CHAPTER 1
Find something valuable.
Her father’s words followed Ariella as she slipped off the end of the dock and into the ocean, breathing a quiet sigh of relief as the cool water closed around her and the gill slits on her neck fluttered open.Home.She belonged here as she had never belonged on the surface, neither as a sick lonely child nor the “successful” result of her father’s experiments.
She surfaced for a moment, looking back towards the shore. The lab complex rested on its stilts, a graceless collection of prefabricated modules and rust-streaked metal that her father called home and she called a cage. He was probably watching her on the sonar display, recording her movements, just as he’d recorded every moment of the never-ending experiment of her life.
Beyond the lab, the village huddled along the curve of the bay. This far from Port Cantor and the technology of the spaceport, the majority of the buildings were crafted from wood and stone rather than plastic or steel. They looked far more suited to the sometimes harsh conditions along the coast than the lab, the two existing in uneasy proximity.
She looked up at the sky, already bruised black and purple. She’d felt the storm building all morning, the change in pressure like a tuning fork struck against her bones. The offshore winds were already whipping the surface into chaos—whitecaps and foam, waves that would send any normal diver scrambling for shore.
But she wasn’t normal. She never had been.
She sighed again and dove back beneath the waves, leaving the chaos on the surface as she descended deeper beneath the waves, drawing oxygen from water that tasted of salt and the coming rain. The bioluminescent specks covering her skin began to glow through the transparent mesh of her diving suit, casting a soft blue light into the murk as she arrowed through the water, heading for the trench that opened like a wound in the ocean floor.
The locals called it the Maw—a jagged crack that ran for kilometers along the continental shelf, dropping into a darkness so complete that even her enhanced vision struggled to penetrate it. There were stories about the Maw, stories about monsters in the deep and ships that sailed too close and were never seen again.
Fishing boats avoided the area because of them, but she knew better. The Maw was just rock and water and pressure, dangerous, but not malevolent. The real monsters lived on land, in boardrooms and laboratories, with their contracts and their calculations.
A small ledge ran just beneath the edge of the trench and she paused there for a moment, gently examining her treasures, small items that held no intrinsic value but which pleased her. She traced the smooth contours of a piece of sea glass, its jade green contrasting with the deep green of the water. Nearby lay a cluster of shells, their iridescent interiors catching the faint light from her glowing skin like scattered pearls. A length of red ribbon, its color still miraculously intact despite the salt water, drifted in the current. She’d arranged them carefully over months—each one a tiny rebellion against her father’s endless demands for more valuable items.
Find something valuable. Or at least something significant enough to make sure that Merrick Bane’s company would continue funding his research,she thought bitterly. He was always more concerned about his present expenses than the lingering debts of the past, even if Merrick was threatening to collect on that debt in a way that had nothing to do with credits. A chill not related to the temperature of the water ran down her spine, but she forced it aside, concentrating on her present task.
She had mapped portions of the Maw over the years, meter by painstaking meter, but vast swaths remained unexplored. She moved to one of those areas, then closed her eyes and began to sing. The Song began as a vibration in her chest, then pulsed outwards in invisible waves, bouncing off rock formations and sand and the ancient bones of creatures that had died long before humanity ever left Earth. The echoes returned to her like scattered light, painting pictures in her mind.
The trench appeared in fragments. Steep walls pocked with caves. Another ledge three hundred meters down where something metallic glinted. Deeper still, a cluster of thermal vents bleeding heat into the frigid water. The metallic fragment was the most promising, but there was something else down there, something that didn’t quite fit with the natural geometry of stone and sediment.
After a brief hesitation, she swam down in that direction. One hundred meters. Two hundred. The pressure increased with every meter, squeezing against her like a fist closing slowly. A normal human’s lungs would have collapsed at that depth, but all she felt was a pleasant tightness, as if the ocean were holding her close.
At three hundred meters, her lungs began their gentle reminder that even she had limits. Modified as they were, capable of extracting oxygen from water through her gills, they still preferred air. She had perhaps another ten minutes before the ache became insistent, another twenty before it became dangerous.
Come on,she thought impatiently, sweeping the trench with another burst of sound. The Song bounced back off of rock and sediment, the hollow spaces of ancient lava tubes, and finally, the anomaly she had sensed from above.
A small object, barely longer than the length of her hand, lay half-buried in sediment at the base of the trench wall, but when her Song touched it, a sound emerged, as if the object were answering her call. It was wedged into a crevice that suggested it had been there for a very long time.
Very carefully, she pulled it free of the sand. A length of polished bone emerged, pale as moonlight, shaped into a hollow tube with delicate holes along its length. Even in the soft glow from her skin, she could see the faint etchings that covered its surface—patterns that seemed to twist and flow like currents of the water.
A flute, she decided, or something like one. She had seen drawings of similar instruments in her father’s old books, although those had been crafted from metal rather than bone. Curious, she raised it to her lips, and directed the soft pulse of her Song through the instrument.
What emerged was her Song—but changed. Amplified. The single note spread outwards in waves rich with harmonics that she had never produced before. The trench walls seemed to hum in response, and far above, she could have sworn she felt fish turning towards the sound, drawn by something ancient and irresistible.
She lowered the flute, her heart pounding.
What are you?
The bone was warm against her palm, warmer than it should be, here in the crushing cold of the deep. She started to place it in her gathering pouch, then changed her mind and slid it beneath the neckline of her suit, tucking it carefully against her body before she began the long ascent towards the surface.
The storm had grown teeth while she was below. She felt it as she approached the surface—the increased turbulence, the churning currents that grabbed at her limbs and tried to drag her sideways. The water was warmer here, though still cold by human standards, and filled with debris kicked up from the shore. Sand and kelp and fragments of things that had been torn loose by the waves filled the waves.
She broke the surface and gasped, her gills sealing shut as her lungs took over, the air thin after her time in the water. Above, the sky was a roiling mass of black and gray. Lightning forked across the clouds, and thunder followed so closely that the sound seemed to strike her chest. She was further north than she’d realized, on the far side of the rocky outcropping that protected the small village harbor.
She was about to dive back under the waves when she heard a cry. Small, high, nearly lost beneath the howl of wind and crash of waves. A child?
She froze, sure that the cry had come from the base of the cliffs. The rational part of her brain said it was impossible. No one lived on the cliffs. The beach below them was rocky and dangerous, cut off from the mainland by steep drops and treacherous paths. No parent would let their child near that water during a storm, and no child could have survived those waves for long.
But the cry came again, and this time she was sure. There was a child in the water.
She didn’t think. Didn’t calculate distances or assess dangers or consider that the person crying out might recoil from her the way everyone else did. She just dove towards the sound, her body knifing through the churning water, the strange bone flute still pressed against her chest.
