Kali waited until the others were deep in sleep, the kind that comes only from chemical exhaustion and the psychic fatigue of combat. The low red cabin lights cast long shadows over the cargo bay, giving the space a faint funereal hue. He approached the body bag slowly, boots silent on the cold alloy floor.
With careful fingers, he unzipped it, inch by inch, trying to keep the sound beneath the ambient hum of the Helion's systems. The seal hissed faintly, and the heavy polymer peeled back.
Nikola Diens stared up at him.
His eyes were still open, glassy and milk-slicked, pupils locked in an expression of existential terror. His mouth hung slack in a frozen scream, lips curled back to reveal teeth stained pitch-black with a viscous liquid that had dried to a crusted foam at the corners. The smell was immediate, sweet, chemical rot.
"Gods," Kali muttered.
He crouched, the ship's subtle rumble buzzing beneath his knees, and steadied himself. He took a slow breath, then extended both gloved hands and placed them on either side of the dead man's head.
The flesh was ice-cold, but he felt the echo beneath it, the faint, pulsing residue of thought trauma and psychic fragmentation.
"It's now or never," he murmured.
His fingers tensed, and then his vision went black. Like falling backward through oil. Like drowning in another man's scream.
The psychic connection snapped taut, like a cord around his spine, and Kali was yanked down into the black. There was no transition, no gentle fade, no dreamlike drift. One moment he was aboard the Helion, hands on a dead man's face, and the next, he was submerged in a pulsing, throbbing darkness that smelled of rusted wires and decaying tongues.
Diens' mind was no longer a mind. It was a wound.
A spiraling rift carved into cognition, stitched together by screams and slick with oily, multichromatic fluid that wept sideways across impossible surfaces. The laws of thought didn't apply here. Time staggered like a dying animal. Concepts fractured into teeth.
Kali staggered forward through a corridor that pulsed like a throat. The walls were formed of flesh and old machine, dotted with surgical staples, flickering screens, and orifices that blinked when looked at. Code dripped from the ceiling like bile, scripted in synaptic loops, fragments of SynSpec clearance keys, corrupted access logs… and prayers.
All repeating. "We opened the door. We opened the door. We opened the—"
He turned a corner, though no such thing should have existed, and saw a man-shaped silhouette writhing in a loop of torment. His body half-consumed by barbed tendrils of Fade matter, fibrous, translucent cords that moved with insect logic and marine patience. His lower jaw was missing, replaced by a fan of twitching proboscises, each of them whispering in dozens of languages Kali had never heard.
He was speaking. Or rather, something through him was speaking. "Your mind sings like the ages. You are one them. You freed us."
Then the figure twisted violently, bones rearranging in place. The voice grew layered, human, machine, and something deeper, a timbre like rotting music vibrating inside an abandoned cathedral.
Kali took a cautious step back.
From the periphery of his vision, something moved.
No, somethings.
Shadows shaped like children with eyeless faces. Crawling upside-down across reality. Clusters of grasping hands forming from neural static, each finger jointed with segments of writhing data. One of them skittered across a broken thought-loop, dragging a sack of severed memories.
Then, from behind him, came a single voice, familiar but wrong. "You shouldn't be here."
Kali turned.
Nikola Diens stood whole. Uncorrupted. Eyes shining with cruel clarity. "You opened the door again."
Then his face split like wet paper, revealing rows, layers of teeth and glyphs and blinking black pearls. The scream that came from him wasn't sound, it was intent. It was violence given grammar. And the entire mindscape collapsed inward, pulling Kali toward an impossibly vast maw filled with cityscapes, starfields, and weeping statues.
Kali thrashed.
It was like drowning in gelatinous fire, thoughts collapsing, memories unraveling, the taste of burning copper seared into the base of his brain. Every time he clawed for the surface, it shifted, slithered away, dragged him deeper. Faces without skin. Tongues without mouths. Sigils spinning on the inside of his skull.
And then—
Snap. Reality slammed into him like a returning heartbeat.
He erupted back into his body, air flooding his lungs with a soundless scream as light exploded across his retinas.
Someone was shaking him, hard.
"Kali!" a voice roared.
He blinked, trying to parse shape from blur. Kharv loomed over him, all four of his muscled arms wrapped tight around Kali's flailing form, pinning him down. His voice was hoarse from shouting, veins bulging along his neck.
Kali realized he was screaming too. Or had been. The sound had warped inside him, distorted, like a radio shrieking underwater. It tore out of his throat before cutting short, replaced by ragged gasps.
"I'm fine," Kali choked, voice raw, mouth tasting like spoiled metal.
Brann and Sela stood behind Kharv, half-suited in exoskin, eyes locked on him. Brann's jaw was clenched tight, his hand hovering near the grip of his sidearm. Sela looked paler than usual, brow furrowed in a mix of concern and calculation.
"What were you doing?" Sela asked, voice low but sharp. "You flatlined for almost thirty seconds."
Kali tried to speak, but something warm dripped from his nose. He reached up, wiping beneath his eyes, and froze.
Blood. Thick, dark, streaking across his fingertips in jagged swirls. More trickled from the corners of his eyes. Not tears.
He hadn't just cried. He'd bled. The realization struck him like a slow bullet, his pulse racing behind his temples. Every breath was like dragging air through static.
He wiped at his face again, slower this time. "I… linked with Diens' memory architecture," he said, voice unsteady. "What's left of it."
Sela knelt beside him. "What the hell were you thinking?"
"I needed to know what happened," Kali muttered. "I needed to know what we brought back."
Brann's expression hardened. "And?"
Kali stared at the body bag lying nearby. The shape of Nikola Diens, sealed and silent, now with blackened veins visible through translucent skin like ink slowly blooming beneath the surface.
"They're in him. Still. Even dead. The Fade didn't just infect his mind, it rewrote it, restructured cognition into something... alien. Something collective. And I think it noticed me."
A beat of silence.
Then Kharv finally let go, pulling back with visible reluctance. "You shouldn't do that again."
"I won't," Kali replied, breath trembling.
The ship creaked softly around them. Somewhere in the distance, an old warning system flashed faint red.
Sela stood and exhaled slowly. "We may be carrying something worse than a corpse."
Brann nodded grimly. "Then we better decide fast what to do with it."
"Toss it," Kali said, rising shakily to his feet.
The others stared at him.
Brann didn't speak right away. His jaw tensed as he looked toward the sealed body bag, then back at Kali. Kharv glanced at Brann, arms folded, clearly hesitant. Even Sela looked uneasy, her fingers hovered near her data-slate, no doubt calculating the loss in real time.
That corpse was fifty thousand credits.
Kali knew exactly what it meant to throw it away. "We still have the data," he added, voice steady now. "That's what SynSpec wants. The body is contaminated. Worse, it's aware. We bring that thing into dock, we risk a containment breach at minimum."
Brann narrowed his eyes for a long second, then nodded. "I suppose."
He turned. "Kharv, take it to the airlock."
Kharv grunted and stepped forward. He didn't argue. He just hoisted the body bag over one shoulder like it weighed nothing, then walked down the corridor in silence, the sound of his boots dull against the deck plating.
They watched him go. No one spoke.
Kali exhaled slowly. His breath steamed in the chilled cabin air. For a moment, he felt… lighter. As if something massive had uncoiled from his spine.
Then he froze. Something was wrong.
No, not wrong. Just… different.
The world hadn't changed. The light still flickered in the overhead strips. The hum of the Helion's engines still filled the silence like a low, mechanical heartbeat. But everything had gained a new weight, a subtle refraction. Edges looked too crisp. Sounds had a residue. He could hear the shape of Brann's thoughts before he spoke them. Could taste the residue of Sela's mild panic hanging in the air like static. His mind was reaching, sliding sideways through cognition layers he'd never accessed before.
He touched his temple.
He had broken through.
Second Order.
He blinked, slowly. Inside his mind, Rizen stirred.
"You felt it," Kali said, barely above a whisper.
"I did," Rizen answered. "You have crossed the threshold. Be careful. Somnus Logos Scribes believed the ninefold thought was not a gift, Kali. It is an infection of truth. And it will change you."