And one of the things you knew was that the city, like those who had made it, was not dead. It was a machine, a terrible organic machine that the bogies had built and now, worshipped as a god. She, of course, did not know any of this to be true, but she felt it deep inside and did not doubt the truth of it. The city was conscious. It read their secret terrors and externalized them. And as the anomaly grew stronger and stronger, the very beating heart of it, she knew something was going to happen. She could feel it. Critical mass was approaching and if Murphy and Bell did not shut it down, something perfectly horrendous was going to happen.

If they could shut it down…if, if, if…

Where the hell was Hubbs?

She got on the habitat intercom and hailed him. Nothing. She hailed him again. Still nothing.

On the radio, Murphy was jabbering on about his hometown of Haymarket, Wisconsin, some isolated agricultural burg stuck out in the middle of fields of corn and wheat and rye. It sounded almost idyllic. But you could tell from what he said and the tone of his voice that he hadn’t liked the place. The desolation. The claustrophobic old-world way of thinking. How everything was linked to the harvest. How everyone there seemed to be part of it and he’d felt like an outsider. There was almost a silent terror to his words as he recalled it. She wondered why that was.

“Sounds pretty peaceful,” Bell said.

“Sure, sure, I guess it is. But that town…hell, it’s like…how do I put it? It’s like a pretty rock you find in a field. Real shiny and all, but then you kick it over and there’s bugs and crawly things worming on the underside. That was Haymarket. Things happened there in the past you wouldn’t believe. But nobody ever talked about it. And when we kids would ask about all those weird, creepy scarecrows out in the fields or Sarah Burges, that little girl that disappeared around Halloween, or about all those empty farmhouses out on Bellac Road, we’d get swatted. There was this one story about—”

“Shut up,” Bell said.

Silence.

Javonivic felt her stomach pull up into her chest.

They were seeing something. They had entered another large chamber like a cylinder set on its end. The video showed the gloomy water, the shadows created by the beams of the suit lights and spots. Silt raining down that they had stirred up. A blurry shape moved at the very edge of the lights. Bell and Murphy made surprised gasps, trying to bring their lights around to track whatever it was.

The images were jumping and out-of-focus now. The screen went black, rolled, came back up. Javonivic couldn’t say what that shape had been…it was obscure, nebulous…but something about it filled her vitals with ice.