Chapter 7

chapter 7

ELLE

I helped Donna bring in all the crates of supplies that'd come down with me, becoming just as pressure acclimated as I had, tucking them into a storage alcove in the hallway, while Marcus filled the submersible back up with color-coded duffle bags full of...trash?

But some of them made clinking sounds when he set them down, and unless there were beer bottles on board, or one of them was distilling their own hooch, I doubted that was the case.

"How long have you all been down here?" I asked as Donna and I finished. She started going through the crates, popping off lids to look for fresh vegetables, while I helped take up Marcus's cause. His duffle bags were heavy, and now that I was carrying them, I could see that all the zippers were tag-locked.

"That's classified," Marcus grunted as he set a bag down.

It took me a moment to realize he wasn't joking. "Oh."

"Welcome to the private sector," he said, with an amenable smile.

"How long does it feel like we've been down here? You can ask that, though," Donna said, coming up. "Because I feel like we've been down here for long enough to miss the entire last season of Gray's Anatomy ."

"Donna," Marcus groaned her name as he walked into my submersible to take one last look around.

She didn't care, she pounced on me. "What happens?"

"I—I don't watch." And even if I had, I would've stopped the second my life started intersecting with hospitals in bad ways.

"What? What good are you! Who doesn't watch Grey's ?" Donna said, stomping her foot.

I raised both hands helplessly. "I would've, if I'd known." A little white lie wasn't going to hurt anything.

"Yeah, you seem like the helpful type."

"Okay, that's everything," Marcus said, returning, then looked to me. "Last chance to stowaway back home."

And go back to my sister's grave and my soon to be ex? I put my hands into my Arcus Industrial branded pockets. If my new boss hadn't fired me, I sure as shit wasn't going to fire myself. "I'm afraid you're stuck with me for a bit."

"Sounds good," he said. "Just remember later on, I gave you a choice," he continued, then shooed both Donna and I back, spinning shut the doors.

My jaw dropped a little at his phrasing, but Donna grabbed my arm before I could say anything. "There's the whole rest of the lab to see—come along!"

She picked up a crate and made me do the same, then we took them both into the kitchen, which was the nearest wing to the chamber dock. It seemed state-of-the-art to me—I was used to going out to digs and making due with whatever we could hike in with us, sometimes for weeks at a time, so I was entirely okay with a lack of fresh greens.

It did look a little lived in, however. There were scuffs from their boots on the smooth metal here and there, and I saw a flash of a poster taped inside one of the cabinets where Donna was restocking supplies .

The sight of it made me smile. Humans were going to human, no matter where they were.

"Who is that?" I wondered aloud, when she put away some condensed milk and I saw it a second time.

"McDreamy, d'uh," she said, looking over her shoulder in no small amount of horror. "You really don't watch, do you!"

"No, sorry," I said and winced apologetically.

She snorted to let me know what she thought of that, and then it was as if she read my mind. "I put it there because Marcus never cooks. It's not sexual harassment if he never sees."

I couldn't help but grin at her. "Unassailable logic."

She nodded smartly. "Thank you—and hand me that?"

I helped her restock, learning where everything was in the meantime, while Marcus handled disconnecting the smaller submersible and sending it back aloft.

"Want to see your room?" she asked when we were finished.

"Room" implied I got to close a door on them—a rare thing on a scientific adventure. "Yes?" I said hesitantly, braced to be introduced to a bunk bed in a space we all shared.

"You really do," she promised, and then led the way through another one of the circular doors into another short hall.

I could tell all of ALRI was built out of separate modules—we walked past an engine room, and she announced, "Don't go in there, and don't ever touch anything," then took us past a large operations node, with several desks in front of a bunch of computer screens, currently reporting in scrolling data, and she tsked when I got distracted. "This is all Marcus's, don't touch anything here either," she said, jerking her head further down the hall.

And there was an actual hall, with actual doors in it. Circular doors, clearly less substantial than the ones between the prior modules—but there were quite a lot of them. "They had to house the workers when this place was being built," Donna explained. "This is mine," she said, "and this is Marcus's." She pointed at the second, and then we reached the third. "And this is yours," she said, rolling it open to show me like she was doing a magician's trick.

Inside, there was a space like a college dorm room, with a small desk, a narrow bed, and—"A window?" I asked with a gasp. "Down here?"

Marcus caught up, ducking into the room to join us. "Yeah, it's insane."

The window faced out onto utter darkness, just a yawning, gaping black.

"If I turn the outside lights on, all sorts of critters will swim up to say hi," Donna said, preening a little at my awe. "But don't worry. I won't do that without telling you."

I stepped forward, waving my hand in front of me, realizing the window was slightly concave, bubbling forward into the nothingness beyond.

"I put a blanket over mine for the first two weeks," Marcus offered.

"Scared of the dark?" I guessed, looking back at him.

"No. Because I have no idea how the thing doesn't shatter."

"Oh," I said softly. I hadn't been worried before—but now I was.

"ALRI is full of surprises—wait till you see the dock."

I was mystified. "Where I just came in?"

"Nope. C'mon," he said, and led our group back into the hall. We went back to the office-node—which I now realized was the center of the operation, and that all the rest of the halls radiated off of it, rather like a starfish—and took a different door.

And it, too, opened onto a curtain of blackness—only in here, I could also hear lapping water.

Because one whole wall of the room was the ocean.

If I hadn't so recently stared death in the face twice, my sister's and the potential of my own, I would've jumped back into the hall we'd come from and slammed the door on utter instinct.

"What the fuck is that?" I demanded, feeling anxiety swell in my chest .

Marcus gave my fear an accommodating nod. "It's what we have that no other sea floor facility has had before. The ability to keep a portion of the space pressurized with magic."

I finally hazarded to look around and saw the dive suits that were stored in alcoves along the wall. There were six slots, but only two tactimetal suits, with their umbilical cables neatly looped above them. I knew from the manuals I'd been given to read up on that they were each five million dollars a pop, and realized this was where we walked—quite literally, walked —them into the sea.

No chambers, no doors, no airlocks.

We just put on our suits and walked down the goddamned ramp.

"And that's open water?" I wasn't proud of the way my voice rose up, but I had to hear him say it. Because I could see it rippling and hear the slight sloshing sounds it made and scent the salt and what I assumed was deep-ocean funk in the air—if I was hallucinating, I needed to know.

"Yeah. If you cross that line, though," he said, gesturing to a red-laser created square hovering about six inches on our side of the water, "without a suit, you'd die. Or if you fell in, got pushed, et cetera—no roughhousing in the dock room."

"I wasn't planning on it."

"And don't put your hand through there either," he went on, like he'd given this lecture before. "In addition to the pressure, that side of the line is fucking freezing, the same temperature as the water outside. We're heated and powered geothermally, but past that line you might as well be in the sea," he said, and paused. "Doctor Kepzler?"

"I hear you," I said, even though I couldn't tear my eyes away from the rippling blackness. It had the same quality as an old-fashioned static-y TV, or one of those magic-eye thingies—hell, even thunderclouds in the Midwest, if you were lying down on your back on the ground before a storm rolled by.

It felt like if you looked at it long enough you could see anything you wanted in it, up to and including the future, and despite all my PhD-level reasoning, the salty square of darkness had me in a chokehold.

"It's like staring into the abyss, huh?" Donna asked.

"Yeah," I whispered.

And just like in the proverb—somehow I knew the abyss was staring back.

I managed to rip my gaze away from it to look at Marcus though. "Are you going to tell me what my actual job is now?"

He jerked his chin up. "I've got a dossier waiting for you in my office. Go unpack and then come meet me."

I walked back to my room unaccompanied—it wasn't like I could get lost; there weren't that many places to go—and my bags were waiting for me outside my door.

I brought them in and tossed them on my bed. The dark window along one wall held no interest for me now. I felt like I'd left a piece of my soul back in their "dock" room, and I was eager to go retrieve it, once I knew why the hell Arcus Industries had shipped me here.

I hadn't brought much along—just more sets of plain cotton clothing, swimsuits, some underwear, socks, and no bras.

This was the first trip I'd gone on since the double. And I could remember standing in front of my dresser, packing, ready to open up my bra drawer out of habit, before I caught myself.

The nice people at the surgery center had given me some brochures about breast replacements, and I'd hunted down information on the internet. It would just be another surgery to heal up from; it was a common enough procedure.

But I couldn't imagine doing it just yet.

Because to have breasts again would mean that things were getting "back to normal", and after Lena's death, I didn't want anything to be. My sister and I had fought like cats and dogs, but only because yelling was our love language. Growing up we were both so self-assured, and confident verging on cocky. We knew we would achieve anything in any field we desired, and we had. I'd become a historian and linguist for ancient monster civilizations and she'd gone on to work for a Michelin chef.

What I hadn't realized was how much of my own success was possible because she was there. She wanted to hear about my expeditions, and was very likely awake any time I called, no matter the time zone. She'd fly out to meet me when she could and give me grocery lists of exotic ingredients to smuggle home when she couldn't. After our parents died, we'd been each other's support system, and when something good happened to me, the first thing I wanted to do was talk to her. Same if it was something awful.

So "fixing" what was "wrong" with me, so that I would meet other people's expectations, felt like it would be a denial of what we had—and permission for me to carry on.

I didn't want to fucking carry on.

I wanted precisely what I'd had, when I'd had her on speed dial.

I stood in one place too long, struck by grief, which seemed to be my only current long-term relationship—then I made my way to the bathroom to splash water on my face. It tasted strange, and I guessed it'd been desalinated from the water outside. I blinked it out of my eyes, regretting not looking for a towel first, when I spotted something strange on the counter.

A long, blonde hair.

My hair was a shoulder-length brown, and it didn't match Marcus or Donna.

So either there was someone else I hadn't met here at ALRI and they were lying to me, or?—

"I was wondering what happened to you," Marcus said, from the doorway, catching me.

I about jumped out of my skin. "Do the doors here not lock?"

"Not if you don't lock them," he said with a shrug.

"Whose was this?" I asked, holding the hair out curiously.

His eyes focused on it. He groaned, then hollered, "Donna!"

It only took her a moment to appear. When she did, she saw what I was holding and sighed. "Okay, look, just because Marcus treats me like a scullery maid doesn't mean that I actually am one. We've had a lot of other scientists come through—I did my best," she said, and shrugged. "I changed your sheets?" she said, apologetically.

One hair didn't really disgust me, I'd traveled rough before. I just found the situation strange. "If other people have been here, why haven't I heard about this facility?"

Marcus twisted his head like a confused puppy. "Did you or did you not sign an NDA the length of your arm?"

"There's NDAs and then there's hanging out a bar with other nerds drunk. I may not be much of a party animal, but when someone builds something like this," I said, pointing at the frankly extraordinary structure surrounding us, "word gets around."

"Not when those people are hired for Arcus Industrial. They don't talk. Mr. Marlow makes sure of it," he said, handing an Arcus-branded tablet over.

"I'm going to pretend that didn't sound ominous as fuck," I muttered, taking it from him. "How private is anything here?"

"All the bathrooms in the facility are—you're allowed to shit in peace. Or agony. As the case may be, with Donna's cooking."

"You take that back right now, Marcus."

He grinned at her, then looked back to me. "Other than that, once you've started your research, we'll turn off the cameras to your room, and you're expected to lock the door when you're not in here. It'll be keyed to your handprint, just for you."

"Wait, are you telling me, I'm classified?" I asked, pointing at myself.

He nodded. "Precisely. None of us can get into this room from the outside if you don't unlock it. So make sure if you have a medical emergency, you can somehow hobble to the door."

I made a concerned face. "I'm waiting for you to tell me that you're teasing."

"I wish I was, but our instructions regarding scientists are very precise, Dr. Kepzler," Marcus said and shrugged—and I realized I was going to need to go back to my maiden name, or make my peace with Grant's last name haunting me for the rest of my life.

It was already the name I'd used on most of my accepted papers.

I ground my teeth as Marcus continued.

"We don't even transmit out data. We send things out the old-fashioned way, on hardware."

"Why?"

"Trade secrets. What's that saying—two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead? Well, it's a lot easier to keep secrets if you don't port all your data into the outside world continuously."

Which would explain all the duffle bags we'd shuffled back and forth, and all the armed guards on the boat I'd come out on, who'd appeared more mercenary than military.

"Huh." It'd take me awhile to wrap my head around the reasons for all of this, but when he handed me over a tablet, I took it.

"Read up on your dossier and rest tonight. We've got your first time out scheduled tomorrow, after your bonding ceremony with the kraken."

I was already stepping away from them, when I paused, not sure I'd heard him correctly, before slowly turning back around. "You're...kidding, right?" I asked, and when neither one of them denied it, I went on. "No one mentioned that when I was topside."

"You might've noticed, this is a ‘When Mr. Marlow says jump, we say how high' situation down here."

I shook my head strongly. "But I don't want to bond to a kraken." I was fucked up enough currently, the last thing I needed right now was someone else mucking about in my head. Krakens hardly ever bonded with humans, choosing instead to use telepathic intermediaries—because the problem with bonding was that it was almost entirely one way. Your small human-mind could telepathically talk to a kraken once they'd bonded with you, but those fuckers could see right into your soul and read every thought you'd ever had, from what you were currently thinking down to who you shared lunch with in the third grade .

It hardly seemed equitable.

"They're supposed to guard you," Marcus said, gesturing to the open seas outside.

"From what?" I demanded, panicking. Was that what happened to the mysterious blonde that'd been in my room? Had she decided to back out at the last minute, rather than share all of her most intimate thoughts with a stranger?

"I recommend you read the provided dossier."

Donna reached out and put a comforting hand on my arm. "You're a xenoscientist, right? I'd have figured you'd love the chance to interact with a kraken. Personally. If you know what I mean." She waggled her eyebrows as I reached up to rub on my temples.

Everyone always assumed you went into monster sciences to fuck them. "I study dead monster languages and cultures. It's different."

"We're not going to push you out the dock," Marcus said, and when I gave him another nervous look he went on. "You're not the first scientist we've had here—and you're not even the first one we've seen freak out. I don't know what's on that tablet you've got in your hand, because it's classified and will only open with your biometrics, but I do know that every time a scientist reads that, they're suited up to go out the next day. Read it and see. There's a storm overhead. You're going to be trapped here for a bit, regardless."

Donna nodded strongly beside him. "Hopefully the dossier will explain more of what you want to know."

"Hopefully," I said, mostly without any, and then waved them both out of my room.