Chapter 30
Thirty
Ellie
Ellie should have known he wasn't going to bring her somewhere just to enjoy themselves.
But it had been nice while it lasted. She'd liked lying on top of him, listening to his breath as he slept.
She'd pretended to sleep with him, maybe even dozed off a little herself.
But she hadn't been able to sleep completely.
Not while the most remarkable thing happened to her. Seeing Proteus at ease, relaxed, trusting her not to harm him while he rested? It was a gift she would treasure for the rest of her life.
She'd watched his eyes move underneath the lids as he dreamt, trying to guess what she thought he might be watching or doing.
Perhaps he was swimming through the waves, scheming some other plot.
Maybe he was fighting the kraken off. Trying to keep her safe in a glorious battle between two ancient gods.
But no, she liked to think he was dreaming of what they had done. That the taste of her was still on his tongue, and that his mind was going back through all the pleasure she had given him.
Even now, as she walked through the room trying to find the panel he had told her about, all she could think about was the pleasure they had found in each other.
She hadn't even realized it would feel like that.
No wonder so many people in Tau had chased it for hours on end.
She would have too if she had known it would feel so good.
"This panel?" she asked, finally seeing a small square in the wall that looked like what he had said. It was etched there, almost as if someone didn't want anyone to find it other than the person who had made it.
She bent down, looking it over before planting her hand against it and giving it one firm press.
The panel shifted into the wall and then turned around to reveal a touch screen on the other side. "Seems high-tech considering what you said this place used to be," she muttered.
Once the panel turned on, the controls were pretty easy. She just had to enter a few additional coding pieces to bypass the password she didn't know, and replace a few of the wires in the back that were easy enough to reach. And then voila. She was in.
Proteus shifted closer to her, dragging himself across the floor so he could look as well. "This whole wall should be screens, if you can pull them all up. The permissions are lost on me, though. I don't remember what was required to—”
She'd already tried out a code, and the panels were all rotating around. Exactly as he said they would.
There were likely thirty screens on the wall. Many of them flickered on and off, and a majority remained black. But they were there.
"How did you do that?" he asked, but his eyes remained glued to the screens.
"They’re the same functions that Tau used. I had a feeling the passwords might be the same." She shrugged. "Maybe they knew about this place."
"If they did, then the people who ruled your old city knew more than they told anyone. How many of these screens are active?"
Running a few diagnostics took time, but soon enough, she had a report.
"It looks like five of the cameras are still online.
The rest are either non functional, that looks like thirteen, and a few of them are fixable but they need software upgrades.
It looks like they used to use..." No, that couldn't be right.
She leaned closer to the screen as if that would make the coding change. "Huh."
Proteus's gaze was like a physical touch. "I don't like that sound."
"It's just... Well, I'd swear it says they used drones to fix the old cameras. But there's no way they could have used drones. What could fly in weather like that?"
Nothing but silence answered her question. She looked up, confused at the expression of anger on Proteus's face. He should be happy, shouldn't he? At least they had five cameras that were in working order. And wasn't that the whole point of all this?
She felt all the blood drain out of her face as she realized that yes. Yes, this had been the whole point of it. Of all of it.
"The facility you first brought me to," she whispered. "You said there were supposed to be cameras there, but you needed the mainframe to be online."
"I did." He still wasn't looking at her.
"So the building where the other humans are, that's where the mainframe is. Now that it's online, and people are actively bringing it online more, we could come here. This is where all the cameras have always been."
"It has." He glanced down at her, his expression shifting just slightly when he realized she was looking at him with disappointment. "What? What is it?"
"Has all of this been about..." She gestured at the screens.
"Of course."
"But what about me?"
He blinked at her, clearly not understanding the question. "What do you mean, what about you?"
"I just... I thought some of this was maybe about finding out where I was from. The people who created all of this. Saving the planet. There are a hundred things you told me, but now it seems to all be about surveillance and... and..." She gestured at the screens again. "This."
"We have to see the surface. We have to know what is going on there so that we can bring the humans Above. That has always been what this is about."
She knew that. He'd told her that before. Ellie had just hoped maybe it was a bit more than that.
He was still staring at her, seeing that his words weren't getting through to her at all. "What? Why are you looking at me like that? You always knew the entire point of every move I have made was to bring humans back to the land. I want them out of the water. All of them."
Her shoulders slumped. "I thought that maybe there was more to all this. Maybe you wanted to save the world. Maybe you wanted everyone to see you as a savior, not just a god. But look at it, Proteus. Nothing we show them from these cameras will convince them to leave the water."
She looked at the five that were still online, and all she could think was that there was nothing there. Just sand. Dust. Heat. No one could live out there. She'd stepped out onto the sands herself and knew that blistering heat would sear the flesh off someone's bones.
But at night, it looked even worse. The cold would set in quickly.
She remembered how frigid it was in that kind of cold, and how there wasn't anything at all that could warm her.
Ellie had walked out there only once at night, just to try it, and the temperatures made her breath frost in front of her face. How could anyone survive out there?
"Wait..." she whispered, pointing at the top right screen. "Is that... Is something moving on the sands?"
Proteus leaned up, using his hand on the wall to brace himself as he stretched out his tail. He was right in front of the screen, watching it with true interest. "Not on the sands. In them."
"Lift me up."
"Ellie, you don't have to see it."
"Now, Proteus."
He sighed and picked her up. She brought the tablet with her so she could control the angle of the camera as they both stared at the sand. There clearly was something inside that dune. It tunneled through the granules, moving with a speed that was almost hard for the camera to keep up with.
"Something is alive out there?" she whispered in shock. "How is that even possible?"
Proteus said nothing, staring even harder until finally, the sands parted to reveal a terrifying monster.
She thought it might be an undine on first inspection.
But then she realized how wrong she had been.
Though it was human-like in the top half, the bottom half was clearly that of a snake.
It lifted onto its tail, turning its head to look around.
And then she saw a massive, long tongue flick out of its mouth. Tasting the air like snakes did.
It was hard to see the creature through this camera. The darkness made it difficult to make out exact features, not to mention it was very far away from the camera now. But that was a living creature, one who looked almost similar to a human, at least on the top half.
"Oh my god," she whispered. "The notes in the facility about them experimenting on people and splicing genetics with animals. They succeeded."
The horror of it ran through her. It meant that there were things alive Above. That all the horrible experiments those people had been doing, they'd taken root.
Had some poor woman been forced to carry a serpentine child inside of her womb?
Had she been in the same room where Ellie had slept, praying that death would take her long before she gave birth to some monstrosity?
Or had they created these beings in a test tube just like Ellie?
Were they born cold and terrified of where they were, with no one to love them?
No one to tell them that they weren't entirely unnatural after all.
The figure on the sands suddenly snapped its head around, looking at something neither Ellie nor Proteus could see.
It dropped down, slithering as though hunting.
Not like an undine, then. It didn't need to drag themselves.
Its tail was strong enough to propel them through the sands but also keep them upright and moving.
Her breath caught in her lungs as the creature disappeared from their sight.
"So," Proteus said, sounding almost breathless. "They actually did it."
"I don't know how to feel about that."
"It complicates the plan."
"You're thinking about the plan right now?
Of course it complicates the plan! There are people living Above!
Just like there were people living underneath the waves.
" She struggled in his arms until he finally set her down.
Her mind whirled with what this meant. "We can't go Above.
They don't want us there. No one wants us. "
"Ellie—”
"It's just as I feared. There are so many people who need hope, Proteus.
Being able to go Above, no matter how dangerous, could give them that hope.
People like me. Clones who were woken up and now have to deal with all the backlash from people who don't understand who they are, or don't care to even see them as people.
This was a chance. But there are people already there. "
She couldn't breathe. Her heart thundered in her chest, far too fast for that to be normal, and here she was, trying to clutch at the strings of her own hope.
If she could help other people like herself, then she wasn't entirely a failure. If she could give other people a chance to live a life on the land, to see the sun, to explore the lands that they had been denied for centuries, then maybe that made her more than a clone.
Hands framed her face. Claws reached the top of her head, clacking as they bumped into each other. She focused on the face in front of her. The worried god who stared into her eyes with a gaze that was so big she couldn't look anywhere else.
"Breathe, Ellie," he said. And then he did it himself. Making her watch him as he inhaled, and then exhaled.
She mimicked what he did. Dragging air into her lungs that were begging for more air far too fast, and then slowly letting it out even though it made sparks dance in front of her vision.
She did it over and over again until finally her body gave her some small bit of relief. She could think. She could reason.
This didn't mean the end of the plan. It just made things more complicated. Like he had said.
"What do we do?" she whispered. "I don't think anyone is going to be convinced to go up there if there is already a known threat.
Humans have spent centuries fighting the undine.
Essentially, this means that we're taking them out of one place and putting them right back into the same issues that they just fixed.
Now… now we're making them start at the beginning. "
He pressed their foreheads together with a sigh. "Ellie, I have rarely ordered you to do anything. I would argue that I have impressed upon you that it is important to me that you learn how to make choices for yourself, and that I honor those choices."
"I know."
"I'm ordering you now to say nothing of what we have seen here.
Not to anyone. The humans can never find out that there are people living Above already.
They need to continue this work, and they need to move out of the sea.
That is my will. That was the will of the ancients before they passed. This future must come to be."
It felt wrong what he was asking her to do. He wanted her to lie. To lie to so many people while knowing that she might be putting them in danger.
"What if the people who live on the sands hunt them down?" she asked. "What if we can't even build safe places to live because of them?"
"We will make sure that doesn't happen. We will keep them safe as we watch over them all. Do you hear me? We will use the drones. Pilot will get the blueprints for the flying ones. We will use those as our weapons. We will keep everyone safe, and they will never know what we have seen here."
No, this was wrong. This was taking people's lives and putting them willingly at risk. They couldn't do this.
But she didn't have much of a choice. For all that Proteus had been kind to her, reminding her that he wanted her to become her own person and how he wanted her to make her own choices, she could hear the finality in his tone now.
He wouldn't let her tell people. He needed her to be trustworthy in this, and if she wasn't...
Blowing out a breath, she nodded. "I won't say a word. But I don't think this is smart, Proteus. I think they need to know so they can prepare for whatever that is."
Her gaze strayed back to the screen. There wasn't anything there anymore. No snake creature. Just the trail it had left in the sands and even the sight of that made her skin crawl.
The undine were one thing. They were creatures of the sea. They made sense.
Whatever lived Above? A creature like that was unnatural.