The fluid tasted of pennies and seawater.
Grigor had stopped counting the hours. Time had no meaning inside the membrane—only the rhythm of his lungs filling with slime, the convulsive coughing that expelled nothing.
And the slow, grinding erosion of his sanity against the walls of his flesh prison.
''Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. Beryllium.'
He recited the periodic table in his head, the words slurred by oxygen deprivation but still recognizable. It was a grounding ritual. A tether.
On Earth, he'd done the same thing when crime scenes got bad—when the smell of a three-week-old decomp threatened to crawl inside his skull and build a nest there.
'Boron. Carbon. Nitrogen. Oxygen.'
Oxygen. What a joke.
His fingers scraped against the membrane for the thousandth time. The surface was slick, fibrous, like a bad cut of beef wrapped in snake skin.
It stretched when he pushed but snapped back the moment his strength faltered. And his strength was always faltering now.
The fluid stole everything—his air, his heat, his will.
'How long?'
Hours? Days? The concept of "time" required external reference points. Sunrise. Sunset. A clock on a wall. Here, there was only the glow—the faint, bluish-white radiance filtering through the membrane, illuminating the curled shape of his own body reflected back at him.
He looked like a specimen in a jar.
'You are a specimen in a jar.'
The thought arrived with clinical detachment. Grigor Ash, age thirty-eight, former forensic cleaner for the NYPD's Crime Scene Unit. Cause of death: blunt force trauma to the orbital bone, inflicted by a set of brass keys wielded by a desperate friend of the victim. Current status: dissolved. Processing. Recycled.
His souvenirs had always been anchors. The watch from the Bronx double homicide. The tie clip from the Wall Street suicide. The child's shoe from the bathtub custody dispute. Each one was proof that he had been somewhere, done something, existed in a way that mattered.
Without them, who was he?
'Meat', something whispered. The voice came from inside his chest, inside his skull, inside the hollow space where a soul would be if he believed in souls. Just meat.
Grigor's jaw tightened.
'No.'
He'd been drowning for an eternity, and the panic had long since burned itself out. What remained was something colder. Something that felt like the chemical residue of bleach in a cleaned-out freezer: sharp, sterile, and utterly indifferent to its own discomfort.
'I am not meat. I am the man who cleans the meat.'
His hands were useless. The fluid made them too slippery to grip. His legs were weak from kicking at barriers that wouldn't break.
His teeth, however, still worked.
He remembered Henderson's apartment. He remembered cutting through biological matter that refused to be scrubbed, using tools that weren't designed for the job because the correct tools were back in the van.
'Improvise. Adapt. Bite.'
He floated toward the membrane. His lips touched rubber-flesh that tasted of copper and rot, old leather cured in something unspeakable. His stomach lurched.
'Clean it', the voice whispered again.
He bit down.
The membrane tore.
It didn't tear easily—his molars ground against fiber, his jaw ached, his gums split and bled into the fluid. But it tore. A fissure no wider than his pinkie finger, admitting a single thread of cold air that burned like acid against his face.
Grigor didn't think. He shoved his fingers into the gap and pulled.
The membrane screamed. Or perhaps that was him—it was hard to tell when his throat was full of slime and his eardrums were pounding with pressurized terror. The fabric resisted, stretched, and then—
Pop.
The world decompressed.
Grigor tumbled out in a torrent of grey-pink slurry, his body slamming against black stone with a wet crack that might have been his elbow or might have been his dignity. He slid two meters, couldn't stop, and rolled off a ledge that should have killed him.
It didn't.
He caught a rusted pipe with one hand, his fingers screaming, his shoulder wrenching in its socket. For a moment he hung there—naked, dripping, gagging on afterbirth—and stared down into an abyss of fog and faint, screaming echoes.
'Don't look down. Don't calculate the distance. Just pull.'
Then he pulled himself up.
''Survive first. Panic later.'
The air hit his lungs like inhaling glass shards dipped in sulfur. He coughed—great, heaving spasms that expelled the last of the fluid in ropes of grey mucus—and collapsed face-first onto the stone.
It was cold. It was freezing. After the fever-heat of the membrane, the temperature felt like a slap from a disappointed god.
Rain fell. It wasn't clean rain. It was grey and oily, smelling of rotten eggs and rusted metal, stinging where it touched his skin like diluted acid. The droplets left faint red marks where they landed, as if the atmosphere itself was slightly corrosive.
Grigor lay there, naked and shivering, and let the rain wash the worst of the slime away.
'I'm alive', he thought.
Then: Define "alive."
He catalogued his body's condition with the same detachment he'd once applied to crime scenes.
'Lungs: Functional, probably scarred. Skin: Intact, no visible wounds. Limbs: Responsive, though weak. Temperature: Dropping rapidly. Estimated survival time without shelter or heat source: Unknown.'
This place didn't follow Earth's rules.
The Hatcheries stretched before him like a nightmare rendered in architecture.
Grigor pulled himself upright, his legs shaking, his arms wrapped around his chest in a futile attempt to conserve body heat. The ledge he occupied jutted from the side of a tower—black stone, slick with rain and some kind of organic grease, rising into a sky that had no sun.
The sky. God, the sky.
It was a bruised grey ceiling pressing down on everything, low and heavy like the lid of a coffin. No stars. No clouds, exactly—just an oppressive, infinite flatness that made him feel like an insect trapped beneath a boot that hadn't yet decided to step.
No sun. No moon. No way to track time. This place is designed to disorient.
And below...
Miles of translucent sacks.
They hung from the tower walls like oversized fruit, clustered in forests of pulsing membrane that stretched as far as he could see.
Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.
Each one glowed with a faint, bioluminescent rhythm, a heartbeat of blue light in the grey dark. And from each one came a sound that he had mistaken for the wind.
It wasn't wind.
It was a chorus of wet, muffled screaming. A symphony of the drowning that reverberated through the damp air, constant and terrible.
Grigor stared at the harvest, and for the first time since opening his eyes, the cold wasn't the only thing making him shiver.
'I am not alone.'
And then he saw the shapes moving between the sacks.