Page 11 of Whispers of the Deep

Her claws pierced through his neck and he scented his own blood on the water. Again. Bleeding out for his family as he always had.

“She is a current,” Mitéra said, her voice low and quiet. Her hair swallowed them up, like they were the only two people in the ocean. “You will follow that current. Use her to the best of your ability, my son, my child, soul of my soul. You will take her from her safe home. You will make her trust you. And in doing so, you will learn the secrets of the achromos.”

“I do not wish to return to her. I wish to serve our people.”

“And so you will. With every secret you unveil from her pale soul, you will save us. Arges, you are the first to find one unafraid of our kind. Draw her to us.” Mitéra backed away, just enough for him to see a hundred colors swirling in the depths of her eyes. “Go collect your strange new friend, Arges. With her at our side, we will finally destroy them all.”

Five

Mira

Mira leaned over her boss’s shoulder, looking at the reports that the drones had given them. Unfortunately, she’d done a lot more damage than she’d thought.

Of course, no one else knew that. They assumed that the undine had done it, and if she wanted to keep her head attached to her shoulders, she would let them continue to think so.

He hissed out an angry breath, leaning back in his chair and throwing the controller onto his desk. “Damn beast. There’s no way we can patch that.”

“Are you sure?” She pointed at the section of the wall where she’d removed all the bolts. No one could see it from the drone, thankfully, but any video feedback through the water was hard to tell details. “Look right here. It’s just one panel we have to replace, and we could probably get in there.”

“Yeah, if anyone could get there.” Dennis swiveled all the way around, glowering at her. “The lift isn’t working, Mira. You know that. I know that. None of the electrical works at all.”

“Then we get one of the suits to head down there and patch it up.”

“They don’t know how, and those suits aren’t rated for any detailed work and you know it.” He sighed and shook his head. “Damned shame. All of our work is down there, and we can’t get to it. Not to mention the heads are going to have a field day trying to re-home the rest of us.”

Mira honestly hadn’t thought it would come to this. She was certain, in fact, that they would be able to fix the tunnel. That’s why she’d blocked it all off.

They could see the blast doors had held. She claimed that she’d closed it from the inside and then used one of the escape pods to get to the elevator shaft. But... They’d see the lie in that story once they got back to their section of Beta. All the escape pods were exactly where they were supposed to be.

This was why she wanted to be part of the team to fix it. If she could release one of the pods, then the ocean would do the rest of the work for her. It would be dragged naturally in the elevator's direction and anyone who wondered why it wasn’t right up next to it, would assume that the currents had caused it to drift.

Mira shouldn’t lie, because this was the problem with lying. She was dragged in every which way, trying to keep the lie going when she should have come clean hours ago.

Dennis looked her up and down, then rolled his eyes. “Listen, you’re in no state to be giving advice on this. Go get warmed up, put on some dry clothes. They set the kitchens up for us for the time being. I’ll come get everyone when they know where they’re going to put us.”

She could use a warm shower. Mira had spent her day with the other engineers, mostly in that damned elevator shaft, trying to get down to their old home. Unfortunately, that left her crusted from top to bottom with salt, stiffening her hair and clothes. She had a blanket over her head and tucked underneath her armpits, but she couldn’t let this go. Not when she knew there was a way for her to get her coworkers back to their section of Beta.

“Dennis?” she asked as he strode out of the control room.

He paused at the door, looking at her over his shoulder. “What?”

“Will they make us leave Beta?”

His shoulders rounded forward. “Every city needs engineers, Mira. Just... maybe not so many of them.”

So they weren’t going to another city, which was good news. But it also probably meant most of the engineers would end up in other jobs. Herself included, considering she hadn’t been on the team for very long.

She sank down into the wheelie chair he’d vacated and stared at the computer screens. They had drones all over the facility to keep an eye on everything, plus cameras on every external surface they could put them on. She’d always known they existed, but Mira had never been up here before.

Engineers kept to their own quarters unless there were areas for them to fix. Like she had when she first saw the undine. But this? She’d never thought there was a room with sixteen different screens, all set into an ancient silver table with so many buttons and joysticks that she didn’t know what she could or couldn’t touch.

But it seemed rather self explanatory. She peered around her, making sure that no one had remained in the room. She was still alone. Just her, a bunch of screens, and a wall of windows that looked out onto a quiet ocean. They were so high up in the tower, most likely all she would see were the whale migrations when they happened.

Oh, she bet they had a great view.

The only thing out there right now was deep blue. So much blue that sometimes it made her eyes go out of focus, like there was something massive out there just waiting for her to see it.

Shivering, she touched one of the buttons. Just a green one, since red seemed like a bad idea. One of the screens in the middle flickered, then changed what it was looking at.

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