Chapter I. Strange Days

Project Katabasis · Resonance, Book One

Jun 30, 2026

I check the order one more time, parked at the tree line a half mile out. Same four lines it’s been since 0300.

Asher. Site KATABASIS gone dark, last contact ninety-six hours ago. Proceed. Assess. Report only what can be confirmed.

I put the phone away. None of those words tell me what I’m walking into. They never do.

I kill the headlights and coast the rest of the way with the engine off. The gate’s open. No floodlights. No voice on the intercom. Just the fence and the dark buildings sitting there like they’ve already finished with whoever was inside.

Four days of silence from her.

Kora answers even when she’s buried in something that should take both hands and all her attention. She answers when she’s pissed off, when she’s exhausted, when there’s nothing useful to say except that she’s still breathing on the other end of the line.

It’s the first silence that feels like she’s already gone.

No one bothered to lock the main door.

Inside, the corridor lights are still burning. The same low thrum I remember. My footsteps strike the tile too loud. I call her name once.

“Kora.”

The sound leaves my mouth and doesn’t come back.

I move into the first lab. Benches wiped clean. Monitors dark. One chair left crooked, like the person sitting in it stood up mid-thought and left. A coffee mug abandoned near the edge of a desk. Skin across the top. Long cold.

I keep moving, still trying to rule things out even though every explanation’s already collapsing in my hands. Power failure that somehow left the lights on. A drill I was never read into. Some containment event they’ve already cleaned up and filed away. None of it holds. The words feel like they belong to a different man.

The second lab looks exactly like the first. Everything in its place. Nothing out of order. Yet the whole room feels evacuated. Something’s already taken what it wanted.

The third lab’s where the pretense ends.

The smell reaches me before I’m through the door. Damp earth covering something warmer. Sweet and ferrous. The taste of it clings to the back of my throat. Everything looks untouched, almost normal. But the far wall was torn inward from the other side. Heavy green strands braid through the opening and claw their way up the wall. The black isn’t part of the green. It’s using it to climb.

Fifteen years of walking into rooms after the worst has already happened. Blood, and the men it came out of. I’ve never stood in front of something still in the middle of itself. I don’t understand what I’m looking at. I put my palm to the glass. The cold comes through and stays in my hand after I pull it away.

It takes me a moment to step back.

Something passes through me. A pressure behind the teeth, there and gone. I don’t have a word for it. The lights stay steady. Nothing shifts in the corridor behind me.

I take one breath and keep going.

The recorder’s on the bench in the next room. Old analog unit, single cassette in the tray, not fully rewound. Her handwriting’s on the label. Two words, block capitals.

PROJECT KATABASIS

I stand over it for a long moment without touching it.

Then I reach out and press play. I let the tape run all the way to the end. Kora’s voice remains low but steady.

“...And hear me when I say this. The thought of death isn’t as scary as the thought of becoming them.”

The tape clicks off. I sit there with my hand still on the recorder, the room loud with how quiet it’s gotten. I’ve listened to it enough times now that I could say it back to her.

I keep thinking if I play it enough, I’ll hear the moment she stopped being herself. There isn’t one. I’ve marked the timestamps. I’ve slowed it down.

It isn’t there.

So I do what I’m supposed to do. I rule things out. Stroke. Aneurysm. Some silent chemical failure that rewires a person overnight. I pull her medical file and find a perfectly healthy woman. I check for drugs, coercion, blackmail. Nothing. The equipment is clean. The logs are clean. Everyone she spoke to that week checks out clean.

I’m good at this. Ruling things out is my job.

I rule out everything.

Something is still missing.

That’s not how it works. You eliminate the impossible and what remains is the truth. The truth is what you write down and file away. Mine isn’t. Mine is a hole. Something had been in the room with her from the start, and she never saw it.

I see something shift at the edge of my vision. Gone by the time I look for it, except I don’t turn toward it. Fifteen years of not reacting to the wrong thing has taught me that much.

If you move first, you tell it you saw it. If you hold still, you might still be the one deciding what happens next. A faint pressure moves behind my teeth again.

I’m not alone in this room either. It’s right there enjoying how well I’m pretending not to notice.

The cold reaches me the same way it must have reached her.

“Sam,” it says, in her voice.

I look up.

Kora is right there. Close enough to touch. She looks at me with the same green eyes I’ve spent five years not being able to look away from. She smiles like she’s never been happier to see me.

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