Page 9 of Song of the Abyss

This was the first time in her life she’d wondered if he was maybe right.

Her heart raced in her chest, thundering against her ribs until she wondered if it was possible to die from fright. Bitsy kept flashing a message in her eye piece but she didn’t have the faintest idea what it said because she just couldn’t get herself to read right now.

She had been alone in this room. She was certain of it.

Hadn’t she?

What if she hadn’t been alone? What if someone had walked right up behind her and she had no idea? All she could think was that her father had enemies. What better way to get to the old man than by killing his most prized possession?

But as the water slowly stilled, she could see there was nothing in there. There was no one in the room. Her panicked gaze flickered over everything before she settled on that truth. She was alone. She had been alone.

Something in her whispered that she’d seen something reflected in Bitsy’s glass. An impossible thing because her mind couldn’t conjure up the details of an undine that perfectly. She had only seen the drawings of them on that fateful day when she’d lost her hearing, and even then, it wasn’t like she could remember it all that well.

No. There was no undine in the city. That had never happened before and it wouldn’t happen while she was alone here.

Then she read the message that Bitsy kept flashing in front of her eyes.

“There is someone here.”

Gulping, she shook her head. “No one is here, Bitsy. You can see that as well as I can.”

But again, her little droid was always the argumentative one. “No, someone was here.”

“The maid came in and out.”

This time in dark red, underlined, with wiggling text so it looked like the kind of message a serial killer would leave on a mirror. “We are not safe.”

Anya told herself that the droid was overreacting. They’d both had quite the fright, and it still felt like someone was looking at her. She swore she had sensed eyes on her the entire time she was in here, but she was also talking with Ace and figuring out a plan to get people into Alpha. They had a plan to destroy this place from the inside out, so of course she felt like someone was watching her.

If anyone caught her talking to someone off Alpha, then they would send her in for questioning. Let alone if they got their hands on Bitsy and saw the schematics that she was sending to someone off station.

But there was no one in this room. She was just paranoid because she was doing her work out of her room, and her clip must have just... flung out of her hair. That was the only explanation she could think of.

Reaching up, Anya ran her fingers through the strands. “Maybe the clip had too much strain on it,” she muttered.

Bitsy’s reply flashed loud and clear. “You’ve used that clip a hundred times.”

She had. It was her favorite because it had been her mother’s. It was the only thing she had left of the woman that gave her life, because her mother had died in childbirth. Unfortunately, she’d left Anya alone with a tyrant for a father.

Pinching her nose, she took a deep breath. “Do you see where the clip went?”

By the time she opened her eyes, Bitsy had circled an area in the pool. Because of course her clip had flung off so far that it was now deep in the water. She couldn’t leave it there, though. It was the last bit of her mother, and Anya would do insane things to keep it.

Looking around for one of the pool nets, she groaned as she realized no one kept the nets around their pools in this section of Alpha. There was likely some kind of cleaning house nearby where they kept everything. But if she stepped outside like this, then she would be swarmed by people. And she had no idea how much the salt water of this pool was going to ruin her mother’s clip.

“Fine,” she muttered. “Two birds, one stone.”

“What are you doing?” Bitsy asked.

“I’m going to get my clip back. And I’ll be soaking wet, so Dad will send me right back to the house to get changed. And then I will decide that I won’t come back. Easy. I don’t have to go to the party, and I get my clip back.”

“This is stupid.”

“You’re stupid,” she replied, before yanking her dress over her head. She took Bitsy off as well, setting the droid on the ground even though she knew it was probably making some kind of noise in displeasure. The little thing was already rocking back and forth like it wanted her to pick it back up.

But she needed to get that clip, and she refused to let fear control her. She had let it control her life for years after the accident. She wasn’t a little girl anymore, and she was braver than she was back then.

In nothing but her bra and underwear, she dove into the pool. She’d been swimming her entire life, and she found it as easy as breathing. At least without currents. From what she’d heard, it was harder to swim outside of Alpha than it was within it.

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