Sinking Depot

The concrete floor buckled upward, throwing all three of us against the iron wall panels.

A wall of freezing seawater, mixed with thick plumes of black grease and smoking red mist, poured out of the drainage grates at the far end of the hall. The sweet, nauseating smell of wild berries and burnt sugar hit my tongue instantly, cutting through the salt air.

"It's the fog!" the second guard screamed, his hands flying to his helmet to check his visor seals. "The intake filters blew out!"

Through the rushing water, a shape emerged from the dark drainage pipe.

It wasn't on all fours anymore. The creature was larger, its charred-gray skin covered in thick rows of wet, barnacle-like scales that had grown over the volcanic rock layer.

Its long arms ended in the same jagged bone talons, but its torso was wider, its ribs expanded to accommodate a massive, water-breathing lung structure.

Cynthia had adapted to the ocean.

She looked through the blue light of the corridor, her crimson eyes locked onto my face with a terrifying, ancient focus. Her split jaw opened, a torrent of black fluid and saltwater spraying across the concrete as she let out a shriek that drowned out the fortress foghorns.

The first guard raised his rifle, his finger freezing on the trigger as he initialized a blind-fire burst into the smoke.

"Die, you bitch!"

Cynthia didn't try to dodge the rounds. She blurred through the freezing water, her bone talons swinging in a swift, upward arc that caught the guard directly beneath his ballistic visor.

The force of the strike shattered his neck instantly, throwing his limp body twenty feet down the hall into the rising pool of seawater.

The second guard panicked, his hands fumbling with his sidearm holster as he backed away toward my position.

"The keys!" I yelled, shoving my bound wrists into his chest. "Unbolt the cuffs or she will kill both of us in this pipe!"

The soldier didn't listen. He drew his pistol, firing three rapid shots into Cynthia's chest as she closed the distance.

The bullets sank into her scaled skin with dull, wet thuds, the wounds closing with thick black fluid before the shell casings even hit the floor.

Cynthia caught him by the front of his armor, her talons digging through the Kevlar plates as she lifted him off the deck.

With one violent, effortless twist of her arms, she hurled him through the thick safety glass of the two-way monitoring window behind us.

The glass shattered into a million sharp shards, and the guard went silent among the debris.

I stood alone in the knee-deep seawater, my back pressed against the iron door of the secondary bay, my bound hands shaking as my sister stepped through the smoke toward me.

The freezing seawater swirled around my shins, carrying the oily black grease of the lower intake pipes.

"You look tired, Valerie," Cynthia whispered.

Her voice carried that strange, multi-layered echo, vibrating against the wet concrete walls of the flooded corridor. She stopped five feet from me, her scaled, barnacle-crusted shoulders heaving with a wet, rattling gasp.

The charred-gray skin of her face twitched, the crimson pupils in her ruined eyes tracking the rapid pulse of blood in my throat.

"You aren't my sister anymore, Cynthia," I said, my voice shaking despite my best effort to keep it flat.

I pressed my back harder against the sealed service door.

"The ocean didn't save you. It just made you heavier."

"The ocean is quiet, Valerie," she hissed, her split jaw parting to let a stream of black fluid drip into the rising seawater. "No sirens. No doctors telling us our hearts might stop. Father tried to build a cage for me in the clinic. Thorne tried to build a cage for me in the lab. But the water goes everywhere."

She raised her right arm, the jagged bone-like talons extending with a sickening, wet pop as the cartilage shifted.

My eyes darted down to the dead guard lying half-submerged in the debris of the monitoring window. His knife was still strapped to his combat belt, the black steel handle glinting beneath the blue lights.

It was less than three feet away from my left boot.

"You think Father loved me best because I was the unhealthy one," Cynthia said, taking another slow step forward.

The water splashed around her thick, scaled calves.

"Yet he looked at you and saw an insurance policy. And me, he looked at me and saw an expense. But look at us now. Who is bleeding?"

"I am not playing this game with you, Cynthia," I said.

I dropped straight down into the freezing water, my shoulder hitting the surface as I slid forward on my knees toward the dead guard's belt.

The biometric cuffs around my wrists buzzed an angry warning tone as the sudden kinetic movement triggered the internal resistance lock.

Cynthia lunged.

Her talons sliced through the air where my chest had been a microsecond before, the points scraping a deep, white gouge into the iron service door behind me.

My fingers locked around the black handle of the knife.

I didn't try to stand up. I rolled onto my back, bringing the heavy metal hilt of the knife up and jamming the narrow steel tip directly into the digital override port on the side of my biometric wrist cuff.

A sharp, electric spark bit into my skin as the knife blade bridged the internal circuit board.

The cuffs gave a high-pitched beep, the digital latches popping open with a small snap that released my wrists from the dead weight.

I scrambled to my feet, the knife gripped tightly in my right hand, my breath ragged inside the damp corridor.

Cynthia pivoted on the wet concrete, her eyes fixing on the open cuffs floating in the water.

She let out a low, vibrating growl that rattled the fillings in my teeth.

"You still only have one heart, Valerie. You can't outrun the water.”