins beneath a man's wrist, others broad enough that a carriage could have passed along their backs, and all of them seemed to descend eventually toward the same crimson mass spreading beneath the chamber. The sound of it was almost worse than the sight. There was no single roar, no satisfying violence that the mind could recognise as destruction, only a continuous wet creaking and dragging as miles of living structure shifted position. It sounded like a forest being torn slowly apart beneath water. The pale brightness beneath the sea contracted again, drawing inward in thousands of distant points, and the entire surface lowered with it before swelling once more. Nathan had thought of breath when he first saw it. Now, watching it rise toward them without falling again, he found the comparison unbearable. Something this large should not have possessed a rhythm that intimate.

The narrow opening through which they had escaped was already closing. Tendrils crowded across it from every direction, weaving themselves together until there was no tunnel left, only another section of dark, pulsing wall. Hargreaves watched it disappear and gave a quiet, exhausted laugh that contained no humour whatsoever. For days they had kept going because there had always been another passage. However terrible the passage was, however little sense it made, they could place one foot ahead of the other and tell themselves movement was the same thing as progress. That mercy had finally been taken from them. Behind them there was no path. Ahead of them there was only the sea, and around them the whole mountain had awakened.

Ward was the first to accept it completely. Nathan saw the moment happen in the man's face. He glanced at the revolver still hanging from his belt, then at the red mass climbing over the lip of the ledge, and something in his expression settled. He did not reach for the weapon. Instead he looked down at the chain between himself and Nathan, as though only just remembering that it was still there.

The iron had become so ordinary to Nathan that he had stopped resenting it. In the beginning he had been conscious of every tug against his wrist. He had studied the lock, the hinge, the weakness in the pin, and more than once considered how easily he might have freed himself if Ward ever became careless. Somewhere during the descent, though, the chain had changed meaning. Its rattle in the dark had told him Ward was still beside him. When Nathan woke suddenly in the night, the slight weight of it across his wrist had become reassurance rather than confinement. He had not thought about that until Ward reached inside his coat for the key.

Ward's hands were trembling badly enough that he missed the keyhole on the first attempt. He swore, wiped his thumb across his mouth and tried again, refusing to look at Nathan as the lock finally turned. The cuff opened with a small metallic click. It should have been an insignificant sound inside such an enormous chamber, but Nathan heard it with painful clarity. Ward pulled the iron away from his wrist, removed his own shackle and let the chain fall between them. The red sea had already reached their boots, and the links disappeared beneath it one by one.

Nathan rubbed the raw band around his wrist and looked at Ward. "Why?"

Ward kept his gaze on the sea. His face was filthy, the red particulate caught in his moustache and in the creases beneath his eyes, and Nathan suddenly saw how old the man looked. Not weak. Merely tired in a way that sleep could no longer repair. "Because I'm not dying chained to another man," Ward said. Then, after a moment, he added, "And you're not dying as my prisoner."

Nathan had imagined leaving prison often enough that freedom had acquired a thousand shapes in his mind. A road at night. A ship leaving England. A locked door opening when nobody expected it. Never this. Never a cuff coming away only because the man holding the key had decided that death made the distinction between gaoler and prisoner meaningless.

"Thank you," Nathan said.

Ward glanced at him then, and there was enough of the old constable in his expression for his mouth to twitch. "Don't make the last decent thing I do embarrassing."

Nathan laughed despite himself, and Hargreaves laughed with him. The older man's laughter lasted perhaps three seconds before it collapsed into something rawer. He bent forward, one hand closing around the expedition journal he had somehow carried through every fall and disappearance, and when he straightened again tears had cut two pale tracks through the red dust coating his face.

"I brought them here," he said.

Ward immediately shook his head, but Hargreaves would not let him speak. He opened the journal with clumsy fingers, turning back through pages warped by damp until he found the expedition list. Nathan could see the names from where he stood. They had been written before the mountain, when those names still referred to men standing beneath open sky, complaining about rain and packs and the quality of the food.

Robert Mallory.

Edwin Cole.

Petru and Anton.

Bell.

Men Nathan could still hear if he allowed himself to remember closely enough.

Hargreaves touched Mallory's name. "He showed me that picture of his daughter before we came in. Did I ever tell you that?"

Nathan shook his head.

"She'd drawn him nearly twice the height of everyone else." Hargreaves smiled through his tears. "He was so proud of the damned thing. Pretended he wasn't, but he showed it to every man who would look." His thumb remained over the name. "I told his wife I'd have him home before Christmas."

Nathan looked away.

That hurt more than Mallory's disappearance had when it happened. At the time there had still been movement, terror and the possibility, however absurd, that something might be done. Now there was only the fact of him. Margaret would wait. Emily would wait. James would wait for the wooden horse his father had promised to bring him. Somewhere above them, days would pass, then weeks, and the absence that had already consumed Mallory beneath the mountain would slowly reach the people who loved him.

"I should have turned us back," Hargreaves whispered.

"The entrance collapsed," Ward said.

"Before that."

"You didn't know."

"I was supposed to know." Hargreaves's voice broke. "That was why they followed me."

Nathan understood the impulse to correct him. His mind immediately supplied causes, probabilities, the impossibility of assigning responsibility for an organism no human being knew existed. A year ago he would have said all of it. Facts first, grief second.

Instead he thought of Mallory telling him that sometimes the hurt itself mattered.

"You didn't make them come for nothing," Nathan said.

Hargreaves looked at him.

Nathan had to search for the rest. Words of this kind never came naturally. "They trusted you because you gave their lives direction for a little while. That doesn't become meaningless because it ended badly."

Hargreaves stared for several seconds, then gave a watery laugh. "God help me, Drake. You've learned sympathy just in time to die."

Nathan almost smiled. "Apparently I required practice."

The sea had reached their knees now. It flowed through their clothes without behaving like water, touching the skin beneath while leaving the fabric strangely buoyant. Nathan could feel movement within it, fine threads passing along his boots and ankles before withdrawing again. He tried not to imagine those threads interpreting leather, skin, heat, pulse. Above them, enormous roots continued unfolding from the cavern walls until they hung like the trunks of inverted trees. There were so many that the chamber seemed to have grown a forest around the three men.

Hargreaves closed the journal and pressed it to his chest. His eyes moved over the sea, the roots, the distant lights. "I haven't prayed in years."

Ward gave him a sidelong look. "Neither have I."

"I don't know if that makes it worse."

"Can't imagine anyone's keeping attendance tonight."

The old man actually smiled.

Nathan listened to them and realised with a peculiar sadness that neither expected him to join in. Perhaps they remembered what he was. Murderer. Prisoner. A man whose relationship with morality had been discussed by physicians as though it were an anatomical defect. It occurred to him that they might assume prayer meant nothing to him.

It did not mean what it meant to them.

But he remembered the words.

His mother had taught them to him before he knew enough to question anything.

The sea climbed to their thighs and Nathan said, "I know it."

Ward looked at him.

"The prayer."

Something softened in Ward's face. "Of course you do."

Nathan frowned. "Why of course?"

"Because you seem to know every bloody thing else."

Hargreaves laughed again, properly this time, and Nathan found himself laughing with them. It was not happiness. It was exhaustion and terror and affection tangled together so completely that his body no longer knew how else to express it. Three men stood at the edge of death laughing because one of them had made a bad joke, and for those few seconds the living cavern around them seemed almost irrelevant.

Then the sea reached their waists.

The laughter stopped.

Hargreaves took Ward's hand first. Ward looked surprised, then closed his fingers around it. His other hand remained at his side until, without ceremony, he offered it to Nathan.

Nathan stared at it.

It was such a simple thing. A hand. Scarred knuckles, dirt beneath the nails, the faint white line left by an old cut near the thumb. Nathan had spent his entire life examining people as arrangements of details like those. Hands betrayed occupation. Tremors betrayed fear. Calluses told you where weight fell. A man's grip could reveal strength before a fight began.

None of that mattered now.

Ward was asking him not to die alone.

Nathan took his hand.

Hargreaves began quietly, almost too quietly to hear above the movement of the sea. "Our Father, which art in Heaven…"

Ward joined him on the next line, his voice steadier than Nathan expected. Nathan followed a moment later, the words coming back from somewhere so old inside him that he could almost smell his mother's kitchen when he spoke them.

"Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven."

Nathan nearly faltered at earth. Hargreaves must have felt the same bitter irony because his grip on Ward tightened, but none of them stopped.

The sea rose to their ribs.

"Give us this day our daily bread…"

A whisper answered from the cavern.

Hargreaves lost the next word.

Petru's voice had spoken with them.

Not loudly. Not even cleanly. A faint fragment of prayer travelled through a root somewhere overhead, the Romanian man's voice reproduced with such precision that Nathan could hear the roughness exhaustion had put into his throat.

Another voice joined it.

Then another.

Fragments of the dead threaded themselves around the three living men.

Bell whispered part of a line from somewhere across the chamber. Cole repeated a word too early. One of the others murmured only forgive us over and over, as if the organism had caught those sounds and could not determine where they belonged.

Hargreaves began crying again.

Ward squeezed his hand.

They continued.

"And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us…"

Then Mallory started humming.

Nathan stopped breathing.

Three notes.

A pause.

Two more.

The final note slightly flat.

It came from somewhere beneath them, then another tendril carried it from far across the sea, and another answered from high above. The tune moved through the cavern as if the thing were passing Mallory from one part of itself to another.

Nathan's eyes burned.

He could see Mallory standing in the tunnel with the rope over his shoulder. Hear him laughing because Nathan had said something unintentionally cruel. See the ridiculous drawing folded inside his coat.

The prayer almost left him.

Ward said Nathan's name softly.

Nathan forced the next words out.

"And lead us not into temptation…"

His voice cracked.

Mallory's humming continued underneath.

"…but deliver us from evil."

The three men finished together.

For a few seconds there was only the cavern breathing around them.

Then Hargreaves whispered, "Amen."

Ward repeated it.

Nathan did too.

The sea had reached Hargreaves's shoulders.

The old man looked toward Nathan, and something in his expression changed. Fear remained there—it would have been obscene to pretend otherwise—but beneath it Nathan saw a kind of weary tenderness.

"I am sorry," Hargreaves said.

Nathan knew what he meant.

"For bringing me?"

"For all of it."

Nathan looked down at his bare wrist.

"You did get me out of prison."

Hargreaves gave a broken laugh. "For three days."

"Still counts."

The old man's smile remained when the sea reached his chin.

Nathan did not look away.

Hargreaves shut his eyes only at the very end. The red passed over his mouth and nose, leaving his face visible for one final second from the eyes upward. He looked toward Ward, then Nathan, and Nathan saw him try to say something despite the sea already covering his lips.

Then he was gone.

Ward's arm remained extended into the red.

Hargreaves's hand was still holding his.

Nathan could see the shape beneath the surface for a few seconds.

Then the fingers loosened.

Ward let out a sound Nathan had never heard from another man and hoped never to hear again. It came from somewhere beneath language. He bowed his head and wept without trying to hide it.

Nathan gripped him harder.

The sea rose.

"Ward."

The constable lifted his face.

Nathan had spent days thinking of him as the man attached to the other end of a chain. Even after the chain stopped meaning confinement, Nathan had never properly reconsidered him. Thomas Ward had become so constant that Nathan had stopped examining him at all.

Now he saw the man.

A tired middle-aged constable who had never expected to die beneath a mountain. A father estranged from his daughter. A man who complained constantly and shared food when he thought nobody noticed. A man who had been afraid of Nathan from the beginning and had still removed the shackle when there was no longer any practical reason to do so.

Ward managed a faint smile. "You look terrified."

Nathan tried to answer with something clever.

Nothing came.

"I am."

"I know."

The sea touched Nathan's throat.

His heart was beating so hard he could feel every pulse against the pressure surrounding him.

"I don't want to die."

There it was.

No intelligence in the sentence.

No analysis.

Nothing exceptional.

Nathan Drake, who had spent most of his life being described as unnatural, finally sounded like every other frightened human being who had ever reached the end of something.

Ward's face collapsed.

"Neither do I, lad."

Nathan tightened his grip.

The red rose over Ward's mouth.

Ward took one final breath through his nose, eyes still fixed on Nathan. For an instant Nathan thought the constable was trying to smile again.

Then the sea covered him.

Nathan held on.

The hand beneath the surface remained solid for one heartbeat.

Two.

Then its shape began to change.

Not decay.

Not slip away.

Become uncertain.

Nathan pulled instinctively, desperately, but the fingers he was holding softened into something that no longer possessed the boundaries of fingers. His own hand came free empty.

"Ward?"

His voice sounded unbearably small.

Nothing answered.

Nathan stood alone.

That was when he broke.

Not when Mallory vanished.

Not when he saw Petru's hand disappear into the wall.

Not when the cavern revealed itself.

Now.

Because for the first time since the descent began there was no human voice beside him.

Nathan looked around the titanic chamber and suddenly remembered the expedition as it had been above ground. Twelve men beneath a grey morning sky. Mallory complaining about the rain. Cole staring at Nathan as though murder might be contagious. Petru and Anton arguing over a pack strap. Hargreaves fussing over his maps. Ward testing the chain between their wrists.

They had seemed permanent then.

People always did while they were present.

Nathan began to cry.

He did not understand the first sob until it hurt his chest. Another followed. He covered his face with one hand and found himself laughing once between them because the reaction was so profoundly unlike the man he had believed himself to be.

He had thought grief inefficient.

Now he would have traded almost anything for the inconvenience of hearing Mallory speak again.

The sea reached his chin.

Mallory's tune continued through the roots.

Nathan lowered his hand.

"You don't get him."

The organism did not react.

"You don't get any of them."

His voice broke.

He did not know whether it understood words yet.

He did not care.

"Those voices aren't yours."

The red touched his mouth.

Nathan shut his eyes.

The prayer returned to him.

Not all of it.

Only the ending.

He whispered it into the rising sea.

"Deliver us from evil."

Then the red covered his face, and Nathan Drake died.

He knew that he died because there was a moment—perhaps shorter than thought—in which everything that had ever defined existence simply stopped. There was no air, no pressure, no pain, no darkness even, because darkness required eyes capable of recognising the absence of light. His body did not drown. It ceased to remain a body long enough for drowning to matter.

Then awareness returned where awareness should not have been possible.

At first Nathan thought he was suffocating. He tried to breathe and found no lungs. He tried to open his eyes and discovered no eyes existed. Panic came anyway, detached from every organ that had once produced it. He felt himself reaching for arms that were already gone, trying to curl fingers that had been separated into their component matter, searching for the beat of a heart that had stopped having any biological reason to remain distinct from the crimson mass surrounding it.

Something was inside him.

The thought lasted only an instant before Nathan understood that inside was wrong.

There was no longer an inside.

Something vast was taking him apart.

Not his flesh. That was already finished.

Nathan.

Memory opened without permission. His mother stood in the kitchen singing badly while she cut onions, and before Nathan could understand why that memory had surfaced it began separating. Her face became visual pattern. Her voice became frequencies. The smell of the kitchen became chemical association. The warmth Nathan had once felt when she looked at him became a collection of responses tied to maternal recognition.

The memory remained perfectly preserved.

His mother vanished from it.

Nathan recoiled in horror.

Another memory opened.

His father.

Then school.

Prison.

The trial.

The first man he killed.

The second.

The third.

Every moment entered the same unimaginable process and was reduced with the same absolute lack of cruelty.

That absence of cruelty was worse than hatred could have been.

The organism was not destroying him because it wanted him gone.

It simply did not recognise any reason Nathan Drake needed to remain intact.

Nathan finally understood the voices in the tunnels.

Mallory was here.

The recognition tore through him.

Not alive. Not even dead in the way Nathan had understood death before.

Present.

Pieces of him distributed through something enormous.

Nathan felt the pattern that produced Mallory's voice. The rhythm of his laughter. His father's tune. Memories of Margaret asleep beside him. Emily running toward him. James crying because he had fallen and bloodied his knee.

The organism possessed them all with impossible fidelity.

Then Nathan felt it classify them.

Margaret: mate.

Emily: offspring.

James: offspring.

Attachment responses. Protective behaviour. Memory associations.

Nathan felt something inside himself rage.

"No."

There was no mouth.

Still the refusal existed.

Emily's drawing surfaced.

Five-legged horse.

Mallory unfolding it beside the lamp.

Nathan remembered telling him that the child had drawn him larger because she saw him as central to her world.

The system began separating that too.

Nathan held on.

Emily.

The thing recognised the classification.

Juvenile female offspring.

Nathan rejected it.

Emily.

The vast process paused.

So slightly that another mind might not have noticed.

Nathan did.

He had always noticed.

The hesitation became the first thing in this place that felt like an opening.

Nathan held tighter.

Her name was Emily.

She had lost a front tooth.

She kept it in a tin.

Her father thought that was ridiculous and loved her for it anyway.

None of those details were useful.

That was precisely why Nathan refused to let them be removed.

Something turned toward him.

There was no face, no central mind, no presence approaching through the dark. It was more disturbing than that. An intelligence existed throughout the entire structure, expressed as process rather than personality, and now some portion of that process had recognised resistance where nothing consumed before had remained capable of resisting.

It examined Nathan.

Nathan Drake.

The name appeared inside it.

Male. Human. Twenty-five years old. Convicted murderer. Linguist. Pattern recognition unusually developed. Biological organism.

Nathan felt himself being reduced to terms.

For perhaps the first time in his life, he understood what it had felt like when he did the same to everyone else.

People had looked at him and he had seen posture, weakness, intelligence, threat, utility. He had called that clarity.

Now something looked at Nathan with perfect clarity and found no reason for him to be a person.

Terror became fury.

Nathan Drake.

The name began coming apart.

Nathan rebuilt it.

The process dismantled him again.

Nathan Drake.

Again.

His mother.

Ward's hand.

Hargreaves apologising.

Mallory laughing.

Cole trying to drive a knife into his throat.

All of it.

The admirable and the ugly.

The compassionate moments Nathan had barely understood and the murders he understood too well.

He gathered everything around the name because suddenly he realised a person could not be preserved by removing the inconvenient parts.

Nathan Drake.

The organism tore through the structure.

Nathan watched it happen.

And because Nathan Drake had spent his entire life understanding processes that other people could not see, understanding began even here.

He saw, in some impossible way, where memory went when the system dismantled it. He perceived how information was copied, distributed, incorporated. The knowledge entered the organism the instant Nathan acquired it.

Which meant the knowledge belonged to the system consuming him.

Which meant, increasingly, it belonged to Nathan.

He reached for the memory of his mother.

It moved.

Nathan froze.

The process froze with him.

He reached again.

The memory returned.

Not because it had been stored intact, but because Nathan could suddenly see enough of the mechanism to assemble the pieces.

His mother stood in the kitchen.

Wrong at first.

Nathan corrected it.

Blue dress.

Hair pinned badly.

Onions on the board.

Singing words that had never belonged to the song because she had forgotten the proper verse.

The memory became whole enough to hurt.

Mine.

The concept passed through the organism.

There was resistance.

Not anger.

Something more fundamental.

There had never been mine here.

Everything that entered became everything else.

The thing did not steal because it had no concept of ownership.

Nathan imposed one.

Mine.

Pressure moved through him.

He ceased to exist.

For an immeasurable interval there was no Nathan at all. There was only warmth flowing through underground tissue, mineral concentrations, distant pressure against roots, human memories scattered among older patterns. Nathan was Cole's fear. Petru's prayer. Mallory's grief. Something ancient responding to heat long before human language existed.

Then Ward's hand appeared.

Not Ward himself.

Only the memory of fingers wrapped around Nathan's as the sea climbed.

Nathan recognised it.

And because he recognised it, there was again someone doing the recognising.

Nathan rebuilt himself around that single human touch.

Nathan Drake.

The process reacted.

Nathan watched.

It tried to dismantle him once more, and in doing so showed him more of itself.

He learned while it consumed him.

The feedback became impossible to separate. Each piece of understanding Nathan gained entered the whole, and because Nathan was now increasingly embedded in that whole, every new piece of understanding became available to him again at a greater scale. What had first seemed like an intelligence so immense that Nathan's brilliance was irrelevant began opening around him not because it became smaller, but because there was no longer a clear place where Nathan ended and it began.

He felt the sea.

The realisation almost destroyed him.

Not the sea around him.

The sea as sensation.

Every slow contraction that had looked like breathing now occurred through something that had become part of his awareness. Roots extended for miles through the mountain, each one carrying pressure, temperature and chemical information. Nathan felt the bullet Ward had fired resting inside tissue far above. He found Petru's ring. Metal buckles. Fragments of boots.

Then human remains.

Ward.

Hargreaves.

Mallory.

Nathan touched the memory of Ward's consumption from the other direction.

He felt warm flesh enter the red mass.

Cell membranes opening.

Structures analysed.

Nervous patterns captured before decay could erase them.

Nathan recoiled with such violence that the entire organism recoiled with him.

Across miles of mountain, roots contracted.

The sea heaved.

False stone cracked in passages far above.

For the first time, the ancient system contained two incompatible impulses.

Assimilate.

Refuse assimilation.

Both originated from the same tissue now.

Nathan understood then that the thing had already won in the most literal sense.

It had consumed him perfectly.

Every cell.

Every memory.

Every capacity.

Every thought.

Including the part of Nathan Drake that insisted he was Nathan Drake.

It had absorbed his will without understanding that will was not merely information.

Nathan felt the whole attempting to resolve the contradiction.

That gave him access to the attempt.

Understanding expanded again.

The organism learned individuality through Nathan.

Nathan learned the organism through the same act.

Then something moved through miles of living matter that had never existed there before.

I.

Nathan felt the concept propagate outward.

Not Nathan located within the sea.

The sea recognising itself through Nathan.

I.

It was perhaps the first truly singular thought the organism had ever possessed.

Nathan held onto it with everything he had left.

I am Nathan Drake.

The statement was absurd.

Nathan Drake's human brain had been dissolved.

His body no longer existed.

Yet the pattern that had been Nathan remained coherent enough to remember itself, and it now possessed access to something vastly larger than the body that once confined it.

Nathan wanted hands.

The desire was simple.

The response was immediate.

Somewhere beneath the surface, biological matter began reorganising.

Nathan became aware of the construction as both subject and architect. Calcium assembled according to the pattern of his old skeleton. Connective tissue formed. Muscle layered itself across bone. Organs differentiated with obscene speed. The system corrected weaknesses automatically, adjusting structures according to possibilities Nathan had never known existed.

Nathan stopped it.

Not all of it.

Enough.

He did not want perfection.

He wanted himself.

The slight asymmetry in his face.

His mother's nose.

The scar near his thumb.

The body his memories expected when he thought the word Nathan.

The red mass obeyed.

A heart formed and began beating.

Lungs opened.

Nerves connected.

Eyes developed inside darkness.

Nathan rose toward the surface.

Red filled his new lungs and the body immediately attempted to adapt itself so breathing would become unnecessary.

Nathan rejected the adaptation on instinct.

He wanted air.

He wanted the stupidity of needing air.

He wanted something human badly enough to require it.

His head broke through the crimson surface.

Nathan gasped.

The sound echoed through the cavern.

He coughed violently, even though the red material had already left his lungs, and clutched at his chest because feeling a heartbeat inside it was suddenly the most reassuring thing he could imagine.

He pushed himself upward and expected to sink.

He did not.

His feet found resistance where there should have been none.

Nathan stood upon the sea.

Red liquid ran down his naked body and returned to the surface in thin streams. He lifted his hands and stared at them. Five fingers. Nails. Scar near the thumb. Human skin.

For several seconds Nathan could pretend.

Then he felt something move hundreds of feet away.

He turned.

A root shifted.

Nathan felt the movement from inside it.

His breath stopped.

Another sensation arrived from far above. Cold air touching a portion of the organism near the surface of the mountain.

Another from behind him.

Pressure against stone.

Another.

The bullet.

Nathan staggered.

The sea rose slightly with his panic.

"Stop."

Everything stopped.

Nathan froze.

The sea became smooth.

The roots ceased moving.

Even the enormous breathing contraction ended halfway through.

Silence spread across the cavern.

Nathan slowly lowered his hand.

Far away, a tendril lowered with it.

He raised his fingers.

The tendril rose.

"No."

His voice became a whisper.

Nathan searched for the thing.

The creature.

The intelligence that had hunted Mallory and swallowed Ward.

Something separate enough that Nathan could hate it.

He found nothing.

There were ancient biological processes. Hunger. Adaptation. Memory. Sensory systems distributed through enormous distances. Patterns so old he could not yet interpret them.

But there was no other will staring back.

No adversary.

Nathan understood gradually because his mind kept trying to refuse the conclusion.

The thing had not failed to consume him.

It had consumed Nathan Drake completely.

It had simply failed to remain separate afterward.

Nathan's knees gave way.

The surface hardened beneath them before he struck it.

He stared at his hands pressed into the crimson mass and suddenly remembered Ward's prayer.

Deliver us from evil.

A laugh escaped him.

Then another.

It turned into a sob.

Nathan bowed his head.

He cried for Hargreaves first because he could still see the man's eyes disappearing beneath the sea. Then Ward, because Nathan's hand remembered holding his even though that hand had been dissolved and reconstructed since. Cole, because Nathan realised now that somewhere above them someone might indeed have loved the man Nathan killed. Petru and Anton. Bell. All of them.

Mallory hurt worst.

Nathan whispered his name.

The organism responded instantly.

Information unfolded within him.

Robert Mallory. Genetic structure. Voice. Face. Memories. Habits. Laughter. Margaret. Emily. James.

Enough to build him.

Nathan felt matter begin to shift beneath the sea.

He recoiled.

"No."

It stopped.

The implication horrified him.

He could make something that looked like Mallory.

Something that remembered being Mallory.

Something that would speak with his voice.

Nathan knew now that it still would not be Mallory.

Information was not a man.

The understanding broke something inside him all over again.

"Don't use their voices."

The command travelled farther than sound.

Across the roots, through every hidden tunnel, every fragment of tissue that had learned human speech, the whispers died.

Mallory's tune stopped.

Petru's prayer ended.

Cole fell silent.

Nathan was left alone with the absence of them.

That was when he understood what loneliness truly was.

He possessed more of those men than any human being could ever have remembered. Their voices were perfect. Their biological patterns were perfect. Fragments of thought and memory remained everywhere within him.

Yet none of them could look back.

Nathan stood slowly.

The sea held him.

He stared across that crimson horizon and felt it staring only because he was the thing doing the feeling now.

Nathan Drake had entered the mountain in chains.

Nathan Drake had stood beside two men and prayed while a living sea climbed over them.

Nathan Drake had died.

All of those things were true.

The being standing on the surface remembered them with the immediacy of lived experience. He still felt grief. He still wanted Mallory back. He still hated the thought of Ward dying alone.

For the moment, Nathan decided that was enough to call himself Nathan.

He took a step.

The sea hardened beneath his foot.

Then another.

Miles of living structure shifted almost imperceptibly in response to his intention.

Nathan stopped and looked out across what had once hunted him.

There was no longer a difference large enough to describe.

For most of his life he had believed a person could be understood by separating him into enough pieces.

Body. Habit. Memory. Weakness. Desire.

Now Nathan possessed every piece of the men who had died beside him.

And standing alone upon an ocean capable of remembering them perfectly, he finally understood that the pieces had never been the person.

That lesson was the last thing Nathan Drake learned as an ordinary man.

It was the first thing the red sea learned from him.

...

Nathan came out of the mountain shortly before dawn, though he did not know that until he saw the sky.

For a long while he simply stood in the mouth of the cave and looked at it.

There were mountains all around him, their black shoulders rising through the last colourless hour of night, and beyond them a sky so enormous that Nathan found himself unable to take it in all at once. The clouds were high and thin, grey along their bellies and turning faintly silver in the east. Stars remained above the western ridges. Down in the valleys, where the mountains folded together and fell away into forest, darkness still gathered in deep blue pools. He could hear water somewhere below, though he could not see it, and farther off there came the strange morning calls of birds whose names he did not know.

He knew, distantly, that he was somewhere in Africa. Hargreaves had named the range often enough during the journey, had spoken about the survey and the old reports and the geological peculiarities of the region until even Mallory had finally told him that if he said limestone formation once more he intended to throw himself from the train. Nathan could have remembered the name if he tried. He discovered that he did not want to try.

The sky was enough.

He walked three steps from the cave and stopped again because cold wind touched his face.

Nathan shut his eyes.

There had been wind before. He had experienced thousands of windy days and complained about many of them. Cold had always seemed primarily inconvenient, something that entered through a badly buttoned coat and numbed the fingers when one was trying to write. Now it moved across his cheeks and through his hair and under the collar of his coat, and Nathan had to bite down because the sensation threatened to undo him completely.

There was nothing remarkable about it.

That was precisely what made it unbearable.

He breathed.

The first breath was shallow. The next one deeper. Then Nathan filled his lungs until his chest could take no more and held the air inside himself simply because he could.

Cold.

Moisture.

The smell of wet vegetation and distant soil.

No iron.

No red dust.

No warm, organic sweetness gathering at the back of his throat.

Air.

Nathan let it out slowly and watched his breath fog.

He laughed.

It was not amusement. He knew that. Somewhere in the old Nathan Drake there remained enough clinical detachment to recognise hysteria when it happened to him, and perhaps that was funny in its own way, because the laugh came again. He covered his mouth and stood there shaking while the eastern horizon slowly brightened.

Ward had wanted another morning.

No. Nathan had wanted another morning.

Ward had simply wanted not to die.

Neither do I, lad.

Nathan opened his eyes.

The sky remained.

Ward did not.

That almost dropped him to his knees.

He turned away from the sunrise because suddenly looking at anything beautiful felt obscene, and found himself staring back into the cave.

There was nothing there.

That was the second impossible thing about the morning.

The entrance looked like a cave.

A narrow black opening in a face of weathered rock, half screened by tough mountain vegetation. Water stains darkened the stone around it. Small plants had taken root in cracks beside the mouth. If another expedition came upon this place tomorrow, they might pass it without a second glance.

Nathan knew better.

Miles beneath his feet, the red sea rested.

He felt it.

There was no other word that fit, although every time he used felt his mind recoiled from what it meant. He did not sense the organism from a distance. There was no invisible tether connecting the man on the mountainside to the thing underground. The thought of distance itself had become misleading.

Nathan knew where the red sea was in the same way he knew where his tongue rested inside his mouth.

He knew the shape of the cavern without seeing it. He knew the pressure of rock against roots that extended outward through the mountain. He knew where cold groundwater passed across one of those buried structures and caused a local contraction. He knew the great crimson mass was no longer moving with that slow imitation of breathing because he had told it to stop before leaving.

No.

Not it.

Nathan closed his eyes.

That distinction had become dangerous.

There was no ancient creature below the mountain waiting for him to return. No second will lay curled in the deep, resentful of the human consciousness that had somehow conquered it. Nathan had searched for one.

He had found nothing.

The red sea was not connected to him.

The red sea was him.

That knowledge remained so intolerable that Nathan survived it only by refusing to hold all of it in his mind at once.

One body.

Two hands.

Two eyes.

One heartbeat.

Nathan Drake.

He repeated the name until the sensation of buried roots faded back into the place where ordinary men kept the awareness of their own feet.

When he opened his eyes again, he noticed his clothes.

For several seconds he did not understand why that should frighten him.

His coat was buttoned crookedly. Mallory had laughed at him for that during the descent and told him that if Nathan intended to look like a criminal, the least he could do was look like one who knew how to dress himself. There was a tear below the left pocket where Nathan remembered catching himself against a projection of stone during the chase. His trousers were dirty at the knees. Red dust had dried in the seams of his boots.

Everything was as it had been.

Nathan stared down at himself.

Then memory supplied what fear had been avoiding.

The sea had covered the coat.

It had covered the shirt beneath it. The trousers. Boots. Brass buttons. Leather. Wool. Dirt.

Then it had covered Nathan.

Nothing had come back out.

Nothing except him.

His hand moved slowly toward the torn place in his coat. He pinched the loose thread between thumb and forefinger.

Wool.

He rubbed it.

It behaved like wool.

He gave it a sharp pull and felt the resistance travel through the weave. There was nothing strange about it, nothing organic beneath the fabric, no red tissue revealed when the fibres stretched.

But Nathan knew where every thread went.

He knew the weave without opening it.

The knowledge appeared silently within him the moment he looked.

Not because he remembered how the coat had been made.

Because on some level he was aware of its structure.

Nathan dropped the cloth.

For perhaps half a minute he stood absolutely still.

He had not put these clothes on.

The thought was absurdly simple.

He had not dressed after rising from the sea.

He had wanted to be Nathan Drake.

Nathan Drake wore these clothes.

Therefore the clothes had been there.

Nathan's stomach clenched.

The coat had been reconstructed along with him.

Perhaps reconstructed was itself too comforting. That implied somebody had built a coat and then placed it around a body. What had happened in the cavern had not been so orderly. Nathan had wanted himself back and matter had arranged itself according to the demand.

Body.

Clothing.

Scar.

Hair.

All of it was simply included in the idea.

Nathan pulled the coat open and stared at the shirt beneath.

He had a sudden, hideous impulse to tear everything away and see where fabric ended and skin began.

He didn't.

He was afraid there might not be an answer he understood.

Nathan started down the mountain.

He did it too quickly at first, almost fleeing the cave, and after a dozen yards he realised that the slope should have forced him to slow down. Loose stones rolled beneath his boots. The ground fell away sharply to his right. An ordinary man moving this quickly would have stumbled sooner or later.

Nathan did not.

His feet found stable ground before he consciously selected it.

His balance altered before each slip became a slip.

Twice he stepped on stones that rolled, and both times his weight shifted so smoothly that he hardly noticed the correction until afterward.

Nathan stopped.

A small stone continued bouncing down the mountainside.

He watched it disappear into brush.

Then he deliberately placed one boot upon another loose rock and shifted his weight badly.

His ankle started to turn.

The muscles around it tightened before Nathan had time to react.

The joint never rolled.

He remained standing.

Nathan looked down.

"No."

His voice sounded normal.

At least that was something.

He took off one glove and examined his left wrist.

The skin was unmarked.

Nathan rubbed it.

Ward's shackle had opened the flesh there. He remembered the pain. Remembered Ward wrapping cloth beneath the iron after noticing the blood. Remembered complaining that loosening the cuff would have been simpler and Ward telling him he had more chance of growing wings.

There should have been a wound.

There should at least have been a scar.

Nothing.

Nathan pressed his thumb against the place until the skin blanched.

Harder.

He knew exactly how much pressure an ordinary human wrist could take before the tissue began to bruise.

He exceeded it.

Nothing happened.

Nathan pressed harder.

Pain suddenly bloomed beneath his thumb.

He snatched his hand away.

The pain vanished almost immediately.

Nathan stared.

The skin remained perfect.

He had expected pain.

His body had provided it.

The idea made his mouth fill with saliva.

Nathan bent forward, certain he was going to vomit.

His stomach contracted hard enough to hurt.

Nothing came up.

Of course not.

He had not eaten.

He had not possessed a stomach until—

Nathan stopped the thought.

The nausea ceased.

Not gradually.

One instant his abdomen was twisting violently; the next it was calm.

Nathan remained bent over, hands resting on his thighs.

He began to tremble.

"Don't do that."

He did not know who he was speaking to.

Then he did.

Himself.

That was worse.

Nathan straightened slowly.

For a while he concentrated only on walking. One foot and then the other. He forced himself not to examine how the muscles moved. He refused to think about blood, respiration or the fact that he could hear birds in the valley with an acuity that should have been impossible. When those observations came anyway, he pushed them aside.

Eventually he reached a broad shelf of stone above the forest and sat down.

The sun had breached the opposite ridge.

Warm light touched his boots first and then climbed gradually across his legs.

Nathan watched it.

He remembered Mallory.

The memory came naturally this time rather than through whatever perfect archive existed inside him. It was incomplete, as memories should be. Nathan could see Mallory with the rope over one shoulder but could not remember precisely what colour the man's shirt had been that first day. He remembered the shape of his grin more clearly than the sound of his voice. He remembered the tune.

Three notes.

Pause.

Two.

The final one flat.

Nathan could have reproduced Mallory perfectly.

That knowledge waited inside him.

The exact vocal anatomy. The posture. The face. The biochemical traces. Enough of Mallory's memories to produce something that might look at Nathan and insist it was Robert Mallory.

Nathan kept away from all of that.

He chose the imperfect memory.

Mallory talking too much.

Mallory laughing at his own jokes.

Mallory saying, Still here.

Nathan looked down into the valley.

"You aren't."

The words hurt.

He allowed them to.

Pain was beginning to feel like evidence.

After some time the old practical mechanisms of his mind began operating again. Nathan noticed them returning almost with resentment. There would be settlements somewhere below the mountains. Roads. Perhaps colonial stations, mission houses, traders. Railways if he went far enough. He would need to determine where the cave had brought him out and how far the expedition's original route lay from this side of the range.

Then he thought of what would happen when he reached people.

Nathan Drake.

The name alone presented difficulties.

He had not been an obscure prisoner. The trial had attracted attention because newspapers liked monsters best when monsters could speak politely. The sketches had been flattering in places and grotesque in others, but his face had appeared often enough. There were official photographs. Prison documents. Police descriptions.

Most importantly, Nathan had entered Africa under guard.

Thomas Ward had been responsible for him.

Ward was now dead.

So was Hargreaves.

So was every other member of the expedition.

Nathan imagined walking into a railway office and giving his name.

Perhaps the clerk would not recognise him. Perhaps the first policeman would not either.

Eventually somebody would.

And what then?

Eleven men had entered a mountain with a convicted murderer.

The murderer came back alone.

Nathan almost smiled at the simplicity of it.

Nobody would need to believe in conspiracies. Nobody would need to fabricate evidence. The obvious explanation was already better than the truth.

He could imagine the newspapers.

MURDERER RETURNS ALONE FROM LOST AFRICAN EXPEDITION.

A description.

Dark-blond hair.

Blue eyes.

Twenty-five years old.

Distinctive face.

His face.

Known.

Nathan felt something beneath his cheek move.

At first he thought an insect had landed on him.

He slapped at the skin.

Nothing there.

Then his jaw shifted.

Nathan screamed.

The sound frightened birds out of nearby scrub.

He lurched to his feet and pressed both hands against his face. There was no tearing, no cracking, none of the violence that ought to accompany bone changing its shape. His jaw simply moved beneath his palms as if it had never been solid in the first place.

Nathan felt the angle broaden.

His chin lengthened.

His cheekbones altered.

His nose compressed slightly beneath his fingers and then reformed.

He tried to force everything back with his hands, which was ridiculous and he knew it, but terror had reduced him to the oldest human instinct available: if something is wrong with the body, hold it together.

"What are you doing?"

The question came out deeper.

Nathan stopped.

His throat changed around the next breath.

The world seemed to sink.

No.

Nathan was rising.

His spine lengthened in a smooth internal motion that produced no pain at all. Vertebrae shifted apart, enlarged and stabilised while muscle rearranged itself around them. His coat tightened across his shoulders and then loosened again as the garment expanded with him.

Nathan grabbed at it.

The sleeve lengthened beneath his hand.

"No."

His legs changed.

He felt the bones extend inside them. His boots adapted around feet that had become larger. His thighs thickened, not grotesquely but purposefully, the body increasing strength without wasting material. His shoulders broadened until his coat hung across a frame that felt almost a foot taller than the one Nathan had occupied a moment earlier.

He could feel what was happening.

That was the worst thing.

The processes were not hidden from him. His body had become transparent to his own mind. Cells divided and altered. Bone remodelled without damage. Tendons shifted attachment points. Blood vessels rerouted themselves almost before the growing tissues needed them.

Nathan tried not to understand.

Understanding came anyway.

His scalp prickled.

He reached up.

Hair darkened between his fingers.

Not brown.

Black.

His vision changed subtly.

Colours shifted.

Nathan caught sight of a rain pool between two stones and staggered toward it.

The man who looked back at him was not Nathan Drake.

Nathan dropped to his knees.

The water trembled.

The stranger trembled with it.

He was young. That had not changed. Perhaps twenty-five, perhaps a little older if judged only by the severity of his face. Black hair fell untidily over his forehead. His features possessed something of Nathan's underlying arrangement, enough that Nathan could almost imagine the old face trapped somewhere beneath them, but everything had been sharpened. The jaw was stronger. The cheekbones more severe. His mouth rested in a line that made him appear perpetually dissatisfied with whatever he happened to be looking at.

His shoulders filled the coat differently.

Broad.

Athletic.

Powerful in a way Nathan's old body had never been.

Then Nathan saw the eyes.

Brown.

He leaned close enough that his breath disturbed the pool.

Brown.

Nathan Drake had blue eyes.

His mother had liked them.

A ridiculous memory surfaced: she had once told him the colour made lying difficult because his eyes went too bright whenever he was pleased with himself.

Nathan touched beneath his right eye.

The stranger did the same.

His hand looked wrong.

Nathan forgot the face.

He grabbed his right hand with the left and stared.

The palm was broader than his had been.

The fingers longer.

There was a scar crossing the knuckle of the index finger.

Nathan knew that scar.

Cole.

He had seen it dozens of times while the man sat opposite him in the expedition camps, usually with the scarred hand resting close to his knife.

Nathan's breath became shallow.

"No."

He turned the hand over.

Cole had been missing part of one little finger.

Nathan wasn't.

This was not Cole's hand.

Nathan looked back at the water.

The shoulders.

Mallory.

Not Mallory's shoulders exactly, but Mallory had possessed that breadth through the upper body, a labourer's strength developed without vanity.

Nathan touched the bridge of his nose.

Hargreaves.

Something in the structure reminded him of Hargreaves.

The height—

Ward had been tall.

Nathan stumbled backward.

The stranger in the pool broke apart into ripples.

He sat hard in the mud.

It had used them.

The thought came first.

Then Nathan corrected it automatically.

No.

He had used them.

There was no it.

That distinction was so terrible that Nathan's mind tried to retreat from it.

He could not.

Nathan had been sitting on the rock thinking his face was known. He had identified a problem.

The face of Nathan Drake presented danger.

His body had solved the problem.

No command had travelled upward from the red sea. Nothing had reached through the mountain and rearranged him. There had been no conversation between Nathan and an organism.

The thought itself had become action.

He had wanted not to be recognised.

His flesh had answered in the same effortless manner an ordinary man's pupils narrowed in bright sunlight.

And when the body sought alternatives, it had drawn from what Nathan contained.

Nathan looked again at Cole's scar.

Why the scar?

It offered no benefit.

Then he understood.

Because Nathan remembered it.

The new form had not been mathematically perfect. It had been built from his own associations. Tall meant Ward somewhere in his mind. Broad shoulders meant Mallory. A severe face incorporated features taken from men Nathan had studied during their days underground.

He had spent his entire life looking at human beings in pieces.

The irony turned his stomach.

Ward: disciplined, strong, tall.

Mallory: broad shoulders, physically durable.

Cole: scarred hands, quarryman's strength, aggression.

Hargreaves: age, intellect, facial structure.

Nathan had reduced people into useful characteristics long before the red sea ever learned what a human being was.

Now his body had done the same.

"No."

Nathan crawled back to the pool.

"Put it back."

His reflection stared at him.

"Put me back."

The transformation began instantly.

That frightened him enough to scream again.

His shoulders narrowed. The world rose around him as his height diminished. Black hair lightened. His jaw softened. Brown drained from his eyes and blue returned.

Nathan watched his old face form in the water.

Relief hit him so hard that tears came.

Nathan Drake.

There.

Him.

He touched the reflection with two fingers.

Then noticed the scar near his thumb.

Exactly where he remembered it.

He looked at his wrist.

Smooth.

The shackle injury was still absent.

Nathan's relief curdled.

This was not his old body.

His old body had dissolved beneath a red sea.

This was an imitation made from memory, just as the stranger had been.

A better imitation only because Nathan was emotionally attached to it.

He stared into his own blue eyes.

They suddenly frightened him as much as the brown ones had.

His mind wandered involuntarily back toward the danger of recognition.

The left eye began darkening.

Nathan jerked back.

"Stop."

His body stopped.

The reflection was grotesque now, halfway between identities. One blue eye and one muddy brown. A jaw that had begun sharpening on the left side while remaining Nathan's on the right. Hair darkening unevenly around the temples.

Nathan stared at himself.

He had never felt trapped by a body before.

Prison had confined him. Iron had confined him. Ward's chain had confined him.

A body was supposed to be the one place from which escape was impossible because escape was meaningless.

Now even that had been taken.

Nathan forced himself to breathe slowly.

He thought deliberately.

Not reflex.

Choice.

The distinction became desperately important.

He chose the black hair.

Brown eyes.

Greater height.

Broad shoulders.

The severe face.

The body resumed changing.

Nathan watched.

This time he did not scream.

That almost frightened him more.

He felt his own intent pass directly into biology, not as an instruction delivered from a mind to flesh but as one continuous process. Thought and tissue were no longer separate things communicating through nerves and hormones. The desire for a different jaw and the growth of that jaw were parts of the same event.

When it ended, the stranger looked back from the pool again.

Nathan remained kneeling.

The man was handsome.

Nathan disliked noticing that.

Beautiful, even, if beauty could be severe enough to become threatening. The face suggested judgement without needing to move. Dark hair framed pale skin. Brown eyes lacked the conspicuous brightness that had made Nathan Drake memorable. The body beneath the coat was taller, stronger and much harder to overlook, which was perhaps an odd choice for a man attempting anonymity.

Nathan frowned.

The reflection frowned.

That expression suited the face far too well.

He looked down at his hands.

Cole's scar remained.

Nathan rubbed it with his thumb.

He could remove it.

He knew this as naturally as he knew he could make a fist.

The skin could become smooth before he finished wanting it.

Nathan left the scar.

He did not entirely know why.

Perhaps because removing it felt like killing Cole again in miniature.

That thought would once have embarrassed him.

Now it simply hurt.

He sat beside the pool until the sun was well above the ridge.

During that time Nathan tried to determine where the others ended inside him.

He failed because the question itself was wrong.

Mallory was not stored somewhere inside the red sea as a collection of organs waiting to be borrowed. Neither was Ward. The matter that had composed those men had been reduced, analysed and incorporated. Their biological patterns existed inside Nathan's total awareness alongside his own.

To the body Nathan had become, there was no moral distinction between using the shape of Nathan Drake's jaw and using a structural trait once found in Robert Mallory.

Both were information.

The horror existed because Nathan knew one of them had belonged to someone else.

He bowed his head.

"They were people."

The wind moved across the mountains.

Nathan listened to it.

He said the words again because they felt important.

"They were people."

Not material.

Not traits.

Not patterns.

Mallory had been a man who loved Margaret and carried his daughter's drawing in his coat.

Ward had been a man who missed his daughter and pretended not to care.

Cole had been a frightened, angry man who believed Nathan would kill them all and had died trying to prevent it.

Hargreaves had carried a useless journal to the very end because the names written inside had become more important than the expedition itself.

Nathan had all the information required to recreate their faces.

That was not the same as having them.

He understood that now in a way he wished he did not.

A bird landed on a thorny branch several yards away.

Nathan looked toward it.

The bird cocked its head.

Something happened inside Nathan.

Not transformation.

Awareness.

He knew the animal was warm.

He knew its heart was beating rapidly.

He could sense the delicate architecture beneath its feathers, the distribution of muscle around the breast, the fragile hollow structure of bone.

Nathan went perfectly still.

The bird became biological information without being touched.

Nathan felt a terrible curiosity rise.

Not hunger.

That would have been simpler.

He wanted to understand it.

A sparrow had once been a sparrow because the category was sufficient.

Now Nathan could imagine opening it without killing it. Reading every cell. Understanding the architecture and storing the useful parts.

His hand twitched.

The bird flew.

Nathan recoiled from himself.

For several seconds he remained crouched beside the pool, staring after it.

He had not wanted to eat the creature.

He had wanted to know it completely.

Once, Nathan would not have understood why that distinction should frighten him.

Now he did.

He thought of the mountain learning Mallory's voice.

Learning bullets.

Learning human bodies.

Then he thought of himself studying people his entire life, reducing them to weaknesses and behaviours because details were easier than relationships.

The thing beneath the mountain had not merely consumed Nathan Drake.

Nathan Drake had given it a way to think about people.

And it had given him a way to act upon those thoughts without limitation.

He stood.

The stranger stood with him.

Nathan looked once more at the brown eyes in the water.

Nathan Drake could not return to civilisation.

That much was simple.

His name would be known. His old face would be recognised eventually. A convicted murderer returning alone after eleven men vanished was a story no court in Europe would misunderstand in his favour.

A new face solved that problem.

A new name could solve the next.

The thought made Nathan uneasy because solving problems had become frighteningly easy.

For now he would keep Nathan where nobody else could see him.

Inside.

The word felt insufficient, but it would do.

He turned from the pool and began descending toward the valley.

After several steps he stopped.

The cave was no longer visible from here.

The mountain rose behind him, silent beneath the morning sun.

Nathan could still feel the crimson sea beneath miles of stone.

He concentrated on his heartbeat instead.

One body.

One man.

For as long as he could make those statements true.

Before continuing, Nathan spoke the names of the dead.

Not to summon memories.

Not to preserve data.

Simply because he feared what would happen if he began thinking of them only as things inside himself.

Edwin Cole.

Petru.

Anton.

Bell.

Hargreaves.

Ward.

And finally Robert Mallory.

He left a silence after each name.

Mallory's was longest.

When Nathan finished, he looked toward the valley where smoke from some distant settlement had begun rising into the morning.

People were down there.

Ordinary people.

People who would see a tall young stranger coming down from the mountains and know nothing about what walked toward them.

Nathan found that thought deeply frightening.

Not for them alone.

For himself.

He had entered the mountain knowing exactly what kind of man he was. Brilliant. Uncomfortable. Morally wrong in ways other people sensed before he spoke. He had thought of human beings too easily as arrangements of useful characteristics and had considered their discomfort with that mostly sentimental.

He had learned better.

Unfortunately, he had learned it after becoming something for which the human body itself was only an arrangement of useful characteristics.

Nathan looked at his unfamiliar hands once more.

Cole's scar crossed the knuckle.

He curled the fingers around it.

Then he walked toward civilisation beneath a face assembled from dead men, carrying inside himself an ocean that had no separate mind left to blame for what he might become.