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"Interesting."
Ren reached up and scratched his chin.
Inwardly, he thought. What the fuck is that.
He looked at the cluster of eyes across her scalp, all of them moving independently, some tracking him, some directed at the ceiling, some at the walls. The irises were wrong, the pupils were wrong, and they had the quality of something that had been designed to resemble eyes without being quite right about it.
If it's already this terrifying you should be looking for a priest, not a doctor, he thought. What brought you here.
But he had told himself he would do his best, so he set that aside.
"Four months," he said. "What happened four months ago?"
"When I went to the moon," she said. She straightened slightly. "My name is Tara Farin. C-rank hunter. Also an astronaut."
The eyes on her scalp turned toward him in a slow, unified arc.
Ren stood at the reception desk and thought about this for a moment.
Why, he thought, did I never consider this before.
This world was modern. An extremely twisted version of modern, with gates and Hunters and eldritch things in the dark, but modern. It had cities and cars and phones and universities and cafeterias with decent food. Of course it had space programs. Of course it had astronauts. It had the sun and the moon and presumably the rest of the solar system and whatever was beyond that.
I could have left, he thought. In a worst-case scenario I could have just gotten on a rocket and gone. Why have I been so focused on developing resources in this god-forsaken world.
He pressed a hand to his face briefly.
Although, he thought, outer space is probably full of things like the goat mother, and I've already met her. Best to stay on the ground.
"Tell me what happened on the mission," he said.
"It was a sample collection trip. Standard procedure. We were supposed to collect and return." Tara's voice was careful, the voice of someone who had told this story enough times to know exactly which parts people reacted badly to. "I had done six previous missions without incident. The team had done four together. We were experienced."
She paused, collecting herself.
"There was a spatial storm. Our ship nearly got pulled in. We managed to divert toward a nearby planet to land and wait it out." She paused. "The surface was wet. Slick. It had a smell I've never been able to describe. And it was fascinating."
She had been looking at her hands. She looked up.
"That's the part I keep coming back to," she said. "It should have frightened us. We landed on an uncharted planet with no atmospheric data. Protocol was to stay in the ship. But all four of us wanted to go out. Not ordered to. We all just agreed that we should go." She shook her head. "I'm a scientist. I've been trained to question irrational decisions. But it felt completely reasonable at the time."
"You all wanted to go out," Ren said.
"Immediately. Without discussion. We suited up and went." She looked at her hands again. "We got out to collect samples. Before we could collect anything, we all lost consciousness."
"At the same time?"
"Yes. I woke up already on the ship, in the pilot seat. We were back in orbit above Qintara. I had flown us home with no memory of doing it." She folded her hands. "My crewmates were in the back. They had all died from burst blood vessels in the brain. All three of them."
"The same cause of death for all three."
"Yes. Identical rupture pattern. The medical examiner said he had never seen anything like it, three people dying from the exact same internal event at what appeared to be the exact same moment." She was quiet for a moment. "They were good people. Dr. Yuen had a daughter. Lieutenant Park was three months from retirement."
Ren said nothing.
"The next day, in the hospital, the first eye appeared on the back of my head. The doctors were very surprised." A pause that might have been a dark laugh. "Since then they've grown. Now there's no hair left."
"Has anything else changed?" Ren asked. "Perception. Memory. Physical ability."
Tara considered this. "My memory of the period just before we lost consciousness is gone. Completely. I remember landing, I remember the surface, and then I'm in the pilot seat in orbit. Nothing between." She touched the edge of her scarf where it covered the lower part of her scalp. "My vision has changed. I can see things at the edge of my regular field of view that I couldn't before. Details I shouldn't be able to resolve from that distance. I thought I was imagining it at first."
"You weren't."
"No," she said. "I know I wasn't."
She was looking at her folded hands again. Her actual eyes were wet.
Ren looked at the cluster on her scalp. She had gone to the moon, come back alone, and had spent however many months covering this with a hat every time she left her apartment.
She's a woman. If my hair fell out and eyes grew in its place I'd probably hang myself.
He pushed that thought aside.
"Have you tried removing them?" he asked.
"Yes." She swallowed. "The doctors at the Qintara Space Institute attempted a removal procedure."
She stopped.
"And?" Ren said.
"The surgeon's head exploded."
Ren stared at her.
The clinic was completely quiet.
That, he thought, is not a plague or a curse. That is a trap. An enormous, specifically designed trap. Someone put a pressure-release mechanism on this thing and aimed it at anyone who tries to take it apart.
And what in the name of everything does it take to make someone's head explode during a routine removal procedure. What the fuck are you made of, Lucy, recommending this to my clinic. Are you trying to get me killed. Did Malvick put you up to this.
"Can you see through them?" he asked.
"No. I can't see anything from them."
"But they move."
"Yes."
He stepped closer and studied the arrangement. Each eye had its own movement pattern, independent from the others, but something in how they tracked objects suggested they were gathering information even if she could not access it consciously. The distribution across the scalp was not random. The placement had a logic to it, deliberate rather than organic.
All of them turned toward him at once.
Ren stepped back sharply.
That is unsettling, he thought. That is extremely unsettling and I say that as a man with tentacles.
He looked at Tara, who was watching him with her real eyes, close to crying again.
"Sorry," he said. "I'll do my best. No promises."
She nodded.
"This will feel strange. Bear with it."
He stepped forward, raised both hands, and covered her ears gently. The needle-like tongue extended slowly from his palm and found the entry point.
Then he began to diagnose.
He stopped.
He was seeing from the eyes on her head.
It was not sight. The sensation had no framework: a complete data flood arriving through the channel of vision, compressing into his nervous system all at once.
Stop, he thought. Stop, I need to stop—
He tried to retract.
Too late.
The knowledge hit him.
His upper body burst. His torso from the shoulders down detonated outward, flesh and coat spraying across the clinic walls, the force of it loud enough to shake the framed sign above the door. The white mask dropped and hit the floor.
Thud.
"EKKKKKKKKKKKK—"
Tara's chair scraped back as she shot to her feet, her hat falling to the floor, all the eyes on her head spinning toward the space where Ren had been standing.
The mask lay on the tiles.
Then something began to knit itself back together around it.