Chapter 11: The Fourth Donor's Demand
The red light washed over them in waves, slow and heavy, like a heartbeat made visible. Becca stood at the edge of the pool of it, the cold of the floor bleeding up through her bare feet, and the fourth creature's six pale eyes fixed on the low mound of her belly.
The sound that wasn't a sound pressed harder. It pushed against the inside of her skull like a thumb testing a bruise. Not words, not yet. Just weight. Just an enormous pressure of want.
"That's its child," she said quietly. "That's what it's seeing."
Chloe came up beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched. "It can't do anything. It's contained."
The creature's tentacles moved against the glass. Slow, deliberate, they pressed flat to the panel, and the red light threw long shadows through the liquid behind them. A crack ran up the side of the tank with a sound like a frozen lake breaking. It spiderwebbed outward, thin lines branching from a single point where the tentacle pushed.
"Contained" didn't sound like the right word anymore.
The pressure in Becca's head peaked and broke. A voice came through, not sound, not words she could parse, but meaning that landed in her like a stone dropping into still water. Give it to me. Give me back what's mine.
She felt the creature inside her go rigid. A hard convulsion rolled through the bump, a scrabbling panic against the wall of her womb. Her hand went to it, pressing flat, and she felt the small body trembling under her palm. Not fear of the fourth creature. Something closer to obedience.
"Becca." Chloe grabbed her arm. "Becca, move."
Chloe pulled. Becca's feet stayed planted. The red light throbbed, faster now, the rhythm of something ancient and furious grinding itself against a cage. The creature in the tank gathered its limbs and slammed them flat against the panel. The crack ran wider, a jagged fork of black across the red light.
"Becca, we need to go." Chloe's voice had gone high. "We need to get Vance."
The command came again, heavier this time, and Becca felt her knees buckle under the weight of it. It wanted the creature inside her. It wanted the thing that had grown in her belly, the thing it had put there. It wanted its lineage back.
"It's in me," she said. "It's in me and it wants it out."
"Then it can't have it." Chloe's fingers dug into her arm. "You born it, Becca. It can't take it back."
The tank creaked. The crack had reached the top of the panel now, a thin seam of darker red, and a bead of liquid wept from it, running down the glass to pool on the black floor. The creature's eyes never left her belly. Its tentacles pressed against the wound in the tank, prying at the crack with a patient, insistent pressure.
And under it all, the wanting. The enormous, ancient hunger of it, filling every corner of her skull.
Give it back.
She couldn't move. The red light pulsed and pulsed, and Chloe's hand was on her arm, and the glass was cracking, and something inside her was trying very hard to answer a call she couldn't refuse.
Chloe hauled on her arm with both hands, heels skidding on the black glass. Becca felt the command pull at her bones, a gravity that wanted her rooted to the spot. But Chloe's grip was iron and her voice was sharp with terror.
"Move, Becca, move now."
Something in the tone cut through. Becca's feet came unstuck and she stumbled backward. The creature slammed the glass again and the crack split wider, a rifle shot of sound through the chamber. Liquid jetted from the seam in a thin high spray.
They ran. The door was ten feet away, then five. Chloe reached it first and slapped the panel on the wall beside it with her whole palm. A second button beneath it, emergency, red, recessed. She mashed her thumb into it and held.
A klaxon went off. Not the soft dim hum of the facility but a wall of sound, a hard wailing that filled the corridor. The door began to slide shut, slow, hydraulic. Becca turned to watch it close and saw the tank go.
The crack raced around the glass in a single unbroken circle. For a heartbeat the tank held its shape. Then the panel burst outward in a sheet of shards and red liquid poured out in a great gush, spreading across the black floor in a spreading pool. The creature came with it.
It hit the floor wet and enormous. Its tentacles flexed, splayed, and it began to drag itself forward across the glass, leaving a slick wake behind it, six pale eyes fixed on the narrowing gap of the door.
"Go, go, go."
Chloe shoved her into the corridor. The door met its frame and sealed with a hard thunk, and the last thing Becca saw through the narrow window was the creature's body slamming against the inner panel, a wet flat impact that shook the wall.
Then the sirens drowned out everything.
They stood in the corridor, both of them breathing hard. The red light above the door had gone to a strobing emergency flash. The wail filled the hall, bounced off the concrete, pressed into her teeth. Somewhere far off, doors were slamming open.
"What did we do," Chloe said.
"We contained it."
"We did not contain it. It just exploded its tank."
The corridor ended in a junction. Past it, the wing doors, and through them, the low-ceilinged tunnel that led to the residential block. She started walking, and Chloe fell in beside her, both of them barefoot, both of them shaking.
The sirens had a rhythm to them, three notes repeating. She could feel the creature inside her jump every time the siren peaked. The small body trembled against her walls and she pressed a hand flat to the bump, hoping the warmth of it would quiet it. It didn't.
They made it to the residential block before someone caught up to them. Running footsteps, heavy and urgent, and then a figure came around the corner.
Vance. He was wearing pajamas. Blue flannel pants with a drawstring and a wrinkled T-shirt, and a pair of brown leather slippers that slapped against the floor with each step. His hair was standing up on one side.
"Report," he said, breathing hard.
"The fourth donor," Becca said. "It got out."
Vance stopped. His face went through a sequence of expressions. Confusion, then disbelief, then something that might have been horror, and then confusion again.
"Got out," he repeated.
"It's tank exploded. We hit the emergency seal. The door's closed, it can't get out of there." She looked back down the corridor, at the distant red strobe of the donor wing. "I think."
Vance pinched the bridge of his nose. "Explain everything. From the beginning."
Becca wrapped her arms around herself. The hoodie was thin and the corridor was cold. "It called to me. In my head. Not words, but meaning. It wanted the creature inside me. The one I pushed out the other day, that was its spawn. I know that now."
Vance looked at her. His eyes went from her face to the bump under her hoodie and back.
"It wanted its spawn back. It sensed it in me and it wanted it out. It was giving me a command to come to it. To surrender it." She felt the bump quiver. "I couldn't move. I couldn't have moved even if I wanted to."
"You were being psychically compelled," Vance said.
"I don't know what I was being. Chloe pulled me out and hit the button."
Vance was quiet. He stared at the far end of the corridor, where the red light pulsed its emergency rhythm, and then back at the two of them.
"I have absolutely no understanding of what we are dealing with," he said.
Becca let out a breath. It came out shaking.
"Yeah," she said. "Join the club."
Vance looked down at his slippers, then back up at them. "Go back to your rooms. Both of you. Stay there until the situation is cleared and the quarantine is lifted."
"How long?" Chloe said.
"Until I tell you it's over." Vance shook his head. "The donor wing is sealed. Whatever that thing does in there, it does alone. I need to get the facility on lockdown and figure out what we actually have on our hands."
"And then?"
"Then I'll come find you. We need to discuss details." He turned and started back down the corridor, his slippers slapping against the concrete. "Go on. Now. Don't stop for anything."
Becca stood there a beat longer, watching the red light pulse at the far end of the hall. Then Chloe took her hand and pulled her along.
The walk back felt longer than the run out had. The sirens were still wailing, three notes repeating, and the facility lights had gone to a dim amber emergency mode that cast the corridors in a strange, underwater glow. The creature inside her was quiet now, coiled low and tight, but she could feel it trembling.
They reached their room and Chloe shut the door behind them and locked it. Then she stood there with her hand on the lock, breathing.
"I thought we were going to die," Chloe said.
"Me too."
"Your feet are bleeding."
Becca looked down. She'd cut her sole somewhere between the donor wing and the residential block, a thin line of blood smeared across the black floor she'd walked over. She hadn't felt it happen.
"Doesn't hurt," she said.
Chloe guided her to the bed and sat her down, then fetched a damp cloth from the bathroom and knelt to clean the cut. Becca watched her work, watched the careful way she pressed the cloth to the wound, the way her brow furrowed with concentration.
"You saved me," Becca said.
"I pulled you. That's not saving."
"It is. I couldn't move. I couldn't have moved." She looked down at her belly. "It wanted me to come to it. It was going to make me walk through that door."
Chloe didn't answer. She kept working the cloth across the sole of Becca's foot.
They sat in silence as the sirens wound down and stopped. The amber light stayed. Somewhere deep in the facility, doors slammed and voices echoed, muffled and distant. Then quiet.
Becca didn't sleep. She lay on her side with Chloe's arm around her and watched the amber light move across the ceiling, her hand resting on the bump, feeling the small pulse of the creature inside her. It hadn't settled. It was still trembling, a fine constant vibration against her wall.
It knew what had called it.
Chloe slept in fits, her breathing shallow, her grip on Becca's ribs tightening whenever a footstep passed in the corridor. Neither of them spoke much. There wasn't anything to say.
It was late morning when the knock came. Chloe was up first, her hand pressed flat to the door. "Who is it?"
"Vance."
She unlocked and let him in. He had changed into proper clothes now, a white button-down and dark slacks, and his face was gray with exhaustion. A tablet was tucked under his arm.
"Quarantine's lifted," he said. "Come with me. We need to talk."
Becca swung her legs off the bed. The cut on her foot had scabbed over, a thin dark line. She pulled her hoodie straight and followed him out, Chloe close behind.
He led them to a small conference room on the medical level, one they'd never been in before. A single metal table, four chairs, a blank screen on the wall. Vance closed the door behind them and sat, and they sat across from him.
"The donor wing is intact," he said. "The emergency seal held. It didn't get out."
"What is it?" Becca said. "You said you had no understanding. But you've had hours now."
Vance was quiet. He pulled up something on his tablet and turned it to face them. An image. A scan, taken from inside one of the tanks. The creature, rendered in pale blue light, its tentacles splayed wide, its six eyes clustered in the center of its body.
"It's not a Xanthari," he said. "Not that it's something else entirely. It's a different genus. We believe it's what the Xanthari evolved from. A predecessor, a branch that grew into the more docile form we've been working with."
"And it's been laying eggs in the others?"
"It's been reproducing. It prepares a host, deposits its young, and the young feed and grow. The creature you expelled was its offspring.”
Becca looked down at her belly. The bump pulsed once under her hand.
"It sensed a new host," she said. "It sensed me carrying its line again."
Vance nodded. "Which is a problem. Because it also senses that you're still carrying a creature. A Xanthari. It wants it. It wants to reclaim whatever it identifies as its own."
"The creature inside you," Chloe said slowly. "It's not the same one you expelled."
"No," Vance said. "That was its offspring. The one she carries now is a standard Xanthari. The line that descends separately."
Becca pressed her hand flat against the bump. The creature moved, a faint shift against her palm.
"What are you going to do with it?" she said.
"The fourth donor?" Vance shook his head. "We're going to have to study it. Learn what it is, what it wants. It's the most significant find of this entire project."
"And me?"
"You're going to stay away from the donor wing. The creature inside you is valuable, and we're not going to let that thing get within reach of it again." He looked at her, hard. "But you need to know something. It recognized you. It reached into your head and it called you. That means it remembers you. And it won't stop wanting it back."