The walls began bleeding light.
Not the sterile glow of facility fluorescents, but the deep ultraviolet from before - exposing the truth in jagged pulses. Our doppelgängers stood frozen mid-transformation, their half-melted faces caught between human and something older. Between invitation and inviter.
Insha pressed shaking hands against the nearest monitor. "Facility C's footage... it's playing again."
The screen flickered without power, showing Dr. Kwon's final moments on a loop. But now we saw the details hidden in the static:
The prismatic shape on the surgical table wasn't being injected with black fluid - it was producing it.
Captain Wang's reflection in the containment glass didn't match his movements.
Just before the corruption hit, Dr. Kwon's mouth formed two words: "Find seven."
Zayn's blackened eyes tracked something above us. "The countdown wasn't a timer," he whispered. "It's a frequency."
Above the surgical tables, the air vibrated at 06:00:00 Hz. The exact resonance pattern of Flight 1-Zeta's black box recorder. The same frequency that now pulsed through our teeth, through the half-dried black fluid seeping from our wounds.
Aaron - or whatever wore his skin now - moved toward the facility's deepest door. His reflection still showed Flight Engineer Cho, but the movements were different. Purposeful. Familiar.
"The eclipse needs seven anchors," Cho's voice came from Aaron's unmoving lips. "They made six facilities. You're the seventh."
The realization hit like a bone saw:
Our plane wasn't escaping.
It was delivering.
The monitor suddenly switched to live footage from Facility D. There, in the quarantine zone, stood six prismatic shapes arranged in a perfect circle. At their center floated a seventh form - humanoid, its features shifting between all our faces.
It opened eyes that were pure eclipse.
And through Aaron, it spoke:
"Welcome home, carriers."
Outside, the false dawn split open.