Chapter 3: The Gala of the Abyss
The Midnight Sun, Thorne’s yacht, was a floating fortress. Elena infiltrated it by clinging to the underwater stabilizer fins, the water around her freezing, pressurized, and thick with a strange, bioluminescent silt.
She climbed onto the deck, shivering. The party was in full swing, but it felt wrong. The guests were too still, their smiles too wide, their movements jerky, like puppets on strings.
She found the engine room, descending into the belly of the ship. There, she found the horror.
Thorne had a containment unit, but it was cracked. A swirling mass of shadow and liquid light—the Dressmaker—was flowing through the ship’s vents. It was literally stitching the ship’s metal to the crew’s biology.
“Dr. Vance,” Thorne’s voice echoed.
He stood on the catwalk, holding a remote trigger. He looked ecstatic. “You’re just in time for the premiere.”
“You have no idea what this is,” Elena shouted over the groaning steel. “It’s not biology, Silas! It’s a localized collapse of physics! You’re not wearing it; you’re being unmade!”
“I am being perfected!” Thorne countered.
The Dressmaker surged. A tendril of shadow shot up, not toward Thorne, but toward the hull. The ship began to buckle. The Dressmaker was not a creature; it was a force of nature that sought to return to the ocean's depth, and it was using the ship to construct a tunnel back down.
The pressure began to build inside the room. Elena’s ears popped. The rivets on the wall began to pull free.
“It’s going to crush us all!” she yelled.
Thorne looked at his hands. They were translucent. He screamed as his skin began to stretch, the Dressmaker pulling his atoms apart to use as raw material for the tunnel.
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Elena didn't hesitate. She threw her seismic scanner into the Dressmaker’s core. It wasn't a weapon, but it emitted a high-frequency pulse calibrated to the Trench’s natural sonar frequency.
The Dressmaker shrieked—a sound of grinding tectonic plates.
