Between Darkness

"Kate — now."

Rylee's voice came hard over the channel, no soft edges left on it. Kate was already moving. She had been moving since the first pressure came through the bulkhead, cold and flat, a steady weight pressing on the bone behind her eyes. Her bunk was two turns from the junction and she took them at a run.

The fringe outpost wasn't much. A hardpoint, a short ring of hab modules, a dock that held two light transports and a shuttle that smelled like coolant no matter how many times Chelsea scrubbed it. The crew held it because somebody had to.

"How many?" Chelsea asked. Her hands were already on the seal controls for the outer corridor. Kate could feel her from here: the quick warm loop of her thinking, the fear she never said out loud, the part of her that always counted the people first and the doors second. Chelsea got the outer seal down and reached for the inner one.

"I don't count them that way," Kate said. She put her palm on the bulkhead. The metal was cold, and under the cold the wrongness ran. "They're not people, not anymore."

Walkers. That was the station word for them. People the Hollowing had gotten into and worn thin until something else moved the legs. Kate had seen them from a distance before — at the edge of a veil, in the grey space between stations, in the bad dreams that didn't always wait for sleep. She had never felt this many pressing one position at once.

Nigel's channel clicked open. "Array's giving me noise and static and a map that looks like somebody spilled ink. Kate, talk to me."

"They're in the outer ring," she said. "Three points. The veil's thin at the north seam — that's where they're coming from. The corruption's already past the outer hatch. It's in the air scrubbers on deck two."

"Of course it is," Nigel said. "Because the scrubbers are where I keep my optimism."

"Hold the inner seals," Rylee said. "Lucas, I want fire teams at the junction, and nobody opens anything without my word, not a hatch and not a panel. Chelsea, keep the girl where I can hear her."

"She's not going anywhere," Chelsea said, and her hand found Kate's shoulder without looking.

Kate didn't pull away. She almost never did, when it was Chelsea. The corridor lights flickered once and steadied, and she felt the thing outside the hull lean in. Chelsea's hand stayed where it was.

It wanted the station. It wanted the warm bodies. It wanted the little bright places people made when they refused to leave a bad edge of the map. Kate could taste the wanting — metal and old snow and a patience that didn't belong to anything that had ever been human. She swallowed twice and the taste stayed.

And under all of that, it flinched when it found her.

She felt the flinch as she felt everything now — as temperature and pressure, as a cold that wasn't weather. The Hollowing knew what she was. It knew her the way skin knows fire.

"They're at the north junction," she said. "Twenty meters. Fifteen."

The deck under her boots thrummed. One of the strip lights over the junction had been dying for a month and it picked that moment to go, and nobody had time to care. Somewhere distant, something metal gave. A man shouted. Another voice — Lucas, plain and big — said, "Stay behind the line. If it moves wrong, burn it."

A second channel opened. One of the junior crew, breathing hard. "Commander, I've got movement in the service run. Something's dragging—"

"Sealed," Rylee said. "You hold that hatch and you do not go looking, whatever you hear on the other side of it."

"Yes, ma'am."

Kate closed her eyes and listened past the voices. The walkers didn't think in words. They thought in hunger and direction. The dark behind them thought in neither. It thought in pressure, in the slow work of unmaking a place until the place agreed to be empty. Kate held still and let the pressure map itself against her ribs.