Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
MAREN
Dutch stands beside him with a tablet under one arm and a paper cup of coffee in his hand. My name’s written on the side in Lina’s handwriting with a tiny skull after it. Which means someone’s finally acknowledged my caffeine requirements as a medical issue.
Dutch holds it out.
“Bribe?” I ask.
“Evidence lubricant.”
“That’s not a phrase anyone should use before seven.” I take the coffee. It smells terrible. Burnt, bitter, chemically loyal. Perfect. “Please tell me this is about a guest trying to baptize himself in the petting tank and not anything that’ll make me regret being conscious.”
Reyes sets the sample vial on my main workstation. A small, dry, pale fragment rests inside it.
“Suite six,” Dutch says. He doesn’t look away.
The lab around us continues being the lab.
Monitors hum. The whiteboard across the room holds half-erased equations and yesterday’s tour route notes.
The cot in the corner has my sweater folded over the pillow.
The basin tracking screen shows the reef in quiet morning drift, all clean data lines and animal icons moving through acceptable ranges.
“What happened in suite six?” I ask. My voice is calm.
Dutch gives me the report. “Reyes confirmed it links to maintenance lateral six.”
I look at Reyes.
“There isn’t room,” he says.
“For what?”
“For most things.”
I set the coffee down. “Show me.”
Dutch unlocks his tablet and turns it toward me.
The first image shows a scratch low near the seam, barely visible. The second image is close. Angled downward. The third image shows the interior mark.
My mind assembles possibilities. Maintenance tool scrape. Guest tampering. Cleaning cart impact. Panel misalignment. Rodent equivalent, except we’re four hundred feet underwater and don’t have rodents. Inspection drone malfunction. Service cable abrasion. Fauna intrusion.
Fauna.
The word tries to put on shoes and walk into the room. I close the door in its face.
“Panel lock?” I ask.
“Engaged,” Dutch says.
“Guest access?”
“No.”
“Staff access after turnover?”
“None logged.”
“Maintenance drone?”
Reyes shakes his head. “Not deployed in lateral six for thirteen days.”
“Could the mark predate turnover?”
“I checked suite six at 1840. Panel was clean,” Dutch says.
I enlarge the interior scratch. The data begins to line up. I pick up the sample vial. The fragment inside shifts against the glass.
“What am I looking at?”
“Chitinous. Not trilobite,” Reyes says.
My fingers tighten around the vial. “What is it?”
“Unknown.”
I turn the vial toward the lab light. Pale. Curved. Dry. Thin enough to be fragmentary, hard enough to scrape composite. Not anything that belongs inside a suite wall.
“We need microscopy,” I say.
“Prepped,” Reyes says. He’s already cleared space at station two. Microscope warmed. Imaging software open. Sample tray ready.
“Petting tank?” I ask Dutch without looking away from the vial. “Still clustered?”
“Away from the reef side. Same as last night. Twenty-six hours and counting.”
“Vibration?” I ask.
“Intermittent at dome surface.”
“Tank sensors?”
“Green.”
“Of course they are.”
Reyes’s mouth moves by less than a millimeter.
I set the sample into the tray with tweezers and slide it under the microscope. The screen fills with magnified structure. Layered. Organic. Fine ridging.
My pulse stays steady. I can feel it in my throat. “Not trilobite,” I say.
“No,” Reyes says.
“Not Dunkleosteus.”
“No.”
“Not A1.”
“Too small,” he says.
“Kevin doesn’t shed in my walls.”
“Good policy,” Dutch says. He’s watching me, not the sample.
The microscope image refreshes, and I don’t.
I capture stills, route the image through the lab comparison database, and bring up the reconstructed fauna catalog.
The system begins scanning morphology matches.
Its little progress wheel spins with a cheerfulness I find offensive.
While it works, I open Reyes’s EM grid overlays. “Talk me through it.”
He steps closer. “East nodes four, six, and seven are drifting upward. Still within tolerance. Variance clustered. Trend line growing over eight weeks, more pronounced over three.”
I look at the graph. “Why didn’t this flag?”
“Tolerance band.”
I zoom in.
The green band widens around expected live-system fluctuation. My live-system fluctuation. My model. My allowance for complexity. My argument, made a hundred times to people who wanted rigid boxes around organisms that never agreed to be simple.
The variance barely sits inside it. A beautiful little failure of prediction wearing my name.
Dutch says nothing. Reyes says nothing.
“Show me route C,” I say.
Dutch sets his tablet down and pulls up the tour incident timeline from yesterday. Time stamps align in neat, ugly little rows.
A dull warmth gathers behind my sternum.
The database chimes.
NO CONFIDENT MATCH.
Of course the ancient resurrection aquarium has begun producing unidentified chitin from inside a guest bathroom wall.
I stand. “Okay.”
Reyes straightens. Dutch’s gaze sharpens. Neither of them asks okay what, because neither of them is stupid enough to think okay means fine.
I start moving.
Station one: containment controls.
I wake the main display and mirror it across the wall screens. Reef basin. Facility map. Guest levels. Maintenance corridors. EM grid. Sonic deterrents. Petting tank. Submersible routes. Everything layered. Everything bright.
“Dutch, suite six stays sealed. The entire corridor gets a soft restriction under plumbing inspection. I want guest movement rerouted away from that branch without anyone using the words breach, animal, contamination, or incident.”
“Already started.”
“Upgrade the Alvarezes.”
“Done.”
“Good. Petting tank stays closed. Officially: animal rest and system recalibration.”
“Unofficially?”
“Unofficially, if Dane Whitcomb comes within five meters of that corridor, bite him.”
Dutch blinks.
“Not you personally,” I say.
“Shame.”
The corner of Reyes’s mouth moves.
“Reyes,” I say, turning to the map. “Lateral six, east maintenance conduit four, and crossover two are restricted to essential engineering only. No solo access. Radio checks every five minutes. I want vibration sensors added at petting tank dome, suite six access panel, and the lateral junction.”
He nods. “Already pulling sensors.”
“Pull more. I want redundancy.”
I open the sonic barrier control. “East grid gets reinforcement pulses at irregular intervals, low amplitude. Nothing that will stress the fauna or alert guests, but enough to interrupt pattern testing.”
Reyes’s eyes move to me. Dutch looks toward the reef monitor, then back at me.
I keep talking. “Add exterior camera review for east approach corridor and submersible bay gate. Last forty-eight hours. Tag any movement smaller than juvenile Dunkleosteus, larger than hand-span, hard-bodied if visible.”
“Hand-span?” Dutch asks.
“Technical term.”
“Sounds official.”
“It will be by lunch.”
“Proud of science.”
“Science thrives on improvisation and spite.”
I bring up guest operations. “Submersible tours suspended until noon pending routine systems calibration. No cancellations yet. Delays only. If anyone asks, we’re optimizing exterior visibility after yesterday’s rare fauna encounter.”
“That’s almost true,” Dutch says.
“All useful guest language is almost true.”
Reyes looks at the EM graph. “No tours until I clear east node seven.”
“That may be after noon,” I say. “Guest operations will object.”
“Yes.”
“The board evaluator will object to me not objecting.”
“Maybe.”
“I like his optimism,” Dutch says.
I turn back to the controls. “No tours until east node seven is cleared.” I enter the restriction.
The system asks for reason.
I type: ROUTINE CALIbrATION REVIEW.
The worst language rarely lies. It stands next to the truth in nicer shoes.
Reyes is looking at the screen. “Routine,” he says.
There was a version of me, one ex-boyfriend and one apex predator ago, who’d have grinned at being caught and rewritten the entry then and there.
“It buys us the morning,” I say.
Reyes doesn’t argue. He knows what the clean word buys and what it costs, and he’s not going to tell me the cost out loud in front of the security chief at 0700. He holds my eyes for one second longer than comfort allows. “Buys us the morning,” he repeats.
Dutch hasn’t moved from my right. He’s been watching the whole transaction the way he watches a guest reach for a railing that isn’t load-rated. “Morning’s useful,” Dutch says.
He doesn’t believe it either, and he’s not pretending to.
He’s just standing his stillness between me and the consequence of what I typed, the way he’ll stand it between a guest and a flooding corridor if it comes to that.
Protection looks like a lot of things on Dutch.
This morning it looks like agreeing with a lie he can see straight through.
Inside my head, the numbers multiply.
Depth: 122 meters. External pressure: 12.
9 atmospheres. Guest count. Staff count.
Accessible submersibles. Emergency pod capacity.
East grid node seven variance. Unknown chitin in wall.
Avoidance posture in trilobites. Tour lane deviation after EM irregularity.
Kevin’s morning perimeter hesitation: eleven seconds.
No. Do not put Kevin in this yet.
“Maren,” Dutch says.
I look up.
“Your coffee.”
I glance at the cup. “How is that relevant?”
“You stopped drinking it.”
“I’m conducting a rapid multi-system response to possible containment-adjacent anomalies.” I pick up the coffee and drink. It is cold now. Terrible. “Happy?”
“No.”
Reyes clears his throat. A small sound. Strategic. “Microscopy stills saved?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Send to my tablet.”
I do.
He checks them. “I’ll compare against tunnel residue from lateral six.”
“Take Nia with you.”
His eyes lift.
“No solo access,” I remind him. “That was my own rule twelve seconds ago. I’m told I can be quite convincing.”
“You are,” Reyes says.