3.
At three in the morning, Claire woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.
It was honestly a miracle she’d managed to sleep at all.
The anxiety meds rattling around in the bottom of her suitcase were the only way she’d finally straitjacketed her exhausted mind into stillness, able to ignore the close quarters enough for rest. Whatever haze of adrenaline and acceptance had mostly kept her from panicking in the first half of the day had completely worn away.
When she finally did drift off, her dreams were heavy and suffocating, the kind that you felt in your body long after the details had leaked from your brain.
But she remembered one. Elias, his eyes yellow and too big for his face.
Hovering in the air, held aloft by something in the dark, his feet gently swaying from side to side, pulled by unseen currents.
In the dream, she’d been in this same room, and he hadn’t said anything.
Just looked at her, and that look had been hungry.
When she woke from that one, her skull felt like it was full of packing peanuts, her limbs swollen and stiff.
The whole room smelled salty, as if the ocean had bled into the pores of the rock, and the air was clammy on her skin.
Claire wasn’t sure if the moisture was sweat or condensation, but either way, it was gross.
“Yeah, no,” she muttered under her breath, and pushed herself up.
This room was barely tolerable when she was unconscious; she wasn’t about to stay in here when she was awake.
She’d walk around until she was tired again, then hopefully grab a few more hours of sleep.
If she made it back here, great, but if not, there were some couches in the large main room.
That might make the morning awkward, but surely she’d earned a pass there.
She pulled on a sweatshirt in lieu of a bra and rummaged around in her suitcase until she found a pair of gym shorts.
They froze her for a second, the slippery fabric cool against her palms. They’d been Elias’s.
She hadn’t realized that when she packed, grabbing clothes from the laundry pile still on the floor.
The same one he’d seemed to float next to in that first dream, the night he died.
She wished she’d stop dreaming about him. It felt awful that she would want him gone from her mind. But the way her subconscious kept churning him up, wet and wrong, was worse than never seeing him again.
Claire pulled the shorts on and swallowed, hard.
Her door didn’t creak; it slipped open easily, the hinges well-oiled.
Claire crept out into the silent hall. The water-covered windows were black as pitch.
A few lamps on the main floor cast low light, and she wondered how that might look if you were out in the depths, a yellow glow in all that dark blue and green.
Like a hallucination, a house underwater, where no houses should be.
The thought made her shiver. Made her think of heavy dreams and drowning, the pull of salt water on her body and a voice echoing in the dark.
She closed her eyes and shook her head. Late nights were always bad for flashbacks. No one was meant to be awake at this hour, when brains played fast and loose with reality.
Claire sat down next to the wall right outside her door and tapped her phone screen.
She’d connected to the Wi-Fi before dinner—it wasn’t password protected—and had surprisingly good service, at least for the internet.
She hadn’t received any texts or calls, but that was typical.
Now that Elias was gone, there wasn’t really anyone to text or call her.
If anyone did, she’d receive them, probably. Mr. Ashbury had no problems talking on the phone in the elevator, about whatever was going according to plan with Rhodes and Hodge.
One half-hearted scroll through Reddit, then she opened the web browser and typed in “Ashbury Marinography.”
The official website was the first hit, the Wikipedia entry she’d already perused the second, followed by the countless articles that she hadn’t had the brainpower to really comprehend before.
The negative ones caught her eye this time.
From what she could glean from the link previews, they mostly seemed to be about allocation of funds.
Popular Mechanics thought that the government grants going to Ashbury Marinography should be used for military research instead of private enterprise.
Esquire thought the same, as well as bringing up the safety concerns Patrick had mentioned, and the fact that the amount of federal funds received wasn’t disclosed to the public.
But even those articles had something nice to say, too, and everything else looked completely complimentary.
It seemed like on the whole, science-y people were very into the Ashburys.
One Forbes article said that there was already a thousand-person waiting list for the commercial submarine once it went into production.
Claire tapped on the official website. The banner was that same symbol painted on the side of the plane, a sinuous blue line.
Scrolling brought her to a list of higher-ups, complete with pictures and bios.
Everyone who worked in management for the Ashburys was attractive, not a crooked tooth or acne scar in the bunch. They were also all white dudes.
“Yikes,” Claire muttered, with no hint of surprise.
She clicked the screen dark, sliding her phone into the pocket of Elias’s gym shorts. Her head tilted back against the wall, her unfocused eyes turning to the windows.
They were empty, other than water and fractured light.
Something about that seemed off. Shouldn’t the lamps make fish come to them?
There were deepwater species that used light as a lure for food, so Claire assumed smaller fish were like bugs, drawn to things that glowed in the dark.
But there were no signs of life framed in the glass, at least none she could see.
Nothing but endless ocean and the strange glowing lines that currents made as they moved.
They looked like electricity, which had always struck Claire as odd.
Two things so diametrically opposed shouldn’t resemble each other so closely.
(anglerfish, that was the name of the species that used light as a lure, the shining sphere bobbing and swaying just like Elias had in her dream, like bait—)
Claire shook her head.
There was a light out in all that dark ocean. A tiny speck of brightness, like a fallen star. Maybe it was a trick of her eyes, or a reflection from the house.
She didn’t realize she’d drawn nearer to the balcony railing so she could see it better—didn’t even realize she’d stood up—until she felt it press into her stomach. Maybe she was like a fish or a bug, too, drawn to glow, to anything that would break up the darkness into more manageable pieces.
It wasn’t a light, she could see it now. Something white, though, giving the illusion of light in all that dark. It looked almost like a dress shirt, for the second she could concentrate on it, as if someone had dumped their laundry into the ocean. In a blink, it was gone.
Movement in the room below broke her concentration, made her look away.
A figure stood right next to the windows, close enough to reach out and touch the glass. Wait, not stood—knelt, like a supplicant at an altar. The dim light made it difficult to make out who it was. Claire squinted, leaned forward, the railing cutting into her middle and grating against her ribs.
Broad shoulders beneath an expensively cut suit, graying hair. Wellington Ashbury, still dressed for dinner.
Ol’ Wellsley couldn’t sleep, either, she thought. An inane laugh ticked at the back of her throat; Claire swallowed it, pushing back from the rail so she wasn’t dangling over the balcony.
Mr. Ashbury was still and silent, kneeling in front of the windows.
Slowly, he tilted his face up to watch the water waver and press, ebb and flow.
His head tipped back farther, making the light of the lamps wash over him.
His expression was peaceful, reverent, composed enough that Claire wondered if he was sleepwalking.
More movement from the back of the main room, someone emerging from the tiny cloisters built into the cliff. Two someones; the pair of dark figures walked slowly toward Mr. Ashbury, kneeling on either side of him, bowing deep. Patrick and Greg, she was almost certain.
After a moment, the other two Ashbury brothers tilted their heads back to the exact angle as the eldest, as if they were trying to look up at something extremely tall.
The same peaceful expression cut across three faces, lightning over the tide.
Then, as one, the Ashbury brothers bowed their heads all the way to the floor, bending into something like the child’s pose she’d learned in a beginner yoga class.
Midnight yoga? Maybe. Hot yoga and wet yoga and all sorts of other yoga variations were advertised at the studio she passed sometimes. But the Ashburys weren’t dressed for exercise, and not for sleeping, either, still wearing the suits they’d worn earlier.
Her stomach twisted, twisted.
Maybe they were looking for something. Claire leaned forward over the railing again, peering through the water beyond the windows, trying to see what the Ashburys saw.
That glimmer of white? No, whatever they were staring at, it was much bigger.
She could almost see it, if she stared hard, concentrated.
The sense of displaced space, something massive—