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Marcus gave my fear an accommodating nod. “It’s what we have that no other sea floor facility has had before. The ability to keep a portion of the space pressurized with magic.”
I finally hazarded to look around and saw the dive suits that were stored in alcoves along the wall. There were six slots, but only two tactimetal suits, with their umbilical cables neatly looped above them. I knew from the manuals I’d been given to read up on that they were each five million dollars a pop, and realized this was where we walked—quite literally, walked—them into the sea.
No chambers, no doors, no airlocks.
We just put on our suits and walked down the goddamned ramp.
“And that’s open water?” I wasn’t proud of the way my voice rose up, but I had to hear him say it. Because I could see it rippling and hear the slight sloshing sounds it made and scent the salt and what I assumed was deep-ocean funk in the air—if I was hallucinating, I needed to know.
“Yeah. If you cross that line, though,” he said, gesturing to a red-laser created square hovering about six inches on our side of the water, “without a suit, you’d die. Or if you fell in, got pushed, et cetera—no roughhousing in the dock room.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“And don’t put your hand through there either,” he went on, like he’d given this lecture before. “In addition to the pressure, that side of the line is fucking freezing, the same temperature as the water outside. We’re heated and powered geothermally, but past that line you might as well be in the sea,” he said, and paused. “Doctor Kepzler?”
“I hear you,” I said, even though I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the rippling blackness. It had the same quality as an old-fashioned static-y TV, or one of those magic-eye thingies—hell, even thunderclouds in the Midwest, if you were lying down on your back on the ground before a storm rolled by.
It felt like if you looked at it long enough you could see anything you wanted in it, up to and including the future, and despite all my PhD-level reasoning, the salty square of darkness had me in a chokehold.
“It’s like staring into the abyss, huh?” Donna asked.
“Yeah,” I whispered.
And just like in the proverb—somehow I knew the abyss was staring back.
I managed to rip my gaze away from it to look at Marcus though. “Are you going to tell me what my actual job is now?”
He jerked his chin up. “I’ve got a dossier waiting for you in my office. Go unpack and then come meet me.”
I walked back to my room unaccompanied—it wasn’t like I could get lost; there weren’t that many places to go—and my bags were waiting for me outside my door.
I brought them in and tossed them on my bed. The dark window along one wall held no interest for me now. I felt like I’d left a piece of my soul back in their “dock” room, and I was eager to go retrieve it, once I knew why the hell Arcus Industries had shipped me here.
I hadn’t brought much along—just more sets of plain cotton clothing, swimsuits, some underwear, socks, and no bras.
This was the first trip I’d gone on since the double. And I could remember standing in front of my dresser, packing, ready to open up my bra drawer out of habit, before I caught myself.
The nice people at the surgery center had given me some brochures about breast replacements, and I’d hunted down information on the internet. It would just be another surgery to heal up from; it was a common enough procedure.
But I couldn’t imagine doing it just yet.
Because to have breasts again would mean that things were getting “back to normal”, and after Lena’s death, I didn’t want anything to be. My sister and I had fought like cats and dogs, but only because yelling was our love language. Growing up we were both so self-assured, and confident verging on cocky. We knew we would achieve anything in any field we desired, and we had. I’d become a historian and linguist for ancient monster civilizations and she’d gone on to work for a Michelin chef.
What I hadn’t realized was how much of my own success was possible because she was there. She wanted to hear about my expeditions, and was very likely awake any time I called, no matter the time zone. She’d fly out to meet me when she could and give me grocery lists of exotic ingredients to smuggle home when she couldn’t. After our parents died, we’d been each other’s support system, and when something good happened to me, the first thing I wanted to do was talk to her. Same if it was something awful.
So “fixing” what was “wrong” with me, so that I would meet other people’s expectations, felt like it would be a denial of what we had—and permission for me to carry on.
I didn’t want to fucking carry on.
I wanted precisely what I’d had, when I’d had her on speed dial.
I stood in one place too long, struck by grief, which seemed to be my only current long-term relationship—then I made my way to the bathroom to splash water on my face. It tasted strange, and I guessed it’d been desalinated from the water outside. I blinked it out of my eyes, regretting not looking for a towel first, when I spotted something strange on the counter.
A long, blonde hair.
My hair was a shoulder-length brown, and it didn’t match Marcus or Donna.
So either there was someone else I hadn’t met here at ALRI and they were lying to me, or?—
