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“I was wondering what happened to you,” Marcus said, from the doorway, catching me.
I about jumped out of my skin. “Do the doors here not lock?”
“Not if you don’t lock them,” he said with a shrug.
“Whose was this?” I asked, holding the hair out curiously.
His eyes focused on it. He groaned, then hollered, “Donna!”
It only took her a moment to appear. When she did, she saw what I was holding and sighed. “Okay, look, just because Marcus treats me like a scullery maid doesn’t mean that I actually am one. We’ve had a lot of other scientists come through—I did my best,” she said, and shrugged. “I changed your sheets?” she said, apologetically.
One hair didn’t really disgust me, I’d traveled rough before. I just found the situation strange. “If other people have been here, why haven’t I heard about this facility?”
Marcus twisted his head like a confused puppy. “Did you or did you not sign an NDA the length of your arm?”
“There’s NDAs and then there’s hanging out a bar with other nerds drunk. I may not be much of a party animal, but when someone builds something like this,” I said, pointing at the frankly extraordinary structure surrounding us, “word gets around.”
“Not when those people are hired for Arcus Industrial. They don’t talk. Mr. Marlow makes sure of it,” he said, handing an Arcus-branded tablet over.
“I’m going to pretend that didn’t sound ominous as fuck,” I muttered, taking it from him. “How private is anything here?”
“All the bathrooms in the facility are—you’re allowed to shit in peace. Or agony. As the case may be, with Donna’s cooking.”
“You take that back right now, Marcus.”
He grinned at her, then looked back to me. “Other than that, once you’ve started your research, we’ll turn off the cameras to your room, and you’re expected to lock the door when you’re not in here. It’ll be keyed to your handprint, just for you.”
“Wait, are you telling me, I’m classified?” I asked, pointing at myself.
He nodded. “Precisely. None of us can get into this room from the outside if you don’t unlock it. So make sure if you have a medical emergency, you can somehow hobble to the door.”
I made a concerned face. “I’m waiting for you to tell me that you’re teasing.”
“I wish I was, but our instructions regarding scientists are very precise, Dr. Kepzler,” Marcus said and shrugged—and I realized I was going to need to go back to my maiden name, or make my peace with Grant’s last name haunting me for the rest of my life.
It was already the name I’d used on most of my accepted papers.
I ground my teeth as Marcus continued.
“We don’t even transmit out data. We send things out the old-fashioned way, on hardware.”
“Why?”
“Trade secrets. What’s that saying—two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead? Well, it’s a lot easier to keep secrets if you don’t port all your data into the outside world continuously.”
Which would explain all the duffle bags we’d shuffled back and forth, and all the armed guards on the boat I’d come out on, who’d appeared more mercenary than military.
“Huh.” It’d take me awhile to wrap my head around the reasons for all of this, but when he handed me over a tablet, I took it.
“Read up on your dossier and rest tonight. We’ve got your first time out scheduled tomorrow, after your bonding ceremony with the kraken.”
I was already stepping away from them, when I paused, not sure I’d heard him correctly, before slowly turning back around. “You’re...kidding, right?” I asked, and when neither one of them denied it, I went on. “No one mentioned that when I was topside.”
“You might’ve noticed, this is a ‘When Mr. Marlow says jump, we say how high’ situation down here.”
I shook my head strongly. “But I don’t want to bond to a kraken.” I was fucked up enough currently, the last thing I needed right now was someone else mucking about in my head. Krakens hardly ever bonded with humans, choosing instead to use telepathic intermediaries—because the problem with bonding was that it was almost entirely one way. Your small human-mind could telepathically talk to a kraken once they’d bonded with you, but those fuckers could see right into your soul and read every thought you’d ever had, from what you were currently thinking down to who you shared lunch with in the third grade.
It hardly seemed equitable.
