Siena

"There are many things I haven't told you about the Deadswitch expeditions." Wilder Feyrer's finger circled the rim of his half-empty pint. "We spent so little time at the actual glacier. The study... well, the study was a ruse." He laughed at this declaration. "I can't believe we were never found out."

Siena had stayed distracted through the conversation's devolution. Emmett's hand had inched higher on her thigh. Beautiful raindrops streaked the dark window near their booth, toying with the pub's dim light. They'd just finished up a conference and had gone somewhere to let loose and celebrate their funding. Now she was drunk, far too drunk for stories or science, but the old man opened like a faucet every time he had a couple of beers in him.

Wilder's confession caught her attention. Emmett's hand froze on her thigh. Even Cam glanced up from her phone.

"What does that even mean?" Siena asked.

The reflection of the table's candle flickered on Wilder's glasses. "There were anomalies on Mount Agnes far more important than Alpenglow. But we had to keep the research a secret, or the university would have pulled our funding."

"Okay." Cam began stacking the empty pint glasses. "I'm cutting you off."

Wilder placed a hand on her arm, stopping her. "This is important."

Cam sat back and cast a look of reluctance at Siena.

"I told you Deadswitch will change your lives, but I don't think you understand how much."

"You said the prestige of a study will change our lives," Cam said.

"I—I don't get it." Siena leaned forward. "What exactly are you getting us into?"

Wilder shook his head. "The research stays in the woods. We don't discuss it unless we're there. I made the mistake of divulging once. Never again."

Don't go.

The tunnel vibrated beneath Siena as she crawled deeper into the darkness and the endless dirt throat of the tunnel, the heartbeat thudding in her ears. She pled with herself to turn around, but the second she lifted her hand, the tunnel summoned her forward once more.

"What did you get us into, Wilder?" she whispered.

She was close. Close to something. A secret, just out of reach. She couldn't have been less than a hundred feet deep, but she hadn't run out of rope. It wasn't possible. Cam would have stopped her at the end of the line.

"How deep am I?" she yelled over her shoulder.

Thuthump... thuthump ... thuthump ... thuthump ...

"Cam!"

Thuthump... thuthump ... thuthump ... thuthump ...

"CAM!"

Fear ate at the edges of her nerves. Sweat dripped past her temples, and she shut her eyes to clear her head and think.

Just turn around. Turn around, you idiot.

Siena opened her eyes.

A dirt-clotted root dangled in front of her. Beyond, the tunnel's ceiling swept upward into a wall of river rock and cement. About five feet up the rocks had crumbled, leaving an opening.

Grit dug into her knees and the flesh of her palms, the ground no longer smooth. The air reeked of mildew and rot, but the smell was familiar. It reminded her of the cellar.

It can't be.

She crawled to the tunnel's end and grabbed on to the bottom of the hole in the wall, lifting herself until she was eye level with the cellar's floor. She and Cam must have missed this opening in the wall when they were here yesterday.

"I've reached the cabin!" Siena yelled, listening for a response. None came, but the heartbeat was gone. The muscles in her chest relaxed.

She couldn't hear Cam, but maybe Cam could hear her.

"I'm gonna unclip!" she yelled. "I'll meet you back at the tree!"

She unfastened the carabiner from her harness, clipped it to a rebar jutting from the concrete, and found a leg up into the cellar. Crawling through the hole in the wall, Siena shimmied on her belly across the floor until she was out of the tunnel. She stood, brushing herself off.

She needed to hurry back to the tree, in case Cam and Emmett hadn't heard her. If they pulled back a loose rope, Emmett would flip his shit, and neither of them would forgive her—or let her do anything like this again.

Siena jogged up the stairs and punched open the cellar doors. A spray of mist coated her face, the sky the color of waning twilight. Strange—it had been a sunny morning. A cap cloud must have settled on the mountain in the past fifteen minutes.

She started heading toward the tree, and then stopped and spun, her eyes flicking across the trees in the surrounding forest. Panic burned in her fingertips.

Something was wrong. No... not just one thing. Everything was wrong.

The trees were much older than she remembered, moss dripping from gnarled limbs. Between the elders, the forest was utterly dense with young pine, spruce, maple, and hemlock. Dozens of saplings burst from the decay of fallen trees, the air rich with rot and soil and life.

And the sun—the sun was setting.

Where the hell was she?

Beads of mist dripped down her face as she ran to the other side of the cabin and along the porch. She grasped on to the doorknob and froze. Scrawling olive text covered the plaque on the wall.

THE WAY BACK

Siena reached out and touched it, then rubbed her fingers together. The paint was wet.

Every cell inside her screamed to return to the tunnel, but how could she leave amid this phenomenon? She was a scientist because she searched relentlessly for answers. Here, she was on the brink of discovery, and nothing made sense. She needed to understand what the hell was going on.

She pushed open the door.

Wood creaked beneath her feet as her eyes darted around the front room and the kitchen. Avocado-green curtains covered the windows. The utility sink stood between the stove and the counter. A few things were scattered atop the slab table's surface.

As she drew closer, she identified an unfurled map, its corners pinned down by a collection of items—a pair of old binoculars with a leather strap, a jar of water, the deck of cards with the songbirds on the buck's skull, and a tarnished lighter.

Siena ran her fingers over the map's illustration of a forested valley and surrounding range. The paper was worn and weathered. Old water stains blurred once-meticulous sketches of trees, structures, and peaks. Someone had drawn the entire map by hand.

She glanced up at the map's title.

The Briardark

She yanked her hand from the map and clenched her fingers to keep them from trembling. The mist, the trees, the paint. The Briardark, just like the song from the radio. She was incapable of comprehending whatever this was, like an infant desperately trying to understand language.

Siena left the kitchen and crept down the hall, pushing open the lab door.

The window was boarded up so tightly that no light penetrated the space. Siena's headlamp beam floated across the wall as she turned toward the back of the room.

A strangled cry escaped her throat. She grasped blindly for the doorknob, clutching on to it before her knees gave out.

Hunting knives pinned a severed mule head to the wall, its eyes and tongue carved out. Blood ran from its mouth, dripping into a metal bucket on the floor.

Someone else was in the cabin, someone with enough depravity inside them to mutilate an animal and paint a message across the wall in its blood.

THE MOTHER REIGNS

GetoutgetoutgetoutgetoutGETOUTGETOUT—

It felt like decades before her body registered the message from her brain. Siena coaxed herself backward, out of the room, and into the hallway.

"You shouldn't be here."

She whipped her head toward the deep, muffled voice. A tall figure stood between her and the back of the cabin, their hulking form wrapped in a hooded coat. A Soviet-era gas mask covered their face. She saw nothing behind the clouded lenses and snoutlike filter.

GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT—

But she couldn't. She couldn't so much as lift a foot, her petrified body betraying her. The figure took a step toward her, and then another, lifting a glove-covered finger to touch her cheek.

"You aren't strong enough."

She tried to say something, but her voice died beneath a wave of tremors.

"It will fight to keep you here.Drag you deeper. You can't let it."

He dropped his hand.

"PROMISE ME."

The spell broke. Siena stumbled back and spun, nearly tripping as she bolted through the hall and out of the cabin. She halted, heart thundering, headlamp beam wildly bouncing between the darkness and the trees.

Siena held her breath as a visceral rumble stirred from deep within the woods, vibrating the ground beneath her. Hunger. It sounded like hunger. And the hunger wanted her.

She sprinted around the cabin to the open cellar door, taking the steps two at a time until she fell down the rest of the staircase and skidded across the floor. She crawled to the hole and swung her feet around, dropping into the tunnel.

The rope and carabiner were where she'd left them. She willed her panicked fingers to work the latch, snapped the rope to her harness, and crawled as fast as she could through the passage.

Thuthump... thuthump ... thuthump ... thuthump ...

As the passage narrowed, her light flashed across an insect skittering along the tunnel floor as a second darted between her fingers. She ripped her hand from the ground with a cry.

Thuthump... thuthump ... thuthump ... thuthump ...

A beetle fluttered into her face. As she stopped to slap it away, a chittering whir crescendoed above the heartbeat.

Bugs. Thoraxes and spines popping and snapping. The hiss of intimidation of the glistening roil of insects in front of her.

THUTHUMP.

The beetles scattered, surrounding her in a black-shelled swarm. Buzzing wings and crunching exoskeletons clouded the air, sheathed the ground, dripped in strings from the tunnel ceiling.

Siena opened her mouth to scream. A beetle landed on her lower lip, and she smacked it off her face, yanking her fingers through her hair and ripping another from her braid.

It didn't matter—there were more. Thousands more, their legs twitching against her skull, wings beating in the tangles of her hair. They crawled down her shirt and under the hem of her pants. They clogged the artery before her, roiling waves of screeching insects building a living wall to block her way out.

It will fight to keep you here. Drag you deeper.

Her brain. Her delusional brain was fighting to keep her here. Trap her. Just like it had before. And these delusions... they'd taken everything from her once. This manifestation of paranoia. These bugs. They'd stolen her sanity. Her job. Her fucking fiancé.

Never again.

A scream tore from Siena's mouth as she launched herself forward and through the beetles.