Kaelen couldn't breathe. The woman's words echoed in his mind, twisting and turning, filling every corner of his thoughts.
The signal doesn't just communicate—it becomes.
He stumbled backward, his mind racing to comprehend what was happening. What did she mean? Was the signal trying to merge with them? With him? Was this why he'd felt so different ever since the message had first played over the comm system?
"We need to stop this," Kaelen said, his voice hoarse. He looked over at Mira, who was trying to process the situation as well, her face pale. The woman—or whatever it was—had become nothing more than a vessel for the signal, a host for something ancient and unfathomable.
"How?" Mira asked, her voice barely a whisper. "How do we stop something like this?"
The woman—no, the entity—stared at them with an unreadable expression. "You can't stop it," she said flatly. "You're already too far in. There's no going back."
Her eyes locked onto Kaelen's. "It's inside you, inside all of you. It has always been."
Kaelen's chest tightened. He could feel it now, an oppressive weight on his mind, a deep presence pressing in on his thoughts.
"No," he whispered, shaking his head. "This isn't me. This isn't who I am."
The entity's lips curled into a faint smile. "That's what you think. But the signal doesn't just take form—it shapes who you are. You'll never be the same again. No one ever is."
The walls around them began to warp, distorting and twisting. The ship's systems hummed louder as the signal surged through every inch of the Vigilant.
Kaelen's vision blurred. The reality around him felt like a dream, or a nightmare, where every shadow, every sound, was just another fragment of something he couldn't understand.
Suddenly, the room split—right in front of him. A mirror appeared in the middle of the engine room. The reflection staring back at him was not his own.
It was a shadow.