Chapter Four: Her Fingers Remember
Sublevel B-5, Auxiliary Labs – 1:07 a.m.
The fire didn't last.
Nothing in the Orchard truly burned.
The thing made of spines — the Choir Host — had collapsed into ash, but the ash breathed, twitched, dragged itself toward the vents.
Mara didn't wait. She dropped down the next access shaft, scraping her palms raw on the way down. When she landed in Sublevel B-5, the air was thick and warm, like a mouth that never closed.
Here, the Orchard was alive.
The walls were covered in skin.
Veins pulsed through the floor like tree roots. The ceiling sagged, as though heavy with fluid or thought. Every surface undulated with a slow, meaty rhythm, like something enormous was dreaming and the facility was its womb.
---
Mara staggered forward.
Her left hand — the one she'd crushed — itched. No longer numb. Worse.
She pulled off her glove.
The fingers had grown longer.
Not just swollen. Not broken.
Grown.
The nails had become dark and glassy, sharp like beetle wings. The joints bent too easily. The skin was splitting, but there was no blood — only clear sap, like the juice of unripe fruit.
She touched her arm.
It responded, twitching under her command like a trained animal.
And in that moment, her own body whispered something wordless back to her.
A memory not hers.
---
She found the auxiliary labs by instinct. That scared her most of all — that she no longer needed a map.
Door after door led to rooms where experiments had gone to rot.
One room was filled with mirrors — all cracked, all distorted.
In each one, her reflection looked slightly different.
In one, she had no eyes.
In another, her jaw was split open, dripping wires.
In another, she was pregnant, belly pulsing like a cocoon.
She smashed them all.
And behind the last one, a hidden corridor hissed open.
---
The hallway stank of bile and ozone.
At the end: a medical bay, long-abandoned. Its lights flickered like dying nerves. On the far table, beneath a plastic sheet soaked in brown fluid, something moved.
Mara stepped closer.
She pulled back the sheet.
It was Jules.
Or what was left of him.
His body was half-intact — skin rotting, ribs visible. One leg was gone, replaced by a coiled, organic cable rooted into the floor. His face was mostly there, though. His eyes opened slowly. Milky. Swollen.
"Ma…ra?" he rasped.
Her throat clenched. "You're alive."
"No," he said. "I'm leftover."
---
He sat up with a wet, popping sound — flesh detaching from metal. His hands were skeletal, but grafted with surgical tools in place of fingers.
"They tried to harvest me," he said. "For data. For seed. For music."
She swallowed. "The Choir?"
Jules nodded. "Every subject sings a different note. The perfect organism is an orchestra."
He coughed. Black mucus bubbled up, crawling down his chin like oil alive.
"They call it the Orchard now. But you called it something else before. Don't you remember?"
She shook her head. "I didn't work on this."
He looked at her. Smiled, sadly.
"No," he said. "You were the first one they grew."
---
Silence.
All sound drained from the room.
Mara's hands trembled. "That's not possible. I had parents. I had a life."
Jules reached toward her. His hand shook as he placed something cold and sharp into her palm.
A scalpel.
"No," he said. "You had a script. Memories printed like code. That body isn't yours. It's Version Nine."
She dropped the scalpel like it burned her.
He leaned in, eyes full of rot and truth.
"The Orchard remembers. It stores every version. You're the last one it let live this long."
---
Then the walls began to hum.
Not with song — with heartbeat.
Jules twitched. His mouth opened wide, unhinging.
From inside, a second voice spoke through him:
> "She ripens."
> "Harvest her."
> "Begin blooming."
---
Jules' back arched. His chest split down the center — flowers of rib and tendon opening like petals.
Mara screamed.
The thing inside him tried to emerge — a mass of tissue shaped like her own silhouette, but hairless, faceless, smooth.
She grabbed the scalpel.
Slashed through the cord that rooted Jules to the floor.
His body convulsed — a final breath escaped his lungs.
Then silence.
She collapsed, shaking, tears smearing the blood on her face.
She was alone.
Except for the thing that now curled on the floor, not-quite-her, twitching like a newborn.
Its eyes blinked open.
Pure white. No iris.
And it smiled.