Chapter 7

Seven

Mira

Mira was shocked the suit was holding. There was a decent amount of pressure this deep in the ocean, not to mention the insanely icy temperatures. Most people couldn’t dive even with suits on for very long.

But the engineers had really gone out of their way to make sure this suit was perfect. Most likely because they wanted to get back into their home, not because they wanted to keep her safe. Still, a girl could dream.

The drone meandered ahead of her, so slowly it made her eyes roll more than a few times behind her goggles. They’d insisted on sending this one with her, something about the undines being a little too close for comfort these days. And she understood the fear. Really, she did.

But wouldn’t it have been better to send her with six of the tiny gliders? They could hold on to the panel and move quickly. Faster install meant she was in the water for less time, and that limited the options for the undine to interact with her.

Apparently, such a thought was “beyond her pay grade”.

It made her want to hit her head on a rock and get it over with. She’d never be anything other than a useful tool to the heads of Beta, and she knew that. She’d grown up with those punches, and shouldn’t have expected that to change just because she’d made a device that allowed her to breathe underwater without a tank of air. Still. It took a while every time for the stinging ache of rejection to leave her body.

The drone moved forward, still holding that panel over its head like a shield. But they eventually made it to the engineering tunnel, and she sucked her teeth at the sight. The ocean didn’t wait long to take everything back.

There were barnacles on the walls. Starfish on the glass. Even a few little sea urchins that slowly meandered across the floor that was now covered with sand. Thankfully, it looked like her blast door had held.

Swimming in that direction, she kicked her fins and moved a little closer to one of the windows. Peering inside, she was pleased to see it was all dry.

No oxygen, maybe, but still no leaks.

It was a good start. They’d have to fix a lot more than just this panel, but at least they could get back to their things.

She pressed her fingers to the glass. Inside that room were her only belongings, and the only ones that made any impact on her happiness. A picture of her parents, her mother’s bronze bracelet, and her father’s tool belt.

They’d been injured inside, of all places. Her father had been fixing a rather large heating element and her mother had been working on the wires above him. No one really knew what happened, but neither of them made it out of that room alive.

At least she had their things, though. At least she had some way of remembering them beyond fragile memory.

Sighing, she turned and let the air bubbles filter out of her rebreather. She’d been working on this invention for a very long time. Twin tubes at the back of her head sucked oxygen out of the ocean and allowed her to breathe. Not quite like a fish, but really close. She’d never tested it underwater like this, though she had known eventually she’d have to wear it.

Thankfully, it worked. She honestly hadn’t been certain it would.

Mira saw the dark mass out of the corner of her eye just moments before it struck her. She hadn’t expected anything to move that fast through the water, let alone attack her. They’d already searched the area with drones to make sure there wasn’t anything large in the general vicinity.

Three other men were joining her. She had the belated thought as she was smashed against the side of the tunnel. She just had to make it until they got here.

Mira reached to the belt around her waist and tried to grab her serrated knife. It wouldn’t do much against a shark, but it might keep her alive. Or at least, make the creature think twice.

Whipping out the blade, she blindly struck but soon realized that every one of her attempts to hit something vital was stopped by what felt like a... forearm?

Twisting, she tried to turn in the water, but the damned deep sea flippers on her feet made that hard. They were built for long, graceful movements. They propelled her through the water quickly, but she had to be in control of her body.

Peering down, she saw a thick forearm wrapped around her waist. The darker skin, the slight yellow speckles that she’d not quite been expecting to see, and the thin fissures of bright blue that glowed like veins on top of those clawed hands.

Damn it, she knew exactly who had her in his grasp.

The undine, the idiot who had come far too close to the city and now he was grabbing her in the water?

Mira fought with even more intent. How dare he? He thought he could attack her outside the city? They had a deal. Or at least, some semblance of a deal. She’d saved his life. He saved hers. They were even. The damned thing needed to leave her alone.

Twisting in his grip, she finally spun herself around in his arms. But now he was holding onto her suit and she couldn’t wiggle without risking damage to the material.

If she somehow got away, there was no way she could explain the claw marks on an expensive new piece of equipment. Besides, she needed this suit to stay alive down here. The pressure, the cold, all of it would kill her instantly.

Nervous, she punched her fists into his ribs, but he didn’t budge. Didn’t even look down at her as he swam her far away from this place and toward who knows what.

Speaking of... She craned her neck to look at where they were going and all she could see was the edge of the cliff where Beta had built their city. A cliff that dove deep.

Real deep.

“No,” she said, her voice warped through the rebreather. “No, you can’t take me down there.”

She didn’t know what was that far underneath the waves, but that didn’t matter. She knew what the pressure would do to her. She needed a better suit, a much better mask, and if they kept going like this...

Mira struggled again, slamming her hands over and over against the muscular prison. “Stop! Listen to me, I can’t. We can’t. I don’t know how deep you want to go, and I have no idea how far down that even goes. I’m an engineer, not a pilot. But listen to me, undine, I can’t!”

He didn’t pay her any mind. She stared up at him, wondering how much it would hurt if she grabbed a handful of his gills. But then she remembered the knife in her hand. Stupid. She was so stupid when she panicked.

Fear controlled her body. Fear of the unknown, the depths of the ocean, of the blackness behind her and how the currents seemed to work in his favor. They were already at the lip of it, already so close to the abyss that opened like the maw of a massive sea creature.

And she had no idea what he wanted from her. Only that his kind killed hers.

She reacted. Mira slashed out at him with the serrated blade and felt his shock ripple across her body. His fins flared, his arms loosened, and those gills around his neck puffed out like some fancy collar she’d seen in the history books.

But then she was falling. No, she was floating away from him and a current had snagged onto her. She didn’t have any way to control herself, nor did she know where it was taking her. Only that the current ripped her out of his arms and down over the edge.

“Fuck,” she grunted, screaming out a growl of anger at the end of the word.

She kicked her feet, flailed her arms, anything to stop the rioting movement of her body tumbling down into darkness.

Her flashlight illuminated dust particles and a rock wall. That was all she could see, and even then, it swirled around her as she wildly spun through the water. Dust turned gold, then red, then white as all the light disappeared other than her own. Color was hard to see or decipher. And then the rock wall fell away too.

She had the unnerving sensation that she no longer existed. There was nothing around her, no sense of ground or where she might be. Just nothingness that even her light could not penetrate. Particles came and went. Little dust motes that floated by her. She swore at one point she stared into an open mouth full of teeth.

There was nothing. Just her and the open darkness of the abyss. She did not know where up or down was. She couldn’t even hazard a guess. But she had the image of herself as a single speck of dust on a blank canvas of darkness and a monstrous being beneath her that she could not see.

And then suddenly her back struck something hard and unyielding.

Mira turned. Her legs tangled together as her long fins caught on each other, but somehow she reached out and grabbed onto the rock she had hit.

It wasn’t much. But it existed. It was sturdy, and that was enough right now. Breathing hard, she could hear the gears at the back of her head churning to make enough air for her to gulp down, but it wouldn’t last forever. She hadn’t built it for someone to breathe so frantically.

Fingers digging into the rock, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to control her breath. In and out. She couldn’t count to five on the inhale, but she could count to three. So she did that ten times before switching to four, and then slowly focusing on the rest of her body.

Her toes were intact. She could wiggle them in her fins. Her suit was fine, although she could feel the cold water seeping through a hole in the back. Eventually, that would be a problem, but right now, she was okay. It would last. The integrity of the suit hadn’t been overly damaged, so she could relax about dying of hypothermia.

Draped over the rock as she was, she couldn’t see much other than stone. At least the light attached to her head still worked. She peered down at the rock between her fingers. Black, porous. She’d seen these specimens come into Beta before.

They were volcanic. She tried to pull up the other words for them, but couldn’t. She panicked a bit. Had she hit her head? Maybe that was the problem.

“You didn’t hit your head,” she assured herself. “You would remember if you hit your head. This is a panic attack. You’ve had them before. You’re all right.”

But she didn’t feel all right. She lifted her head to look around, adjusting her light so it was the smallest, most intense beam it could be and still... nothing. Just water. Just vague shapes in the distance that she thought might be other rocks. Or deep-sea creatures she didn’t want to meet.

The current moved just over her head. Mira reached her hand up and could feel it shoving against her palm. She must have fallen out of the bottom and now she was lying here, on volcanic rock, and there had to be another drop off somewhere nearby.

“You’re alive,” she repeated to herself, folding again over the stone and trying not to think about pressure changes and what they did to a body. “You’re alive, and you’re not hallucinating. You would see things moving in the distance, you would...”

See dark shapes.

She would see dark shapes moving a little closer with every heartbeat and she would probably think they were alive. Mira’s brows wrinkled as she turned her attention back to the shadows in the distance. She didn’t think they were moving yet, but what if they were?

Nitrogen poisoning. It affected divers, and she knew it made them see things.

But wait, no, she was panicking. Her rebreather didn’t do that. She wasn’t carrying tanks of oxygen, nitrogen, and everything else they breathed. The device she made turned the water into air just like the fish did. She wasn’t going to hallucinate, which meant the dark shape approaching her was not in her head and right in front of her.

Fear spiked through her body and she moved without thought.

Mira turned from the stone and kept her body low as she swam away. Whatever trailed her, speeding after her like a bullet through the water, it was hunting. But she was smaller and swimming through tight spaces would give her a lot better chance at surviving.

She didn’t take the time to fear that she might swim farther away from Beta. It was a risk she would have to take to stay alive. Dodging through the stones, she found what she was hoping for. Tall spirals of volcanic material that had fallen over each other, creating a labyrinth of tiny cracks where pale fish schooled.

Cracks she could fit in. But whatever was following her? It couldn’t.

She didn’t stop to see what manner of creature hunted her. Mira darted across the volcanic ruins, hoping it wasn’t still active. Black dust floated up around her, and she could only see as far as her hand, but she knew the spirals were right here. Right in front of her. She just had to make it before whatever was behind her caught up.

One more thrust of her feet and she was there. She grabbed onto the edge of the stones just as one of her fins was caught in the current. It dragged her upward, cutting her hands on the sharp stone, but she refused to let it stop her. Gritting her teeth, Mira tunneled beneath one of the stones, wedging herself so deep inside she didn’t know if she’d be able to get out.

But she couldn’t stop wheezing. She had never once in her life felt like prey, but now she knew what it felt like to fear teeth digging into her without ever seeing her attacker.

Spinning around, she moved too fast and her light hit the stone above her head. She couldn’t hear the sound of breaking glass, but she could feel it crunch and then everything plummeted into darkness.

She thought she was scared before? Now she knew real fear.

Nothing existed. She didn’t exist, if not for the feel of the stone around her and the icy water gathering at the base of her spine. There was no light. And she’d thought she knew what it was like to stare into the darkness, but she had been so wrong.

This was like she was dead. This darkness was like someone had plucked out her eyes and taken her ears. She was nothing and everything all at once.

Until a soft blue light bloomed ahead of her. It was some distance away still, but it was baby blue like the bird eggs in the hatchery. So soft and unassuming that it almost cajoled her out of her hiding place.

Blinking her eyes into focus, she realized that blue light was familiar. Her undine floated across the volcanic ravine, pulling himself with those webbed, clawed hands. He searched for her, she realized. He was looking in all the cracks and crevices, his brows furrowed in concentration and those gills fully extended.

They were so fragile. So thin. Fluttering around his head, moving on their own as the water toyed through them. So many shades of blue, all glowing with bioluminescence around his face. Cutting that muscular chest deeper with shadows and faint blue highlights. His long, powerful tail moved him with barely a flick. Like an eel drifting through the current.

He was beautiful, she thought. If she died here, she was grateful that it was at the hands of something like him.

Then those gills stopped moving, a ripple stiffening them as he turned in her direction and she knew, somehow, he’d found her. But, she supposed, it was never easy for prey to hide from a predator.

Especially not one like him.