Page 9 of Call of the Fathoms (Deep Waters #4)

Nine

Alexia

W hat the fuck was he doing? He should be killing her. All he had to do was squeeze the vice of his tail and soon enough, she would be dead. She could feel the power in his muscles as he tightened that tail around her. The fins on the sides of his hips kept them from falling, so they just hovered where they were.

And what was going on with his eyes? She had looked into them enough now. They were pitch black, without a hint of white in them. But now they were an oil slick. Black water covered by a thin film of beautiful colors that shimmered the more she looked into them.

Her gut rolled with the knowledge that she shouldn’t be looking into his eyes. Some inner part of her screamed to look away, and that she was losing her chance to do so. But she couldn’t tear her gaze from his. Those colors had caught her in their grasp.

“What are you doing to me?” she tried to say, but the words came out slurred.

She plummeted. She wasn’t sure if they were falling through the ocean or what was happening, but all of a sudden she wasn’t floating in the dead center of the sea with a monster holding her in his tail. She was standing in Harlow’s room.

Alexia shook her head in confusion. Was she losing her mind?

Looking around the room, she tried to ground herself. Everything was the same as she’d always seen it. Opulent, beautiful, maybe a little different from normal, with the drapes the wrong shade of pink and the bed was more rumpled than usual. She couldn’t feel her feet on the floor, either. Or even react when she looked right up at the bulbs of light. Her eyes didn’t water, and she didn’t get the burned orbs in her retinas.

What was happening?

The doors opened and in walked Harlow and... herself. Alexia stared at her younger version, back when she had first been gifted to Harlow. Not a single ounce of nerves showed on her features, and she remembered how numb she was then.

She’d been just out of training when she’d been given to her Original. Everything had felt so new and wonderful and she’d eaten up all the attention without an ounce of shame. She had been one of the first in her class to get her own Original.

How magical it had seemed. How honorable it had been.

“You are going to live in the room beside mine. I hope you will be satisfied with the size.” Harlow chuckled. “The last one wasn’t happy with how small it was. You behemoths never seem to be comfortable, though.”

“I will be fine,” her younger self said, with zero emotion in her voice at all. “Thank you for the honor, Original.”

“Please, call me Harlow. I don’t like all that Original nonsense. It makes me feel old.”

And then a voice whispered in her ear. A deep, echoing voice that sounded like the rumble of a sea, “So you serve one of the Originals.”

Alexia spun toward the voice, but there was no one behind her. She was alone in this memory. But it didn’t feel like she was alone.

Furrowing her brows, she searched for where the voice had come from. While the other two women in the room continued to talk about expectations and how Alexia would be essentially a slave to the Original, she looked for that voice.

Finally, she paused in front of a mirror that didn’t have her own reflection. Instead, she was staring into dark, swirling eyes and a wide open maw that spread wide the moment their gazes met.

“Good job finding me,” the undine snarled. “Now show me more.”

She was spun out of this memory and thrown deeper into the recesses of her mind. She tried to push him toward memories she didn’t care if he saw. Memories that were easy enough for her to live through again. Training where she fought other genetically enhanced soldiers. The mundane parts of her days where she didn’t have to think about Harlow or anyone else. The commissary, or the other guards. Anything he could see other than the reality of her life.

She didn’t like to think about the times when she was a child, but that was immediately where he took her.

Alexia stood there and watched as she was pulled out of the test tube where they grew the children. Tubes that were filled with a viscous liquid that was breathable, but not really. It was enough to keep the specimens alive, but she remembered waking up from it. The small version of herself, still nearly five feet tall at only six years old, landing on her hands and knees.

She vomited up all that yellow goo, watching as it splattered onto her hands where she crouched on the ground. Not a single scientist had helped her. They just left her on her hands and knees as they moved to the next genetically enhanced child, and the next. They were all disposable. No one had cared that there was a little girl in front of them. Because to them, she wasn’t a little girl. She was a product they had designed.

“I wondered what was different about you,” the undine murmured in her ear. “They made you, didn’t they?”

“I am not having this conversation with you,” Alexia snarled, turning away from the sight of herself that still stung. “Get out of my head.”

And then... She could feel it. A power in her that he didn’t control. This was her mind. Her memories. If she didn’t want him to see what he was seeing, then she could make him get out.

She thrust against the presence in her mind, shoving at him with all her might until she felt him move. The bulk of him wasn’t knotted around her mind as much now, and she could at the very least change the memory. It was still warped, still felt like striding across sand, but it worked.

Suddenly, they were back in Harlow’s room. The Original was prattling on about something to do with her hair, and that was better than watching herself as a child.

“No,” the undine snarled, and the tension around her mind knotted yet again.

Then she was standing in the med bay. She had been a little girl at this point too, although she was fourteen and over six feet tall at that point. They’d sat her down in a chair and strapped her arms into it.

“Just for protection,” the doctor had said. She didn’t remember who it was that administered her first shots, and as such, all she remembered was a faceless man in white who had injected her.

She turned her eyes away from it. It was the first time she hadn’t felt like a person. Even when they were training her, brainwashing her, telling her who to be and how to protect, she had still felt like herself. Alexia. An individual with thoughts and desires and hopes and dreams.

This memory made her remember that she used to draw on her arms. Weaving patterns that looked like waves. She’d steal pens from the doctors and redo them every time they scrubbed her skin clean of the black etchings. She’d always wanted to tattoo the patterns onto her skin. She didn’t know where the thoughts came from, only that she liked to look at them.

“What are they putting in you?” he asked, his voice deep and cajoling. “What do your people give someone like you to keep you under their thumb?”

“Get out of my head!” she cried out, crouching and putting her hands over her ears.

Her heart was racing. She could feel her breath sawing in and out of her lungs, and some rational part of her mind remembered she was still underwater. She couldn’t keep breathing like this. Her air was finite and soon enough, she would run out of oxygen. She needed to control her emotions.

She needed her medicine.

Struggling to get through the memory, she turned away from the sound of her own struggles. Back then, she’d fought it. The memory warped into the next time they’d given her the drug, and she could hear herself begging to not have them put whatever it was in her body.

“Please,” she had screamed. “Please don’t. Don’t do this!”

The doctors never listened. She was injected, and then all her struggles disappeared. Memory by memory, she argued with them less and less each time until finally they handed her a box of needles and told her to take them back to her room.

And she’d done it ever since. It had never changed. Every morning she injected herself with the medicine that kept her quiet and composed, no feelings to interrupt with the job that was meant to be done.

“How strange,” he muttered in her ear. “You have never sought freedom on your own.”

That wasn’t true, though. She’d been seeking it lately, and no one knew it yet.

The moment she had the thought, she was suddenly sitting in front of Doctor Barker again. Not watching the memory as she had with those older ones. Time had given her the ability to see all those old memories through another lens. Or perhaps she had simply become a different person since then.

This memory was new.

Fresh.

Aching.

She sat in front of him and remembered how he’d asked her why she was feeling. His words still echoed through her mind, but worse, it was her own thoughts that seemed like they were real people speaking all around her.

“You’re broken. You’re feeling. You’re thinking.”

The worst one was the quietest, but she could hear the tiny murmur, “Maybe it’s time to go.”

Rage burned through her. She was not a weak-willed woman who would listen to these foolish thoughts and the folly that came with them. She was a warrior who would fight until her very last breath and she would not give up this easily .

With a cry of rage, she thrust him out of her mind and staggered back into reality. The cold hit her first. At some point, he must have turned the heater off of her exoskeleton. Her entire body was freezing, icy in a way she hadn’t felt for ages. Teeth chattering, she glared at the undine who wasn’t hiding in the back of her mind now. He was still coiled around her, looping his tail like a snake around her entire body until she couldn’t even move her arms.

“Fuck you,” she spat out. “And stay out of my head.”

Already his eyes were glowing again. That whirling kaleidoscope of colors that had called to her originally, but now she knew what it was.

Alexia turned her face away from him, hissing out a breath when a clawed hand cupped her jaw. He was trying to force her to look at him. He wanted her to have to stare into his gaze because he wanted to steal even more of her memories. But they weren’t for him. They were for her to suffer through alone.

A voice chirped in her ear. “Oxygen at fifteen percent.”

If she didn’t get back into her ship, he was going to drown her. And he knew this. He understood her language. His hearing seemed far too good to not have heard the warning along with her.

She wiggled her fingers. Her arms were pinned by his tail, but she thought if she could get her hand to just rotate, then she might grab her knife. It was heated, just like the rest of the exoskeleton. She just needed to distract him long enough to grab it.

“You like to paw through my memories?” she said. “Seems like something an undine would have to do. You damn well know I’m not going to tell you a single thing, not even if you torture me.”

That clawed hand moved up from her jaw to the mask attached to her face. Alexia struggled a little harder as he squeezed it and the glass creaked.

His hand could crack through her only oxygen and he would drown her right here, right now.

The undine leaned ever closer, that open maw of his sharpened teeth coming ever closer. “Do you want to see how long you would last with me torturing you, virago? I think we both might enjoy it.”

There! She grabbed onto the handle of her knife, hit the button to heat it, and twisted it into his tail. He let out a little sharp sound, but then his tail only tightened even further. Thankfully, that worked in her favor. The heated blade sank deeper, bubbles rising from where it was boiling through his flesh.

Finally, he relented. The coils dropped from around her and it gave her just enough time to hit the other button on her suit that fired up the shoes. Propelling herself away from him was easy. But she was so frozen it was hard to get back to her ship. She overshot the entrance and nearly ended up on the wrong side before grabbing onto the opening with an achingly cold hand.

An echoing roar of rage seemed to shake the very ocean itself as she hauled herself into the ship.

Water dripped from her body in a river as she sealed the door. Coughing, she yanked the mask off her face and breathed in the stale air within her ship. It would get better as the filtration was used more. They hadn’t used a ship like this in a very long time. Breathing heavily, she avoided hitting any of the important buttons as she struggled to stand.

It was a small battleship. Just enough room for her to walk five steps to her bed, five more steps to storage, and five other steps to the pilot’s chair. A tight space, no doubt, but it would do well enough.

“Computer,” she called out. “Turn the exoskeleton offline.”

“Affirmative.”

The suit opened, and she staggered out of it. Soaking wet in her skintight black suit and shivering, she rushed to the pilot’s chair and sat down.

“Now, where are you?” she hissed. “I’m going to light you up with as many lasers as this ship can shoot.”

But she couldn’t find him. Again. He was so good at hiding in these murky waters and there was only so far her lights could break through. Somehow, it seemed almost more dusty than it had been when she’d first exited the ship. She narrowed her eyes, ignoring the drip of saltwater from her hair down into her eyes.

“Come on. Show yourself, you big bastard.”

A small flicker of a tail. That was all the warning she got. Then she opened fire. Over and over she shot into the darkness, hoping that at least one of them would catch him. She’d already shot him once, stabbed him, but she really didn’t know if that was going to be enough to take him down. He didn’t seem easy to kill, that much was certain.

When she stopped shooting, she inhaled in the sudden silence. There was no way she’d killed him. He was too strong.

A thud echoed throughout her ship. She looked up just in time to see his grin once more where he was attached to the roof of her ship. He gave her a little smirk and then seemed to yank on something.

The lights in her ship flickered. Was he...

She screeched as he yanked again and all the lights on her ship went out. He’d taken the damn batteries off the ship. How he had managed to yank them off, she had no idea. The amount of power it would take to forcefully remove welded metal was a shocking display of strength.

But she didn’t have time to think about that once her ship started a slow decline through the sea.

“Computer!” she shouted, spinning to press the buttons that would display the ship’s life support, power supply, and ability to move. “Why are we sinking?”

“The ship cannot sustain life support and continue idling.”

“Then send the ship home.”

“We are too far with only minimal battery life. Docking ship.”

“Docking ship?” she repeated, screaming now with anger. “Where the fuck are you docking the ship?”

“The sea floor.”

She was sinking to the fucking sea floor. As she watched the undine disappear into the darkness above her, she flipped him off while he gave her a little wave. He’d sent her to a tomb in the darkness.

Bastard.