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CHAPTER THREE
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Monterey, California: July 28, 2022

Dinner was quick, pizza bolted down as fast as Tory and Luis could chew while Tory’s parents looked on in amazement. They knew not to interfere when something like this came up. Tory was dancing along the edge of scientific discovery, getting ready for the moment when she would have to trust her instincts and jump into the unknown.

Shoving the last bite into her mouth, Tory stood, already pointed toward the door. A hand locked around her wrist. She stopped, turning to look quizzically at her mother.

“Mom?” she said.

“I know you think this is an answer, and maybe it is; I don’t understand the kind of science you do, any more than you understand how the human body fits together,” said Katherine. Her voice was grave; her eyes were even graver. “But baby, if it’s not an answer, if it’s not the piece you’ve been looking for, don’t let it break you.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” said Tory. She deftly extricated her wrist, bending to press a kiss against her mother’s temple before she said, “I’m already broken,” and followed Luis to the door.

Luis’s car was a first-generation Tesla, inefficient compared to more recent models, some of which could run on solar power for a week between charges. It still ran, and buying a new car was a hassle, and so he stuck with the familiar. It was parked at the end of the charging row, no parking permit on the dash. A ticket fluttered there, pinned under a windshield wiper like a butterfly under glass. Luis plucked it and shoved it into his pocket, where it would wind up too crumpled to read. His family came from old tech money, Silicon Valley startup royalty stemming from the age of Microsoft and IBM; he could afford to ignore his parking tickets, knowing the apps monitoring his police record would pay them dutifully and in a timely manner.

Tory envied his casual relationship with money. As long as something didn’t crest the mid-five figures, he could pay for it on a whim—and often did, keeping their lab outfitted with all the latest toys, subscribing to all the relevant journals, and guaranteeing neither of them would starve while takeout was an option. The only things he didn’t pay for were the data bands, partially because he was less obsessive than she was—he already had years of data to collate and review—and partially because they’d agreed that once her penny-a-piece scans began bearing fruit, he’d throw their entire research budget behind whatever feeds would serve them best.

He’d offered to take up the subscription fees for the feeds she had already deemed necessary. Several times. But for now, this was the way Tory could contribute and not feel entirely dependent on him. It was something. It was small, but most of the time, it was enough.

“I’m okay with this as long as you’re taking blind stabs at the target,” he’d said. “But as soon as you narrow it from ‘the ocean’ to ‘this stream, right here,’ I’m going to start paying for whatever we need.”

Tory had been narrowing ever since. Years of narrowing, of eliminating other trenches, other dead spots, focusing more and more on the fifteen-hundred-mile-long geographic feature known as the Mariana Trench. It had been inevitable, in some ways. The Mariana Trench had been the last known location of the Atargatis before communication stopped. The ship had been found some distance from there, but that could have been a matter of drift; there were strong currents in that part of the ocean. Her answers were waiting in the Mariana Trench. She knew it.

Luis looked at her worriedly as he unlocked the car. “You’re making the scary face again.”

“Which one?”

“The one that says you’re going to burn down the world if that’s what it takes to get what you want.”

“It’s good to know I’m easy to read.” She opened the door and slipped into the car, buckling her belt and waiting for Luis to join her before she continued, “I’m so close, Luis. I’m so close. Anne’s out there, and I’m going to find her.”

“Tory… Anne’s dead. You know that, right?” Luis put a hand on the wheel, making no effort to hide his concern. “She died before I met you. Figuring out what happened to her isn’t going to bring her back.”

“I know.” Anne’s bones were at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they hadn’t been devoured by some creature of the deep, recycled into the body of the living ocean. Tory would have been content for her own final resting place to be in the belly of a giant squid, but her sister? Her land-loving, bright-eyed sister who’d only ever wanted to make a name for herself? No. Anne deserved better. Anne deserved a pine box in an ecologically sound graveyard, lying under six feet of nutrient-rich soil, going back into the ground. Anne was never going to have that. The least Tory could do was solve the mystery of why not.

Anne was supposed to have been famous, to have been bright and beautiful and worried about getting old. She wasn’t supposed to be dead, or intrinsically linked to what most people believed was a massive maritime hoax by a corporation with more money than morals. If Tory couldn’t make Imagine apologize for taking her sister away, she was damn well going to make sure the world knew the truth. Anne hadn’t died for nothing. She hadn’t died because the crew fucked up, or because she’d made a mistake.

She’d died because Imagine had discovered mermaids, and, upon finding them, hadn’t been able to control them.

“Do you really? Because sometimes it seems like you think there’s going to be a quick and easy answer to this question.”

“I want there to be. But quick and easy both passed us by years ago.” Tory shook her head. “I know we have a lot of work to do. I know we’re not even halfway there. Most of all, I know we can’t stop looking just because it seems like it’s too much.”

“Hey, now.” Luis smiled, allowing his worries to melt away in the face of the sheer joy of scientific progress. “I never said that.”

He hit the accelerator. Tory watched long enough to be sure they weren’t about to back into one of the other cars in the parking lot before allowing her attention to turn to the printouts she was clutching in both hands.

The data was open to interpretation. She knew that. All data was open to interpretation, and there would always be people ready to disagree with any theory that arose, ready to argue that the water on Mars didn’t count because it was the result of slow geologic processes and not weather patterns, ready to argue that the bacteria clustered around volcanic vents was not proof of extremophilic life. Scientists liked to argue about discoveries almost as much as they liked to make them, and arguing about someone else’s discoveries was the best game of all.

And yet.

And yet it was difficult to see what those peaks and valleys could be, if not the evidence that something deep below the pelagic zone was mimicking a sound heard on the surface: some sort of undersea echo repeating the roar of an engine that had died years before, going silent forever.

And yet it was impossible to look at the lists of disappearances in the vicinity of the Mariana Trench—so many that they rivaled the fabled Bermuda Triangle—and not see the claw of some unknown predator at work. The number of people lost in that slice of the sea was startling, but the ocean had never been gentle where humanity was concerned; sailors were forever being washed overboard, passengers were forever being surrendered to the weather. Ships sank in storms. The seas of the world were a vast and interconnected graveyard, every inch riddled with bones and haunted by the ghosts of the lost. Every mile of every ocean could be marked as the site of some “surprising” or “unexpected” death; humanity sailed, and the sea punished it for its hubris.

And yet. The number of whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals lost in and around the Trench was more than startling; it was unreal. Older pods tended to avoid the waters around the Mariana Trench, unless blown there by bad weather. Even some of the older sharks would go miles out of their way to avoid swimming through those waters. It was difficult to say what sort of memory a shark had, but they knew enough to stay away.

Something was down there. Something that could slaughter sperm whales and leave research vessels floating abandoned and unmanned. Something that mimicked the sounds it heard, using them to lure its prey. Something that defied belief. And whatever it was, Tory was going to find it, and make it pay for what it had done to her sister.

During the semester, Tory and Luis worked out of a lab at UC Santa Cruz. For the summer, Luis had taken a research position at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, not far from the wharf where the whale-watching tours docked. Both worked on their respective dissertations whenever possible, meeting to compare notes and verify that their research was still coming up with the same—or at least similar—results. Luis was seeking proof of hidden deepwater megafauna, for whales without eyes and dolphins adapted to dive so deep that the pressure should have burst their air-filled lungs inside their chests, for surviving megalodon and the source of the kraken myth. He pointed to diving bell spiders and geological off-gassing as proof that there could be air breathers in the deeps that never came to the surface. He used Tory’s sonar readings to argue that there were things down there, beyond the reach of even unmanned scientific vessels, with no need to seek the light.

“Sure, it’s not likely, and sure, it would throw a lot of what we think we know into question, but we have strong enough evidence that it’s worth chasing,” he said when pressed, expression calm and voice untroubled. This was a speech he’d been giving for most of his adult life. He had it down pat. “The ocean is the last great mystery in the world. We may as well pursue every clue it contains. We’ll have all the questions answered soon enough, and things are going to get very boring after that happens.”

Both Luis and Tory knew that it was his father’s money that made his theories even halfway palatable to the academic community; sure, he was chasing monsters, but he was funding more practical research almost as an afterthought, using it to create the structures and framework he needed. As long as he kept signing checks and doing solid lab work, the fact that his version of marine biology owed a great deal to philosophy and folklore could be overlooked.

Tory wasn’t so lucky. Since acoustic maritime camouflage wasn’t a recognized field, her official area of research was acoustic marine biology, using unusual sonar readings to create an accurate census of the population of the oceanic trenches and valleys. Geothermal imaging made topographical maps of the seafloor common, and they grew more precise by the year. Geothermal imaging couldn’t account for things like coral growths, shipwrecks, or cold currents, and it certainly couldn’t predict where the animals would be. Sonar could. Bit by bit, Tory was constructing a model of the living ocean, one that could shave decades off research and exploration. If that had been all she was doing—if that had been her focus and her passion—she could have written her own ticket to any research facility in the world. Privately held, military, scientific, it wouldn’t have mattered. They would all have wanted her.

Sadly, her passion was elsewhere, and everyone in her admittedly specialized field knew it. She was as much of a monster chaser as her partner, and she didn’t have the pedigree to make her seem respectable.

Luis pulled into his parking spot behind the Monterey Bay Aquarium, managing to fit mostly between the lines this time. There were only a few other cars present, and Tory recognized them all: they belonged to researchers and wildlife rescue workers. Anne-Marie was raising a group of orphaned baby sea otters, and they needed her at all hours of the day and night, causing her to virtually move into her closet-size office. Dmitri was tracking the long-term impact of desalination on the local plankton, expressing a very real concern that they were throwing the balance of the sea off, one filtered gallon at a time. His work required him to take water samples according to a rotating five-hour schedule, slowly shifting him around the clock and forcing him into a world of catnaps and constant caffeination. Bo just hated sleep, and avoided it in favor of the lab whenever possible. They were her people, in love with the ocean, forgiving of its foibles, protective of its boundaries.

To a point. None of them had lost as much as she had. She loved the ocean—she always would—but it needed to give back as much as it had taken from her, even if it could never return her sister. Tory looked at the sonar readings in her hands, tracing a line of data with her finger. The ink was dim under the parking lot lights, but she didn’t need to see it anymore. She knew what it said.

“What if this isn’t what we think it is?” she asked, and her voice was small and timid, the voice of a child who’d never been allowed to say goodbye, rather than the voice of a woman on the verge of a discovery that could change her life.

“Then we’ll keep looking until we find something that is what we think it is,” said Luis. “I know the answers are out there.”

“Thanks, Mulder,” said Tory, aiming a friendly punch at his arm.

Luis grinned and said nothing.

They had keycards and passcodes for building access after hours. The lights came on as they walked down the hall, then turned off again behind them. (The motion sensors were a bone of contention within the administration. The marine biologists wanted them set to the highest sensitivity possible, to allow them to track runaway seal pups and escaped octopi. The accountants wanted them turned down as far as they could go, keeping the building from being lit up like Christmas every time someone sneezed. The result was something that pleased no one, with the sensors set to notice the presence of “average” humans but nothing smaller. Some of the shorter researchers couldn’t get the lights to come on, and had to be escorted to the bathroom after closing time.)

The door to Tory and Luis’s lab was ajar. The pair stopped dead, looking at the gap between door and frame like it would explain itself.

“Did you leave the door open?” asked Tory finally.

“No.” Luis sounded more baffled than offended, but there was offense there too; he’d grown up so certain of his own privacy that it had taken him a while to realize that an unlocked lab was a lab at risk. Supplies were always running low, and people often “borrowed” things when they thought they could put them to better use. Since those things sometimes included data passes for the feeds, or supposedly confidential test results, locking everything was the only way to be safe.

“I was on the boat all morning, and I went straight home after I got fired.”

“I know.”

“So there’s no way—”

“I know.” Luis reached to the side, gesturing as if he were going to push Tory behind himself. “I’ll go in first.”

Tory rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. I’m the one who passed her self-defense class, remember? If we have an intruder, they’ll leave you with a broken arm and I’ll be carrying everything for the next three months.” Her voice only quavered slightly. She’d been tackling waves too big for her and problems beyond her pay grade since she was a child. She wasn’t going to let fear take her now. “Get behind me.”

Luis kept protesting as she surged forward and slammed the door open. The motion sensors snapped on, illuminating the room.

The man who’d been sitting patiently at her desk, so still that the room had forgotten he was there, smiled. “Ah,” he said. “Finally.”

Tory froze again, staring at him. Luis stepped into the room and stopped in turn. The man continued smiling.

He was handsome, in an expensive way: everything about him looked more designed than natural, as if he’d been refined in a factory for creating lovely, forgettable men. His teeth were white; his jaw was strong; his hair was dark and thick; Tory thought she would have trouble picking him out of a lineup after five minutes away from him. The only remarkable thing about him was the color of his eyes, a bright ice blue that would have seemed more ordinary on a sled dog. Even they might have been contact lenses, a flash of something spectacular to distract from the predictable whole.

His suit was clearly bespoke, and just as clearly expensive, fitting him like he’d been born in it. His polished leather shoes were a few shades darker than the briefcase beside his purloined chair. His hands were folded on one knee, a casual, easy pose that did nothing to make him seem more human.

“I’m surprised,” he said, in a conversational tone. “I was expecting you nearly an hour ago. Did you get distracted by some bright new discovery, one worth postponing the opportunity to change the world?”

“You’re trespassing,” said Tory. Anger flared in her like a lit match. Her eyes narrowed. “Who are you? This lab is private property. You can’t be in here.”

“You’re correct that the lab is private property. It belongs to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which does not fund your research but, as I understand it, is willing to let you conduct your work here in exchange for a healthy donation from Mr. Martines’s parents”—the man nodded toward Luis—“and in the hopes you’ll discover something that can benefit this institution. If you read the fine print of your contracts, you’ll find the aquarium reserves the right to allow anyone access to your lab at any time, providing they are confident the individual or individuals in question are not here to interfere with your research in any way. I assure you that I’m not here to interfere.”

“So why are you here?” Luis’s inflection mirrored Tory’s almost exactly.

The man rose, extending his hand for one of them to shake. He didn’t seem concerned about which of them it was. “My name is Theodore Blackwell, and I’m here as a representative of Imagine Entertainment.”

Tory stiffened, the blood draining from her face so fast it left her reeling. For one terrified moment, she was afraid she was going to collapse, leaving Luis to deal with this—whatever this was—alone. The moment passed. Her heart, while beating too fast and too hard against her ribs, did not go out on her; her lungs continued to fill. She was still standing.

“Get out,” she said, through clenched teeth. The soothing sound of the sea seemed impossibly far away.

“Miss Stewart, you’ve been asking—begging, cajoling, and occasionally ordering—Imagine to send a second expedition to the Mariana Trench for the past seven years, and for the past seven years, Imagine has been refusing. There was insufficient data to make a second voyage viable. As I’m sure you understand, Imagine remains in a highly precarious position where the events of 2015 are concerned. On the one hand, there is no one who wishes for answers more devoutly than my employer—no.” His voice hardened on the last word. “I see you preparing to contradict me, to cite the loss of your sister as proof that no one has suffered as much as you have. I concede that you’ve suffered. I do not dispute that you’ve paid a greater price than anyone anticipated. But your sister was not the only one lost at sea.”

Mr. Blackwell took a step forward. “There were dozens of Imagine employees on that boat. People I’d worked with for years. People I considered personal friends. My losses are greater than yours in volume, and again, I’m not the only one. Each of those people had a sister, Miss Stewart, or a brother, or a lover, or a parent. So yes, we want to know what happened as much as you do, if not substantially more. But there is always the other hand to consider. The hand which answers to shareholders and the court of public perception. The Atargatis was a tragedy—one the world has, by and large, allowed to be forgotten. The footage is dismissed as false; the tragedy becomes an unavoidable accident. The word hoax overtakes the much less pleasant slaughter. There was no hoax. The footage is real.”

“We knew that,” said Luis softly.

Mr. Blackwell spared Luis a tight smile before returning his attention to Tory. “Going into those waters for a second time will reopen old wounds and bring all the old accusations and armchair experts flooding back into the light. To use the maritime metaphors your people seem to be so fond of, we’ll be throwing out chum, and the sharks will come. A second voyage can only be undertaken under the most specific and particular of circumstances.”

“What are those?” asked Tory. Her jaw felt like it had locked in on itself. It was beginning to ache. It was oddly difficult to see that as a bad thing. If she was focusing on the pain, she wasn’t going to hit the man from Imagine with a chair.

“We must have new information that would allow us to get answers from sending another ship. A crew that will be careful, cautious, and invested. And absolute secrecy, of course. That goes almost without saying.” The corner of Blackwell’s mouth twitched. “Imagine will film everything for release if we’re successful—it could bring peace to those who’ve been questioning for the past seven years—but if we fail, or if what we find is less than savory, nothing will be said. We need people who understand that.”

“So you decided to sit in our lab like a creeper because you wanted to gloat at Tory about how you were never going to make her feel better?” Luis stepped up next to his partner, hands balling into fists. “I don’t know how you do things at Imagine, but where I come from—”

“Where you come from, disputes are settled by calm discussions in beautifully appointed boardrooms, while the people having the discussions pretend they’ve bucked the old trappings of the business world simply because they no longer need to wear ties. I know where you come from, Mr. Martines. You cannot frighten me by playing on the idea that you might commit violence. I know better.”

Luis frowned. “That’s not how this was supposed to go.”

Again, the corner of Blackwell’s mouth twitched. “My apologies. Next time I’ll have my office call ahead for a copy of your script.” He returned his attention to Tory. “I’m not here to toy with you or waste your time. I’m here to make you an offer.”

“What’s that?” she asked, warily.

“Imagine has been taking an interest in your research,” he said, still calm, still unruffled. “We find your approach to the mystery of the Mariana Trench fascinating. Sonar, for the depths where light cannot go. Ingenious, if unlikely to produce any truly useful results—but unlikely is not, as they say, impossible. Your findings have been remarkable.”

Tory’s eyes widened. She hugged the printouts to her chest, finally finding her voice as she demanded, “How do you know what I’ve found?”

“We’ve been monitoring the same data feeds. We’ve even been instrumental in convincing some of the feed holders to reduce their fees for you. Without informing you, of course. We didn’t want you to feel beholden to Imagine.”

“I would never!”

“We’re aware, Miss Stewart.” Blackwell shook his head, lips pressed into a thin line. “The filming aboard the Atargatis was never expected to be hazardous. If it had been, we would never have been there in the first place. We’re an entertainment company. We never wanted anyone to die. Had we possessed the slightest inkling that there might be something real out there to find, we would have handed responsibility for the mission over to a research group that could handle the more dangerous aspects of the project. Errors were made. People were lost. Some of their associates have attempted to blackmail the company, even after Imagine was found innocent of intentional wrongdoing. Not you. Not your family. You’ve never taken a dime from us—”

“I would never,” said Tory again, more hotly.

“—voluntarily,” said Blackwell. Again, that twitch of his mouth, like it was all he could do to conceal his amusement. “Imagine has been interested in your research for some time. Mr. Martines has provided enough financial support that our contribution has been… masked, shall we say. We’ve been able to slip certain necessary items to guide your professional development into the gaps he would otherwise have left.”

All those years. All those times when a data feed would become accessible exactly when it was needed, when a piece of equipment she would have sworn Luis didn’t care about had suddenly appeared in the lab, letting her work progress. Even the ease with which certain applications had been approved by committees infamous for their slowness and reticence to consider research not focused on feeding people or relieving the increasingly global droughts… Tory had taken all those things as a consequence of Luis’s family wealth, or her own status as a victim of the Atargatis tragedy, or both. Suddenly she was seeing them in a whole new light, and she didn’t like it.

“I can see this distresses you,” said Blackwell. “I knew it would. I recommended to my superiors that you be left out of this project. I was outvoted. Apparently, there are those who believe your expertise is key—or at least, that your presence on the vessel, as one of our scientific experts, will prevent rumors of hoax.”

“Project?” said Luis.

“Vessel?” said Tory.

“The Melusine sails from San Diego in three weeks’ time; preparations have been under way for years, only waiting for the science to catch up with the ambition. You have the sonar reports. You know how the equipment works. We—by which I mean the board of the Imagine Network—want you on that vessel when it launches. It will travel to the Mariana Trench. It will use its dynamic positioning system to settle itself in the best possible place. And it will, God willing, finally answer the question of what happened to the Atargatis. The entire voyage is being funded by Imagine, with support from several other interested parties. It will cost you nothing but time. It might provide the answers you seek. So.” Blackwell paused. “Will you set sail with us?”

“I don’t even see how that’s a question,” said Tory.

Blackwell nodded and reached for his briefcase. “Excellent,” he said, although his tone implied that it was anything but. “As it happens, I have the paperwork right here.”