Into the Drowning Deep

  Someone was already there. The little blonde who’d been doing interviews on the foredeck during orientation. Her hair was paler than Hallie’s, ice white instead of wheat, and it looked natural, unlike Hallie’s own. (All three Wilson sisters were natural redheads. But red hair drew attention, and ASL interpreters were supposed to blend into the background, not pull focus from the people speaking. She’d been dyeing her hair since she was sixteen. She no longer knew what she looked like as a redhead.)

  “Hi,” said Hallie gingerly, approaching the water. “Do you mind if I join you?”

  “The water’s free,” said the blonde. She didn’t open her eyes. She had relaxed completely, a towel propping up her head to keep it from grinding against the marble edge of the tub. “Hot, though.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement.” Hallie eased herself into the hot tub, unable to stop herself from hissing as the water enveloped her. “Okay. Not kidding about the hot. Good, but … holy crap, that’s warm. I’m Hallie, by the way.”

  “The sign language interpreter.” The blonde still didn’t open her eyes. “I know who you are. Your file was pretty impressive. I’m Olivia. I’m one of your assigned media personalities.”

  “What’s a …?”

  “A media personality is someone who’s famous for being famous about being famous. We live in the shadow of our own tautologies.” Olivia sank a little deeper. “I report for Imagine. Sometimes I do photo shoots from the set of whatever series they’re getting ready to launch. I moderate panels at big conventions and get my picture taken with people who’re famous for actually having done something, and then people look at those pictures and they assume I must be more famous than I am, and I get more famous by association.”

  “That sounds—” Hallie stopped. It sounded awful and appealing at the same time, and the exact opposite of her own intentionally shadowed existence.

  Olivia cracked open an eye and smiled wryly. “I know how it sounds,” she said. “It started as a therapy thing, believe it or not. Debilitating social anxiety and self-image issues. My therapist was a comic nerd. She recommended cosplay as a way to step outside myself and see me the way other people did. One of the people who saw me was a scout for Imagine’s web network. They needed correspondents who looked good in a corset, I needed something to focus on that wasn’t how uncomfortable I was, one thing led to another and now here I am. I’m pretty cool with it. I like what I do, and I’m good at what I do, and I’m going to keep on doing it for as long as I can.”

  “Huh,” said Hallie. “I actually hadn’t started judging, but that’s good to know.”

  Olivia’s smile faded a bit, losing some of its wryness, replacing it with a vulnerability rendered surprising by the brevity of their acquaintance. Then again, they were both naked; that was usually good for shortcutting a few social conventions. “I didn’t think you were judging,” she said. “It’s just that people make assumptions, and sometimes it’s easier on me if I can … skip past them and get to what comes next.”

  “Makes sense to me,” said Hallie. “People make assumptions about me too.”

  “Really?” That coaxed Olivia’s other eye open. She looked much younger when she was paying full attention, like she was expecting to be graded. “Like what?”

  “Well, I don’t know if you noticed, since I was standing way back on the stage, but I’m almost six feet tall.”

  “I did notice that,” said Olivia. “It sort of stood out.”

  “Exactly. I’m tall, I’m curvy, I’m a natural redhead—I know people who assume I should have been a lingerie model or a centerfold. Not that there’s anything wrong with nudity, if that’s what you want to do for a living. It’s just weird sometimes to realize how many people start out their first conversation with me imagining what my tits look like under my clothes.”

  Olivia blinked. “You’re naked now.”

  “So you don’t have to imagine it.” Hallie shrugged. “I’m tall and hot and I decided to go into a profession where most of the time, it’s my job to be unobtrusive. Clearly I must have hit my head.”

  “The possibility exists,” said Olivia. “Your sisters seem nice.”

  “My sisters are brilliant and obnoxious and I have ceded our room to them until they stop yelling at each other.”

  Silence fell. It extended for several seconds as Olivia tried to find a way to ask the question that was clawing at her throat without seeming inappropriate. Finally she blurted, “How are they yelling?”

  “Even ASL has a yell mode,” said Hallie. “It involves a lot of waving and slapping of hands, and it’s distracting as hell, especially if you’ve been trained to pay attention to signing. I can’t tune them out and I don’t want to eavesdrop, so I came for a nice soak.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you, fellow soaker,” said Olivia.

  Hallie smiled. “You, too.”

  Elsewhere on the Melusine, similar scenes played out—some clothed, others not, depending on the participants. Scientists set up equipment. Porters carted boxes and suitcases from level to level. In the galley, kitchen assistants prepared the next day’s breakfast, taking rashers of bacon from the freezer and kneading the dough that would become the morning’s cinnamon rolls. And some people, of course, slept, confident in the knowledge that their journey had begun, that soon they would be making history.

  In her cabin, Tory paced, restless, unable to chase the specter of her sister away long enough to relax. Anne had sailed on a ship like this one. Anne had cut across these same waters (no, not the same; the Atargatis had set sail from Seattle, not San Diego; she had sailed the same sea, but she had sailed on other tides, borne ceaselessly toward a watery grave), had slept in a bunk like this one, had tried her best to make it home.

  “I’m coming for you, Anne,” Tory whispered, stopping by her cabin window and looking out on the dark water. The reflections of the running lights that dotted the sides of the Melusine twinkled like stars against the sea.

  “I’m coming to make sure everyone knows what really happened,” she said, and everything was silence. She crawled into bed.

  It was hours before she slept.

  The first active shutter drill began at midnight.

  It ended two minutes later, in failure.

  The Melusine sailed on.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Pacific Ocean: August 29, 2022

  Life on board the Melusine fell into a rhythm that was familiar to everyone who’d been part of a research expedition before, and faintly baffling to the rest of them. Meals were served from six to nine, noon to three, and six to nine again, accommodating the admittedly eccentric schedules of the scientists and technicians who swarmed the decks, monitoring their projects, stealing one another’s clipboards, and generally getting in the way.

  Jacques and Michi Abney staked out a place on the rear deck, running fishing lines off the back of the ship and celebrating each catch with a degree of enthusiasm that bordered on the obscene. They had a portable barbeque and would cook portions of their catches. Whatever they couldn’t eat would be thrown back into the water to attract bigger fish.

  (Their position at the rear was a compromise. They had originally been planning to fish off the side of the ship, until the people in charge of water sampling and analysis objected. Apparently the presence of lightly barbequed fish in their samples could throw off their results.)

  The security teams, as yet unneeded, spent their time drinking coffee and working on their tans. Quite a few crew members “accidentally” wandered into those tanning sessions. The captain didn’t stop them. Shirtless, well-oiled men were good for morale. Even Michi Abney seemed to think so, and would sometimes deliver platters of barbequed fish to the men. The lack of women on the security team seemed like one more clear indication that they had been chosen on the basis of their looks, and not for anything related to their qualifications.

  Tory’s lab was toward the rear, close enough for her to smell the Abneys’ grilling and as
far as possible from the engines. She had run various microphones and sensors from the sides of the Melusine, anchoring them with magnets to keep them from being lost as the ship moved, and spent her days analyzing her recordings, looking for signs that they were passing over something—anything—that didn’t sound like the sea was meant to sound. She was bent over her keyboard when there was a knock at her lab door.

  “Enter,” she said, not turning.

  “Really?” The voice was female, unfamiliar, and surprised. “I thought you’d ask who it was first. Are you sure you want me to come in? Because I will, but then I’ll be in, and you’ll have to live with that.”

  Tory spun on her stool. The lithe blonde she’d seen doing pickup interviews with the other scientists on board—the one who had tried to talk to her at the welcome banquet, the one she’d been dodging since they’d left the dock—was standing in the doorway. As seemed to be her norm, she was dressed entirely in white, this time a white sundress with ruffled straps that would have seemed more natural on someone ten years younger than she looked. (Knowing Imagine and the way it did its casting, that probably meant she was fifteen years too old for that dress. They always went for the ones who looked young. It meant they could stay on the air for longer.)

  “Oh,” said Tory, in a strangled voice. “I didn’t realize …” She stopped. Anything else she said would have been insulting or flat-out rude, and no matter how much she didn’t want to talk to this woman, she had to share a ship with her. The Melusine was huge. At the same time, it was a closed community. There was no escaping.

  “I figured,” said the woman, with a small, unhappy moue of her lips. “I know you have good reasons to avoid me. I’m not here to ask for an interview or shove a camera in your face. My contract says I have to at least try for an interview with everyone on board in a research capacity, but it also says that if I can get half of a research partnership, that’s enough, if the other half doesn’t want to talk to me. Your partner was really sweet. We chatted for an hour to make sure I wouldn’t be required to talk to you.”

  “So why are you here?” Tory couldn’t keep the whine out of her voice. This was the situation she’d been dreading since she’d realized an Imagine-funded voyage would, of necessity, have someone to fill the role Anne had filled when the Atargatis sailed: to chronicle and frame the complex, confusing process of oceanic research in a way that the audiences at home would be able to not only understand, but appreciate. Scientists were almost stock characters to people who didn’t have to deal with them directly; everything they said sounded scripted and foreign, because they were speaking a part of the language that was no longer commonly used at home. If it ever had been.

  “Because I know who you are, and I know why you’ve been avoiding me, and I know you can’t keep avoiding me forever, so I figured I might as well come down here and clear the air before we reach the Mariana Trench,” said Olivia. “Once we’re there, everything moves to the deck—as much as possible—and I’ll be running around with a camera crew, trying to make sure we’re present for any major discoveries. I can’t do that if it’s going to make you so uncomfortable that you can’t focus on your work.”

  “If you know who I am, you know why I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “I’m not your sister.”

  Silence fell between them, heavy as a stone. Tory narrowed her eyes. Olivia’s cheeks flushed a deep, painful-looking red, like an internal sunburn.

  “I mean … Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck me. I mean, just because I’m doing the job she did on the Atargatis, that doesn’t mean I’m trying to take her place. I’ve seen her reports. She was really good, but we don’t have the same reporting style, we don’t focus on the same aspects of a situation, we don’t even have the same inflections. She spoke French and German, I speak Klingon and Quenya.”

  “Quenya?” asked Tory blankly.

  “Uh, Elvish. From Tolkien. My point is, we’re different kinds of nerd who just happened to luck into being conventionally pretty and having a decent amount of presence on camera. I didn’t know you’d be here when I took this assignment.”

  “When did you take this assignment?”

  “About two months ago.”

  That made sense. Imagine must have been working on the Melusine long before the ship reached the point of being ready to go, and even if Tory’s research had been the last thing the mission needed, the company would have been getting the crew ready all that time. There were Imagine-funded scientists on board. Their research had been going on substantially longer than a month. There were porters who knew every inch of the ship—and the Melusine hadn’t been built overnight. Of course there were people who’d known before she did what they were signing up for.

  That didn’t make it feel any less like a betrayal to know that her sister’s replacement had known about the journey before she did.

  Tory swallowed, trying to put her personal feelings behind her. It wasn’t working. She wanted to yell, to rage, to tell Olivia she didn’t belong in this lab, that if anyone was going to be the face of the voyage, it should have been Anne. There was archival footage. There were recordings that hadn’t been used. There were all the videos Anne had sent home, videos that Tory knew had to be preserved somewhere on Imagine’s servers, alongside everything else that had been transmitted from the Atargatis.

  But this was already a haunted house. Would giving Anne’s ghost a face really have made it any better?

  “I’m sorry,” said Tory, swallowing again. “I’m just … I’ve been avoiding you, and I’m really grateful that you’ve let me, and I’m not ready for this.”

  “Are you ever going to be?”

  Tory paused before she said, “I don’t know.”

  “I need you to know, because my job says I have to be on that deck, and so does yours.” Olivia looked at Tory solemnly. “I want to respect your pain. I want to give you the space you need. But I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t respect your pain enough to let it cost me my job. I don’t respect anyone’s pain that much, not even my own.”

  “At least you’re honest,” said Tory. She felt numb more than anything; like the world was slowly, softly slipping away from her, leaving her suspended in nothingness. It was an interesting sensation. She couldn’t say she liked it. “I know you’re not Anne, and I know you didn’t take this job out of some weird desire to shit on her memory. I mean, intellectually, I’ve known that from the start. Imagine didn’t stop hiring people to be professionally pretty just because they lost one. That would have been silly.”

  “Silly, and not very profitable,” agreed Olivia. “Not too good for me either. I took this job because people scare the hell out of me.”

  Tory lifted an eyebrow. “How does that work?”

  “I’m scared of you, but there’s a camera between us. That makes you safe. I talk to you, and the camera catches everything you say, and I can review it later, at my leisure, when there’s no pressure to say the right thing or react immediately.”

  “But don’t you have to do that while we’re talking for the camera?”

  Olivia shrugged. “Sure. It’s just that you’re not talking to for-real Olivia when that’s happening. You’re talking to camera-Olivia, who is essentially fake and exists only so for-real Olivia can buy nice things.”

  Startled, Tory laughed. “Who am I talking to now?”

  “I’m not sure. I think mostly for-real Olivia, because there’s no camera. But I am using some of the breathing exercises my therapist taught me to keep from freaking out.”

  “I don’t do breathing exercises.”

  Olivia’s shoulders hunched.

  “My therapist taught me to think about the sound of the sea instead. It helps.”

  Olivia’s shoulders relaxed. She even smiled as she took a look around the lab. “This is where you work?”

  “Yup.” Tory finally pushed her chair back from the monitor, enjoying the way the wheels rolled across the tile floor. She waved her arms, indi
cating the whole space. “Luis has his fancy radar over there, and I have my fancy sonar over here. When I get a result that seems like it could actually be something, he reorients his sensors and takes as many readings from the same area as he can. I’m looking at sounds and he’s looking at shapes.”

  “Oh, I know what you’re recording,” Olivia said, looking embarrassed. “I go over all the video footage every night before sending a highlight reel to Imagine. I can usually arrow in on what’s going to play well with our audience.”

  “Right,” said Tory. She took a deep breath. “I can’t promise to be your new best friend. I’m trying to find out what happened to my sister, and you’re always … I mean, you’re just so present. You’re doing the job she should be doing, and isn’t.”

  “Because she’s dead.”

  Tory sputtered for a moment before she asked, “Are you always this blunt?”

  “When I have to be.” Olivia shrugged. “I have a job to do. Will you let me do it?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know.” She turned to head for the door.

  “Wait.” The word was out almost before Tory had consciously formed it. Olivia paused, looking back at her. Tory stood. “I know you’ve been to most of the labs on board. Do you want a tour of this one?”

  Olivia looked surprised. Then, almost shyly, she smiled.

  “I would love that,” she said.

  Below the Melusine, the living ocean drifted by.

  They were miles from any major landmass, off the shipping routes and away from all targets of military interest, sailing through waters that saw few vessels in the average year. They were skirting the Mariana Islands, never coming close enough to encounter the fishing boats that skated around them like bugs on the surface of a pond. The locals knew the Melusine would be coming through, had been warned both as a courtesy—a ship this size would frighten away most of the usual fish—and to keep vessels that didn’t want to be caught on film from crossing their path.