Chapter 31
CAMILLE
W ar had moved into my house of water.
Banks of monitors where we usually kept coolers. Headsets lined up like syringes. A printer spitting maps that smelled faintly of ink and tide. Navy boots careful on our wet concrete, as if the floor might take offense.
McGuire set a headset on my head herself, palm brief and grounding against my hair. “You’ll get the open channel,” she said. “Not everything.” A warning and a kindness.
Nearby, with a wall between us, the pens breathed.
Pumps kept their promises. In the quiet room, the little Kogia took her small, even breaths like a metronome.
Becca called numbers without looking up.
Miguel’s knuckles were split at the second joints—canvas rub from hours of sling work—and he still looked like he wanted more to hold.
Tamika wore the radio like a spine. I could feel her listening even when she wasn’t on our net.
In another one of the smaller rooms, my father stood at the back wall with his hands in his pockets. He had changed shirts but he hadn’t changed faces.
My people were nearby. That was enough.
It was time to begin.
McGuire tipped her chin at a chair no one else had taken. I didn’t sit. I braced a hip against the table and put my hands flat where I could feel them.
“Dominion Hall, this is Sector,” the speaker crackled. No drama. A coastal accent. “Confirm assets in position.”
A chorus of yachts answered, their names eaten down to call signs: Blue-One, Blue-Two, White-Lead. Someone said “Golden.”
The gray-suited man I didn’t like was a shadow at Langford’s shoulder, polite as a knife in a drawer.
“We’re dropping,” someone said. “Devices away.”
They didn’t say what the devices were. The words on my headset were careful—net, gate, line. The shape of a trap without its teeth named.
On a second screen, a ring of icons blinked into a pattern across my corridor like a necklace laid flat on blue.
I knew that water the way you know the inside of your own mouth.
Sandbar here. Channel there. Place where tide turns mean sixteen minutes before the hour when the river’s sulking.
They were hanging something in it. Listening. Waiting.
We were good at waiting, in my work. We were not good at waiting when the waiting was for something we never asked to move.
“Blue-One, steady at mark,” came through, warm and unbothered. Marcus, probably. “Noise floor’s clean.”
“Copy,” said Sector. “Hold. White team, shift ten starboard. Give me shadow coverage on the outer bar. Net’s shy.”
“White copies. Ten to starboard.”
I could feel my jaw in my face. The way it wanted to lock and grind. I let my tongue push against a back molar and counted quiet. One. Two. Three.
Waiting was hard. I’d seen women do it—on piers, in kitchens, in parking lots outside armories—holding coffee cups like talismans while a mission ate time they couldn’t touch. I hadn’t planned on being one of them.
Loving a military man meant letting the word “go” outrank your name sometimes. It meant making room for compartments you didn’t get keys to, trusting the part of him that came back would still fit the drawer where he’d left his things.
He treated risk like currency. I treated breath that way. Could I spend mine while he spent his and call it a shared life?
“Dominion Hall, Sector,” the voice said after a beat. “We have motion. Bearing one-eight-five, speed variable. Cross-current.”
The room leaned toward the sound together. Even the machines.
On the center screen, a smear of darker green moved where green shouldn’t move that way. Not a whale. Not a ray.
“White-Lead, do not spook,” McGuire said, low, not into my channel. Then louder, professional: “White-Lead, hold your angle and let the field do its work.”
Field. The word made the hair on my arms lift. We put fields around animals sometimes—sound curtains and slow arcs of boats that teach a humpback where the channel is.
This wasn’t that. I didn’t ask.
“Copy,” White-Lead said. “Holding.”
“Sector, Blue,” Marcus again, the grin audible. “The fish is rolling.”
Fish. Um hmm.
“Wait,” Langford said, the first time his voice crossed our net. Calm. Quiet. The kind of wait that turns men into instruments.
The room went very still.
I thought of the little Kogia’s ribs under my palm, the soft lift when a breath picks a body. I set my fingers on the edge of the table as if it was her flank. “Breathe,” I told myself, muttered down.
A soft tone sounded, not the kind of beep that means mistake. Something else. Anticipation computed. A buoy icon pulsed. Two more answered like a heartbeat finding rhythm.
“Now,” Langford said.
Something moved through the water that I couldn’t hear but everyone else could. The screens blinked. The smear jumped, jerked, tried to remember what its own body was. A gasp went around the room.
“Target slowed,” Sector said, and the room exhaled like a choir. “Repeat, target slowed.”
“Blue team, you are green,” McGuire said. No triumph. Authority like a hand on a shoulder. “Boarders in.”
Boarders. As if the ocean were a house.
I didn’t like any of the words. I liked the man whose mouth had said mine with his breath doing that steady soldier thing it does. I hoped he was okay.
“Blue-Three in,” a new voice came—Jacob’s, clipped down to the muscle, all the heat taken out for work. “Blue-Four in. Lines good. Vis okay. Current mild on the bottom. Mark’s thirty out.”
I could see it without wanting to: dark water, a smear of mechanical thought ahead, two men dropping into something that could decide not to be friendly, the way a rip decides not to be friendly when it forgets you’re a body and thinks you’re freight.
“Copy, Blue,” Sector said. “We have you. Keep your tethers clean.”
“Clean,” Jacob answered.
I put my hand flat on the table again. The speakers went busy without getting louder.
“White to Blue, your shadow is drifting east,” someone said. “Compensate.”
“Compensating.”
“Dominion Hall, Sector—you have a squall line building offshore. Nothing ugly for twenty. You’re fine.”
“Copy.” Marcus, light again. “We like fine.”
“Eyes,” Langford murmured. It wasn’t for the net. It was for the walls.
“Blue-Four, contact,” a voice said, not Jacob. Tight. Excited the way you try not to be when you know other people can hear your heart. “Visual on structure. Not natural.”
My stomach tried to turn itself into a fist. I told it no.
“Describe,” Sector said.
“Angular,” the diver said. “Edges wrong. Surface irregular. There’s—” a crackle—“resistance to the light. Stall. Stall?—”
“Blue-Four, say again,” Sector said. The casual went out of it.
“Blue-Three,” Jacob cut in, steady. “We have it. Approaching from starboard. Lines clear.” A beat. “Boarding.”
Boarding. God.
The room contracted. McGuire’s hand found the back of a chair and didn’t know it had. The gray-suited man’s jaw moved once like he wanted to chew on the air.
“Blue team, we’re seeing a spike on—” a tech started, then shut up when Langford lifted two fingers.
“Keep chatter down,” the admiral said. “Let them work.”
The speaker hissed like a kettle.
“Blue-Four on hull,” the not-Jacob voice said. “Finding purchase. Texture is—” static—“like a?—”
“Say again?” Sector.
“Blue-Three on hull,” Jacob said, and I almost put my teeth in my lip hard enough to make it bleed, because the sound of him doing that thing where he takes his breath and sets it down exactly where it belongs is a sound my body wants to crawl inside and live. “Proceeding to?—”
His sentence broke in half. Not static. Cut.
“Blue-Three, repeat last,” Sector said immediately, efficient. No fear. “Blue-Three, radio check.”
Nothing.
“Blue-Four, status,” McGuire said, louder. “Where’s your three?”
“Four here.” Long enough to wonder if the man had a heartbeat. “Three was at—” a roar, not sound so much as absence of it, like someone opened a door and what came in was everything.
The speakers went cold.
Every screen went soft gray for one blink and then flicked back to maps that had already decided to forget.
“Sector?” McGuire. Not calm. Crisp.
“Stand by,” Sector said. Their voice changed shape, went smaller, like they were talking down two nets at once in their head and picking the one they could save. “We lost Blue-Three. Four, I need your mark.”
Silence the way a room makes it when everyone is thinking the same ugly thought.
“Blue-Four?” Langford said, and all the admiral fled out of him until what was left was an old sailor who’d learned how to keep men alive by saying the right thing in the right order. “Talk to me.”
“Blue-Four,” the voice came after a beat that felt like being held underwater by a wave that misjudged you. “I have—” and then nothing again, but worse. A soft pop the way a radio makes it when a battery gives a tiny, polite goodbye.
The gray-suited man finally found his mouth. “Kill the room feed,” he said, and a tech actually flinched before looking at Langford, not him.
“No,” I said, before I could remember my rank wasn’t real here. Every head tilted toward me like I’d thrown a glass. “You do not shut me out of my own facility.”
“It’s an operational—” the suit started, and McGuire cut across him without moving her eyes.
“She stays,” she said, flat, and I loved her for it.
“Sector to White,” the speaker said, hedging around me. “We need a sweep on Blue’s last. Give me a spiral, inside to out.”
“Copy,” White-Lead said, still maddeningly cheerful. “Spiraling.”
“Dominion Hall,” another voice slid in, cool and dry. Atlas, maybe. “We’re adjusting the net.”
“Do it,” Langford said. “Quietly.”
On the other side of these walls, the world I could actually touch kept moving without me.
The Kogia would be ticking her breaths. The bottlenose would be floating like a tired queen, sling whispering against skin.
Becca would be counting, Miguel measuring, Tamika making herself a post—none of it in my ears, all of it in my bones.