Day three started the way the other two had packing up before full light, Halvard checking gear, Bexley walking the perimeter one last time before they moved.
By midafternoon they’d looped back around toward the checkpoint nearest the surface gate, one final night before the walk out in the morning.
Camp that evening had a different feel to it than the two before looser, a little louder, the specific relief of a cohort that had made it almost all the way through a first real expedition without anything actually going wrong.
Wren spent a good half hour trying to convince Tobias that the counting game she’d invented two days ago had, in fact, been won by her all along, on a technicality nobody else remembered agreeing to.
Tobias argued the point with real conviction for exactly as long as it took Wren to threaten a rematch, at which point he declared the whole subject closed and changed topics.
Varun laughed along with the rest of it, mostly honestly, and felt the cold thing behind his ribs come back the moment evening light started fading anyway, exactly on time, exactly like Wolfy said it would.
Same as before, Wolfy said.
A door, still open, not close.
Except tonight it feels a little more like the door’s been left open on purpose.
Meaning what.
Meaning I don’t think it’s hiding from us anymore.
I think it stopped caring whether we noticed a while ago.
Watch rotation went up the same way it had the last two nights.
Varun’s name landed in the third block, well past midnight, paired with a boy from the far end of the cohort he barely knew.
He lay on his bedroll afterward, staring at the low ceiling, turning the decision over the way he’d been turning it over since the midday chamber the day before.
I want to go find it, he said finally.
Tonight.
Before we leave and lose whatever trail there is.
Wolfy didn’t answer right away.
That’s a bad idea, he said.
I want to say that clearly, so you can’t tell me later I didn’t.
I know.
Doesn’t sound like you know.
Sounds like you’ve already decided.
Both things can be true.
Another pause, longer this time.
Fine.
If you’re doing this, you’re doing it my way.
First real sign of danger not “this feels weird,” actual danger you call me in full beast form, no hesitating, no trying to handle it clean first.
Agreed?
Agreed.
He waited until his actual watch block ended and the boy beside him had gone back to sleep, then waited a while longer, until the fire had burned down to almost nothing and the whole camp had settled into the specific stillness of people genuinely asleep instead of just lying still.
He gathered nothing no need for supplies he wasn’t planning to use and eased himself up off the bedroll.
He was three steps from the ring of sleeping bodies when something made him glance back, some old instinct he didn’t examine too closely.
Nothing was wrong.
Wren was curled on her side, one arm thrown over her face.
Tobias slept flat on his back, mouth slightly open, in a way Varun privately thought he’d enjoy mentioning later.
Near the perimeter, Halvard’s shape lay still under her blanket, same as everyone else’s.
For just a second, though, he thought her eyes were open.
It was there and gone before he could be sure of it a glint of firelight where an open eye might catch it, gone the instant he actually focused on it, nothing but closed lids and even breathing when he looked again.
He decided, the way he decided most small unexplainable things, that it had been nothing.
A trick of low light.
Someone shifting in their sleep the way people did.
He didn’t look back a second time, and he didn’t see the way Halvard’s breathing didn’t quite match sleep once he’d turned away, or the careful, unhurried minute she let pass before she sat up in the dark and followed the sound of him leaving.
The wrongness pulled him the same way it always had not a direction so much as a pressure, thinner in some parts of the tunnel and thicker in others, like walking toward a draft from a door he still couldn’t see.
He followed it past the checkpoint’s warded edge, into a stretch of tunnel the map hadn’t bothered naming, glow-fungus thinning out until the only light left came from Stormfang Alpha’s faint gold-black glow where he held it low and ready.
The tunnel narrowed twice, widened once, dropped a shallow step he almost missed in the dark.
Every sound felt too loud his own boots, water somewhere dripping in a rhythm that never quite repeated, his own breathing, which he made himself slow down on purpose more than once.
Getting stronger, Wolfy said, quieter than usual.
Whatever it is, we’re close now.
How close.
Close enough that I’d like you to actually slow down.
He slowed down.
The tunnel opened into a hollow he didn’t recognize from the map a rough chamber, water dripping somewhere unseen, walls closing into a low dome overhead.
And standing at the far side of it, exactly where the wrongness had been pulling him the whole time, was the thing itself.
It didn’t look like anything Varun had a name for.
Roughly beast-shaped, low and angular, built out of proportions that didn’t sit right together legs too long for the body, a head too narrow for the legs and its eyes gave off a faint light that wasn’t any color light was actually supposed to be, something his mind kept trying and failing to file under blue or violet or grey and never quite landing on any of them.
It didn’t move like anything, either.
One second it was across the chamber.
The next it was three feet closer, without ever actually crossing the space between no blur, no sprint, just there and then somewhere else, like a page turning.
Varun went very still.
I don’t know what that is, Wolfy said, and there was no reassurance in it at all this time, none of the usual careful calm.
I don’t recognize it.
Not the shape, not the movement, not the eyes.
I have never, in my whole life, seen anything move like that.
Is it a beast.
I don’t know.
Maybe.
Maybe not anything close to what either of us means by that word.
The creature tilted its head, slow and deliberate, studying him the exact way he was studying it not with the blank hunger of something hunting, but with something closer to genuine curiosity, an intelligence behind those wrong-colored eyes that Varun felt land on him and actually consider him, the way a person considers a locked door they’re deciding whether to open.
Neither of them moved for a long moment.
Then the thing tilted its head a fraction further, and something about its posture changed the loose, watching stillness sharpening into something with weight and intent behind it, shoulders (if they were shoulders) dropping low the way something dropped low right before it committed to closing a distance for real.
Varun.
Wolfy’s voice had gone flat and urgent, all the uncertainty burned off it in an instant.
That’s not curiosity anymore.
That’s a decision.
Call me.
Now.
Varun’s grip tightened on Stormfang Alpha, and the creature’s wrong eyes narrowed, and the last thing he registered before the chamber changed entirely was how impossibly fast it had gone from watching him to closing the last of the distance between them.