There’s a pulsing thump outside the ship. Julia bellows, quiet and soft. It wakes Charlie, but it’s not altogether an unpleasant song. It continues without end, keeping rhythm with the thumping.

  Someone is pacing in the hall. Charlie gets up and the footsteps fade away, growing more distant until they’re gone. She steps outside and walks to the mess hall. She doesn’t bump into anybody on her way there. She sits at a table and listens, eyes closed.

  A light shines into the mess hall and Charlie blinks, struggling to keep her eyes open. When they adjust, she sees Lewis, flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other. His eyes are empty. There’s a shadow behind him. It looks like his own, but it’s bigger than he is. It floats in the air, in the fog, detached from the walls. She looks at Lewis, and he looks at her. They say nothing and he moves on. The shadow moves only a second after he does.

  Then Charlie is returning to her bed. She’s out of breath for some reason.

  Bill touches her leg before she can ascend to her bunk. He musters the strength to whisper her name, and she stops, kneeling at his side.

  “I’m sorry,” he rasps.

  “Don’t be,” Charlie replies.

  “You have a family, and now--” He pauses. “But maybe it’s better that rescue doesn’t come.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I think, maybe, they were right. Charlie, whatever she is, I think she was trapped for a reason.”

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  Later, Charlie stirs from sleep. A vague memory of a sharp, loud sound hovering at the edge of where her dreams cross into her waking hours.

  Awake, she decides she might as well check the others in the room but ends up in the bathroom, dry heaving over the toilet. For a moment, she feels like she’s choking, like there’s something caught in her throat, the feeling of needles stabbing into her brings tears to her eyes. It passes, and she returns to the bunks.

  She brings water. Some drink, others let the water drip out of their mouths, unmoving. She wishes they would understand how important it was, but there’s a heavy chunk of lead in her gut, and it makes her afraid to speak to them.

  Charlie returns to bed. There’s something else in it, they don’t move as she bumps into them. Climbing back down, she ignores them and goes to the mess hall instead.

  She hears a knock on the freezer door just as she falls asleep.

  Clank.

  Something bumps the Narwhal.

  Charlie awakens in her bed, she doesn’t remember when she returned to it. There’s a heavy feeling around her, a weighted blanket, but cold and wet. When she sits up it’s carried away by a light breeze.

  A new sound echoes through the ship. But it’s not new, just forgotten. It’s the sound of the ship’s upper hatch opening.

  Ears perked, for once, Charlie’s able to push the pangs of hunger to the wayside of her mind and concentrate on something else.

  Below her, she thinks she hears Bill mutter something, but she can’t understand his words, if they are words. He sounds upset.

  Charlie clutches her blankets. Waiting for water to rush into the room and drown her, or for a tentacle to slip inside and strangle her. Instead, she hears boots running on the metal floors. Voices--strong, human voices shout in the dark. And then a beam of light shines into the bunks.

  Charlie stares, blinking as spots dance in her vision. She doesn’t move as a man in a wetsuit, carrying a rifle, runs inside and shouts into a radio on his shoulder. His words sound muffled and distant to her. She gets up, takes one step onto the ladder, then the room spins and she falls to the floor, the world returning to the inky blackness she was so familiar with.