Chapter 4: Hymn for the Drowning

Chapter 4: Hymn for the Drowning

There was no way down. There was no way out. There was only up.

The two days they spent in the observation room were a blur of grim preparation. The truce, brokered by Hensley’s desperate outburst, was a fragile thing, a thin layer of ice over a churning, dark sea. But it held. Under Hensley’s quiet direction, they worked. Ann, with her ruthless efficiency, tore apart the heavy computer terminal and the reinforced chair, her prybar finding every weakness. Hope, with her careful hands, stripped the cabling from the walls, braiding the thinner wires into ropes of surprising strength. June, her terror channeled into a hyper-vigilant focus, tested every knot, every loop, her sensitive fingers detecting flaws the others might miss.

They were not climbing the outside of the tower. That was suicide. Instead, they’d found a maintenance shaft behind a panel in the observation room, a vertical tube of darkness that seemed to stretch into infinity in both directions. It was their new cliff face, a smooth, cylindrical prison of cold steel.

“The anchors won’t hold in metal like they did in rock,” Ann stated, her voice flat, devoid of its usual sneer. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint. She held up the rebar pitons. Useless.

“Then we don’t use anchors,” Hensley said, looking up into the oppressive dark. Faint service lights, spaced hundreds of feet apart, dotted the ascent like cruel, distant stars. “We use the maintenance rungs.”

She pointed. Every twenty feet, a series of recessed U-shaped rungs were set into the wall, meant for service drones, not people. Their plan was as simple as it was terrifying. Ann, the strongest, would free-climb the twenty feet to the next set of rungs. She’d secure a line, and the others would follow. Then they would repeat the process. Again, and again, and again.

The climb began. Ann moved with a spider’s grace, her powerful limbs finding purchase on invisible seams and bolt heads. She never looked down. When she reached the first set of rungs, she hammered a scavenged metal strut between them, a solid anchor point, and clipped in the braided cable. “Rope’s set!” her voice echoed strangely in the confined space.

Hensley went next, then helped haul a still-trembling June, with Hope climbing last, clearing their gear as she came. They gathered on the narrow rungs, a four-person knot of humanity clinging to the wall of their tomb. Below them, the darkness was absolute. It wasn't the open, vast abyss of the chasm, but something worse: a contained, suffocating blackness that promised a single, final impact.

And then, the whispers began.

Kingfisher had written that the abyss whispered. He was wrong. It didn't whisper. It listened. It found the cracks in your soul and poured itself in.

For June, it was the scuttling, clicking sound of the creature from the cliff, a phantom noise that seemed to come from just below her feet. Falling, it murmured in her own terrified thoughts. Falling into its arms. It’s still hungry, little bird. It’s waiting.

For Ann, it was the cold voice of logic, her own pragmatism turned against her. This is pointless. You know that. Kingfisher’s log was clear. You are hauling three sacks of dead weight up a well with a lid on it. You are strong. You could climb faster alone. Let go of the rope. Let them go.

Hensley felt a pang of empathetic fury from Ann and squeezed her shoulder. “Stay with me, Ann,” she whispered, her voice tight.

Ann just grunted, her jaw clenched, and began the next ascent.

The process repeated. The clang of the temporary anchor, the scrape of boots on metal, the strained breathing. Each twenty-foot section was a victory. Each new set of rungs, a temporary heaven. But the higher they climbed, the heavier the air became, thick with a psychic pressure that squeezed the hope from their lungs.

The whispers found Hope next. They didn’t use fear; they used love, twisting it into a weapon. A perfect memory surfaced in her mind: Trevor, laughing in the kitchen of their small apartment, sunlight catching the flour on his cheek. He’s forgotten this, the whisper cooed, a venomous sweetness in her mind. He had to move on. He’s with someone else now. Someone whole. Someone who didn’t run away. There is no home to go back to.

Hope faltered, her foot slipping. The braided cable jerked, and for a heart-stopping second, she dangled.

“Hope!” Hensley cried out, her own grip tightening.

Hope found her footing, her face pale, her knuckles white on the rung. “I’m okay,” she gasped, but her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. The light in them had dimmed.

The abyss saved its cruelest poison for Hensley. It didn’t need to invent fears or twist memories. It just used the truth. Mausoleum, it hissed, the voice sounding eerily like Shae Kingfisher’s dispassionate text. Specimen. You are the beacon, Subject H. Your fractured mind called them from the dark. Your sisters, your other selves… they are only here to die because of you. Ann’s anger, Hope’s pain, June’s terror… it is all your fault. A long fall is a kindness. It would be so simple to just… let go. A peaceful end.

Her arms began to tremble, not from fatigue, but from the crushing weight of her guilt. The darkness below seemed to beckon, promising an end to the struggle, to the responsibility. It would be so easy. A final apology to the parts of herself she had doomed.

Clang.

The sound was wrong. It wasn't the solid thud of Ann setting an anchor. It was a sharp, grating noise, followed by a shower of rust-colored dust.

“The rung is loose!” Ann yelled from above. Her voice was strained, laced with a rare thread of panic. She was hanging by one arm, her other hand scrabbling at the crumbling metal around the rung. “It’s not going to hold!”

This was it. The moment of failure. The whispers swelled into a chorus in Hensley’s mind. See? Futile. It all ends here.

But as she watched Ann struggle, something else rose up inside her, something that cut through the despair. It was the memory of the fight in the observation room. The sting on her cheek. The decision she had made. She was the Core. She was the balance.

“Ann!” she shouted, her voice ringing with an authority she didn’t know she possessed. “Look at me!”

Ann’s panicked eyes met hers.

“You are the strongest,” Hensley said, her words sharp and clear. “You hammered fifty pitons into that cliff face. This is just one more piece of broken metal. Find a handhold. You can do this.”

She was speaking to Ann, but she was also speaking to herself. To her own rage. She wasn't commanding it; she was trusting it.

Ann’s frantic movements stilled. Her breathing steadied. Her eyes narrowed, the panic replaced by cold, hard focus. Her free hand moved with renewed purpose, testing, probing the steel wall. Her fingers found a recessed bolt head, then another. With a grunt that was pure, focused power, she hauled herself past the broken rung and up to the next solid one. A moment later, the clang of the new anchor being set echoed down, solid and final.

They were safe. But the moment had cost them dearly. They were all trembling, their reserves of strength and morale almost completely depleted. The whispers grew stronger in the wake of their fear, a drowning tide of despair.

It was then that Hope, clinging to the rung beneath Hensley, began to hum.

It was a quiet, shaky tune. A simple melody, off-key and broken by her ragged breaths. Hensley recognized it instantly. It was a stupid pop song Trevor used to love, one he would hum while cooking. It was a sound from a life that felt more distant than the stars.

“What are you doing?” Ann hissed from above. “Saving your breath is more useful.”

But Hope kept humming. It was an act of pure, irrational defiance. A hymn against the drowning. She was refusing to let the whispers have Trevor’s memory. She was taking it back.

Slowly, shakily, Hensley joined in. Her voice was barely a whisper. Then June, hearing them, let out a soft, wavering note, her humming a counterpoint to her own quiet whimpers.

Ann said nothing. She just climbed.

The humming became their heartbeat, a fragile thread of sound against the crushing silence. It didn't silence the whispers, but it gave them something else to hold onto. It was the sound of one person, fractured and broken, refusing to fall apart.

Higher and higher they climbed, the small circle of light from the next level growing from a pinprick to a promise. They were almost there. Their bodies were screaming, their minds were frayed, and the abyss was pulling at them with the weight of a dying star. But they were still climbing.