Page 36 of Lover from the Waves

Kathryn’s brows rose. “Do you think this is from there?”

“I do not know.”

The man in the hologram was leaned to one side with an elbow on the armrest and his chin propped on his hand. His eyebrows were drawn low over unfocused, troubled eyes. It took Kathryn several moments to realize that she wasn’t staring at a still image; the man’s shoulders were gently rising and falling as he breathed.

At least ten seconds passed before the man tipped his head forward and combed his fingers through his short hair. “I’ve gone back and forth in my head over the last few months, and it only gets harder every day,” he said in a tired voice. “What course of action can I take? What can I do?”

He lifted his hand from his head, fingers splayed in a hopeless gesture. “File a report? This is a top-secret facility. It doesn’t officially exist in IDC records. A formal complaint will see me in a cell solely based on the information I’d have to leak to explain the situation. And all the way out here… I’m not likely to get out of that cell while I’m still breathing. Hell, these logs alone violate enough rules to get me stripped of my clearance and tossed in the brig. I’m not supposed to be recording sensitive information of any sort, even on approved IDC devices…which obviously this isn’t.

“But…” He threw up both hands, shrugged, and leaned back heavily. “Here I am. I can’t just stay quiet, and I don’t know if anyone else agrees with me. Talking about it like this again… Well, it doesn’t change the situation, but at least I’m getting some of it off my chest. Can’t get court marshalled if I don’t get caught, anyway.

“What they’re doing here is wrong. I’m just a grunt, and I don’t understand the science behind all this or how this halorium stuff works, but those things they made… They’re notthingsat all. They’re people.”

A strange, uncomfortable sensation—somewhere between anxiety and outright dread—pooled in Kat’s stomach, making it feel heavy and hollow at once. She glanced at Ector. His expression was solemn, his eyes fixed on the little hologram.

“It’s just…” The man in the recording tilted his head back, angling his face toward the ceiling. “Yeah, they don’t look like us, but they do at the same time. The staff treats them like animals.” He leaned forward, presumable closer to the recording device, and lowered his voice as he said, “What kind of animals can understand what you’re saying and talk back? And I don’t mean just mimicking words, but havingconversations.”

The man sighed and fell silent, eyes dropping to the floor. His expression wasn’t merely troubled, Kathryn realized, it was conflicted, almost tortured. Whoever this man had been, his inner conflict had been clear at the time of this recording.

After another sigh, the man opened his mouth as though to speak. No words came. He took a breath, hesitated, and shook his head. He reached for something just outside the hologram’s view.

The projection reverted to the enigmatic list that had first come up when Kat activated the device.

She looked to Ector again, whose solemn countenance hadn’t changed.

He met her gaze with his own. “There is more?”

“I think so. Most of these other items are marked in the same manner.” She worried her lower as she compared the numbers between several consecutive icons. “I think…I think those numbers are all times and dates, just recorded in the old pre-colonization calendar.”

Ector pressed his lips together for a few moments. His face conveyed a grave thoughtfulness but gave away nothing else. “Shall we continue to unravel this story?”

Kat let her eyes linger on him. Even she—knowing so little of Ector’s people and their history—understood that this unnamed man was likely referring to the kraken. The kraken had been mistreated by humans in the past. Kathryn couldn’t imagine what it was like for Ector to have this potential window into the world in which his ancestors had lived.

Silently, she touched the next selection on the list.

The hologram once again depicted that same room—the bed against the wall was easier to see now—and the same man. This time, he was standing. He moved away from the front of the unseen recording device and paced back and forth across the center of the room.

“Maybe I’m stupid for doing what I’m doing. I know I’m stupid for logging any of this, so…I guess I have a precedent set, at least. If they find me out, it won’t matter either way.” The man—a soldier, Kathryn realized suddenly—shook his head and uttered a short, bitter laugh. “Wish I could say this is all to document what’s happening here, that it’s for some greater cause…but I think it’s really just about trying to make myself feel better.”

The man paused and threw his hands out to the sides. “I’ve been talking to them. We all do while we’re guarding them—they get ordered around a lot, get told what to do. But I mean I was actuallytalking. Having conversations. And they are so much smarter than anyone seems to think. Hell, I’d guess they’re smarter than half the grunts in this place. They know a lot more than they let on, and they know when they’re not being treated right.”

He lifted a hand and raked it through his hair. “Andshe… She’s just beautiful. Doesn’t matter how alien she looks. Those eyes, that skin, her voice… They’re so much like us it’s a little frightening. And I don’t think any of them have ever been treated with even a little kindness. The first few times I interacted with them, they were extremely wary and distrustful. But they’re capable of hope. If that’s not a human quality, what is? Keeping them here like this,usingthem like this, is wrong. They’re looked at as slaves. As living tools.”

The man paced in silence for several more seconds, locking the fingers of both hands together atop his head. Little tufts of his short hair jutted up from between his fingers at wild angles, giving him a disheveled look. He didn’t speak again until he was at the front end of the holographic room.

“I understood when I pushed for my clearance that I’d see some sensitive, questionable stuff, especially if I got a combat assignment. But this…this is so far outside what the IDC is supposed to stand for. This is exactly what we’re supposed to be fighting against, isn’t it?”

The man frowned and leaned closer to the front of the hologram, eyes even more troubled than before. He extended an arm, and the recording ended.

Kathryn’s eyes locked with Ector’s again. He nodded once, and she proceeded through the logs. They watched many of the recordings, transfixed by this glimpse into the past, barely noticing as the moons climbed higher into the night sky. They paused between recordings, sometimes to swap meaningful but silent glances, other times to absently feed another piece of wood into the fire. The song of the sea remained a steady ambience throughout.

The pieces of information scattered across the recordings slowly came together to form a clear idea of the soldier and his circumstances. He never directly introduced himself—why would he, if his logs were his personal records?—but a few frustrated mutterings to himself suggested his name had been Luke. He was an IDC soldier who’d lived and worked in the place the kraken called home, often referring to himself as a grunt or a guard. The topics of his recordings varied. He didn’t always mention the mistreated creatures—and he never named them or described them directly—but they became an increasingly common subject.

His passion seemed to intensify each time he spoke of the creatures, especially a particular female. Kathryn recognized the gleam in the young soldier’s eyes whenever he brought up that female; it was similar to the light in Ector’s eyes when he looked upon Kat—full of longing, adoration…perhaps even the first signs of love. Just the memory of seeing those things in Ector’s gaze was enough to spark heat in Kathryn’s chest.

Luke grew increasingly certain that something had to be done, that some change needed to occur, as the logs progressed. He described his increasingly bold interactions with the kraken—and what else could those mysterious creatures have been? According to Luke, he’d even explained how they could access limited functions through the facility’s computer and its voice commands—mostly what he dubbed harmless information like ancient myths and history.

The information brought a soft smile to Ector’s face. Could it be that this human, Luke, had been the one to enable the old kraken tradition Ector had described earlier?

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