The dreamer squares his shoulders and steps into the ring. There is nothing outside the ring. There is something within it, and it will have him dead.
The god that was a man finds the man that was a corpse and time skips in thunder. The dreamer feels the dream grow thin, and the thinness is pain. All he can do is exhale and know that when this breath is gone, there are no more breaths behind it. He fights like a raging storm, but the other man fights like a falling sea.
The dead man begins to die. Somewhere else, he feels a body ripping itself apart. He feels the heart he once had stopping. He hears human voices in the room beside pain, but there is no doorway back. The dreamer dreams an answering violence. A rat bites a tiger’s paw.
And then, more. A ghost made from hunger. A ghost made from longing. Graveyard children and prisoners. They touch their rage to his, and the dreamers dream together. They press into the machine, and the machine begins to shift and open. A thread swims itself into being, red and thin and tenuous. The horned god bellows a weariness vast as oceans and lowers its inhuman head.
Brightness floods, and for a time outside of time, they are lost in a sea of memories and sensations made meaningless, simple and confused as newborns. When they are again, the machine is the machine and they are outside of it.
The machine whirs and clatters. The little man rises. The hungry ghost rises, sparkling. The dreamers rise toward three brightnesses. Three holes in the ice that is the ceiling of the world.
The horned god forgets. The little man forgets. The sparkling ghost cannot bring herself to forgetfulness, and that is and will always be her hunger. The machine glimmers its idiot glimmers, it shapes its insoluble puzzles, it sings a buzzsaw shriek. And in a dream beneath the dream, a man stands alone in a lighthouse and faces an angry sea. His exhaustion and pain rhyme with something real, and Amos opens his eyes.
The lab was weirdly still. All around him, monitors chirped and alerts sounded. When he breathed in, it felt like his lungs were filled with glass shards. With an effort, he turned his head. Elvi wasn’t there. Jim wasn’t. He recognized Elvi’s second-in-command, though. Lee, he thought. The guy seemed stunned. They all seemed stunned.
“Hey,” Amos said.
Lee didn’t answer.
“Hey.”
With a shudder, the doctor seemed to come back to consciousness from whatever fugue he’d been in.
“What? Oh. Yes. Don’t try to move,” Lee said. “You’ve been through . . . You’ve been through a lot.”
“You all right?”
“Yes, I just . . . I had a very strange experience.”
“Yeah, I figured. But you got to tell Jim and the doc. There’s no way to get in. Duarte knows we’re here now. And I think he’s pissed.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Jim
The experience, when it came, was overwhelming. Jim remembered everything from before it, but with the sense of distance that trauma could sometimes bring. He could still picture Amos, strapped to the medical couch, suffering seizures and pain. He remembered following Elvi down to the catalyst’s chamber and seeing Fayez and the technicians there.
He remembered looking at the woman they called the catalyst and thinking of Julie Mao, the first person he’d seen infected by the protomolecule, and how long it had taken her to die. Or if not die, be transformed. And the victims of Eros Station, injected with the protomolecule sample and exposed to massive doses of radiation to drive the spread of the alien organism or technology or however people wanted to categorize it. Even then, they’d died slowly. Or been unmade and repurposed without the release of dying in between. He remembered thinking how perverse it was that the catalyst could live in that state indefinitely, a skin to hold the protomolecule. A tool made from human flesh. He remembered wondering if there was anything left of her that could be aware of what she’d become.
Then Elvi had opened the isolation chamber, taken out Cara and Xan in hope that they could interrupt the ongoing assault that was killing Amos. All of those memories were clear and unmuddied, but it felt like they’d happened weeks or months before. That was because of what happened next.
There had been a brightness: light that was also a sound that was also an impact like being punched in each cell of his body individually. He’d felt like something in him was opening and opening and opening until he was afraid it would never stop opening, that he’d become a single, ongoing act of expansion that could only end with annihilation.
Then, like a dream, he was a hundred places at once. A thousand people. A vastness in which the idea of “James Holden” was lost like a stone in the ocean. He was a woman with an aching shoulder in the galley of a ship he didn’t know, halfway through a bulb of cheap coffee that had been secretly spiked with alcohol. He was a young man in a small, cramped engineering deck, engaged in a sexual act with Rebecca—whoever she was—and torn between guilt and delight at his infidelity. He was an officer in the Laconian Navy hiding in his ready room, the lights off, trying to keep his sobs quiet so that the crew wouldn’t hear them and know how afraid he was.