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The woman spoke at once. “Did they send you with lettuce?”
I was speechless. “Uhh?—”
“Nothing’s ever going to be crisp down here, Donna, sheesh,” the blond giant spoke up as he pushed his hand out. “I’m Marcus.”
“Maybe they sent snap peas?” Donna asked, forlornly, before laughing. “I’m Donna.”
“What I’m hearing is you miss the color green. I’m Elle.” I shook both their hands, while looking beyond them for more people. “Is it just the two of you?”
“And baby makes three!” Donna said, pointing at me.
“Ha ha.” I laughed awkwardly, rather than let on how her joke stabbed me to the core. It wasn’t her fault, and I didn’t want either of them to think I was an emotionally wrecked weirdo.
We had two months down here together for them to discover that.
At least I wasn’t fired.
“Just the two of us,” Marcus confirmed, as he edged around me in the narrow neck of the hall that connected our two abodes. “We’re more than enough, as you’ll come to find. Let’s unload first, then we’ll show you around.”
chapter 7
ELLE
I helped Donna bring in all the crates of supplies that’d come down with me, becoming just as pressure acclimated as I had, tucking them into a storage alcove in the hallway, while Marcus filled the submersible back up with color-coded duffle bags full of...trash?
But some of them made clinking sounds when he set them down, and unless there were beer bottles on board, or one of them was distilling their own hooch, I doubted that was the case.
“How long have you all been down here?” I asked as Donna and I finished. She started going through the crates, popping off lids to look for fresh vegetables, while I helped take up Marcus’s cause. His duffle bags were heavy, and now that I was carrying them, I could see that all the zippers were tag-locked.
“That’s classified,” Marcus grunted as he set a bag down.
It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t joking. “Oh.”
“Welcome to the private sector,” he said, with an amenable smile.
“How long does it feel like we’ve been down here? You can ask that, though,” Donna said, coming up. “Because I feel like we’ve been down here for long enough to miss the entire last season of Gray’s Anatomy.”
“Donna,” Marcus groaned her name as he walked into my submersible to take one last look around.
She didn’t care, she pounced on me. “What happens?”
“I—I don’t watch.” And even if I had, I would’ve stopped the second my life started intersecting with hospitals in bad ways.
“What? What good are you! Who doesn’t watch Grey’s?” Donna said, stomping her foot.
I raised both hands helplessly. “I would’ve, if I’d known.” A little white lie wasn’t going to hurt anything.
“Yeah, you seem like the helpful type.”
“Okay, that’s everything,” Marcus said, returning, then looked to me. “Last chance to stowaway back home.”
And go back to my sister’s grave and my soon to be ex? I put my hands into my Arcus Industrial branded pockets. If my new boss hadn’t fired me, I sure as shit wasn’t going to fire myself. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with me for a bit.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “Just remember later on, I gave you a choice,” he continued, then shooed both Donna and I back, spinning shut the doors.
My jaw dropped a little at his phrasing, but Donna grabbed my arm before I could say anything. “There’s the whole rest of the lab to see—come along!”
She picked up a crate and made me do the same, then we took them both into the kitchen, which was the nearest wing to the chamber dock. It seemed state-of-the-art to me—I was used to going out to digs and making due with whatever we could hike in with us, sometimes for weeks at a time, so I was entirely okay with a lack of fresh greens.
