What if this is the underworld? she couldn’t help but think with a surge of panic. Hell, Abaddon, the abyss, Tartarus? What if they’re right to be afraid?

Her feelings calmed a little as the gravitational pulsars in the chute sent her gliding down to the bottom level; magnets in the floor and in the soles of her shoes had her settling back down to earth with a satisfying click. The door slid silently open. Park stepped into a blue-lit, cavernous chamber; its walls pulsed and thrummed with a soothing, hypnotic light. Park wondered at the space of it: the room had to run at least half the length of the ship. How could she have never suspected it was down here? She could feel the pressure and density of the Deucalion crowding above her; there was the sensation of being very deep underground.

She looked around, holding her breath. There were many lab tables and work benches sprawled throughout the room. On one, she could see the disassembled parts of a badly damaged exo-armor suit. On another, there lay many empty sample vials and strange medical instruments. A cryogenic pod in the corner caught her attention; she approached it, half-wondering if it was Hunter or Keller or Reimi. Were they conducting experiments down here, on the frozen?

But when she peered into the liquid depths of the pod, all she saw was the rotund naked body of a man she didn’t recognize. For a horrible second she thought it was Wick—Wick’s body—but this man was more square-jawed, his belly a pale blob of fat above his waist, his eyes and mouth held rigidly open. Dead, then, she thought, looking at his medical readout—but not Wick. So who was he? And why were they preserving a stranger’s corpse down here?

She moved on, poised for anything: realm of the dead, indeed. A frozen human body—no wonder the androids had interpreted it that way, made a nightmare of it. They’d never encountered death, not before Ellenex. But how did they even know about it, if they’d never ventured down here?

There were diagnostic computers here, pieces of lab equipment there—nothing she understood, but also nothing out of the ordinary for research on a phenomenon like the Fold. But the body perturbed her. That couldn’t be who Jimex wanted her to see, could it? The “sleeping god”?

A growing sense of wrongness directed her to a doorway on the far side of the room. Some tingling at the back of her neck—a quickening in her blood—told her that she didn’t have much time left; someone would come and find her soon. It felt as if she was breathing too loudly, or with too much force; it felt as if someone, some invisible presence, was pressing lightly on her throat.