The Archive always smells different when you come back. I don’t know how else to put it. You’ve been inside an incursion site, the specific wrongness of a place the Echo has been pressing on, pressing back on you for what seems an eternity, but in reality is probably no longer than a few hours,…

The Archive has a name for the depth I reached. I read it once in a monitoring report, clinical and precise, the way the Department of Residual Thought names everything that frightens them. I understood, reading it, that the name existed because someone had reached this depth before me. I understood, reading it, that they…