And then the smothering carpet of creatures parted and a pair of dark silhouettes emerged, like ghosts against the creatures' strange light.
Demidov could not breathe. For a moment, she could not speak, and then she managed only to rasp out a single word.
“Vasily?”
As Yelagin swore, frozen in shock, Demidov lowered her knife. Vasily Glazkov – her lover and best friend – came to a halt just a few feet away, with Amanda Hart behind him. The small tumblers clung to their clothes and flesh. Hart’s face seemed to bulge around her left eye, as if something shifted beneath the skin, near the orbit. Demidov wanted to look at Vasily, but that bulbous pulsing thing in Hart’s face made her stare.
“Hello, Anna,” Vasily said. His voice seemed different, somehow both muffled and echoing. The tunnel turned it into a dozen voices. He looked sad, and sounded sadder.
"Vasily, you're..." She didn't know what he was.
"It's such a shame," he said. "So many dead."
"We're all that's left," she said. But when he next spoke, she thought perhaps Vasily wasn't talking about the soldiers who had died.
“You must understand that they are no different from us.”
“What?” Yelagin said, shaking her head in confusion. “They’re nothing but different from us.”
Vasily did not so much as glance at her. He focused on Demidov. “There's beauty here. A whole world of wonder. When the shaft opened above them, they went up to explore, just as we came down. They're studying us, beginning to learn about our world. Already they have touched us deeply. Amanda suffered a terrible injury and they have repaired her, strengthened her.”
Things moved beneath the skin of Hart’s neck, and something twitched under her scalp, her hair waving on its own. Demidov stared at Vasily, gorge rising in her throat, hoping she would not see the thing she feared more than anything. Was that his cheek bulging, just a bit? Where his temple pulsed, was that merely blood rushing through a vein or did something else curl and stretch his skin?
“Who's speaking now?” she asked.
Vasily frowned. “Anna, my love, you must listen. There's so much we can learn.”
She could not find her voice, did not dare ask who Vasily meant by we.
“Dr Glazkov,” Yelagin said, shifting nervously as the small tumblers skittered above her head. “Whatever there is to learn, we'll find time for that. But some of our team has died and I don’t see Professor Brune with you. Captain Demidov and I have to report in. You know this. Can you get us to the surface? Whatever these things are, whatever you’ve discovered, our superiors will want to know. We need to—“
“Stop, Kristina,” Demidov said.
Yelagin flinched, stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.
“This isn’t Vasily talking," Demidov said. "Not anymore.”
Vasily smiled. Tiny tendrils emerged from the corners of his mouth, like cracks across his lips. “The truth is the truth, regardless of who speaks it.”
Demidov raised her knife.
They swept over her.
Yelagin screamed and they both fought, but there were simply too many of the creatures, binding them, twisting them like puppets.
Dragging them down, deeper than ever before.
It made her think of what drowning must be like. Tendrils gripped and caressed her, surging forward, one creature passing her to another like the ebb and flow of ocean currents. Sometimes tendrils covered her eyes and other times she could see, but the eerie phosphorescence of their limbs – so bright and so near – cast the subterranean labyrinth into deeper shadow. It was difficult to make out anything but crenellations in the wall or the silhouettes of Vasily and Hart. The sea of tumblers brought her up on a wave and then dragged her under again, carrying her onward. Demidov caught a glimpse of Yelagin, and felt some measure of relief knowing that whatever might happen now, they were together.
She tried not to think about Vasily, tried to focus just on her own beating heart and the desperate gasping of her lungs. Had it been Vasily speaking, lit up with the epiphanies of discovery? Or had these things been masquerading as her man, recruiting for their cause, attempting to find the proper mouthpiece through which to communicate with the hostiles they’d encounter aboveground?
The image of the things twisting beneath the skin of Hart’s face made her want to scream. Only her focus on surviving gave her the strength to remain silent. Every moment she still lived was another moment in which she might figure out how to stay alive.
The ocean of tumblers surged in one last wave, dumped her on an uneven stone floor, then withdrew. She blinked, trying to get her bearings. Glancing upward, she saw they had brought her to the bottom of the original vast sinkhole. Demidov stared up the shaft, the gray daylight a small circle far overhead, just as beautiful and unreachable as the full moon on a winter’s night.
Not unreachable, she told herself. You could climb it if you had to.
But she’d never make it. For fifty feet in every direction, the glowing tumblers shifted and churned, rolling on top of one another, piled as high as her shoulders. Demidov didn’t know what they wanted of her, but she had no doubt she was their prisoner. The tumblers parted to allow Vasily and Hart to approach her once more.
“Anna,” Vasily began. “They need an emissary. There is so much—“
“Where's Kristina?” Demidov demanded. “Private Yelagin. Where is she?”
With a ripple, the ocean of tumblers disgorged Yelagin onto the ground beside Demidov, choking and spitting, tears staining her face. Demidov took her arm, helped her to stand. In the weird phosphorescence she looked like a ghost.
Yelagin whipped around to face her, madness in her eyes. “I saw Budanov! He’s down here with us!”
“Budanov is dead.”
“No!” Yelagin shook her head. “I swear to you, I saw him clearly, just a few feet away.” She swept her arm toward the mass of writhing tumblers. “He’s in there somewhere. They’ve got him!”
Demidov stared at Vasily, or whatever sentience spoke through him. “Give him to me.”
Vasily and Hart exchanged a silent look. Things shifted beneath Hart’s skin, bulging from her left cheek. A tiny bunch of tendrils sprouted from her ear for a moment, before drawing back in like the legs of a hermit crab.
“He is injured,” Vasily said. “They can help him. Heal him.”
Demidov heard the hesitation in his voice, the momentary lag between thought and speech, and she knew this wasn’t Vasily speaking. Not really. Not by choice.
“Give him to me,” she demanded, “and I’ll carry your message to the surface.”
The things pulling Hart’s strings used her face to smile.
Vasily nodded once and the mass of tumblers churned. Like some hideous birth, Budanov spilled from their pulsing mass. One of his arms had been shattered and twisted behind him at an impossible angle. Broken bone jutted from his lower leg, torn right through the fabric of his uniform. His face had been bloodied and gashed, but it was his eyes that drew Demidov’s focus. The fear in those eyes.
“Private—“ she began.
“No, listen!” Budanov said, lying on the stone floor, full of madness and lunatic desperation as he glared up at Demidov and Yelagin. “There’s an airstrike coming! Any minute now… Fuck, any second now! They’re going to—“
Demidov stared up at that pale circle so high above.
She could hear them now – the MiGs arriving – the familiar moaning whistle of their approach. They had seconds. A terrible sadness gripped her, a sorrow she had never known. She looked at Vasily, feeling a hole opening up inside her where the rest of their lives ought to have been. He gazed back at her, mirroring her grief. Then she saw the twitch beneath his right eye.