Chapter 37

Thirty-Seven

Mira

“Bastards,” Mira snarled, spitting a wad of snot and blood toward the man in front of her. She didn’t even know this one’s name, only that he had been sent this morning to make her life a living hell.

But then again, every morning since she’d gotten back was a living hell.

At first, they’d bundled her up and brought her to the fixed engineering wing. She’d gotten to sleep in her old bed, eat familiar food, gorge herself on stale air again and being able to walk more than just a few steps from one side of the dome to the other. Sure, she’d gotten her exercise swimming, but that wasn’t the same as walking.

She’d missed walking. Just taking steps from one place to the other, knowing that she could just step a few feet in one direction and there was another hallway for her to keep going. And then she had realized how much she’d missed the safety of these walls too.

This was the same bed she’d slept in as a child. The same spot where her father had leaned over to kiss her forehead goodnight and tell her stories about monsters of the deep. She still had her pictures of her mother and father here, and a few other trinkets that made her think of home. All of it was good. Even if it was lacking a certain undine who had been the hero of a lot of stories as well.

Then they had come for her. Men in uniforms that she’d never seen in Beta before. Perfectly pressed, starched uniforms that could only mean they came from one place and one place alone. Alpha. Someone had squealed on her.

She’d been getting punched in the face ever since.

The man shook his hand, the one that he’d just used to strike a shoulder since they didn’t actually want to kill her. “You could be spared from all of this. You don’t have to endure all the pain and torture, you realize that? All you have to do is tell us the truth.”

The truth. That’s all she had been telling them.

“I told you already. I was sucked out to sea by a current and I happened to find one of our old research facilities. It was still fairly operational, but it took me a very long time to fix my rebreather. Which works, by the way. Tell my boss to shove that up his ass cause the old bastard said I couldn’t invent anything that worked.” Was her back tooth wiggling? It was absolutely wiggling.

The man sighed. She got a real good look at this one, while the others didn’t like to stand in front of her. This man was tall, lean, far too good looking to be someone who tortured other people for a living. And yet that floppy brown hair that kept falling in front of chocolate colored eyes wasn’t hiding the joy that he got from hitting her. Oh yeah, this guy knew what he was doing.

And he liked it.

He shook his head. “We know you’re lying to us, Mira, and that’s what we don’t understand. We could work together here to figure out what really happened to you and how to help you. How to help our whole city.”

They wanted her to say she was stolen by an undine. They wanted a smear campaign to plaster all over the walls of the city. She knew this game. They wanted everyone in Beta to be living in fear, terrified that they were going to be the next people stolen out of their beds. It gave Alpha even more reason to take ownership over their city.

It would not happen. Not because she cared that much about Beta. The building had been falling apart for ages. But because she would not give them another reason to hate Arges’s kind.

“Go ahead and keep hitting me, man. The story won’t change because I’m telling you the truth!” she screamed the last words of the sentence.

Maybe she yelled to get back at him for that last hit that made her tooth wiggly. Or maybe it was because the louder she said it, the more she believed it herself.

He slammed his hand against the chair they’d tied her to, spinning her around to look at the glass. They had moved her into this room today. Surprising, considering they’d kept her away from the windows so far. She wasn’t all that sure why.

Now, she had a guess. The man leaned behind her, his hot breath brushing against her ear. “We know what happened to you, Mira. There are cameras all around this place. In case you were unaware, we already have the tapes from when you were trying to fix what you broke. And now here we are, listening to you lie over and over again, to keep an undine safe. Why is that? That’s the question I keep asking myself. Why are you trying to protect him?”

He was probably muttering some impressive villainous plan, but she was just looking out to sea.

They were closer to the top of the base, so she could see for miles. There was a pod of whales in the distance, just three humpbacks with a tiny baby in between them. Their tails were so graceful as they lifted and dropped them. Slowly moving through the water together. She wondered if they were seeking warmer waters. Maybe the winter was what made them leave.

A hand slammed down on the chair and tossed her toward the window. She hit it hard, her cheek catching on the glass as she precariously tried to balance herself so she didn’t hit the floor.

He didn’t let her save herself. The man kicked the legs out from under her chair and down she fell. Hitting the ground hard first with her shoulder and then with her face. Groaning, she rolled only to be picked up by the back of her head and a fistful of hair.

“Well, well, well,” he growled in her ear. “I had a feeling if I started hitting you in front of a window, someone would show up. That sure looks like the same undine who saved you.”

She opened her eyes, trying her best to focus on the outside of the windows and... fuck. There he was.

Arges floated in front of the window, all of his lights on full display. His fins were so bright they were almost blinding, and she could see the rage on his features. All his gills were flared out, his black eyes narrowed, and his sharp teeth showing like a shark on the other side of the glass.

The man behind her gave her a shake, ripping out hair in the process. “It sure seems like he wants me to give you back, Mira. Is that what you want? Did you lose yourself to a monster like that?”

“Lose?” she repeated. “I lost absolutely nothing to him.”

“You clearly spent some time with him. I’ve never seen an undine look quite so angry at one of us. Certainly not because we were hurting one of our own.” He dangled her closer to the window, watching as Arges moved closer as well. “You see, we don’t need you to tell us anything, Mira. I can guess what happened. Would you like to know what I think happened?”

“Not particularly,” she ground out through her teeth.

“He took you because he was interested. You were interested, too. Maybe there’s a bit of a slut in that engineering mind of yours. Maybe you fancied yourself to be a pioneer in a new genre of mating. I don’t care what you say about it. Justify it to yourself all you want.” He leaned down, that hot breath in her ear again. “You fucked him. And now he wants you back.”

She bucked in the chair, trying to get away from the monster behind her, and closer to the glass. She wanted Arges to swim away. There was only one direction this was going, and it wasn’t one that either of them were going to like.

The man gave her another shake. “Here’s the thing, Mira. I don’t need you. All I wanted was to see if I could get him here. We’ve been dropping your blood into the ocean for days and that didn’t summon him, but all of a sudden here he is the moment you’re in front of a window. The closer he and his people are, the better. We’re going to light them all on fire and get rid of the problem once and for all. How’s that sound?”

Terrible. It sounded terrible.

But there was nothing she could do, all tied up like this with a man holding her by the hair. She’d always known the hatred between their people ran deep. She had seen it for herself. The years of abuse and greed that had torn this entire ocean apart.

This went beyond that, though. This was an old hatred that made her wonder whether or not this man knew Arges. It certainly seemed like he recognized the blue glowing undine in front of them. And Arges definitely recognized him.

She saw the shaking rage, the undulated gills that were plastered so close to his side now she wondered if he could even breathe. He came closer to the window, pointing at the man behind her ominously.

“Oh, I’m not afraid of you,” the man said to Arges. He had no way of knowing the undine before them could understand him. “I’m going to cut her up into little pieces and feed her to the sharks. Just you wait, undine. I’m not done punishing you yet.”

He was going to what?

She gasped as he shoved her away from the window. She landed hard on her shoulder again, nearly popping it out of its socket as the man followed her. He was laughing. A gleeful, joyful sound that turned her stomach.

Leaning down, he grabbed onto her shirt and dragged her with the chair into the back room. The room with no windows. The room where they had done their worst to her and apparently he was going to do even more.

“I’ve seen that undine around here for ages,” the man said. “Beta sends all their recordings to us, you see. All the cities do. You’ll be happy to know you somehow caught yourself one of the biggest fish in the sea. Or at least, one of the most dangerous. He’s been scoping out our cities for years and doing considerable damage for quite a while.”

She didn’t know that. But Arges was intelligent. It didn’t surprise her in the slightest that he had been successful in every attack he’d made. But what did surprise her was that this man knew him.

Even as the stranger in front of her sat her upright, steadying her chair once again on its wobbly legs, she eyed him. He wasn’t familiar to her. The uniform was clearly Alpha based, too clean and too pressed, but she had never heard of such brutality from Alpha.

Swallowing hard, she croaked out, “You aren’t from Alpha, are you?”

Again, he chuckled, that gritty sound already grating on her nerves. “No, Mira. Alpha employs all of us, but that doesn’t mean we’re from there.”

“There’s only three cities left,” she muttered. “Delta is long gone. Gamma only recently built back up. I suppose you could be from Gamma, but...”

He tsked, the sound sharp and cruel in the otherwise soundless room. “No one knows where I’m from, Mira. No one could ever guess that there is another city. Deeper in the very depths of the ocean. One buried in rock and rubble so the undines would never find us. Are you done asking your questions yet?”

“No.” She glared. “I have a hundred questions for you, but I have a feeling you won’t let me ask any of them.”

“Smart girl.” He brushed her hair back from her ear, and then leaned down to whisper, “Tau is the city you’re looking for. If you somehow survive this, I want them to know who is the real power under the sea.”

And then he plunged a knife into her belly.

It took a few moments for her to realize what had happened. Her stomach muscles cramped, clenching around the cold metal. It was hard to imagine he’d even done it. She knew he had threatened Arges with that, but she hadn’t thought...

Then the fire came. The burning ache that spread throughout her entire form as her body realized that there was a horrible wound on her belly. He ripped the knife out, not even trying to be considerate as he drew it down her arms. Slice by slice. Marking her with cuts that dug into her muscle and made her scream.

She was ashamed at the sounds that came out of her mouth. She had always considered herself to be strong, enduring what others couldn’t. Engineers lived in pain. Her muscles always ached. She was constantly burning herself, hitting her fingers with a hammer, searing her skin with warm bolts. But never had she endured pain like this. Never had she felt her skin splitting and blood pouring down her arms, down her belly, into her lap.

She was going to pass out, she realized. The cold sensation rushed from the top of her head down to her toes, and her vision started to get a little hazy.

The man in front of her slapped her hard. The sudden strike woke her only for a few seconds, enough for her to hear him mutter, “Can’t have you dying just yet. Need to send a message, Mira. You’re the message.”

The message? What message did he want to send? That anyone who spoke or was around the undines would be killed by their own people? Delirious, she faded in and out of consciousness. She knew he was walking around and doing something, but she had no idea what he was doing. But then she got really lightheaded and had no idea what was happening.

No, she wasn’t light headed. She was being carried.

Lifted through the air and dumped into icy water that froze all the air in her lungs. Her initial reaction was to take in a deep breath, but she stopped herself right before she inhaled mouthfuls of water. This wasn’t right. She wasn’t supposed to drown. She had created a device to prevent this, and if they would just give her the rebreather, she could survive this.

But then the pain hit her all over again. The salt made all her wounds turn into searing pain, and it wasn’t possible for her to survive. She couldn’t. The pain was so great that her heart was going to explode.

Warm arms slid around her, pulling her away from that nightmare of a building and against a familiar chest with two hearts beating to calm her. “Hush now,” he said, and she could hear the regret in his voice as another ache joined the others in her neck. “Let me be your breath.”