The idea of going back to that graveyard made his stomach clench like a fist. When he’d first seen the photographs of it made five years before, it had literally ripped something open inside him, made him feel like all his stuffing was hanging out. But being in close physical proximity to it was much worse. He had had the headaches, the nausea, the weird dreams and sweaty nightmares just like the rest. The city was somehow catastrophic to the human spirit.

When Murphy and he had first gotten into the belt of ruins outside the city, he’d been scared. And his suit, which monitored his physiology constantly, showed it: racing pulse, accelerated breathing, profuse sweating.

And that was just the outer ruins.

When he got into visual range of the outskirts, he’d had something close to a full-blown panic attack. God, it was like the world’s oldest collection of tombs and vaults and megalithic crypts. Rising up above them, the city was fashioned from cubes and blocks, spheres and half-moons and weird geometrical shapes fused into a whole. It was honeycombed with hundreds of passages like rat holes. For a few moments there, he literally couldn’t breathe and his heart skipped in his chest. His flesh felt rubbery and chill, his eyes unable to stop staring. He’d experienced the most awful sense of déjà vu he’d ever known. It had filled him and overloaded him.

Javonivic had been on his headset, of course, asking him what the hell was going on. Her monitors back at the habitat were ringing off for both suits. Were they in trouble? It took some time, but Bell assured her they were okay. And this in a voice that sounded like it had been borrowed from a four-year-old girl who’d just shit her pants out of raw terror.

That was his first reaction to it.

What followed was no better. It was as if he was dreaming, lost in some morphic cloud, his mind reeling with images of the city and the bogies. He had glimpses of the city when it was young and filled with creeping life. And that sense of remembrance, again, was beyond mere déjà vu, but a memory of absolute repulsion and horror that was so strong it was positively organic. He knew that city…or something inside him did…and it scared him to death.

It was the same for Javonivic and Hubbs, he knew. He heard it in their voices over the comm and saw it in their eyes when they got back: like him, they were haunted by terrible images and twisted half-memories that short-circuited their brains. It was nearly impossible to shut off that high-pitched, demented scream that shrieked from the very core of your being, warning you away from that rising cemetery and what lay within.