Oh God. The elevator stopped, the door opening with an eerily cheerful chime. With the evac, the floors should have all been lit for the emergency, flooded with whirring yellow warning lights. But it was all turquoise, glittering like the insides of a sapphire struck by a sunbeam. She couldn’t close her eyes, couldn’t look away, even while every reasonable fiber in her body begged her to blink.

Edison raised her unsteadily to her feet and she slumped against him, only moving forward because she refused to be dragged.

And the worst part. The worst part . . .

“What’s happened to them?” she breathed.

They stood just outside the doors, which closed with another happy chime, a sound from out of time, not this time, not this nightmare. The floors were covered in the same gummy webbing and growth as the walls, lapis bright. Strands of it, ropes of it, hung between railings, over visitor signage, over the lights, blotting out whatever the station floors might have looked like, covering it instead in brilliant blue. It almost hurt her eyes to look.

But the people. Most were in a state of decomposition so advanced it rendered them inhuman. Mounds of rounded fungus protruded from skulls and abdomens, bursting from bellies with reaching, arcing stems. Spores puffed out of the flowering ends, sending streamers of particulate white into the air, a winter-dense snowfall of pollen. Other workers and occupants were less disfigured, simply sitting hunched against the wall. One man looked as if he were napping, head tilted against his shoulder, mouth parted as if to snore.

“Is this what you become?” Rosalyn whispered, clinging fiercely to his side, then realizing the true horror of it and tearing herself away. She had forgotten Misato. The plan. The looming and then that she had no answer to.

Edison seemed almost not to hear her. He looked beyond her shoulder, to the curving, tall corridor of the fifth floor, where the blue carnage butted up against a glass office door. No, not butted up against, spilled from. It was quite obviously the epicenter of whatever had happened here, most likely an unwitting customs worker opening a Foxfire sample, not knowing what they were unleashing on the station.

“That way,” Edison said. He shrugged helplessly at her. “The call, the voice, it’s coming from that direction.”

“Wait.” Rosalyn tugged hard on his arm, pulling him away from the hideous mounds of overtaken people to the waist-high directory across from the elevators. A low panel, lit from each side, showed a layout of that corporate floor, with directions to each separate company. Blue film covered the map, but Rosalyn wiped it away, leaning down to study the schematic. Her AR chimed, pairing automatically with the kiosk.

“Look at this,” she told him, holding fast to his wrist. “ISS. They have an office here. We have Piero’s ID; maybe it will get us through the door.”