Quinten Montihan, her mentor and sire, the head of the Montihan Settlement and owner of its agri-lots, looked away from the controls and caught her eyes.
“Good. We may need them.”
It was enough for her stomach to ball up into a fist, hollow and hard. Rylie stepped away from him and looked out the window toward the water she could barely see. The sheath of the dagger rested firmly in her grip.
Chapter Seven
***
Netto overlooked theagri-lot. It was the nearest to the settlement and had only taken twenty minutes of travel by watership. They never fully left the shallows and not much but schools of fish passed beneath the boat.
The mist dispersed as the morning sun came out. He rubbed his hands together, waiting for the ship to slow down. They approached a barricade of rocks that lined the agri-lot. The water within the lot was shielded by those rocks and it gave it a mirrored effect. He could see everything, straight down to the sand and nuggets at the bottom, and the abundant, undisturbed wildlife throughout.
Zeph hunched over their personal sensory system that fed them continuous updates.
“You smell like her.”
Netto looked back to see his partner wearing a lopsided smirk. He did smell like Rylie but had filtered it out. It was safer that way. “Not for long.”
Zeph’s smirk widened. “There’s not much out here. Should we be on the lookout for anything...monstrous below the waters?”
“We should always be on the lookout,” Netto replied, checking his own gear as the glass enclosure lifted away from the boat and pulled back into its panels. It went down in threes: the top deck lowered first, followed by the stern, and once that had peeled back from the seal, the doors dropped straight into the ship. What had looked like a bullet now appeared as a high-tech tugboat.
“You’ve been in these waters before,” Zeph stated more than asked.
“The oceanic survey was never completed.”
Zeph chuckled, then leaned back into a huff of full-on laughter. The noise of his sardonic snigger had Janet appearing from the steps, and it died away into a smile.
“Leave it to the government to lie.” Zeph’s eyes never left the girl as she came forward. “Good morning, beautiful.”
Netto tuned them out. The ship came to a smooth stop beneath them and when he looked over the side, the water was visible under the mist. He linked with Zeph’s readings and found nothing unusual within the vicinity.Do I even know what unusual would be?
He peeled off his shirt and flexed, running diagnostics on his internal metalloid structure. There was one thing he and Zeph had in common, that nearly all other Cyborgs couldn’t relate to: salt-water shifters had to constantly maintain themselves from the deterioration that water brought.
The need to be in it, constantly. An obsession.
