Javonivic desperately wanted to tell the both of them that it was just a hallucination, a mirage, something the aliens had plucked from Murphy’s head and used to torment them with. Just an image. A ghost that looked three-dimensional. The city could project such things. It had the power. Same way it could make harmless jellyfish attack Murphy and the same way it could fill your head with weird visions or send some monster to shake the habitat and the same way it had resurrected her mother. But just because it was a hallucination, did not make it any less real.

When she had woken the other night with something touching her, it had felt like a warm human hand. In her dream, anyway. She hadn’t told the others about that part. That the hand had felt like that of Kyle Donniger, the boy who’d taken her virginity in the twelfth grade. And then as she came up out of the dream, it had not felt like a hand at all, but the cold entrails of a gutted fish drawn along her cheek.

The physical hallucination was fleeting.

“Move it along,” Orr said. “It was a hallucination, that’s all.”

“A group hallucination, sir?” Murphy put to him.

“I don’t give a shit what you saw,” he told them, refusing to admit what he had seen himself. “You got a job to do, so get to it. Ignore that stuff. You hear me? Ignore it!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Murphy said and the sarcasm was so thick in his voice you could have sliced it and served it on crackers.

On the screen, the divers were crossing the chamber for another passage on the other side and one, Javonivic was certain, which would bring them to the magnetic anomaly itself. They pushed on, deeper into that morphic womb of nightmares.

31
CATALYST

Orr had a splitting headache.

And it wasn’t, for a change, from what was beneath the lake or what maybe had laid claim to the entire goddamn Pole. No, this was stress. Plain, simple stress brought on by helming a mission that was simply beyond anything he had ever known or would ever want to know again. God knew there had been tight spots in his life. Times when he felt so goddamned helpless, he wanted to punch a hole in the nearest wall. But nothing like this.

He watched Anderson studying the console.