#Closest Doctor: ...Okay. I will say. That's pretty bad. Yeah he can probably digest like a teaspoon of honey; lemme go add that to his char

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids (XVII)👽👻💚

[I can't remember the original prompt posters  for the life of me but here's a mashup between a cryptid!Danny, presumed-alien!Danny, dp x dc, and the prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]

PART ONE is here PART TWOis here PART THREE is here PART FOUR is here and PART FIVE is here PART SIX is here and PART SEVEN is here PART EIGHT is here PART NINE is here PART TEN is here PART ELEVEN is here PART TWELVE is here PART THIRTEEN is here PART FOURTEEN is here PART FIFTEEN is here PART SIXTEEN is here and we're limping into part 17...

💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts (now featuring mediocre mouseover translations, only available on a computer)

Where we last left off... Two! Words! In! English!!! And a television? Hardcore!

Trigger warnings for this story:  body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) |  my nonexistent attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.

💚👻👽👻💚

Danny can raise his head now.

Only a little. It still hurts his neck for a while after. But his arms and his head both rise, now. His fingers curl, now, too.

The result is that Danny can now watch and change his own television channels. No more news! Now it’s all Food Network, all the time, baby. The result is that sometimes the doctors tending to him get distracted by various pasta dishes, but also. Danny is also distracted by various pasta dishes.

And roast chicken.

And fried potatoes. Every potato ever, actually.

…It makes eating his oatmeal a more awful ordeal.

“Aw, dyrling, na þa sæd egean,” the lady says to him, spoon at his lips. Danny weakly moves his arm towards her, but only manages to hit her elbow with the heel of his thumb. “Inne cwic tima, gise? Hiere þa læce.”

Danny is pretty sure his face is a nightmare to look at at the moment, but he still makes the world’s saddest expression at the lady, because she hasn’t blasted him or hit him or even sedated him yet, and he needs something. Anything.

He’s pretty the lady makes an equally sad look under her medical mask, but Danny is hungry and he’s tired all the time and he’s sad and he wants a cheeseburger. Or fries. Or…or anything at all!

Danny’s look gets progressively sadder, and the lady gets progressively sadder to match, and then they’re both just looking at each other so very sadly until a doctor physically has to cut between them to reach for Danny’s green-speckled blankets.

Ugh. Great. Now he’s cold too. He can’t quite muster a glare, but the doctor gets an extremely stern squint from him for their “help”.

The only response Danny gets is a half-strangled laugh. That is not the response Danny needs. He needs immediate respect and a Nasty Burger number two special.

And a new blanket.

“—Eall dæg?” the doctor asks the woman, but not Danny, and then he has to listen to everyone talking about him in a weird language without even pretending to ask for his input. It’s extremely annoying, and Danny half-considers falling asleep to avoid it. His gaze slides back to the television. He’s just as capable of ignoring everyone else as they are. He bets it sucks. He hopes it sucks.

They talk for a while, but then the lady takes the oatmeal away—and hey! Danny’s eyes widen and sting from the stretch. Uh. Maybe he didn’t think this one through. He’d still thought he’d get lunch out of this.

Um. He would like to continue to receive meals. But he’s watching her walk out with his oatmeal, which is the only human food that’s ever been given to him here, and…

Danny’s stomach cramps. It’s probably just anxiety.

He wishes he’d eaten the stupid oatmeal.

The doctor stays with him, setting the blanket into a laundry bin and checking over Danny’s body (ew) (gross) (nasty) for whatever they have to check on him, and Danny tries to go intangible at least four times during the check only to get oWOUCHOW jerks inside his core. At least one time, he flickers invisible. Not much, he thinks. Probably just an arm and the chunk of his torso.

The doctor pauses. Danny waits for things to (start to hurt) get worse.

“Mæg Ic?”’

…Danny doesn’t move. It hurts to breathe. Every time air scrapes through his nose and mouth, it burns a little more.

The doctor doesn’t move.

So they just.

Wait.

“Mæg Ic?” the doctor asks again.

They move very, very slowly. They touch him, and his—skin—and they rotate him to check underneath him. If they find something of whatever it is they’re monitoring him for, he gets wiped down with something gooey and wiped clean, and sometimes he even thinks they bandage him.

Danny wishes he had a bath. A whole, real bath. Where he could wash his own hair. And wipe off whatever this goo is.

When they’re done, the lady comes back in.

The sound of the door latching shut makes Danny flinch. Is she going to punish him? She walks to his bed. With her medical mask over her face, Danny can’t see if she’s visibly mad at him or not. She doesn’t look mad though…does she?

She stands to his good side, presumably so that Danny can see her. The oatmeal is back—it looks kind of gloopy, though, like it’s been badly reheated. The lady shows something to the doctor, who makes an irritated groan, and then they start talking to each other again. She cuts off to show him something, though—

Danny blinks. She’s showing it to Danny. He…looks down at it.

It looks like a mustard packet. It’s a black packet with yellow streaks, with writing on it with those letters Danny’s never seen before coming here, and it takes his eyes a second to focus on the package before realizing that there’s a little bee and pot on one end of the packet.

Oh. It’s honey?

Oh!

…Oh!!

Danny jerks upright, and, OW, and he definitely scares the lady and the doctor who rush to settle him but there’s honey?? Flavor??? His food can taste good again??!

He wheezes— and slaps a stinging hand onto the packet. “Pl’s?” he begs. He’d stopped begging in the old labs, no one there had listened to him—and he’d stopped begging for them to be gentle, to stop hurting him, to let him go. But for food. For food that tastes, Danny might do anything. Anything. “P’lease? Ple’se? Pleese?”

“Pleece?” the woman repeats, baffled. The word doesn’t mean anything to her; she’s only repeating the sounds. But Danny can’t stop begging.

“P’lease?”

“Pleece? Pleace?”

“Please?!”

“Awrite þis,” the woman mutters, and the doctor leaves. “Bist wel. Eom hebbjan eower wist. Es wel.”

And that still means nothing to him, but the lady gently lifts him up until his back can lay on the pillows, and he can sit more than lay. Danny watches in raspy silence as she rips the packet open and dumps the contents into the oatmeal. She stirs with gloved hands, ensuring that the packet is equally distributed. And then there’s a glob on her spoon, and the spoon to his lips.

Danny takes a bite. Tears well.

“Shhh,” the woman coaxes. “Wanian ma?”

Ma sounds kind of like more. Danny opens his mouth, and is rewarded with another spoonful.

He doesn’t start crying in earnest until the bowl is gone. But that’s alright. The lady finds tissues, somewhere, and he gets to look into her human-blue eyes as she carefully dries over and around his still-soft, green-edged wounds.

It’s a very nice gesture.

Danny sobs a little harder.

[hypnoticwinter]

Down the Rabbit Hole part 5

“Peter, wake up. Peter, please, come on. I know you’re breathing, you have a pulse, fucking wake up, Pete. Please.”

Peter cracks an eye open and sees Makado, forehead pressed against his shoulder, her own shaking with exhaustion and frustration and fear. He wants to reach down and touch her and show her that he’s awake, that he’s okay, but his arm doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with what he wants it to do; he can lift it but it feels like he’s a million miles from his body and whispering in the ear of whoever is really lifting his arm, but they can’t understand him and they aren’t very good at working the arm to begin with. He blinks glassily and shifts his torso a little and Makado looks up and sees that he’s awake and throws her arms around him.

“Goddam it,” she mutters. She smells like peaches. Peter tells her this and she looks at him with a funny expression on her face, like she’s trying very hard not to smile and failing at it. “You really cracked your head, didn’t you?” she says. Peter tries to sit up but she puts a hand on his chest and pushes him back down gently. He raises his arm again and notices that a little bit more of his coordination has returned; he puts his hand on her shoulder and she reaches up and squeezes it.

“Are the kids okay?” he asks, and she nods.

“Yeah, they’re fine. A little banged up but we all are. They’re okay.”

Peter looks over her shoulder and sees the three of them, even Eileen, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes. Fitzroy has a cut on his forehead that looks bad, but it’s a head wound, so it probably looks worse than it actually is, and Eileen is still clutching her wrist. His eyes flick up to Makado. “Have you looked at Eileen’s wrist?” he asks. “She’s been holding it like that since the first wave of convulsions.”

“Yeah,” Makado nods. “It’s sprained, I took a look at it. Not broken, thankfully.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” she admits. “I’m not a doctor. But she wouldn’t be able to move it as much as she can if it were broken.”

“Good,” Peter says, making to get up, but Makado pushes him down again.

“Not so fast,” she says, unclipping her flashlight from her belt. “Stare straight ahead,” she instructs him, and when he squints against the light she rolls her eyes at him. “Don’t squint.”

Peter tries not to but even on the lowest setting the flashlight is very bright. After what feels like eternity Makado turns it off and shrugs. “You’ve got a concussion,” she says, “but probably not a very bad one.”

“Are you sure?” Peter frowns. “I feel like shit.”

“Yeah, you look like it, too,” Makado grins. “You were only out for a minute or two, though.”

“The choke response was over that quickly?” he asks, sitting up. His head throbs for a moment and he puts his hand to it, but the feeling passes.

“No,” Makado shakes her head. “Put your hand on the floor.”

Peter does and then he feels it, a slow rattling rumble from somewhere deep, deep in the Pit, a vibration that passes up his bones and makes his teeth sing. He jerks his hand back like it was scorched. “What the hell?”

“I know.”

“What is going on?”

“No clue,” Makado shakes her head. “I haven’t been able to get anybody on the radio, and the lift stopped halfway down. I think a contraction crushed part of the elevator shaft inwards so it can’t make it all the way.”

“Shit,” Peter mutters. “So we’re trapped down here?”

He glances at the three kids on the other side of the elevator enclosure, but they aren’t paying attention; Fitzroy and Eileen are huddled together, looking exhausted, and Tyler is laid out flat on the floor, shuddering along with the pit.

“I don’t know,” Makado tells him. “The elevator is fucked so that’s not a viable way up but there are others. I know there’s a ladder somewhere that leads up to the bronchial area in the layer above this but I don’t know where it is. Do you?”

Peter shakes his head. “No,” he says after a moment. “I’m down here a lot but I don’t think I’ve ever used that ladder. We always would just take the lift, like we’re –“

“- like we’re supposed to,” Makado groans. “And you don’t have the map downloaded?”

“No,” Peter tells her. “I still have a map of the eastern face in here,” he says, tapping the computer box built into his suit’s chestplate. Makado curses.

“Mine just has a map of the LVC area, I’ve been doing tour groups for the last three days.”

“You? Doing tour groups?”

“Don’t even start,” she groans. “Ryan and Fatoumatta both have been out, Ryan’s dad died and I don’t even know what Fati’s problem was, we literally didn’t have anybody else to cover.”

There’s another grumbling moan from somewhere deep below them. Peter watches Tyler shudder.

“Pit doesn’t sound very happy,” Peter mutters.

“I’ve never heard carnal moans like those,” Makado agrees.

“I know a choke response can be bad but even if the pumps failed in the Sand Gullet it shouldn’t have been this bad.”

“No. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

“Do you have a wireless link with the LVC? I don’t but I don’t know if your suit…”

“No,” she shakes her head. “I thought my suit was damaged but I didn’t worry about it until the elevator got fucked.”

Peter blows his breath out. “We’re screwed, then.”

“Not so loud. We aren’t screwed, there has to be a way up to the LVC, you know how this place is, there’s always a damn ladder or access chute or elevator somewhere, you just never know where they are.”

“But if we can’t get any new maps –“

“Okay, here’s something, though – if we get to a ranger station or a call box we can jack in and try and get a direct line to the LVC that way. I think the wireless issue is the same as the radio issue, I think it’s just that a repeater somewhere got crushed. I don’t know if you know but they aren’t exposed, they’re literally just buried in flesh in places because they really didn’t want anybody screwing with them. It’s just that convulsions this strong are so rare this deep that I guess they figured it was an acceptable risk.”

“So if they buried it in muscle –“

“- which is stupid, I know, even if convulsions are rare -”

“Okay. Well, we can’t get to the ranger station in that digestive bulb. There’s a call box in the Campground –“

“Not any more,” Makado shakes her head. “I saw it when we went in there, it’s fucked.”

“Then the closest one is going to be down in the lower organ trails. There’s a call box every half mile or so.”

“Christ,” Makado groans. “I really, really hoped you wouldn’t say that.”

“It’ll be fine,” he assures her.

“Those macrobacteria had to get in somehow. Where else would it have been but the –“

“You don’t know,” he says. “It could have been literally anywhere with the level of shit we’ve been dealing with for the last half hour or so. Ouch.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he says, putting a hand to his forehead. “I think I’m just catching up now, I have a killer headache all of a sudden.”

“I have a hypo if you –“

“I have some too, it’s okay. We all need to be sharp.”

“Are we trapped down here?” Fitzroy calls, and Makado turns and looks at him.

“No,” she says finally. Peter can see her struggling to think of what to say that won’t make the three teenagers panic. Tyler’s eyes are very wide, or at least they seem so in the red emergency lighting. “We’re just trying to figure out our next plan of action.”

“Are we gonna die?” Eileen asks, so quietly Peter can barely hear her.

“Not today,” Makado says. “Me and Ranger Pete here are going to get you guys out of here.”

“Okay,” Eileen says. There is not a lot of confidence in her voice. At least, Peter reflects, she’s defeated instead of panicked. Then he does a mental double-take and considers what a ridiculous sentiment that is. If she –

“Did you hear me?” Makado asks, frowning. Peter blinks.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she says, leaning closer. “You’re –“

“No, it’s nothing, I just zoned out for a second. I was thinking about how the hell we’re going to get these kids out of here.”

“Yeah, you and me both. At least it seems fairly safe in this enclosure.”

“Yeah. Have you looked outside lately?”

“No,” Makado says, “but it should be okay, I haven’t heard any more stents fail.”

“I was thinking more about wildlife.”

Before Makado can answer the floor bucks violently and Eileen and Fitzroy both yelp, but the tremor subsides slowly and gracefully, winding down with a jolting series of shudders that Peter can tell from Makado’s face she’s never felt anything like before; neither has he.

The elevator enclosure is fairly roomy, big enough for maybe ten or twelve people to wait in relative comfort. The walls are drab reinforced steel, with a few posters taped up about safety requirements and guidelines and a big recruiting poster encouraging people to apply for venterial engineer positions. This was never an elevator intended for guests to use – in fact, most of the time people wouldn’t have gotten to the Lower Gastro Zone through an elevator at all. Peter’s lead many, many tours down the mile-and-a-half walking path that meanders in a spiraling course down the Pit’s eastern side and finally lets out at a large, reinforced bulb that once was a gastrointestinal organ but, like the Campground, had been drained and prettied up and turned into a staging area both for returns to the Lower Visitor Center and for guests making excursions deeper into the Pit. Peter and the other rangers stationed there joked about it being the lower Lower Visitor Center, considering the amount of traffic they usually got, but all jokes aside, Peter had loved his assignment. Generally speaking the only guests they had passing through and downwards were the serious ones, the ones who’d been on a solo or small-group excursion before and knew what to expect and as such required only refills of water, or propane for their tents’ support packs. It had been him, Makado, Carl, and a few others who tended to rotate out as needed, but then Makado caught that promotion a week ago…

At the time Peter had tried very hard not to feel sad, knowing that she’d definitely deserved it, but he couldn’t help selfishly wishing that someone else had gotten promoted instead so that he could continue hanging out with her and Carl and all the others. The past week had been so strange without her flashing eyes and no-nonsense demeanor and quick wit when they’d teased her. He’d known Carl had felt it too, even if they’d never directly spoken about it.

“Why don’t I go down to the Lower Organ Trail,” Peter says, interrupting Makado’s perusal of the hopelessly limited general map stored in her suit computer, “jack in and download a map real quick, and then come right back up here so we can plan?”

“Peter, I really don’t want us to split up. And you’ve got that head injury –“

“Mak, listen, think about it,” he says, drawing in closer to her. She still smells like peaches, he notices. “You want to take the kids down there? This is probably the safest place for them. You’ve got a door you can bar with some of those chairs, and these walls are solid,” he says, touching them. “Got through all those convulsions without any buckling. Yeah, the elevator’s fucked, but…”

“But what if,” she says, voice a low growl, “what if you go down there and get killed by something? Carl bit it from a pack of macros, Pete. Just fucking macros. You know how many of them are down there, probably?”

“We don’t know that they got in from the organ trails,” he says. “There are a dozen other places that they could have came in after convulsions like that.”

“Don’t give me that bull,” Makado says. “You know it was the organ trails. Where else would it have been? That copepod we saw earlier? That came in from the trails. It didn’t come in from a digestive bulb, its carapace can’t handle the acid.”

“It could have come down from upwards, from bronchial.”

“If it was in bronchial it would have been literally the only copepod there. There’s nothing for them to eat in bronchial.”

“You’re making assumptions.”

“What is it going to eat in bronchial?” she asks. “Tell me.”

“Giant mites.”

“A copepod is a giant mite.”

“That isn’t entirely true and you know it,” Peter says. “Look, we’re wasting time.” He pauses there until Makado looks at him. “One of us has to go. You’ve got rank. Send me. Make the call.”

“We don’t have to. We can just go down tunnels until we find a way up.”

“You know that’s a bad idea as well as I do.”

“I’ll go, then.”

“Mak, no.”

“Look,” she says, eyes flashing, “you can put aside whatever notions of chivalry you might be having. I can take care of myself. It’ll –“

“It isn’t about chivalry. You are the ranking ranger of the two of us.” Makado looks like she wants to say something, but Peter gives her a look and she swallows it. “I’m more expendable than you are. You always knew it would come to this. I did too. It’ll be fine; I can just run down, plug in a line, download an automap of the area, and we’ll head out and be back to the LVC in time for a late dinner.”

Makado takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. When she opens them again she nods. “Be careful,” she tells Peter, and Peter grins at her.

“It’ll be fine,” he repeats. “Just down there and back. What’s the worst that could happen?”

 * * *

 “Fuck,” Peter mutters to himself, peering around the corner again. The timer he’d set on the suit computer ticked down off of five minutes a minute ago and the triocanth is still there in the middle of the hallway, its pair of long, stinger-lined tentacles still wrapped around the tubelike macrobacterium that it caught. It’s chewed open a hole in the bacterium’s thin skin and is busily slurping out the bacterium’s innards, leaving a crusty light-orange scum on the metal walkway beneath it. Peter shakes his head.

“This fucker is still here, Mak,” he says into the radio, as quietly as he can. He hears Makado sigh on the other end of the radio, her exhale blending with the static.

“Just be patient,” she tells him again. “It’ll wander off when it’s done.”

“Or it’ll dig a fucking hole into the Pit wall and hide there waiting for me to walk past and sting me and then eat me, how about that?”

“Go around it.”

“This is a one-way trail, there’s no around it. Unless you want me to double back for fifteen minutes and hope that the next call box is intact.”

“We have time. There’s no rush.”

“You have time,” he corrects her. “Meanwhile, the one who’s actually out here risking his ass doesn’t know if something is sneaking up on him right this very moment…”

He can hear Makado smiling. “Have you tried looking around?” she suggests, and Peter rolls his eyes.

“I can see why you made head ranger,” he cracks, and Makado lets out a mock gasp.

“How dare you, sir.”

“I dare,” he mutters, taking Makado’s advice and looking around, checking the ceiling as well as the fleshy, writhing floor of the trail. He peeks around the corner again and sees the triocanth, its long wriggling tail twitching with delight. It looks to be about halfway done with the macrobacterium now. It flicks one of its powerful tentacles and sends a fluttering spray of bacterium skin flying.

“You just looked around, didn’t you?” Makado asks.

“Maybe.”

“I knew it!” she crows. “Hey, kids! Come here and let me tell you how predictable Peter’s getting! Why don’t –“

“Quiet,” Peter says, and Makado turns off like a switch. He hears her telling one of the teens that she was just kidding and to go and sit back down but he doesn’t pay any attention.

The triocanth is gone. The husk of the macrobacterium is still rocking gently on the floor, its orangey innards oozing out of it like a spilled can of soda, bubbling lightly as it reacts with and oxidizes the metal flooring of the trail. He checks the walls and the ceiling but can’t find the tell-tale breathing hole that it would have made if it had burrowed into the Pit’s flesh; it made no noise, but triocanths usually don’t. “What’s going on?” Makado asks.

“The triocanth is gone.”

“Alright, so the way’s clear?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“It took off in a hurry. Like it was scared. It didn’t even finish the bacterium it was eating.”

“Maybe it got full.”

“You know what triocanths are like as well as I do.”

“Yeah,” Makado agrees after a moment. “Greedy bastards.”

“And not cowardly,” Peter continues.

“Do you think it noticed you?”

“Not likely,” he says, scanning the ceiling again.

“What are triocanths scared of?” she muses to herself.

“A shamble?” Peter suggests. Makado clicks her teeth.

“Same size range but shambles are pussies. I’ve seen a triocanth take on a shamble twice its weight before.”

“Alright, so not a shamble. What about a greater bristleworm?”

“You’d have heard it. You know how they make that crunchy sound when they’re slithering around on land?”

“Good point,” he nods. “What about a –“ Peter starts, then stops.

“Peter? What is it?”

“Off mic,” he murmurs, and then Peter reaches up, extremely slowly, and takes the earpiece from his ear. He can hear nothing except for the various drips and drops and fleshy stretching noises the Pit makes as part of its ordinary daily life. He can feel the rumble of a convulsion still wracking the Pit somewhere deeper down in its anatomy through the soles of his ranger suit, but the floor he’s standing on hasn’t bucked or pitched enough to throw him off in at least ten minutes now. The damage has been done; if a triocanth can get into the organ trail there’s clearly a torn section of fence or two somewhere.

But a triocanth is relatively innocuous; while it may have a vicious, paralyzing sting and a bad habit of burrowing into the fleshy walls of the pit to spring out and ambush anything that passes by, if he shot it with his service pistol it would die. It would take only a single bullet.

Peter has peeked around the corner again, trying to spot the triocanth. Instead, he sees an arm, reaching out from a narrow fold in the flesh of the Pit, there on the wall, a large, vertical slit leaking a little blood and pus from its bottommost corner.

The arm is long and thin and fragile-looking; it has too many bends in it, the forearm receding back to an elbow and then folding in on itself to another machine-like reticulated elbow. Its flesh is pale and slightly translucent; he can see a long thin bead of bone struck through with veins that pulse with blue, unhealthy-looking blood. The arm is huge, far larger than a human’s ought to be, though it still terminates in a five-fingered hand, proportioned exactly as a human’s, but large enough to palm Peter’s entire head with room left over.

The hand reaches out with exceeding delicacy and picks up the discarded skin of the macrobacterium and then retracts back into the slit, slopping a little of the macro’s orange innards over the wall of the Pit. There’s a coarse sliding sound that gradually recedes, and then nothing.

Peter waits, scarcely daring to breathe, for about three minutes. Then he picks the earpiece up and digs it back into his ear.

“-ammit, Pete,” Makado is whispering, sounding as if she’s on the brink of tears, “this is all my fault, fuck, come on, just say something –“

“Mak,” he murmurs, feeling a stab of guilt pierce through him; she must not have heard when he said he was leaving the radio. “I’m here.”

“Christ, Pete, you scared me,” she tells him, sounding like a week’s worth of tension has just left her body. “I thought we got cut off cause I didn’t hear anything but then I started to get worried –“

“Mak, listen to me.”

“What? What is it?”

“There’s a copepod down here.”

Makado is silent for a moment. “You mean a lesser one, right?” she says hopefully.

“No. An abyssal copepod. A big one.”

“Are you sure?”

“I saw its arm, Mak.”

“You sure it wasn’t just a really pale person?”

“Yeah, it was a really pale ogre-sized person with two elbows on one arm. Come on. Time to face the music.”

“What music?” she growls. “That we’re all going to get fucking eaten by a copepod? Tell me something better, Pete. Have you downloaded that automap yet?”

“Not yet. I’m proceeding forward now that the coast is clear,” he tells her, moving out around the corner. The metal walkway angles downwards and deposits him on the fleshy floor of the trail, and he feels the telltale grab of his cleats digging in with each step he takes.

“Maybe you should come back,” Mak suggests. “We can fall out to a different ranger station, the general map is saying that there’s one about a mile and a half to the east –“

“I remember hearing at least three stents fail down that corridor,” he tells her, edging past the slit in the wall quickly. It’s almost unnoticeable now that there’s nothing inside it to bulge the opening outwards; if he hadn’t seen the arm, he wouldn’t have known it were there. “You really want to take that risk?”

“No,” Makado says after a moment. “But I don’t want you to die.”

“That makes two of us,” he says. “I can see the call box.”

“How far?”

“Quarter of a mile. I’m in the home stretch. Radio silence now so I can listen.”

“Understood,” Makado says. She’s silent for a moment, then Peter hears her breathe. “You come back to me, alright?”

“Promise.”

“Break it and I’ll kill you myself.”

“Okay, I get it. Now shut up.”

Makado shuts up, and then the broadcast clicks off entirely. Peter is alone.

It’s dark down there in the organ trail, and the jerky bob of Peter’s flashlight, slotted into the tab on the side of his helmet, is completely inadequate to illuminate the vast cavernous space. The organ trails, at least at this end, are some of the largest navigable spaces inside the Pit that aren’t sheer drops or extremely difficult terrain. The floor is smooth, struck through with veins and vesicles and callouses from decades of foot traffic.

While the organ trail’s surfaces appear open and occasionally wildlife does make its way through, all of the ways upwards, at least to this opening mouth of the trail, should have been blocked. The only way for something as large as an abyssal copepod to get there would have been for it to clamber out onto the trail and pull itself up through miles of open areas. But Peter knows that abyssal copepods practically never expose themselves like that; it’s only if they’re directly pursuing prey organisms that they will flop outwards of the tight-fitting vents and veins and arteries that are ordinarily their homes, for although a copepod is graceful and swift in the crushing grasp of a tube like that, its organically lubricated carapace shooting through at speeds of up to twenty miles an hour on a straightaway, out in the open it has to rely on the wriggling of its mammoth body and the brutal pulling strength of its forelimbs to get around.

So, essentially – the armor and fences and sonic discouragement devices and electrical traps, the spike plates and scent lures and redundant obfuscatory canals, the thin web of interlinked and interdependent methods to distract, redirect, and otherwise prevent wildlife from making it to the populated areas of the Pit, has failed, at least somewhere. Probably a plate cap got jostled loose by the series of rolling convulsions and constrictions wracking the Pit, perhaps a speaker got crushed or a scent lure sealed off. The web is redundant but not exceedingly so.

Peter feels his paranoia growing as he makes his way towards the slowly pulsing blue light of the call box. This box in particular looks alright; the first two he passed we bent out of shape and clearly inoperable, crushed by tight squeezes of tunnel, but this section of the trail is so large that even if the muscles bunched around it were to contract, it wouldn’t touch him.

Peter gets to the call box. There’s a small pack of macrobacteria rolling past in a divot of the trail floor, perhaps a hundred feet away, but they’d have to spike their way up a sheer incline to get to him, so he’s not concerned. He notices with surprise that the soft grinding noise they make is oddly comforting.

The call box is splattered with something but it’s dried by now. He smacks the side of it lightly and the dried crust of it breaks off in a shower of tiny flakes. “Mak,” he says. “I’m at the box.”

“Great,” she says. He can hear her stretching as she sits up. “There should be a jack on the side, unroll your aux cable and plug it in.”

“Do I have the right permissions for this?” he asks.

“Maybe. We’ll find out.”

Peter is halfway through reeling out the cable before he notices a blinking line on the box’s display. He leans in and squints at it. “Hey, Mak.”

“Yeah?”

“This box is saying it still has a telephone line to the LVC.”

“Really?”

“The status says ‘fine.’”

“Try calling them, then.”

Peter pulls the glove off his right hand and punches the button. The angled infinity-sign of the dialing symbol comes up and bobs back and forth. Peter stares at it as the seconds stretch onwards and onwards. He shakes his head finally. “It must be busted,” he says. “No response.”

“Hmm,” Makado grunts. “That or the LVC is fucked.”

“Come on, get real,” he tells her. “Let’s see if we still have data. I’m jacked in.”

“Okay. Slide your card.”

Peter reaches down into the acidproof pocket on his belly and takes out his ranger card and slides it. The box whirs to itself for a moment before the access menu comes up. “Do I want mainframe access?” he asks.

“No, hit 8 to scroll, it should be on the third page. Haven’t you done this before?”

“Nope,” he says, punching the 8 button a couple times. “I’ve always gotten my maps wirelessly. I think I was trained on this at some point when they put these new boxes in but all I remember is them saying that maps needed supervisor clearance. Why is that, anyway?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s because the automap system does a ping every time someone requests it. Wear and tear and all that.”

“Well, that’s a damn inconvenience right now. The option is locked.”

“Fuck,” Makado says. “Okay, hit enter on it anyway.”

“It’s asking for a password.”

“Try putting yours in.”

Peter punches it in but the box beeps at him. “Access denied,” he reads off.

“Try putting mine in. It’s…”

Peter cocks his head. “I think we got cut off, say again.”

“No,” Makado says after a moment. “It’s just, you know, don’t laugh at me, alright?”

“Will you tell me the damn password?”

“Capital B bigmakpaddywack2258 exclamation point dollar sign.”

“Are you serious?”

“Type the damn password,” she tells Peter.

Peter bites his lip to hold back his laughter and types it in. His smile gradually fades. “Are you sure that’s your password?”

“Yes I’m fucking sure. Did you type it right? ‘Mak’ without a c?”

“Yes, Makado, I’m aware of how to spell your name. I typed it right.”

Somewhere in the trail there’s a sliding sound. Peter freezes. “You know what it must be,” Makado says thoughtfully, “they must not have updated my supervisor status yet. I knew that –“

“Shut up for a second.”

Makado gasps in mock affront. “Could you be any more rude?”

“Mak!” he hisses. “Not now!”

She lapses into an embarrassed silence. Peter drops into a low crouch, forcing himself to move slowly, and then turns, scanning the trail behind him. He reaches up after a moment and turns his flashlight off.

Peter can see nothing on the trail; the macrobacteria are still rolling past below him – the colony must be at least a hundred individuals, if not more. Peter slowly lets a breath out.

“What’s happening?” Makado whispers.

“Thought I heard something.”

“Please do not get paranoid on me out there.”

Peter peers up at the ceiling but it’s shrouded in gloom; if anything is up there he can’t see it. On the other hand, unless there’s an opening, the giant copepod he saw won’t be there – it would be too heavy to cling to the ceiling. “It was nothing,” he says finally.

“Are you sure?”

“No. But we need this map.”

“How the hell are we going to get it, though? If my password isn’t working –“

“Let me think.”

Peter tabs out of the menu and back to the main screen. The infinity symbol of the call he made to the Lower Visitor Center earlier is still bobbing back and forth, caught in limbo. He shakes his head. “Goddam it,” he mutters. He hears Makado breathing but she stays silent.

Peter thinks for a moment, then hits the control, shift, and caret keys all at once. The screen clears and then a blinking cursor appears, waiting for input. “Did anybody ever tell you the reset codes they use in Command?”

“No. I don’t even know how to get to the screen to put them in.”

“I do,” Peter says. “Control-shift-caret. But I don’t know the codes.”

“I think ‘idkfa’ might be one of them.”

“Really?”

“I overheard a conversation Sol was having with somebody one time, and he mentioned that, but I didn’t really understand and I don’t know the context.”

Peter types it in and punches the enter key. “’idkfa’ is not a valid command.”

“Iddqd?”

“If these are really the codes to anything somebody in IT ought to get fired,” he grumbles, but he types it in anyway. “Nope,” he says.

“I don’t know any others.”

Peter can feel the prickly knot of worry that’s been clenching tighter and tighter somewhere deep in his gut double in size. “Fuck,” he whispers. “I can’t get the maps, Mak, it won’t let me get the maps.”

“Peter, just wait, maybe –“

“Goddam it!”

Peter reaches out, and as hard as he dares, slaps the side of the call box. It makes a dull noise but a soft one, and even as his cheeks color and he looks around nervously at the rest of the trail, wondering if anything heard him, the box makes a chittering sound to itself somewhere deep in its innards and then the loud, tacky, 90s-esque tone of a call connecting to the LVC plays.

“Holy shit,” Peter says.

“Yo, who the fuck – who is down on the organ trail right now?” comes the voice from the box.

“Solomon? Is that you?” Peter asks, looking around nervously. He turns down the volume on the box as much as he can but the voice is still boomingly loud, echoing off the ribbed sides of the trail. It must seem much louder than it really is, Peter reasons, but the volume of it is still worrying.

“Peter? What the fuck are you doing down there, man?”

“Listen, Sol, can you get me an automap of this area? I’m jacked in but I don’t have the permissions.”

“Well,” he says, his voice as heavy and slow as it always is. “I can try, but things are pretty fucked around here.”

“Yeah, what the hell is going on?”

“Well, the LVC slipped down the gullet,” Sol starts, and Peter blinks.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “can you repeat that?”

“Give me one sec, Pete. I’m pinging the automap in that area right now, if it’s working you’ll get a download on your suit in a minute or so.”

“Great, thanks Sol. What did you say about the LVC, though?”

“The LVC slipped down the gullet,” Solomon says. “It’s at about a 45 or 60 degree angle right now.”

“Holy fuck,” Peter breathes.

“Yep,” Solomon says. “Check your maps, you should have it now.”

“You’re taking this pretty well,” Peter says.

“Knew this shit would happen eventually.”

“Is it still slipping?”

“Nah, it’s settled now. There’s some buckling down at the other end but Control is okay for the moment. Do you have that map yet?”

“Let me check,” Peter says, tapping on his wrist screen.

The automap system used in the depths of the Pit is a miracle of mechanical and computer engineering and cost Anodyne nearly a billion dollars to develop. Due to the Pit’s mutable and shifting terrain, as well as being a uniquely three-dimensional space, conventional maps became out of date practically as soon as they were drafted, or if they didn’t, they were so hopelessly general that any sort of close-in work became impossible and instead would rely on work-arounds that rangers and mining crews had to develop on the fly, which usually were inexact, imprecise, and unreplicable in the future.

The automap system, on the other hand, uses a system similar to sonar to send an ultrasonic ping through the tunnels of the Pit and then creates a three-dimensional map that can be downloaded to a ranger’s suit and manipulated using a wrist pad and linked to the ranger’s position via a positioning marker in his suit, allowing him to have an instant and accurate map of the surrounding area. The only downside is that the file size for the map itself is so large that, given the limited amount of space for an on-board computer inside a ranger suit, only one map can be held in memory at a time.

Peter watches the progress bar fill up and then taps on the file for the newly downloaded map. A few areas are hazy, indicating one of the ultrasonic projectors might have been inactive or malfunctioning, but the majority of the map is clear. After a moment the suit triangulates his location and he appears as a small green blip, which stays in place even as he rotates the map up and down, back and forth. He blows his breath out. “Got it,” he tells Solomon. “Thanks.”

“No worries,” Solomon says. “Gotta go. Lots of bullshit up here.”

“Are you okay?” Peter asks, but the call has already disconnected, and he is alone again amid the cavernous trail. “Mak, you hear any of that?”

“Got all of it, Pete.”

“Even the part about the LVC?”

“Yes,” she says. Her voice is tight with worry. “Get back here asap, we need to plan.”

“Can you connect to my suit? I’ll send you the map file.”

“I can’t get a link, already tried. When we…”

Makado is saying something else, but Peter allows her voice to fade into the background.

There’s a red blip on the map, there in the cavern with him. He looks up, looks around cautiously, but he doesn’t see anything; red would mean a moving object of fairly significant mass, but the map updates so slowly that it’s nowhere near to being a motion detector or anything. Plus, when the sensors spin down in a couple of minutes the updates will stop.

Peter takes two fingers, zooms in on the blip, then zooms back out. If this is accurate, it should be…

There’s a shriek of grinding metal behind him, and he whips around. He sees, outlined starkly by his flashlight, a long, gargantuan arm, reaching up from the cliff below, its translucent, five-fingered hand digging into the metal of the call box leaving dents easily six or seven inches deep. With a faint hissing noise the arm retracts and hauls the bulk of the copepod over the cliff, its frilly sensory antennae flicking with wild abandon. He can see the pinprick of his flashlight reflected in its limpid black eyes and takes a halting step backwards. His cleats, trying to dig in at the wrong angle, trip him and he falls, putting an arm out to catch himself. The copepod cocks its head at him, and then it reaches out, its hand seemingly large enough to blot out the rest of existence, and Peter doesn’t have enough breath to scream.

 Continue with Part 6

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