No, no, she couldn’t afford this.

She would not allow herself to believe things unsubstantiated or be overcome by much-repeated urban legends. She simply could not afford such thinking. She put her face in her hands, fighting back the desire to openly weep. God, her nerves were shot, phobias and secret terrors blossoming inside her with wild abandon.

It’s because you’re a woman in a man’s world, she heard the derisive voice of her mother say. You’re in a place you don’t belong.

“Shut up, Regina,” she said under her breath.

But now that this place had resurrected the memory of the old bitch, Javy knew she’d never keep quiet.

And as she fought with her own painful memories in the silence of the habitat, Hubbs off doing whatever it was Hubbs did, she heard something that made her sit up straight.

Tense, her jaw locked tight, she listened again.

Yes, there it was.

A sort of scraping, scritching sound. The sound a spider might make against a windowpane. That same sound you heard in your dreams, from inside your skull. She did not like it. She suddenly felt very hot, very uncomfortable. A trickle of sweat ran down her back.

Licking her lips, she said, “Hubbs? Hubbs, is that you?” But she said it very quietly, as if she didn’t want to be heard.

There was no reply, of course, and she hadn’t expected one. Hubbs was not making the sound. He couldn’t have been, because it wasn’t coming from inside the habitat, but from outside. Scratch, scratch, scrape, scratch. It was too soon for the divers to be back. Which meant there was something else out there, something maybe trying to get in. Which would have been quite easy with the open moon pool.

Javonivic checked the sonar.

Nothing. She checked the outside motion detectors. Again, nothing. Something was making a sound, but it was motionless, insubstantial if the screens before her were to be believed.

She got out of her chair, touched the crucifix at her throat, waited for it to come again. It did. That same scraping, scratching noise that went right up her spine, made her think of insects, crickets maybe, rubbing their hind legs together. It was an invasive spiderlike sound that she found absolutely repelling. She wondered if it was the sound a fly heard as it lay paralyzed in the web of a garden spider, slowly being wound up in silk, those flat dead eyes looking at it, brown venom dripping from the monster’s jaws.

“Stop it,” she said under her breath. “Just stop it.”