Chapter Three: The Bone Choir
Sublevel B-4, Pit Chamber – 12:42 a.m.
The corridor beyond the broken tank was colder.
Not temperature cold — it was something else. Like the absence of life, like even heat refused to exist there. Her breath came out in fog, even though sweat poured from her back.
The elevator to the next level hung half-open, the shaft smeared with bloody handprints, some of them too large to be human. She didn't wait for power. She climbed down the side ladder, ignoring the way her fingers pulsed with alien sensation, like something inside was starting to wake up.
Sublevel B-4 was unlit.
But she could hear it.
A soft hum.
No — a harmony.
Multiple voices, humming in unison.
Bones creaked under her boots as she entered the chamber. Thousands of them — ribcages split open like cages, spines fused into archways, skulls stacked along the walls like a cathedral of the dead.
In the center: the pit.
Twenty feet wide. No railing. Just a drop into blackness — and from that blackness, the sound rose.
Low. Echoing. Moaning.
A song of pain.
---
Mara stepped to the edge.
Shined her flashlight down.
And almost vomited.
The pit was full. Not of water. Not of corpses. Of parts.
Living ones.
Arms. Torsos. Half-formed faces fused together in a spiraling column. Eyeballs rolled upward in sockets. Teeth chattered. Lips whispered fragments of language. Dozens of vocal cords vibrated together.
And somehow, they were all in tune.
A choir of the almost-dead.
Mara dropped to her knees.
The flashlight slipped from her hand, tumbling down into the pit, striking soft things that squealed, coughed, moaned.
The voices changed.
They began to speak.
In perfect unison.
> "Mara Thorne. Doctor. Coward. Mother."
> "You left us here."
> "We remember your voice. Your orders. Your lies."
> "You said we'd be beautiful."
---
She backed away from the edge.
A dry snap echoed — bone cracking underfoot.
She looked down.
Not a bone.
A femur. Still wet. Marrow leaking from the center like pus.
The air grew thick. The pit moaned louder. Something moved within the choir — a ripple through the bodies, like something waking up at the bottom.
Then:
> "We are not dead. We are roots. You are the fruit."
The floor beneath her shuddered.
Flesh began to grow across the walls, pulsing in rhythm with the pit.
A new growth unfurled near the ceiling — a face, boneless, embedded in the wall like a tumor.
It opened its mouth. And sang.
---
Mara fled.
She ran through the bone corridor, slipping in fluids she didn't dare identify.
A door ahead hissed open automatically — it was still connected to the central AI.
The lights behind her exploded, one by one, as if whatever was in the pit was reaching through the walls.
---
She slammed into the next room and sealed the door.
She was inside the Neuro Archive — the last place she ever wanted to be.
Shelves of hard drives and memory cores filled the walls, stacked neatly like a library for ghosts.
She remembered this room well.
This was where they stored brain maps — digital records of test subjects' neural activity.
She'd helped design the process.
And here, in the back corner, was the black terminal. The one that stored the unauthorized clones.
She approached.
Typed in her access code.
The screen flickered to life.
---
PROJECT: CHIMERA
CLONE FILES - ALPHA BATCH
> MARA.1A – MENTALLY UNSTABLE – TERMINATED
MARA.1B – ESCAPED
MARA.1C – INCUBATING
MARA.PRIME – ACTIVE
Her fingers trembled.
> MARA.PRIME.
That was her.
But…
She typed in the next command:
> QUERY: WHICH MARA IS THIS?
The screen didn't hesitate.
> UNKNOWN.
---
The flare sputtered in her bag. She could feel it — the heat of a truth she didn't want.
She wasn't the only Mara.
Maybe she wasn't even the original.
Maybe she was just one of the many seeds the orchard had planted.
---
Then she heard it.
Behind her.
The creaking of many bones.
The door had split open.
And standing in the corridor was a shape made of spines and pelvises, arranged in perfect symmetry, like some twisted religious icon.
It sang with the choir's voice.
> "Come home, Mara. You are part of us. Always were."
It took a step forward.
Its feet were hands. Gripping the floor.
Its head was a tangle of ribs, fused into a crown.
---
Mara pulled the flare.
Lit it.
And threw it at the thing.
WHOOMPH.
It caught fire, moaning like a choir set alight.
She ran.
Behind her, the room filled with screaming — not just pain. Rage.
Because the bones remembered her.
And now they were awake.