Page 96 of Whispers of the Deep

His yellow finned brother was staring at him with a mixture of horror and respect. “It is, Mitéra. I have seen what he says. I was there with him when he first scouted it out with this human, but none of us knew there were many of them. If he knows the locations of all of them, then this would allow us to attack them from many angles. We would destroy the humans easily.”

“We are larger,” Arges interjected. “We are stronger. The humans would not know how to stop us.”

Mitéra’s bell swelled, growing immensely large as her eyes flashed a hundred colors. “Then we will destroy the achromos tonight. Release him.”

And as the bindings fell away from his wrists and tail, Arges permitted himself one moment to wonder...

What had he done?

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.

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