Chapter 1

One

Mira

“Get away from that window, woman!” The shout echoed through the glass dome, anger vibrating in every word.

But Mira had grown up in the engineering dorms. She knew every nook, cranny, and obstacle in her way. The glass wasn’t going to break. She’d already tested its capabilities long before she started welding the metal framework. It was fine.

Taking her finger off the welder’s trigger, she yanked her goggles up and glared down at the man ten feet below. “Really, Hermon? You think I didn’t test everything before I started welding?”

“All the sparks sure made me think you didn’t.” He jabbed a finger at the opposite side of the glass. “That looks like a crack to me.”

“That’s because it is.” She released her hold on the suction cup in front of her and dangled in the air above him. Her rigging was attached to the ceiling of the giant room. A currently blocked off room, because of all the leaks. “But that panel of glass isn’t attached to the rest of it. It’s not leaking from a crack, you old dolt! It’s leaking from a rusty rivet that I am currently removing. So unless you want to drown with me, I suggest you go back to your office and let me work.”

He grumbled underneath his breath, but she heard something along the lines of idiotic women who thought they knew how to weld.

Mira knew how to weld. She’d been doing this her entire life. It was her father’s lifelong career before he’d drowned and left all his tools to her. And she’d gotten really good at it over the years.

Sighing, she shook her head, slammed her goggles back into place, and swung over to the suction cup handhold again. But before she let the sparks fly once more, she stared out of the glass dome that was only a few inches away from her face.

The ocean.

It was terrifying and beautiful all at the same time.

Their city was built underneath the sea. Deeper than the other cities, but still connected through tunnels and long rail systems that allowed people to travel back and forth between cities. This was just one of the many domes currently cut off from use because of water leakage. But she was one of the few who got to see inside the sealed rooms. She got to see what it was like to sit at the very edge of a drop off that disappeared into darkness.

About thirty feet beyond the glass was the edge. There were still plants growing out there, long tendrils of kelp that waved in the currents. Tiny schools of fish coasted in large groups, pausing to look at her, and then zooming on by. The water was crystal clear. She felt like she could see for miles, but really, all she could see was the rest of their city. Glowing in the distance, faintly blue with all the lights of tall towers, gleaming with glass and metal.

Her quadrant, owned by the Beta Corporation, was mostly industrial. But there were rooms like this one that were intended to entertain.

Mira would never be able to scrub the beauty of this room out of her mind. Even though it hadn’t been used in her lifetime, it was still beautiful. Gold and white checkered floors, massive sculptures of muscular men holding up the ceiling on all four corners, and all this glass. It was a wonder it hadn’t broken years ago.

That crack, though. She’d have to fix that sooner rather than later.

When her boss had told her to take the lead on this project—apparently some rich person wanted to hold a party in this room and wouldn’t take no for an answer—she’d almost lost her mind. Of course, she’d take a room that had been sealed for years. Of course, she would risk her life and potentially die tragically if she got to see this. This beauty. This magic that no one had seen in years.

Testing the welder in her hand, she let the flame burst white hot before setting back to work replacing the rivet. It was a slow leak, but real frightening if it was in a room not often used. Someone would close the doors and then find ankle deep water in just a week or two. Living underwater like they did that was a real concern. So they’d shut off access entirely, not wanting to risk the rest of the city. Every room had storm doors that were rubberized and water proof for just this reason.

Maybe everyone was a little “door happy”. But no one wanted the entire city to flood, and they’d been having a lot of issues lately.

A neighboring city, Gamma, had suffered that. No one survived. It was years ago, of course. Her father had told her stories about it when she was little. He’d claimed the entire city flooded, everyone dead. And the corporations had decided it was too big of a city to lose. So they’d sent in a team, him included, and they’d found the leak. Then they’d pumped all the water out and watched the bodies float back down to the floor.

Shaking off the ghosts and ever present anxiety, she finished sealing the rivet for good. The melted metal would last quite a while, but eventually she’d probably be back up on this wall fixing it again. For the time being, though? Their water problem was fixed.

Pushing her goggles back up, she clicked the release on her harness and down she went. It took a bit to untangle herself from the ropes, but then she had the room to herself. No one would expect her for a few hours yet. So instead of returning to her boss with her report, she pulled an apple out of her metal lunch box and stood in front of the twenty-foot glass wall. It went higher in the center, the dome stretching so far up she guessed it might be thirty or forty feet.

Crunching into her apple, she walked around the room. There was so much water outside that glass. So much.

She remembered getting a little sick looking at it when she was small. Sometimes, looking at the vastness of the ocean was too much. She’d grown up in engineering quarters. They weren’t so lucky, like other professions. Most of her life she’d only had a single window in her room, and even then it was just a view of a rock wall. A tiny porthole barely bigger than her head was a lot different from this.

Some lizard brain part of her mind whispered this was dangerous. So much glass surely couldn’t hold up the entire weight of the ocean. And there was a lot more water than land.

Still. It was pretty.

A brightly colored fish flashed next to the window, and she followed its path. It seemed to be drawing her along, its silver side flickering every time it moved about five feet and then waited for her.

Did fish play with humans? She’d heard the rumor that people in Alpha Quadrant actually kept them as pets. They’d make another glass jar, like the ones they lived in, and then watch the fish swim around. Was it doing that to her? Maybe, to these fish, she was the pet.

Snorting, Mira bit another too big bite of her apple and paused right in front of the largest glass pane. No way. The fish wasn’t playing with her, just like the folks in Alpha weren’t playing with any fish in a bowl.

A shadow passed over her hand. Strange, because she hadn’t seen any large animals since she’d started welding. Every now and then, she was treated to the sight of a massive whale in the distance. And sometimes at night she listened to their haunting songs as they swam by the city. It was beautiful, and for some reason, it always made tears sting in her eyes.

Mouth full, still chewing, she looked up to find the source of the shadow and froze.

A monster hovered in front of the glass. His black tail, so long it tangled in the kelp, was at least ten feet long. Blue slashes of fins, so deep they blended in with the water, undulated all along the black scales. It stretched up to his waist, seamlessly turning into that pale, almost gray skin. His body was as all the rumors claimed. So handsome it was painful to look at, and eerily like the gold sculptures that surrounded her.

Dark claws on his hands were intimidating enough, but it was his black eyes that felt like they’d somehow captured her soul. Black, entirely. Inky and dark, they stared straight through her as though she was nothing. Just a maggot wriggling beneath him. Long dark hair floated around him, perhaps waist length, although there were thick cords interspersed through the strands, much thicker than her own, almost like tentacles.

And if the rumors were true, his plush mouth was full of razor-sharp teeth. He tore through his prey like a shark, but so much more intelligent. So much more dangerous.

Fuck, she shouldn’t be here alone. The undine—what her people called his—rarely came around the cities. And if they did, it was only for a shitty reason. They were known to attack cities like her own and perhaps had been behind the sinking of Gamma. But they weren’t seen around her city. No one in Beta had seen an undine in... years.

Unless they were watching her people. Using routes like this one, where they knew no one was going to be in the room while they passed by.

How long had he been watching her? Had he seen her working? The fire should have startled him away. It scared everything else.

Why was she frozen here staring at him, terrified, when she should be running?

Her eyes darted to the crack in the glass and after a second, she realized he looked in the same direction. So they were intelligent. He’d watched her body language as though he was familiar with it, and when he saw the crack, a wave of rippling electricity lit up his body.

He looked down at her and grinned. Those sharp, gleaming teeth were a clear threat.

There was so much hatred in that gaze. Beyond anything she’d ever seen before.

They moved at the same time. She bolted for the door and he swam for the crack. She heard him. The massive bulk of his body as he slammed down on the glass and... and...

It held.

She spun to look at him as she reached the door. Some curious stupidity made her look back. The black, undulating tail laid on top of the glass, and the undine stared down at her. He lifted his claws and scraped them down the surface, the sound echoing and ear piercing. He snapped his teeth, then looked up and sped away. She watched him getting smaller and smaller toward the surface, and then he turned around.

Oh.

Oh, no.

She was frozen again, her mouth open as he torpedoed through the water toward the glass and she thought for an insane second, “He’s going to kill himself.”

If he hit the glass, the force of his body would surely send him catapulting into the room with the water. What did he think was going to happen? He’d be in the glass dome as well. He’d be stuck in here, like those fish the people in Alpha supposedly kept.

But he wasn’t stopping, and she wasn’t dumb. Mira spun around and hit the button to open the door. She slid underneath it as soon as there was enough room for her to crawl and hit the button on the opposite side with a punch that almost broke her finger. The blast doors started coming down and she hissed out an angry breath.

“Come on,” she muttered. “Come on.”

Impact.

The sound of his body hitting the glass was a sickening thud, like someone had jumped from too high. It shook the room like an earthquake. Everything rumbled around her, the metal framing that she’d just fixed whining with the pressure and then the rush of water.

Liquid rushed out of the room over her feet and then stopped as the blast door finally sealed shut. The rubber held. The metal was so much stronger than flimsy glass. It would hold even if the undine got ideas.

But some part of her, some worried, fearful part, opened the tiny viewing door that was even smaller than her porthole in her bedroom. Her hand was shaking as she slid it open and peered into the now flooded room.

Bubbles obscured most of her vision, but she could see her lunch box floating in the distance. Water filled the space, but there was no giant sea creature floating inside it. How had he managed that? She was certain he would strike it so hard that he wouldn’t be able to...

A hand slapped the viewing door. Black claws raked down it, leaving deep furrows in its wake. And then she saw him. So close she could see her own reflection in those black eyes. His tail coiled behind him, looping like a large tentacle of its own.

But oh, he was so beautiful. Those hard edges of his face, almost human but not quite close enough. The sharp teeth bared at her, like this was her fault. Like she had somehow done this. As she stared into his gaze, she wondered why there was so much hatred in those eyes.

Everyone who had ever whispered about undines claimed they were unfeeling monsters. But this one wasn’t. Hate like this burned through a person for years before it ever got this hot. He wanted to murder her, and he didn’t care if anyone would miss her. She could see all of that in his angry gaze.

So she bared her teeth at him as well, mimicking his expression as best as she could. “Sorry, you pretty bastard. Better luck next time.”

He made some kind of noise, eerily similar to a whale, and then launched away from her. He swam with so much grace through the water toward the center of the room. And then she watched him look up at the blasted glass he’d nearly blown to smithereens. With one final look back at her, he swam back up through the crack.

The shards tore at his tail as he moved through it, forcing him to slow down for a few moments as she got an eyeful of the end of his tail. So stunning it didn’t look like it should be attached to his body at all. The fin was delicate and fine, with veins of blue rioting through it. And then she realized the blue was pulsing, glowing, like a bioluminescence that she’d only seen in pictures. With one last, final flick, he was gone. Leaving nothing but his blueish, black blood in the room.

“Fuck.” She drew the word out long and low.

She’d almost died. And now she was going to almost die again when she told her boss that the room she was in had flooded.

Their client wouldn’t want to host a party in a room filled with seawater. And wasn’t it supposed to be in less than a week? She’d have to get out there, fix the glass, and then a cleaning crew would need to be hired. There wasn’t supposed to be a cleaning crew at all in the budget.

If she wasn’t fired, she’d definitely have to pay for all this out of pocket, and...

“Ooohh,” she muttered, again drawing out the word before she turned to look at the blank hall. There were very few windows here, only halogen lights blinking above her, stretching down the long metal tube. “I am so fucked.”