Allister followed Thomas into the depths of the labs. The quiet maze of tunnels and tombs stretched on for what seemed like forever, vast, and without the lines on the walls, some of which were hard to see due to the vines, they’d surely be lost. She hugged herself close as she followed her husband. Nervous, she shook, clinging near to him at all times. The trauma of the past few months didn’t let her be, not easily, not even in the company of Thomas.

  As they walked, they spoke, turning a corner and heading even deeper into the labyrinthine labs. The vines were everywhere here, thicker than even in the rest of the facility, and at times they had to step over them to continue their trek.

  “I’ve missed you,” she eventually said. “I’ve missed you dearly.”

  “I missed you too, Allie,” Thomas said, stopping at a junction to read the signposts in the dark. “It was lonely here, and I clung to the hope of seeing you again to get me through.”

  She smiled softly for a moment. “How did you do it? Survive out here, I mean?”

  “The command center has a large emergency stockpile in a storeroom adjacent to it, for situations much like this. I’ve been raiding it. It’s a five year stockpile, so I’ve only gone through about a quarter of it so far.”

  “That’s incredible,” she said, hugging his arm. “You’re incredible.”

  He smiled down at her. “So are you, love. If you’ve made it this far, you’re more capable than you give yourself credit for.”

  “It was by no means easy,” she said as they began walking again. “I almost died several times.”

  “But you didn’t. That’s what counts at the end of the day.”

  “I was scared.”

  “But you were courageous. And I’m proud of you baby.”

  Allister felt a warmth inside of her, something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Some semblance of peace. “So where are we going exactly?”

  “To the main lab. I haven’t even been in it yet, and I get the feeling that whatever it is we’re looking for, we’ll find it in there.”

  “Why haven’t you been in it?” she asked.

  He looked over his shoulder at her, and, rifle in hand, shrugged. “Those things that creep around this place don’t like it when I get too close.”

  Stopping, Allister began to fidget nervously. “Then why are we going there now?”

  “For answers, Allister,” he said.

  Then, he kept walking. She hurried up behind him. “We haven’t seen many of those creatures,” she noted, looking around. “Where do you think they are?”

  “I don’t know. It’s unusual, that’s for sure. Just keep your eyes open, okay? Like I said, they get jumpy when I get close to the lab.”

  “Are we close?”

  He nodded. “We are.”

  Stopping at yet another junction, he wiped the vines from the wall, smearing dust, to read the signposts. “It’s just up this way,” he said, nodding to a corridor before them.

  “I’m nervous,” she said, looking away anxiously.

  He turned around and put a hand on her arm. “Now is the time for bravery, love. I promise you I will make sure you are safe.”

  She looked at him, read his body language, soaking in every data point she could, and felt at least a little more secure with his words. “Okay.”

  “Come on.”

  They started their way down the corridor that led to the main lab. It was a long hallway, with various doors on either side, and a single door at the end. The hallway was empty save for the crimson waves and the dark, with no sign of the creatures.

  “I’ve never made it this far,” Thomas said. “Usually those things start to harass me by now.”

  “I wonder what’s different,” Allister said, looking around.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. But I get the feeling that there’s something in this lab they didn’t want me to see.”

  They made it to the end of the corridor, where Thomas stood before the door. “It’ll be tricky getting it open without power. But I think the suit will help. Stand back, I’m going to make a hole.”

  Allister backed away as Thomas raised his weapon and began to fire at the center of the door. She watched; he was making a line of bullet marks, about two inches tall, up the middle of the door. Then, satisfied with what he had done, he slung his rifle over his shoulder, and pushed his fingers into the hot metal of the door, where the hole now was, and began to pry it open with all his might. He grunted, strained, but thankfully, the unpowered door budged and began to slide apart. He pushed the metal slabs away from each other with his arms, and then with his legs and back, before the door had been consumed by the wall, and they were let into the lab proper.

  Behind him, Allister peered inward.

  There were rows of lab tables and islands in the center of the room, ringed by counters attached to the wall. The room was spacy and large, filled with beakers, burners, and tubes. Computer equipment sat in the corners, their terminals dark. In the center, there was a large light, now broken and draped in tendrils of tholins, that once shown down on the central table. Here, on the tabletop, flowing out of a beaker in root-like arms that covered the room, poured a bulging, violently crimson mass, like a tumor that had been cut out of someone’s body and allowed to grow. They both stared at it in awe.

  “What is that?” Thomas said.

  Allister slipped past him, her curious nature getting the better of her, and examined one of the arms of the tumor. It was thick and bulbous, and hard to the touch. “I don’t know,” she said. “This is new to me.”

  He entered the room and raised his rifle, scanning the place, only to find it empty, the door at the far wall shut tight. Satisfied, he lowered his weapon and began to look around, along with Allister. She made her way to the center of the room, stepping over more of the growth’s roots, approaching the center island table. Here, it was clear, at least in part, as to what was going on.

  “The lab team here must’ve incubated something in this beaker,” she said. “It’s the source of the growth.”

  She was right, as here, the beaker barely visible underneath the tumor, the growth was the thickest. She leaned in and examined it closely. It seemed to be made of thin strands all connected together, some more bulbous than others, and it undulated every so often, as if sending a pulse out to the arms like a slime mold looking for food. She grimaced; it was disgusting, an abomination even.

  Thomas approached a terminal on the wall and started sorting through some papers on it. “Hey, baby, come look at this. It has your name on it.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Allister perked up, and then headed to the corner where Thomas stood holding a leaf of paper. He turned and handed it to her, and she began to read it. It read:

  TC-ATS//CMCL//HAZARD//FOUO

  Memo Fwd:

  Allister’s findings on Arrokoth are breathtaking. Tholins, we posit, may be the origin of life in the Solar System, and it’s thanks to her that we can assume this conclusion. There’s a missing element, though, and we’re still trying to figure out what it is. The tholins seem to blend in a substrate of minerals and water, but where the life comes in to play, we are still working on finding out.

  I must say, she is quite the mind, to have made such a discovery. But, as I said, it is still missing a critical element. We have some theories, but nothing concrete so far. Will resume testing after the holiday.

  Memo End.

  Allister stared at the paper for a moment. “They used my findings here to create this?” she said, turning back to look at the tumorous growth. “How?”

  “Let’s keep looking,” Thomas said, turning around. “There’s got to be something here that can give us a clue.”

  She wandered off and began to examine the scientific tools that lay scattered around the room. There were Bunsen burners with beakers still on them, and tubes with ancient liquid in side of them that was beginning to coagulate into goop. She picked one up and looked inside of it, before grimacing at the revolting concoction and putting it back down.

  Then, she headed back to the center and began examining the island, where she found one more beaker with a label on it: methyl cation. She stared at it for a moment, thinking.

  “Oh my god,” she said, lowering her hand and looking to Thomas.

  He rushed up to her. “What is it?”

  “They used methyl cation.”

  Giving her a sidelong look, he asked, “Which is?”

  She blinked. “Thomas, methyl cation is a carbon molecule that has only ever been found on Earth and in very, very select few star systems throughout the galaxy. It’s a binding agent that compounds carbon atoms together. If… by god, if they used this with the tholins mixture, that’s what caused this! You see?”

  “No, I don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “What are you talking about?”

  Allister approached the cancer and looked down on it, a mother staring at her horrid child. “All my research on Arrokoth was to discover if tholins could be the origin of life in our system. And they are Thomas, they are! If methyl cation bound the iodized and dissociated molecules of the tholins, when mixed with water and minerals, then RNA could be created. This was the missing link. The methyl cation was the missing link! Theoretically at least. Or,” she said, looking around, “maybe actually.”

  “So they made DNA?”

  “RNA,” she corrected, “but this in turn could create DNA. Thomas, don’t you see? They created life here! They created life.”

  Her eyes grew wide, wild, and her heart began to race. She fidgeted with her hands for a moment, her mind becoming a roaring river of thoughts. “The implications of this are enormous. Insane, even. Life, being created from inorganic materials. A long standing theory, proven, proven here. They did it!”

  She laughed, sweetly, powerfully, looking at Thomas with an intense stare. “If they could do this, they could do, well, anything. We, humanity, can create life. Once thought to be the realms of God.”

  Thomas stepped back, absorbing what he had just heard. “Allister that’s impossible.”

  “Not anymore, my love,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  He looked at his HUD, noting a signature on his radar. He spun around, Allister doing the same, and their lights shone in the doorway Thomas had pried open. There, in the darkness, stood one of the creatures, watching them. Thomas raised his weapon and trained it on the thing, pushing Allister behind him with his free hand.

  The thing stared at them with a lopsided glare, its jaw unhinged and dangling down. Allister began to shake behind Thomas, who stood, still as a statue, staring the monstrosity down.

  Then, it lunged.

  He opened fire at it, but it was quick, running on all fours, darting to the left. He popped a few shots at it, but it began to crawl up the vines on the wall, before stopping and staring at them with its slack jaw and dead eyes.

  Thomas fired at it again, and it tried to jump out of the way, but a bullet hit it in the leg and it fell from the wall, writhing on the floor in an attempt to right itself. As it did so, Thomas shouted, “We need to leave!”

  Allister wasn’t about to protest. Behind him, she rushed out the door as he took point. There were more of the mutated humans here, three or four, and they began darting around, jumping on the walls and using the vines as grip points, crawling toward them. Thomas fired at them, his gun making muffled pop pop sounds in the vacuum.

  He hit one square in the head, and it fell from the wall to its back with a thud. For a moment, the others froze, staring at them with empty eyes, before the one he’d shot sat up slowly and locked eyes with Thomas. His blood ran cold.

  Reloading quickly, he started to unload into the things as they hopped down from the wall and rushed him. Thankfully the slugs in his weapon set them back a bit. Pop pop pop! He kept firing, clearing their way out of the hallway and ushering Allister on.

  “Go, go!” he shouted, pushing her past him and looking behind them as they entered the junction they’d come from. The creatures were all charging him, and only him it seemed. He grit his teeth and pressed the butt of his rifle to his shoulder, firing on them. No matter how many times he hit them, they always rose again, damaged and slower.

  They hurried out of the junction, back the way they’d came, only to find more of them in their path. Now, they seemed everywhere. Allister pulled out her pistol with a shaking hand and aimed it at them, but when she fired it, she cried out as the recoil nearly felled it from her grip. Thomas put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a hearty shove to get her running again.

  They hurried out the corridor, and continued to backtrack as the creatures began to grow in numbers behind them.

  “I don’t think they liked that we were in there,” Thomas said, spinning and firing on the horde.

  Allister, bounding her way through the halls of Sedna, asked, “Which way?”

  “Go left!” he called back as they reached another junction.

  They turned left, and came face to face with yet another monstrosity. Thomas raised his weapon and fired upon it heavily, forcing it to the ground.

  “Go!”

  They hurried over it as it struggled to right itself, and as they did, it gripped Thomas’s ankle and gave it a yank, nearly toppling him. He turned and shot it square in the eye, and it kicked back in the low gravity, letting him go.

  “The command center is going to be up ahead, to your left, down a hall,” he said as they bounced their way through. And soon enough, they were at an intersection that seemed familiar. It was the one Shishone, Yu, Yarns, and herself had all passed through when they’d arrived. Mapping it all out in her head, she rushed down the hallway to her right, followed by Thomas.

  As she did, she saw the others, Shishone, Yu, and Yarns, all rushing out from a side hall and into the corridor that lead to the command center.

  “What’s going on?” Shishone called out over the radio, firing upon unseen mutations from the hall they’d been spat out of.

  Thomas called back, “I think we pissed them off!”

  “You think?”

  They fired down at the creatures, Shishone, Yarns, and Thomas urging Yu and Allister behind them as they slowly retreated to the command center’s airlock.

  “Just keep firing!” Thomas called out.

  Yarns’ heart was beating out of his chest now. “There’s too many!”

  “Keep! Firing!”

  The halls filled with the sound of muffled, silenced gunfire. Yu and Allister backed into the airlock, and the others filed in behind them, continuing to fired down on the creatures. They mounted the walls, rushed at them on all fours, crawled on the ceilings by gripping the vines in an unending horde. Once they were all in, Thomas slammed his fist on a button by the door, sealing it quickly. The blast door shot up, and finally, they were safe.

  All of them were panting, shaken, exhausted. On the other side of the door, they could hear clawing as the air rushed back into the room. Thomas leaned on the wall with his hand and breathed heavily, as Yarns and Shishone checked with Allister and Yu to ensure they were unharmed.

  Allister ripped off her helmet and threw it to the ground, falling to her knees in tears and babbling about death. Thomas, seeing this, approached her and knelt beside her, attempting to console her. Yarns looked at Shishone, who was approaching Yu, and hurried up to meet them.

  They all took their helmets off, and faced each other.

  Yu said, “Whatever happened to those people, they’re sure as hell pissed off now.”

  Shishone grunted. “We barely made it.”

  “Yeah,” said Yarns, “but we’re trapped in here now. What are we gonna do?”

  Thomas stood up and turned to face them, helping Allister up to her feet as well. She clung onto him tightly. “We rest,” he said. “For now, at least. We’ll figure out what to do in a bit. I feel like we could all use some rest before we do, though.”

  “Here,” said Yarns. “I agree.”

  Yu ran a hand through her hair and turned around, beginning to pace. “We have no way out of here. And what’s our guarantee that they can’t get in?”

  Thomas said, “They won’t be able to breach that door. It’s solid titanium. We’re safe here.”

  “And our way out?” she asked, sneering and glaring at him.

  “I have an answer for that too,” he said, motioning for everyone to head up the stairs. “We should rest for now though. I get the feeling we’re going to need our strength. I have food, water, and bedding. Everyone get go get comfy.”

  They all stared at him for a moment, before Yarns quietly turned and started up the stairs. Then so too did Shishone. Yu glared at Thomas for a moment, before her gaze soften, and she sighed, turning to head up the stairs herself. Behind them, Thomas helped Allister, and together, they all entered the command center to rest, and plan.

  The rest was much needed; the nightmares, less so.