They’re gone and you know it. What happened to the dive team below also happened above. They’ve been purged. All of them. Did you really think they’d still be alive after two days of radio silence?

The lights from the cable car windows threw squares of illumination upon the wet floor of the drill tower. Other than that, there was only the glow of the borehole perimeter lights and a red EXIT sign in the distance.

Orr grabbed a flashlight from the emergency box at his feet. Then, breathing deeply, clenching his jaw against the pain of his injured back, he popped the latch and stepped out of the cable car.

His legs were shaky, muscles bunched up from the long ride, his back unbearably stiff. He panned the darkness with his flashlight. The heat was still on so it was warm. But that was about the only comfort. His footsteps on the wooden platform echoed out solemnly throughout the vast hollows of the drill tower. Something which heightened the deserted, claustrophobic feel of the place which was already in nightmarish overdrive.

Nerves, just nerves.

As he stood there, he realized he was having a bit of trouble breathing. Again, maybe it was nerves. But he didn’t believe that for there was something damnably strange about the air…it didn’t feel right. He likened it to being in a decompression chamber after a deep-saturation dive, the atmospheric pressure slowly being reduced to normal. This was very much like that. Right before they let you out, before pressure normalized, you could feel the weight of the air exerted upon you, the heaviness of it. And that’s exactly how the air in the drill tower felt.

Not only heavy, but busy, agitated, crawling with energy. As if proof of that, a headache began to throb in the back of his skull.

He moved forward, slowly, painfully. His back felt like old plaster that would crack open at any moment. He wondered what would be worse: finding corpses or finding none at all? Knowing that everyone was dead and that he was alone or not knowing what had happened or what might happen next?

He really wasn’t sure.

And, ultimately, does it even fucking matter now?

But as he panned about with his light, his brain filled with the horrible imagery he had known below—the Old One he had encountered on deck, the way it had leered at him; the images that Bell and Murphy had sent back of that town in the depths of the city, the ghosts haunting it; his own dreams aboard the LSB of that nameless city which looked very much like the elaborate, intertwined skeletons of deep-sea hydroid colonies he had seen as a young Navy diver, rising into the murk, so alien, so otherworldly—Enough. Move. Continue mission.