He smiled thinly. “Javy, Javy, Javy. Now, where have we gone wrong with you? You’ve been in that fucking tomb with me. You’ve felt the dread of that place. The danger. It’s a nightmare just like the things that built it. Can you deny it? If you can, your mother should have taught you better.”

“You leave my fucking mother out of this!” she snapped.

Hubbs gave her a pitying look, wondering, apparently, what nerve he’d touched. He left the wet porch, making for the Main Lock and the control room. And good riddance to him. When he went through the airlock, she showed him one of her less Pollyanna-type attributes: she flipped him off.

Now you did it, she thought. You let him push your buttons. You lost control. You showed him your soft white underbelly and that prick will remember it, too.

She buried her face in her hands, shaking. Yes, of course, he was right—she’d felt the menace of the city, felt it digging deep into her. She’d been moody and bitter ever since her first trip there, her emotions just under the skin like tinder waiting to burn. And scared, oh God in heaven, don’t forget about the terror you’ve felt. She was not herself. It was like there was another Javonivic inside her, a terrified, deranged anti-Javonivic that screamed in her head. An animal in a cage.

Hubbs knew it, too.

Somehow, he did.

But the city is just a city, regardless of how abstract it is…it can’t be alive, it can’t toy with our minds and dreams. Do you really believe that?

She just didn’t know. Her sense of logic told her the very idea was absurd, yet her emotions, her instinct, told her otherwise.

“Hubbs is an asshole,” she whispered. “He’s trying to mess with you.”

She clenched her teeth, feeling the world—her world—spinning out of control. Guys like Hubbs were hateful, cynical savages at their core. They fed, they fucked, they killed, they shit. But there was no poetry in them, no spirituality. They were exactly what the Old Ones had engineered humans to be: soulless brutes that could be easily manipulated. She saw people like him as a lower order, things barely one step from the caves.

Oh God, what was happening? No, she’d never exactly been in love with Hubbs. But she’d never hated him like this either.

She shouldn’t have let him provoke her…but that goddamn crack about her mother, harmless though it was, had been like a hot knife sliding into her guts. She did not like to think about her mother because she had been too much like Hubbs.