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And then suddenly Omara and I were alone on the ’qa again. My mind felt ten stones lighter for not having a human mind nearby. I shook my head and shuddered.
“He never knows how to end these things,” Omara said, with a chuckle.
“He’s probably too nervous that you’re reading his thoughts.”
“There is that, too,” she agreed, as the boat above us turned its engines back on.
“Well?” I pressed. “Is he hiding anything?”
“What, you would have me give my boss good reason to be scared of me?” She blinked at me with both sets of her eyelids, horizontally with her flesh-toned ones, and vertically with the nictating membranes she had to further protect her eyes.
“You heard him—I am the brother of the king of krakenkind,” I said, with a snort. “And if something happened to me, Balesur would be pissed.”
Potentially.
I supposed it depended on how long it took Sylinda to quiet Gerron’s mind tonight.
I felt a twinge of guilt over leaving again—but Sylinda was right. Me leaving for good was the best way to be free and not hurt anybody.
Omara gave the ’qa between us a thoughtful thrum. “Royce’s mind is very full. He’s cunning when he needs to be—but when he doesn’t, he’s earnest. He suspects he doesn’t have all the information he should about this assignment, but he’s not lying to you. Plus, he’d never even try around me. He knows better.” She gave me a smug look, then held up her hand, as the white lids flashed across her eyes again. She was communicating with the humans above, this time thankfully not including me.
“Here are your directions, Ceph,” she said right afterwards, impressing a directionality, a depth, and several topographical images inside my mind, along with a few pictures taken with a remotely operated vehicle’s external camera.
It was dark in the pictures otherwise, but I knew that didn’t indicate the time of day—it meant that the bottom of the trench was beyond light.
And when her membranes opened back up again, she thought out to me. “And what I asked for, and received in trade—and still do—was you.” She gave me a smile, showing all of her teeth. “Or one of your kind.”
It took me a moment to remember my question, the one I’d asked before Royce had joined our ‘qa.
“I like the manatyls. They need protecting. But there’s only one of me in the sea, and the other sirens have siren-things to do. Royce, however,” she said, and I caught something on the ’qa from her, like the faintest brush of a sweet memory, before it was hidden away. “I have something he needs, and thus he does something I ask,” she finished quickly.
“So you’re responsible for him granting us—my entire people—the Monster Security Agency’s aid?”
I let all of my disbelief and astonishment flood onto our ’qa, which made her laugh, before beaming sweetly at me and nodding. “Yes! So don’t waste it!” She propelled herself forward with her tail to kiss the water near my cheek and then whirled over herself, to start stroking away faster than I could’ve given chase if I’d wanted to. “Good luck with your human, Cepharius!” she thought back at me, just before she was out of reach.
I stared back into the deep blue behind me. The Kalish Trench was far away and right now there was some strange human woman ready to risk her life to work in it—all I could hope was that she would be better at controlling her mind than Royce was.
chapter 6
ELLE
Ten hours later, the compression chamber I was in shifted. “Prepare for docking!” the intercom announced.
I was honestly surprised that Arcus Industrial hadn’t decided to yank me back out. Either there was sunk cost fallacy involved, or someone really liked the paper I’d released on an ancient avian harmotone language last year. It’d taken me months of studying old relics before I realized that the hieroglyphs on their tablets represented actual sounds based not only on the image itself, but on the depth of the glyph’s carving. It made sense, because so much of the native South American avian tongue involved changes in volume rather than changes in the individual sounds—I’d just been lucky there was a centenarian Quetzalcoatl elder who recognized the sounds from his own great-grandmother, in his childhood, and who could independently confirm my theory.
Then again, I was trapped in this chamber with a bunch of crated supplies—maybe they just wanted to finish dropping things off at the lab before taking me back up again.
“Docking initiated!” the intercom shouted again, and I heard a solid thunk as the chamber I was in mated with the laboratory.
I got up and walked over to the door, waiting for the go-ahead to open.
If I opened it up a hair too early, I would die faster than I could even think about it. The air inside the chamber would burp out, and the ocean would rush in and hit me like a brick wall. The concussion might kill me, but if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be crushed; flesh was far too solid for that. But any air that was inside my body would shrink down, instantly compressed to the current undersea pressure, which meant my lungs would be yanked from the inside of my rib cage and shrunk down to the size of golf balls—and then I’d definitely pass.
“Airlock safe! Door clear to open!” was announced overhead, and I was able to dial the locking mechanism open on my side, like I was opening up the vault of a safe, retracting the two massive arms that were braced into either wall of the chamber.
The same thing was happening on the other side of the door, I knew, and soon I’d meet the team I’d be entrusting with my life—assuming no one had secretly fired me.
I let go of the breath I’d been involuntarily holding as the door in front of me opened up, revealing a curvy dark-haired woman and a lanky Norwegian-looking man.
