Maybe everyone was a little “door happy”. But no one wanted the entire city to flood, and they’d been having a lot of issues lately.
A neighboring city, Gamma, had suffered that. No one survived. It was years ago, of course. Her father had told her stories about it when she was little. He’d claimed the entire city flooded, everyone dead. And the corporations had decided it was too big of a city to lose. So they’d sent in a team, him included, and they’d found the leak. Then they’d pumped all the water out and watched the bodies float back down to the floor.
Shaking off the ghosts and ever present anxiety, she finished sealing the rivet for good. The melted metal would last quite a while, but eventually she’d probably be back up on this wall fixing it again. For the time being, though? Their water problem was fixed.
Pushing her goggles back up, she clicked the release on her harness and down she went. It took a bit to untangle herself from the ropes, but then she had the room to herself. No one would expect her for a few hours yet. So instead of returning to her boss with her report, she pulled an apple out of her metal lunch box and stood in front of the twenty-foot glass wall. It went higher in the center, the dome stretching so far up she guessed it might be thirty or forty feet.
Crunching into her apple, she walked around the room. There was so much water outside that glass. So much.
She remembered getting a little sick looking at it when she was small. Sometimes, looking at the vastness of the ocean was too much. She’d grown up in engineering quarters. They weren’t so lucky, like other professions. Most of her life she’d only had a single window in her room, and even then it was just a view of a rock wall. A tiny porthole barely bigger than her head was a lot different from this.
Some lizard brain part of her mind whispered this was dangerous. So much glass surely couldn’t hold up the entire weight of the ocean. And there was a lot more water than land.
Still. It was pretty.
A brightly colored fish flashed next to the window, and she followed its path. It seemed to be drawing her along, its silver side flickering every time it moved about five feet and then waited for her.
Did fish play with humans? She’d heard the rumor that people in Alpha Quadrant actually kept them as pets. They’d make another glass jar, like the ones they lived in, and then watch the fish swim around. Was it doing that to her? Maybe, to these fish, she was the pet.
Snorting, Mira bit another too big bite of her apple and paused right in front of the largest glass pane. No way. The fish wasn’t playing with her, just like the folks in Alpha weren’t playing with any fish in a bowl.
A shadow passed over her hand. Strange, because she hadn’t seen any large animals since she’d started welding. Every now and then, she was treated to the sight of a massive whale in the distance. And sometimes at night she listened to their haunting songs as they swam by the city. It was beautiful, and for some reason, it always made tears sting in her eyes.
Mouth full, still chewing, she looked up to find the source of the shadow and froze.
A monster hovered in front of the glass. His black tail, so long it tangled in the kelp, was at least ten feet long. Blue slashes of fins, so deep they blended in with the water, undulated all along the black scales. It stretched up to his waist, seamlessly turning into that pale, almost gray skin. His body was as all the rumors claimed. So handsome it was painful to look at, and eerily like the gold sculptures that surrounded her.
Dark claws on his hands were intimidating enough, but it was his black eyes that felt like they’d somehow captured her soul. Black, entirely. Inky and dark, they stared straight through her as though she was nothing. Just a maggot wriggling beneath him. Long dark hair floated around him, perhaps waist length, although there were thick cords interspersed through the strands, much thicker than her own, almost like tentacles.
And if the rumors were true, his plush mouth was full of razor-sharp teeth. He tore through his prey like a shark, but so much more intelligent. So much more dangerous.
Fuck, she shouldn’t be here alone. The undine—what her people called his—rarely came around the cities. And if they did, it was only for a shitty reason. They were known to attack cities like her own and perhaps had been behind the sinking of Gamma. But they weren’t seen around her city. No one in Beta had seen an undine in... years.
Unless they were watching her people. Using routes like this one, where they knew no one was going to be in the room while they passed by.
How long had he been watching her? Had he seen her working? The fire should have startled him away. It scared everything else.
Why was she frozen here staring at him, terrified, when she should be running?
Her eyes darted to the crack in the glass and after a second, she realized he looked in the same direction. So they were intelligent. He’d watched her body language as though he was familiar with it, and when he saw the crack, a wave of rippling electricity lit up his body.
He looked down at her and grinned. Those sharp, gleaming teeth were a clear threat.
There was so much hatred in that gaze. Beyond anything she’d ever seen before.
They moved at the same time. She bolted for the door and he swam for the crack. She heard him. The massive bulk of his body as he slammed down on the glass and... and...
It held.
She spun to look at him as she reached the door. Some curious stupidity made her look back. The black, undulating tail laid on top of the glass, and the undine stared down at her. He lifted his claws and scraped them down the surface, the sound echoing and ear piercing. He snapped his teeth, then looked up and sped away. She watched him getting smaller and smaller toward the surface, and then he turned around.
Oh.
Oh, no.
She was frozen again, her mouth open as he torpedoed through the water toward the glass and she thought for an insane second, “He’s going to kill himself.”
If he hit the glass, the force of his body would surely send him catapulting into the room with the water. What did he think was going to happen? He’d be in the glass dome as well. He’d be stuck in here, like those fish the people in Alpha supposedly kept.
But he wasn’t stopping, and she wasn’t dumb. Mira spun around and hit the button to open the door. She slid underneath it as soon as there was enough room for her to crawl and hit the button on the opposite side with a punch that almost broke her finger. The blast doors started coming down and she hissed out an angry breath.
“Come on,” she muttered. “Come on.”
Impact.
The sound of his body hitting the glass was a sickening thud, like someone had jumped from too high. It shook the room like an earthquake. Everything rumbled around her, the metal framing that she’d just fixed whining with the pressure and then the rush of water.
Liquid rushed out of the room over her feet and then stopped as the blast door finally sealed shut. The rubber held. The metal was so much stronger than flimsy glass. It would hold even if the undine got ideas.
But some part of her, some worried, fearful part, opened the tiny viewing door that was even smaller than her porthole in her bedroom. Her hand was shaking as she slid it open and peered into the now flooded room.
Bubbles obscured most of her vision, but she could see her lunch box floating in the distance. Water filled the space, but there was no giant sea creature floating inside it. How had he managed that? She was certain he would strike it so hard that he wouldn’t be able to...
A hand slapped the viewing door. Black claws raked down it, leaving deep furrows in its wake. And then she saw him. So close she could see her own reflection in those black eyes. His tail coiled behind him, looping like a large tentacle of its own.