Dr. Eleanor Voss stood in the corridor that shouldn't exist.
She looked exactly as she did in the faded 1952 photograph I'd found in the facility's abandoned archives—same severe bun, same wire-rimmed glasses, same white coat marked with symbols that hurt to look at directly.
Except she was breathing. Walking. Smiling at me with teeth too white, too perfect, too many.
"You made it through," she said, her voice layered with harmonics that resonated in my bones. "Most don't survive the transition with their consciousness intact. Your grandmother didn't."
I tried to speak, but my mouth no longer obeyed me. The voice inside—the one that had guided me through the door—held my vocal cords hostage.
"She's confused," it said through my lips. "Show her the blueprint."
Eleanor's smile widened. She gestured to the walls around us, and I realized with creeping horror that we weren't in a corridor at all. We were inside something living. The walls pulsed with a rhythm too slow to be a heartbeat, too fast to be geological. Veins of amber light threaded through flesh-like stone, carrying something that looked like liquid thought.
"This facility was never a research station," Eleanor explained, running her fingers lovingly along the wall. "It was a womb. And we are the architects who designed what's about to be born."
She pulled a leather journal from her coat—impossibly preserved, impossibly here. The pages fell open to blueprints drawn in blood and ink, diagrams of human bodies modified into grotesque machinery, equations that seemed to solve themselves as I watched.
"Every thirty-three years, the womb needs feeding," she continued. "A life. A willing vessel. Someone who carries the right genetic markers." She tapped her temple, then mine. "Someone with amber in their eyes."
Flashback memories that weren't mine: my grandmother at age twenty-four, standing where I stood now. Her screams as something burrowed into her skull. Her return to the surface, empty-eyed and pregnant with my mother. The curse passing down like genetic inheritance.
"You weren't supposed to remember," Eleanor said, frowning. "The transition usually erases the before. Unless..."
She stepped closer, peering into my amber eyes. Both of them now. Studying them like specimens under glass.
"Unless you're rejecting the merge."
Suddenly, pain. Blinding, absolute, originating from somewhere deeper than my brain. The voice inside me shrieked, tightening its grip on my nervous system. My hand raised without permission, fingers splaying as symbols burned themselves into my palm.
"Don't fight it," Eleanor commanded. "Fighting only makes the birthing more painful."
But something else stirred inside me. A memory so old it predated my birth. My grandmother's voice, weak and distant, buried under decades of silence:
*"There's a kill switch. I hid it in the blood. Find the red door. End what we started."*
Red door. The walls around me were all amber and grey. All except—
There. At the end of the corridor. A door so dark red it looked black, marked with symbols that didn't burn like the others. Symbols that looked almost... protective.
"No," Eleanor said sharply, following my gaze. Her composure cracked. "That door is sealed. It's been sealed since 1952. Since I—"
She didn't finish. Because the red door was opening.
And what stepped through wasn't human anymore, but it had been once. It wore my grandmother's face, or what was left of it after seventy-three years of existence in a place where time moved sideways.
"Hello, Eleanor," my grandmother said, her voice like grinding stone. "I've been waiting for you to make this mistake again."
She looked at me with eyes that flickered between human brown and something far older.
"Run, child. The architect didn't show you the most important part of the blueprint."
She raised her withered hand, and the living walls began to scream.
"This facility isn't the womb. We are. And what's inside us is about to wake up hungry."