He was wrong to assume that whatever had landed here had somehow taken refuge inside the ancient rock formation in order to hide itself. His inability to determine how high the ceiling rose, to comprehend the vastness of the space, proved that it had adapted over time, shedding its original skin, replacing it with rock and dust and clay, existing here longer than the time it took for the waters to erode the canyon outside.

The cavernous walls soared like tidal waves, their deep hollows and rising mounds frozen just before impact. The slender knolls appeared to breathe, rising and falling, reaching into the darkness above where they merged together at a zenith, reaching down in a thick, pulsating appendage towards the machine below.

It too was riddled with the harsh, grotesque inscriptions that lined the walls of the artery that brought him here. Dim, throbbing lights infected every inch of its sprawling girth. It took up nearly the entire center of the chamber, not with defined and sharp edges, but organically; a tumor from which the infection grew.

In its core was the girl.

He could feel her more than he could see her, as the curved pod she lay within was coated in a thick film.

Reaching her would mean crossing a floor pockmarked with hollows and peaks, like a churning sea suddenly frozen. Ridges, like raised veins, scrawled across the surface, giving the only semblance of a passage to her.

As he began to cross, he dared, at last, to open the channel to her mind.

Ava, I’m here. My name is William. I’m coming.

Don’t slip. Don’t think about what’s within those deep crevices. Find a way to break her free. Just one touch—

No.

He almost stopped, he was so surprised by her response.

Your sister, Lily, brought me. To find you.

He could feel her tremble, see the outside of her form flinch within the encasement.

Run.

Ava—

Run!

The chattering of a thousand swarming rattlesnakes preceded it, slowing and stretching. It rose from behind her: a mud-stained shell of a snapping turtle swollen to the size of a monolith dome. Skin beneath parted to reveal shapes narrowed and long like drowned canoes at the bottom of a polluted river. A maw opened slightly beneath, its saliva thick as dripping tar.

The air around it moved in sways of thrashing locks, thousands of coils born from beneath the shell and lifting like a leviathan free from the water. While most of the tendrils were free to flail, other, larger cords stretched out to sink into the ground and walls. It was everything beneath them, above them; the very air now in their lungs.

The choking fear at seeing its ascension was blasted away by the euphoria.