2.
She woke to soft beeping sounds, almost like an alarm clock, and the sense of movement.
Claire sat up, rubbing gummy sleep from her eyes with the heel of her blood-streaked palm. It took her a moment to remember where she was—in a submarine, with Ash, her new kind-of-husband, being watched over by a sea monster—and when she did, she almost wanted to laugh, it was so ridiculous.
They’d moved closer in the night. She’d turned to face him, though he still lay on his back.
Not touching, but a breath away from it, as if in sleep her body had needed someone near.
His bruises were worse, stormy purple around his eye, zigzagging over his nose.
His lip had gone bluish where it was split, blood a thick line of burgundy down the middle.
The sea around them had lightened, though not by much, the water penetrated only slightly by the rising sun above.
The dark mass of the god was gone. In the featureless water, it was impossible to perceive movement, but a slight lurch in gravity told her they were being brought back to the Ashbury compound, the submarine towing them into whatever doom awaited.
Of course something like this would have autopilot, a fail-safe against some newly married Ashbury couple escaping through the sea.
A speaker crackled to life overhead, seeming to come from every angle at once. “I hope you only knocked out the cameras for some privacy.” Wellington Ashbury’s voice, nearly thrumming with rage. “That will be coming out of your trust fund, Son.”
The speaker clicked off.
Claire looked back at Ash. He was awake, but hadn’t moved, his arms crossed on his chest like a vampire in a coffin. She wondered how long he’d been awake, if he’d held himself like this just to keep from waking her up, too. Ash’s jaw was rigid, his eyes fixed on the glass ceiling.
“Funny that he thinks I would care about that,” he muttered. “It’s not like I’m gonna live long enough to worry about my trust fund.”
She didn’t know what to say. What could you say, when there was nothing to do but wait to be towed back to a cult intent on sacrificing you?
For the first time—and she was ashamed it was the first time, ashamed she’d been so selfish—Claire wondered what would happen to Ash when they got back to the house, what punishment awaited him before his apparently inevitable death.
Maybe it was worse than being Worn. Maybe, once the god had her, it would touch Ash and make him something like the help, something that would end in an aquarium.
At least her death would be quick. Audrey said it could be, anyway. But Elias was still in the god somewhere, clearly. Would she still be locked inside, too?
She’d had every intention of riding out the slow trip back to the dock in silence, but now she sat up, gut writhing.
“I’ll be gone, right?” Claire whispered, not looking at Ash, keeping her eyes on the blood and bile they’d rubbed into the white comforter. Knowing he wouldn’t lie and desperately wishing he would. “When I’m Worn? I won’t… I won’t know anything.”
Because if she did, she might go insane.
If she had to be trapped inside her own body while it was piloted by a sea creature, she would fucking lose it.
Claire couldn’t necessarily say she’d come around to the idea of her imminent demise; it wasn’t something human bodies allowed one to come around to.
But she knew when she was trapped. Knew when there was, really, no way out.
And there’d been some kind of peace in that, when she could think she’d at least be done.
Ash’s silence was his only answer. No truth, but no lie, either.
“Oh,” Claire said. She expected to burst into tears, but they wouldn’t come. Instead, her breath went deep and heaving, pulling in more air than she could let out, throat narrowing in panic. She tried to box breathe, but couldn’t make her inhalations match the right rhythm, couldn’t—
A warm hand on her back. Ash, rubbing in circles, encouraging her lungs to work the way they were supposed to. At least for these last few hours when they were her own.
“That was the worst part of seeing the god Wear my mother,” he murmured, almost reluctantly, like he didn’t want to put this burden on her but could no longer hold it in. “Knowing she was still in there, somewhere, and couldn’t do anything.”
What would that be like? To be lost in your mind, not in control, watching some sea god slowly rip your body apart?
Would it hurt? Maybe it’d be a relief to go insane, before.
To let her mind fracture from the weight of all the things she couldn’t hold.
Claire had no qualms about being a coward, taking the easy way out.
Look where it had gotten her.
“If it’s any comfort,” Ash said, his voice thick, “I don’t think you stick around for long, afterward.
You fade away eventually. The only reason the god doesn’t kill you before is so the body lasts a little longer, doesn’t start rotting immediately.
I don’t think it’s trying to keep the essence of the person alive.
” He scrubbed at a dried streak of gore on his cheek. “That’s something, I guess.”
Claire swallowed, summoning a fierceness she didn’t really feel. “Maybe it could work the other way, too, then. Maybe I could make it fade away.”
Ash said nothing.
She thought of the private plane that had brought her here, the weird dreams she’d had—one, seemingly normal, the night Elias died.
Then one visceral and gory after she’d taken a sip of salt water on the plane.
They must’ve been her first escape hatches, her first failed tests, seeing the god in her mind and not running as it deteriorated.
But it had looked like Elias, worse for wear but not yet the horror she’d seen yesterday, and sounded like him, too. I’m sorry, he’d said. I’m sorry for what we’ll do.
Still in there, slowly fading.
The ocean around them lightened by gradual degrees, the pressure in Claire’s ears popping as they neared the surface. A ring of lights appeared above them, the panels of the dock folding into the glass launch bay below the platform.
The submarine sailed into the bay. As the water drained out, Ash stood up from the bed, moving slowly and carefully. His white button-up was stiff with blood, the sleeve nearly ripped off on one side. The edges of his black eye were starting to yellow, and his bruised nose was slightly crooked.
He held out his hand to Claire and grinned with blood-rimmed teeth. “I don’t think anyone has ever tried to make it fade away,” he said, picking up the thread of the conversation he’d let unravel, “but maybe you could.”
She stood, too, taking his outstretched fingers gingerly in her own as the last of the sea sluiced out of the bay. “Maybe I could.”
The bay sealed tight, then the glass floor pushed upward, shoving them onto the dock platform.
○ ○ 2. ○ ○
The Ashburys ringed the submarine, watching them rise.
The bloody clothes fit for a wedding were gone; now they all wore dazzling white, making their unnatural blue eyes glow.
Audrey had no cigarette, but she clenched her fists like she badly wanted one, pale knuckles sharp as knives.
Dierdre chewed anxiously on her bottom lip.
Greg and Theo stood next to each other, but with space between, like they didn’t actually want to touch.
Theo’s gaze darted to Claire and then away, a minnow fleeing a shark.
But he wasn’t quick enough to hide the flash of respect in them. The envy.
Claire wondered if he’d fought, when he was told he had to have his wedding night on the submarine, becoming an official Ashbury beneath cameras and the watchful eye of a god. She wondered if he’d refused, at first. She wondered what Greg had said to finally make him go along with it.
He regretted it. She knew that. He’d spent a whole day throwing up seaweed because he tried to convince her to run.
Mr. Ashbury was the only one who looked outwardly furious. But all of them were, except Theo; they just hid it better, and their fury was tinged with fear. They knew what she and Ash had done. Or hadn’t done, as the case might be.
The side of the submarine slid open, the glass detaching soundlessly from the ceiling and sinking into the floor. Claire’s hand trembled in Ash’s; he gave it a squeeze.
Wellington stared at them. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
It went on longer than was comfortable, with no hint of humor.
None of the other Ashburys joined in; instead, they took the moment to cast nervous glances at each other, to shift uncomfortably on their feet, like they couldn’t show their fear while the patriarch was paying attention.
The laugh cut off as abruptly as it had begun. Wellington Ashbury stared at them with his thick brows lowered, his movie-star jaw gone tense as his veneers ground together. “You really thought not fucking would change anything?”
He spit the profanity like it tasted bitter, shaking his head. Disappointed. Scared, but trying to hide it.
Hope sparked in Claire’s chest, tiny and flickering.
“I prefer fucking on my own terms.” Ash sounded just as lazy and flippant as he had that first night at dinner, downing whiskey like water. “I can actually get laid without the threat of cosmic doom hanging over my head. You’re just sorry to miss the show.”
Wellington shook his head. “I try and try to help you, Son. You know that if it weren’t for the skins we married, it’d be us, right? It’d be you.”
“You should’ve let it be,” Ash replied. “I’m ready and willing.”
So that’s what would happen, if Claire’s sacrifice didn’t work.
The god would take Ash. And that was why he couldn’t leave Harrow Point.
If the god made him vomit seaweed when he got close to telling the truth, Claire couldn’t imagine what would happen if he left Harrow with no intention of returning.
He’d been touched by divinity, even if he hadn’t spent five years on an island.
There must be lesions in his brain, too, maybe not as many as were in Elias’s, but enough.
Which meant he’d been intending to return, all that time he was following her. Dooming himself, when he tried to keep her away. Racing the clock.
Claire’s stomach hurt.
Wellington’s jaw clenched tighter. “No.” Short and final. “It doesn’t matter anyway. She made a bargain. The god is here to collect.”
So they’d known. Of course they had. She’d been marked since that accident, in more ways than one.
“You won’t even let me try,” Ash said wearily. “I offered to let the god take me instead, a true Ashbury, and you said no.”
“I will always say no,” Wellington answered. “I will always protect my children.”
A noble sentiment, all things considered. Who wouldn’t protect their children above all others? Who wouldn’t commit atrocities to see them safe? Even monsters, apparently.
Ash was Josephine’s son. Josephine, whom Wellington loved, whom he’d sacrificed. Claire supposed that even for a zealot, some things were too much to ask. They passed the buck until they couldn’t anymore.
Claire noticed, though, that Wellington had never offered himself.
Her exhaustion-blunted panic gained strength now, making her limbs prickle, adding fuel to the fire of her hope until it blazed into something unmanageable, something desperate.
The elevator door was closed in the stone wall, the light above it blinking.
But next to it was another door, this one open, a staircase leading up before fading into darkness.
Claire lunged toward it, her whole body pointed in the direction of escape, her mind a haze of alarms and fog with no direction but away. She didn’t get far—didn’t expect to, really—but when Patrick’s and Greg’s arms wrapped around her, rough, she still let out a low, whining cry.
A prick of cold at her neck. Greg’s rasp in her ear. “You don’t want the sedative again, Claire. You’d just wake up in the god. Surely you want to be conscious for your last hour.”
Her fear-strengthened muscles went soft. She sagged in their hold.
“Everyone is waiting,” Audrey said, still wringing her hands together nervously. “Let’s get this over with.”