Chapter 6

chapter 6

ELLE

Ten hours later, the compression chamber I was in shifted. "Prepare for docking!" the intercom announced.

I was honestly surprised that Arcus Industrial hadn't decided to yank me back out. Either there was sunk cost fallacy involved, or someone really liked the paper I'd released on an ancient avian harmotone language last year. It'd taken me months of studying old relics before I realized that the hieroglyphs on their tablets represented actual sounds based not only on the image itself, but on the depth of the glyph's carving. It made sense, because so much of the native South American avian tongue involved changes in volume rather than changes in the individual sounds—I'd just been lucky there was a centenarian Quetzalcoatl elder who recognized the sounds from his own great-grandmother, in his childhood, and who could independently confirm my theory.

Then again, I was trapped in this chamber with a bunch of crated supplies—maybe they just wanted to finish dropping things off at the lab before taking me back up again.

"Docking initiated!" the intercom shouted again, and I heard a solid thunk as the chamber I was in mated with the laboratory .

I got up and walked over to the door, waiting for the go-ahead to open.

If I opened it up a hair too early, I would die faster than I could even think about it. The air inside the chamber would burp out, and the ocean would rush in and hit me like a brick wall. The concussion might kill me, but if it didn't, I wouldn't be crushed; flesh was far too solid for that. But any air that was inside my body would shrink down, instantly compressed to the current undersea pressure, which meant my lungs would be yanked from the inside of my rib cage and shrunk down to the size of golf balls—and then I'd definitely pass.

"Airlock safe! Door clear to open!" was announced overhead, and I was able to dial the locking mechanism open on my side, like I was opening up the vault of a safe, retracting the two massive arms that were braced into either wall of the chamber.

The same thing was happening on the other side of the door, I knew, and soon I'd meet the team I'd be entrusting with my life—assuming no one had secretly fired me.

I let go of the breath I'd been involuntarily holding as the door in front of me opened up, revealing a curvy dark-haired woman and a lanky Norwegian-looking man.

The woman spoke at once. "Did they send you with lettuce?"

I was speechless. "Uhh?—"

"Nothing's ever going to be crisp down here, Donna, sheesh," the blond giant spoke up as he pushed his hand out. "I'm Marcus."

"Maybe they sent snap peas?" Donna asked, forlornly, before laughing. "I'm Donna."

"What I'm hearing is you miss the color green. I'm Elle." I shook both their hands, while looking beyond them for more people. "Is it just the two of you?"

"And baby makes three!" Donna said, pointing at me.

"Ha ha." I laughed awkwardly, rather than let on how her joke stabbed me to the core. It wasn't her fault, and I didn't want either of them to think I was an emotionally wrecked weirdo.

We had two months down here together for them to discover that .

At least I wasn't fired.

"Just the two of us," Marcus confirmed, as he edged around me in the narrow neck of the hall that connected our two abodes. "We're more than enough, as you'll come to find. Let's unload first, then we'll show you around."