I ran.
Not with my legs—those still belonged to the thing inside me. I ran with my mind, diving deep into the corridors of my own consciousness, searching for somewhere it couldn't follow.
Behind me, the screaming walls grew louder. My grandmother and Eleanor faced each other in a standoff that bent reality around them. But I couldn't focus on that. Because I could feel it now.
The thing growing inside me. Feeding on my thoughts. Getting stronger with every heartbeat.
It wasn't one entity. It was thousands. Millions. Every person who'd ever stepped foot in this facility, reduced to raw consciousness and compressed into a single, ravenous intelligence. The Collective wasn't outside me anymore.
It was me. Or I was becoming it.
*"Stop running,"* it whispered with a thousand voices that were mine but wrong. *"We're the same now. We've always been the same."*
Memories flooded in—not mine, not my grandmother's, but older. Ancient. Memories of the facility's true beginning, decades before 1952. Before it was called a research station. When it was just a hole in the ground where something had been sleeping for millennia.
The first excavation team in 1889. Twelve men who descended and seven who returned. How those seven built families, had children, spread the infection through bloodlines like a patient virus waiting for critical mass.
I was descended from one of them. So was my mother. My grandmother. Eleanor. We were all branches of the same contaminated tree.
*"Now you understand,"* the Collective purred. *"We didn't choose you. You were grown for this. Cultivated. We planted ourselves in your great-great-grandfather's mind 136 years ago, and we've been waiting for the harvest."*
My body—no longer under my control—turned away from the battle behind me. It walked deeper into the living corridors, following a path that felt like coming home. The walls welcomed me with pulsing warmth. Veins of amber light brightened as I passed.
*"We're almost there,"* the Collective said through my mouth. *"The Birthing Chamber. Where you'll finally understand your purpose."*
But something else stirred in the depths of my mind. A memory so personal, so uniquely mine, that the Collective couldn't touch it. A moment from childhood: my mother, in one of her rare lucid moments before the madness took her completely, gripping my shoulders with desperate strength.
"When you hear them calling, remember: they can't take what you don't give. Your grandmother forgot. I forgot. But you have to remember."
I didn't understand then. I do now.
The Collective could control my body, access my memories, speak with my voice. But it couldn't take my will. Not unless I surrendered it.
With every ounce of resistance I had left, I forced my right hand—just my right hand—to move. My fingers trembled as I reached for the symbols burned into my palm. The ones Eleanor had branded there.
But my left palm held older scars. Ones I'd gotten as a child, falling on broken glass. Scars my mother had kissed and whispered over: *"Remember the shape. Remember the pain. It will save you."*
I pressed my palms together. Old scar against new symbol.
The Collective shrieked.
Pain erupted through my entire nervous system as two incompatible magics collided inside my flesh. My body convulsed. Blood poured from my nose, my ears, my eyes that were no longer amber but flickering between colors like a broken signal.
For just a second—one beautiful, agonizing second—I had control.
I used it to run. Really run. My legs obeyed. My body was mine.
I sprinted back toward the red door, where my grandmother still held Eleanor at bay with magic that smelled like burned hair and tasted like copper. The walls around them were dissolving, revealing something underneath. Something that had been hidden behind the facility's false reality.
Machinery. Not human-made. Not alien either, but something in between. Organic circuits pulsing with thought. Mechanical neurons firing in patterns that hurt to perceive. A computer built from flesh and metal and compressed human consciousness.
This was what the Collective wanted to be born into. This was the body waiting for a mind.
"The kill switch!" I screamed at my grandmother. "Where is it?"
She turned to me, and I saw tears streaming down her ruined face.
"There is no kill switch, child," she said softly. "I lied. There's only a choice."
Behind her, the red door swung fully open, revealing what lay beyond.
A room. Plain. Ordinary. With a single chair and a single button on the wall.
"One of us goes in," my grandmother explained. "One of us takes the Collective into that room and presses the button. The room seals. Forever. A prison with a volunteer warden."
Eleanor laughed, the sound echoing with inhuman harmonics.
"She's been trying to work up the courage for seventy years," she said. "But she loves life too much. Even this half-life. Even as a monster."
The Collective surged back, reclaiming my body. My feet dragged me away from the door. Away from the choice.
*"Neither of them will do it,"* it said with my voice. *"And neither will you. Because you want to live. You want to see sunlight again. You want—"*
"I want my mother back," I said.
And I meant it. Not my mother as she was—a broken woman destroyed by inherited madness. But the mother she could have been. Should have been. If not for the curse passed down through contaminated blood.
I looked at my grandmother, then at Eleanor, then at the plain room with its terrible choice.
Then I looked at my hands. One palm marked with Eleanor's symbols. One palm scarred with my mother's protection.
And I realized there was a third option.
One they hadn't considered.
I pressed my palms together again, and this time I didn't fight the pain. I embraced it. Let it flow through me like a circuit completing.
The symbols and scars merged, creating something new. Something neither Eleanor's magic nor my mother's protection nor the Collective's hunger had anticipated.
A doorway inside myself.
"What are you doing?" Eleanor shrieked.
But I was already falling through it. Falling into a space that existed between my body and my mind. A gap where the Collective couldn't follow because it needed one or the other to exist.
In this space, I found them. All of them.
The millions of consciousnesses compressed into the Collective. Still individual. Still aware. Still screaming.
Still hungry.
And at the center of it all, a face I recognized.
My mother's face.
Smiling at me with too many teeth.
"Hello, baby," she said. "I've been waiting for you to come home."