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It did look a little lived in, however. There were scuffs from their boots on the smooth metal here and there, and I saw a flash of a poster taped inside one of the cabinets where Donna was restocking supplies.
The sight of it made me smile. Humans were going to human, no matter where they were.
“Who is that?” I wondered aloud, when she put away some condensed milk and I saw it a second time.
“McDreamy, d’uh,” she said, looking over her shoulder in no small amount of horror. “You really don’t watch, do you!”
“No, sorry,” I said and winced apologetically.
She snorted to let me know what she thought of that, and then it was as if she read my mind. “I put it there because Marcus never cooks. It’s not sexual harassment if he never sees.”
I couldn’t help but grin at her. “Unassailable logic.”
She nodded smartly. “Thank you—and hand me that?”
I helped her restock, learning where everything was in the meantime, while Marcus handled disconnecting the smaller submersible and sending it back aloft.
“Want to see your room?” she asked when we were finished.
“Room” implied I got to close a door on them—a rare thing on a scientific adventure. “Yes?” I said hesitantly, braced to be introduced to a bunk bed in a space we all shared.
“You really do,” she promised, and then led the way through another one of the circular doors into another short hall.
I could tell all of ALRI was built out of separate modules—we walked past an engine room, and she announced, “Don’t go in there, and don’t ever touch anything,” then took us past a large operations node, with several desks in front of a bunch of computer screens, currently reporting in scrolling data, and she tsked when I got distracted. “This is all Marcus’s, don’t touch anything here either,” she said, jerking her head further down the hall.
And there was an actual hall, with actual doors in it. Circular doors, clearly less substantial than the ones between the prior modules—but there were quite a lot of them. “They had to house the workers when this place was being built,” Donna explained. “This is mine,” she said, “and this is Marcus’s.” She pointed at the second, and then we reached the third. “And this is yours,” she said, rolling it open to show me like she was doing a magician’s trick.
Inside, there was a space like a college dorm room, with a small desk, a narrow bed, and—“A window?” I asked with a gasp. “Down here?”
Marcus caught up, ducking into the room to join us. “Yeah, it’s insane.”
The window faced out onto utter darkness, just a yawning, gaping black.
“If I turn the outside lights on, all sorts of critters will swim up to say hi,” Donna said, preening a little at my awe. “But don’t worry. I won’t do that without telling you.”
I stepped forward, waving my hand in front of me, realizing the window was slightly concave, bubbling forward into the nothingness beyond.
“I put a blanket over mine for the first two weeks,” Marcus offered.
“Scared of the dark?” I guessed, looking back at him.
“No. Because I have no idea how the thing doesn’t shatter.”
“Oh,” I said softly. I hadn’t been worried before—but now I was.
“ALRI is full of surprises—wait till you see the dock.”
I was mystified. “Where I just came in?”
“Nope. C’mon,” he said, and led our group back into the hall. We went back to the office-node—which I now realized was the center of the operation, and that all the rest of the halls radiated off of it, rather like a starfish—and took a different door.
And it, too, opened onto a curtain of blackness—only in here, I could also hear lapping water.
Because one whole wall of the room was the ocean.
If I hadn’t so recently stared death in the face twice, my sister’s and the potential of my own, I would’ve jumped back into the hall we’d come from and slammed the door on utter instinct.
“What the fuck is that?” I demanded, feeling anxiety swell in my chest.
