"We check residential," Chen decided. "If someone's alive in there, humming or not, we can't leave them."
"Could be a lure," Marcus warned, adjusting his grip on his rifle. "Classic predator behavior."
"Could be someone in shock," Nora countered. "Traumatized, hiding. We have to try."
Chen nodded at Marcus. "We go careful. Standard formation. Anyone sees anything, you call it."
The four of them approached the residential corridor, weapons and tools ready. The humming had stopped, but the silence that replaced it was somehow worse. Chen's flashlight beam cut through the red emergency lighting, creating disorienting shadows.
The corridor was lined with personal quarters—small rooms with bunks, desks, a few personal effects. Each door had a nameplate. They passed them slowly: VOLKOV (Sergei frowned at his own room, empty now). MARTINEZ. KOWALSKI. JENSEN.
"These were support crew," Sergei said quietly. "Good people. We trained together."
At the end of the corridor was a communal bathroom on the left and a larger room on the right. The nameplate read: DR. YUKI TANAKA - LEAD RESEARCHER.
Her door was different from the others. Someone had bolted a heavy lock onto it from the outside. Deep scratch marks gouged the metal around the lock, as if someone—or something—had tried desperately to claw through from the inside.
But the lock was open now, hanging loose. The door was ajar.
"Bloody hell," Marcus breathed. "They locked her in her own room."
Nora moved closer, examining the scratches. "These are from fingernails. Human fingernails. She was locked in and tried to get out." She looked at Chen, horrified. "Why would they do that?"
Chen pushed the door open slowly.
Dr. Tanaka's room was a nightmare of obsession. Every wall was covered—photos, notes, diagrams, calculations scrawled directly onto the surfaces with markers, some in neat handwriting, others increasingly frantic. Papers were pinned, taped, and stapled in overlapping layers. Coffee cups and food wrappers littered the floor, along with scattered clothing and broken equipment.
But it was the walls that made Chen's blood run cold.
Circled words appeared over and over: NOT ALONE. IT KNOWS. MIMICRY. DON'T TRUST VOICES. IT'S LEARNING. THE SPECIMEN.
One entire wall was devoted to a single massive diagram—a biological sketch of something that looked like a cell, but wrong. The internal structures branched and reconnected in impossible geometries. Beneath it, in neat capital letters: "IT REMEMBERS EVERYTHING IT CONSUMES."
"Jesus," Marcus whispered.
Nora was transfixed, moving from wall to wall, reading. "She documented everything. Look—this is a timeline. The drilling team reached the cavern on March 15th. First samples collected March 18th. They brought something up." She traced her finger along the notes. "April 3rd: 'Specimen Z-01 showing unprecedented adaptive behavior.' April 10th: 'Richards reported hearing voices in the ventilation system.' April 15th—" her voice caught. "April 15th: 'They had to burn Richards. God forgive us, we had to burn him.'"
"There," Sergei pointed to a desk in the corner. A laptop sat closed, and beside it, a stack of mini-cassette tapes labeled with dates. The most recent was labeled: APRIL 21 - FINAL LOG.
April 21st. That was three days before all communication ceased.
Chen was about to reach for the laptop when they noticed something that made their skin crawl. The floor near the bed was covered in shed skin—translucent, paper-thin layers of human skin, as if someone had molted.
"Contact!" Marcus suddenly shouted, swinging his rifle toward the bathroom across the hall.
A figure stood in the doorway. Female, wearing Dr. Tanaka's ID badge, her dark hair hanging limp around her face. But they could only see her silhouette in the dim light—she was backlit by the emergency lights in the bathroom, making it impossible to see her face clearly.
"Dr. Tanaka?" Nora called out. "We're here to help. We're the rescue team."
The figure didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just stood there.
Then she spoke, and the voice was perfect—exactly what one would expect from a 48-year-old Japanese researcher. Warm. Tired. Human.
"You shouldn't have come," she said. "It's too late. We opened something we can't close."
"Step into the light," Marcus ordered. "Slowly. Hands where I can see them."
The figure took one step forward. The emergency light caught her face, and Nora gasped.
It was Dr. Tanaka. They could see her features—but something was wrong with her skin. It had a waxy quality, like it didn't quite fit right. Her eyes didn't blink. When she smiled, her mouth moved but her eyes stayed dead.
"I tried to warn them," she continued in that perfectly normal voice. "But they didn't listen. They never listen. And now it knows you're here. It knows your voices. Your faces." She tilted her head. "It knows everything about you, Dr. Chen. Your training. Your past failures in Southeast Asia. That research team you couldn't save."
Chen's blood turned to ice. That information wasn't public. It was buried in classified CDC reports.
"How do you—"
"Because I've been watching," she said, and suddenly her voice shifted—layered, multiple tones. "Learning. Waiting. You brought food. Fresh tissue. New patterns to study."
Marcus fired. The shot caught her in the chest, and she staggered back but didn't fall. Black liquid seeped from the wound—not blood. Something else. She looked down at it with what might be curiosity.
"Interesting," she said, touching the wound. "Pain. I understand pain now."
Then she ran—not at them, but away, disappearing into the bathroom. They heard her footsteps, then the sound of something heavy falling, then silence.
Chen stood frozen, staring at the bathroom doorway. The thing wearing Tanaka's face had just fled—wounded, bleeding that black ichor. It was in there, cornered. They could pursue it, try to understand what they were dealing with while it was vulnerable.
Or they could grab the laptop and cassette tapes—the evidence, the research, the answers Dr. Tanaka had left behind—and fall back to the main hub with information that might save their lives.
Marcus was already moving toward the bathroom, rifle raised. "After it!" he started to say.
But Chen had to make the call.