Read Chapter 9: The Scientist's Note

The flooded passage on the Artemis’s research deck smelled of rust and cold brine, but underneath that, something else. Something organic. Elias played his flashlight over the bulkhead and saw a smear of mucus glistening in the beam, fresh enough that it hadn't dried. He forced himself not to think about what had left it.

The chronometer against his chest was warm. Not hot the way it had been during the attack, but a low, insistent heat that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. He’d stopped trying to convince himself it was a malfunction.

He’d come back onto the derelict alone, leaving Aiko with the Remora’s makeshift repair crew. She’d given him a look when he’d said he was going to inspect the forward holds—that look that said she knew exactly what he was doing and why he wasn’t telling her. He’d let her think it was about the amphipod, that he was checking on the creature’s condition before it died and became another problem to explain.

The lie was getting easier. That worried him more than the creature.

He pushed open a watertight door marked LAB-3 and stepped into a space that hadn’t been touched by sea water. The air was stale but dry, and his light swept across overturned chairs, scattered papers, and a bank of monitors gone dark. A coffee mug lay shattered on the deck, its handle pointing toward the door like an accusation.

Someone had left in a hurry.

Elias moved deeper into the room. The lab was smaller than the ship’s main research bay, probably meant for a single investigator. A cot had been pushed against the far wall, its sheets gray with dust. A woman’s jacket hung from the back of a chair, and beside it, a framed photograph facedown on a desk.

He picked up the photograph. A woman in her late thirties with cropped brown hair and a wide smile, standing on a dock with the sea behind her. She had her arm around a man who looked older, weathered, holding a fishing rod like he’d never used one.

Elias turned the frame over. A faded label on the back read: *Dr. L. Hart – Sable Island, 2019.*

He knew the name. He’d heard it whispered in port bars and salvage yards, always in the same hushed tones you used for someone who’d gone missing under strange circumstances.

He set the frame down and searched the desk. Drawers full of sample vials, all empty. A logbook with water-stained pages, most of them illegible from humidity. But one entry near the back was still readable, written in a tight, precise hand.

*March 14. Specimen alpha is stabilizing beyond projections. Viability markers exceed baseline by 300%. Hart believes the genetic catalyst is transferable. Wong disagrees—wants to push to human trials. Meridian has authorized field protocols. I’ve logged my objection. It will not matter.*

Elias read the entry twice. The name *Hart* jumped out at him from the page, and he flipped back through the logbook, looking for earlier entries. Most were routine—water samples, temperature readings, species counts. But scattered through them were references that made his blood run cold.

*Cargo instability. Containment holding, barely.*

*Subject exhibits distress at depth changes. Recommend termination. Overruled.*

*Meridian Deep has been clear: the asset is more important than the crew.*

The last entry was dated two years ago, over three weeks before the Artemis had been reported lost.

*The asset has breached primary containment. I have sealed Lab-3. The crew is unaware. I am transmitting a distress signal—not for help, but for a record. If anyone finds this, do not tow the Artemis to port. Do not open the cargo hold. Sink her where she floats.*

*—L. Hart*

Elias’s hand tightened around the logbook. The distress signal. The one he’d answered, the one that had pulled him and his crew into this nightmare. It hadn’t been a cry for help. It had been a warning.

He set the logbook down and pulled the desk’s bottom drawer. It stuck at first, then gave way with a groan. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a portable hard drive with a USB port and a laminated label: *HART – PERSONAL – ENCRYPTED.*

Beside it lay a gold band with a simple inscription on the inside: *Forever, R.*

Elias picked up the ring. It was still warm, as if she’d taken it off moments ago. He slipped it into his pocket alongside the drive.

A sound came from the corridor behind him. A wet, sliding noise, like something heavy being dragged across the deck plates. Elias killed his flashlight and stood motionless in the dark, one hand reaching for the knife at his belt.

The chronometer went hot against his chest. Burning hot, through his shirt and the waterproof case he kept it in. He gritted his teeth and didn’t move.

The sliding sound grew closer, then stopped just outside the door. A wet breathing filled the corridor, slow and heavy, like a bellows drawing air through water. Elias could smell it now—that organic stench, thick and sickly sweet, like a whale carcass rotting in the sun.

He counted his heartbeats. Twenty. Thirty. The breathing continued, patient, waiting.

Then the sound started to move away, dragging itself back toward the flooded section of the ship. The chronometer cooled against his chest, and Elias let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

He waited another full minute before relighting his flashlight. The corridor outside was empty, but the deck plating was scored with fresh gouges—long, parallel lines that matched the claw marks on the Artemis’s hull. And in the center of the passage, glistening under his beam, lay a small object.

A flip phone, cracked and water-stained, but intact.

Elias knelt and picked it up. The screen was dead, but the casing bore the same faded logo he’d seen elsewhere on the ship: a stylized wave with a deep blue M integrated into its crest. Meridian Deep.

He pried open the back. The SIM card was still inside.

He thought of the wedding ring in his pocket, of Dr. Lena Hart’s calm handwriting telling him to sink the ship, of the creature breathing just outside the door. The woman had known what Meridian Deep was doing. She’d tried to stop it, and they’d silenced her—or worse, the experiments had.

Now the only record of what she’d discovered was in his hands.

Elias stood, pocketed the phone, and started back toward the Remora. His mind was already racing ahead, through the encrypted drive, through the phone, through the name in the logbook. He needed Aiko’s help with the encryption—she was better with computers than anyone aboard—but that would mean telling her more of the truth.

The truth she was already circling like a shark.

He emerged onto the main deck and saw the Remora riding low in the water fifty meters off, her tow lines straining under the weight of the dead ship at her stern. The sea was calm now, black glass under a starless sky. Too calm. He’d learned to fear that stillness, the way the ocean held its breath before a wave you couldn’t see.

He climbed aboard the Remora and headed straight for the radio shack. Mikhail had warned him. The company that had sent the distress call had warned him, in a roundabout way. Now the dead woman’s warning was in his pocket, and the enemy’s patrol boat was still out there somewhere, hunting.

Elias keyed the mic.

“Aiko, get to the radio shack. I’ve got something you need to see.”

Her reply came back instantly, sharp with suspicion.

“What kind of something?”

“The kind that’s going to put us on the wrong end of a very powerful corporation.”

A pause. Then:

“I’ll be right there.”