Charlie awakens in the late afternoon. Something seems different to her right away. Though she still hears the sounds of the sick around her, stuck lying in their beds, it’s quieter than she’s used to. Even the smell is different, still rank, but there’s something else mixed in, just a hint. And outside, she hears noise coming from down the hall. For a moment she waits, sitting motionless, a tickle of dread in the pit of her stomach. But slowly it dawns on her that she isn’t getting an uneasy feeling from these changes. She doesn’t feel a cold chill running down her spine or a shot of adrenaline pulsing in her veins. For once, what’s changed does not seem to be a turn for the worse.

Standing up and leaving the bunks, Charlie enters the hallway. The sounds grow clearer. There’s a commotion in the mess hall and as she turns into the room she sees why.

The kitchen is warm, bathed in the light of a stove flame kicked up to its highest setting. Long blue flames flicker out from below a massive pot sitting atop them. And the room is filled with the sounds of people: silverware clinking on bowls, the slurping of soup, and, for the first time in a while, actual conversation, even laughter at times. There are more people in the mess hall now than have been here for days, and spirits are high. Some sit and eat, chatting with each other between spoonfuls of their meal, while a few others have begun filling up bowls to carry out to the bunks and take to those who are still too ill to get up. Charlie squints, trying to make sure she’s not in some weird dream. But every dream she’s had on the Narwhal has been a nightmare and this was no nightmare. She pinches her arm, but nothing changes, it’s not a dream. For the first time in a long time, things on the Narwhal don’t seem so bleak and she can’t help but shake her head at how strange it is.

Though the dark corners of the room are covered in strange shadow, wispy tendrils of fog spilling out into the light, they seem almost repelled by the mood of the room, confined to the far corners and edges of the walls, unable to push any further inside. Nobody even gives them a second glance, too preoccupied by a stroke of good fortune that has buried their fears for the time being.

Behind the counter, four sailors chop meat, drop in seasoning, and pour water as they cook. The pot isn’t big enough to cook food for everybody at once, but as they ladle bowls out, more ingredients are dumped in to replace what’s being eaten. Critically low on food, the crewmen revealed a hidden stash in the freezer, a side of beef. Meant to be a celebratory meal for the end of the journey it was brought out to instead become a temporary salvation. It is but one meal for everyone onboard. It won’t keep them alive forever, but though they all know it, nobody really cares. For this singular moment in time, it’s a full meal, served hot, something none of them had eaten in far too long. It was a spark of joy in the cold darkness of the submarine.

Lewis enters the room. He looks disheveled, eyes wild, but he’s smiling, and much like everyone else it’s the first real smile he’s worn in a long time. He marches toward the counter and shakes his head.

“Been holding out on us, then?” He asks. “How’d you manage to sneak this on without my notice?”

The crewman ladling out soup hands him a hearty bowl. “Well,” he says, “guess you can’t keep track of every item coming on, huh, captain?”

Lewis grunts. “Sneaky little shits. I can’t complain, though.” He laughs, a bit longer and harder than comfortable. “You done good.”

Lewis sits down across from Bill and Charlie, then looks around the room, nodding his head. Everyone’s faces are still pale, gaunt, sickly, but the meal has lightened up their eyes. There’s a twinkle of cheer there now, as the temporary respite from their dire situation allows them to relax.

Eager to dig in, Lewis doesn’t say anything, just smiles as he pulls the spoon to his mouth. Steam coils off the spoon as he opens his lips and takes his first bite. It warms him immediately, banishing the chill from his bones. It’s not the fanciest meal he’s ever eaten, simply chunks of meat thrown into water with a few basic spices, but at that moment, he can’t help but think it’s the best meal of his life. He takes a second bite. The meat is chewy, fatty, the spices give it a good flavor, but there is an odd taste beneath them. It’s not high-quality meat, that’s for sure, and sitting in their freezer all this time probably hadn’t done it any good. But given the situation, nobody was sending their bowl back to the chefs complaining.

Lewis finishes the soup in record time. He stands up and, though still fatigued, weak, and light-headed, he feels better than he has in days. Carrying his bowl over to the counter, he hands it back, then walks toward the flip-up countertop that separates the kitchen from the rest of the mess hall.

“Get you another bowl, captain?” The sailor cutting the meat steps up in front of the countertop.

Lewis flashes a toothy smile. “Nah, I’ll make sure everyone else gets their fill before that. Actually wanted to come back there and lend you boys a hand. Don’t know what you’re doing to that soup, but I think we could do a touch better on the meat.” He laughs.

The sailor laughs along with him. “There’s no need, sir. Sit, relax, we can handle this.”

“Nonsense!” Lewis says, still grinning. “What kind of captain would I be if I didn’t give you the chance to eat yourselves? Go on, you’ve earned a break.”

“Oh, we’ve been sampling from the pot since we started cooking. Honestly, I’m already full.”

“Sneaking tastes on the job, eh?” Lewis reaches down to lift the countertop. “Still, I can at least teach you fellas a thing or two. Get that beef properly tenderized and maybe change up the seasoning a bit to cover up that old taste in it.”

The sailor puts his hands down on the countertop, stopping Lewis before he can open it. “Really, sir, you don’t have to,” he says.

“I wanna though, really.”

Lewis puts a bit more strength into lifting the countertop, but the sailor doesn’t budge and his smile fades away.

“Sir, please.”

Lewis’s grin drops immediately and he squints at the sailor’s souring face. In the kitchen, the other three men have stopped cooking and now look at Lewis. His eyes travel to each of them, all looking away, turning their faces back to the boiling pot before he makes eye contact. Lewis’s eyes darkened, the gleam of light fading to nothing.

“Son,” Lewis begins, voice low, “let me in.”

“Captain, I--”

“That’s an order, sailor. Open the counter. Now! Before you end up like them bastards in the torpedo room!”

The man glances at the other cooks. None reply to his gaze, so he backs away from the counter and lets the captain inside. The room has gone completely silent, the casual chatter dying with Lewis’s shouting. The air has cooled, and the shadows on the walls have grown longer, the fog reaching out just a bit more.

Lewis steps over to the pot and the cooks back away. He stirs it, scooping some up and giving it a sniff. Then he moves to the still uncooked piece of beef laying half diced next to the stove. He doesn’t recognize the cut. Looking at it, he sees that it doesn’t look quite the same as any beef he’s cooked either. His eyes pass left and right, looking around the counter as he thinks it over. It’s difficult for him to think straight, a good meal can solve the most basic of ailments, but the prolonged symptoms of their situation have left him a bit scatterbrained. But after a few moments, he lifts his head, looking around the room.

All eyes are on Lewis now, there’s dread in the air again, a familiar sinking feeling that’s stolen their attention from the meal. Not a bite is taken, everyone just sits, motionless, waiting for something to happen. Lewis turns his back to the mess hall and stares at the four sailors behind him in the kitchen. His eyes burn them like daggers tipped with deadly venom.

“What did you do?” Lewis asks, his voice almost calm.

There’s no answer.

“Move. Now.”

Lewis steps forward and the sailors part, unwilling to try and stop him.

“Sir.” One says, his own voice timid and weak. “We didn’t. He told us. To survive.”

Lewis pays no attention to his stammering. He B-lines to the freezer door at the back of the kitchen. Swinging it open, he finds nothing. It’s empty, not a single slice of beef in sight. Turning back out of the freezer, Lewis watches his men. Their breathing is quick and ragged, their eyes shifting. He watches them closely, until he finds what he’s looking for.

Though their eyes shift around the room, never looking at Lewis, they repeatedly glance in one direction: the closet, Jessica’s makeshift cell. Lewis looks at the closet door, then at his men, then back at the door. He marches over, swings the door open, and finds what he’s looking for. Half butchered on the floor is the body of Jessica Cantore. Rags lay around her, stopping up the puddle of blood.

Lewis takes a breath, fists clenched, then slams the door shut behind him as he turns again to face his sailors. The calm in his voice struggles to stay in place, fury bubbling up again.

“You twisted fucking monsters.”

“I-It’s not what it looks like!” One of them shouts.

A few people in the mess have started to stand up to get a closer look at the commotion in the kitchen.

“Not what it fucking looks like?” Lewis’s demeanor breaks and he roars. “Are you insane?!”

“She was already dead!” He shouts back. “Max found her this morning. And we--we were almost out of food. We’re j-just trying to save everyone!”

Lewis’s eye twitches. He looks across the room and finds Max standing near the exit. Pushing the cooks out of the way, he blasts out of the kitchen like a charging bull. Max takes a step back to run, but--his coordination shot from his own deteriorating body--he trips and falls backward. Lewis is already there and grabs him by the collar before he even hits the floor.

With Lewis out of the kitchen, people start crowding around the counter, With the closet door still wide open, Jessica’s mangled corpse is left on display for all of them to witness. They reel back once they realize what it is their eyes are seeing, palms on their faces. Some keel over and vomit on the spot.

The fog creeps from its seclusion in the room’s corners, twisting around chair and table legs, reaching out to caress the shoes of the people in the room. The shadows stand tall along the walls, they bend and warp into bizarre shapes.

Lewis pins Max to the wall.

Max just smiles.

“Talk you bastard,” Lewis says, “before I snap your neck.”

Max shakes his head. “So quick to attack me?” he asks. “What about your chefs back there?”

“You’ve been a pain in my ass for far too long now, Max. First the mutiny, now this shit? You think you’re so fucking clever? You’re not. I see right through you. You didn’t find the girl dead this morning.”

“That’s a bold claim to be making. On both counts. The mutiny? How could you possibly connect me to that little incident? Maybe you just don’t have the amount of trust from your men that you expected.”

Lewis smirks. “You’re at the end of your rope here, bud. Think you’re tough, actin’ so calm? Might wanna take a minute and assess your situation before you start lying to me.”

“I’m not lying, and why shouldn’t I be calm? You have no case against me. You can’t do shit.”

Lewis laughs. “What, you think this is a damned court? I don’t gotta build no case against you, Max. It’s just you and me. Did. You. Kill. Her?”

And Max joins in on his laughter. “Fine, you want the truth? She showed me the truth. We’re going to live! That’s the truth. I promise everyone here that we’re going to make it out alive! I know, because Julia wants us to live just as much as we do! Don’t you see? It all makes sense. Rescue doesn’t come to save the dead, help only arrives to save the living, and she needs the rescue just as much as we do because she’s stuck down here too!”

“Max, I swear to God, your bullshit is not welcome right now. That fucking monster ain’t got nothing to do with this! This is on you!”

“I’m serious. She showed me what we’d need to do to survive! Sometimes sacrifices need to be made, yes, but it’s for our ultimate salvation.”

“Ultimate salvation my ass. You murdered someone, you crazy son of bitch!”

“And staved off starvation. Now we all get to live! You should be thanking me!”

Lewis shakes his head. “Oh, I’ve got your thanks right here.”

He slips the revolver from his belt, pushes the barrel against Max’s chin, and pulls the trigger without a moment’s hesitation.

As Max slumps to the floor, dead, a dark red stain smears on the wall behind him. The men in the kitchen cower behind the counter, the rest just stare, bewildered. Ears ringing, still reeling over the thought of how the meal they had been enjoying was prepared, everyone just stops.

The room is cold again, and the light from the roaring stovetop seems unnaturally dim, unable to penetrate a baleful darkness which has filled the air. The fog has rolled out like a thin carpet across the mess hall’s steel floors; it ebbs and flows like the subtle waves of a small lake, lapping at ankles and kicking up the strange odor of licorice and ozone.

When Bill has finally recovered enough to hear and speak, he steps up to Lewis and looks down at his former roommate.

“Why?” he whispers.

Lewis takes long, ragged breaths. “We are not going to lose to that thing and whatever she did to him. Whatever madness she’s spreading, whatever got into his head, we won’t let it happen again. Keep your wits about you, Bill, before she takes us all down her dark path.”

Bill can’t bring himself to say anything more. He sits down, pinching the bridge of his nose as a pounding headache takes hold of him.

Lewis flashes one scorned look at the men in the kitchen. They flinch, but he does nothing, turning his back and leaving the room. His eyes give warning enough.

As some begin to regain their wits, they gather the bowls of cursed soup left half-eaten and bring them back to the kitchen. Everything is thrown out, and the rest of Jessica’s remains are locked in the freezer along with Max’s corpse.

Dreadful silence returns to the Narwhal as the moment of joy collapses into a void darker than it had ever been. Not a single word is spoken for the rest of the day. The fog and shadows rule the ship, the damp chill leaves everyone torpid and shivering. Julia bellows just outside. By evening, the kitchen stove runs out of gas and the last sliver of light outside the control room is smothered by the dark.

In the night, Charlie lies awake in bed and thinks about what Max said in his final moments. She thinks back to the days that Julia spent slamming into the ice above them. Perhaps he was onto something when he said she was just as trapped as they were. She had broken, or rather, been freed from one layer of security when James’s probe broke the membrane and Julia slaughtered the whales, but the ice was thick and seemed to prove a more difficult task for her. Maybe her best chance to escape was truly the same as their own. The scary truth of his statements was that Julia really had been letting them live. For whatever reason, despite having the size and strength to crush the sub like a tin can, or even worm her way inside and pull people out, she had only killed one person. It was delicate and clever work, deliberate, and even with the chance to do it again after Lewis locked the mutineers in the same room she had broken into, she didn’t. She was allowing them to continue existing.

Charlie shakes her head, clearing her thoughts. There’s no riddle to solve here. Without even knowing what the mystery is, there’s no point trying to figure it out. Julia is an enigma, acting in ways that both make her presence known and at the same time conceal almost everything about her. She never left them alone, always finding new ways to interact, but none of what she did taught them anything about her. Hell, even after all this time, they didn’t even have the faintest clue what the entity looked like.

Entity was the best term Charlie could think to use for Julia. Many on the ship used the word monster, but that felt a little too concrete. A monster had shape and form, it was a physical thing, and though Julia obviously had enough of a physical presence to kill a whale or knock the Narwhal about, she was also much more than that. Julia had another aspect to her, a side that bent light and shadow, conjured alien fog, drained heat from the air, and even left an odd scent in the room. None of what she did made any logical sense.

Julia’s actions seemed purposeless to any observation. Charlie saw her actions and presence as nonsensical, but all that told her was just that she didn’t have all the information. But Max’s logic felt right. For all the mysterious things she had done since, smashing into the ice was one thing that Charlie could relate to. Julia yearned for freedom. Something so simple, so primal, could very well be her motivation. But the question was, what did Julia’s freedom mean? If rescue did come, and Julia was freed from the ice, what would happen next?