The Deep

1.

THE OLD MAN’S HEAD was covered in mantises.

At first Luke thought it was a wig or some weird toupee—but he was at the southern tip of Guam, a few miles from the Pacific, and the man was wearing tattered clothes and what looked like strips of old radial tires lashed to his feet. Why bother with a toupee?

The driver saw the old man, too. He hissed between his teeth—an uneasy tssshk! He said something under his breath: a curse, maybe a prayer? Luke didn’t speak the local dialect.

“I’ll do it,” Luke told the driver. “You wait here.”

He elbowed the Jeep’s door open. Sweet Jesus, the heat. It’d hit him like a fist when he stepped onto the runway at the Agana airport. It hit him again now—the tropical air, laden with the nectar of heliotropes, caused beads of sweat to pop along his brow.

The old man stood facing the wall of a one-story workshop. The ground was strewn with hubcaps and crankcases snarled in rusted wiring. Wrist-thick vines snaked out of the greenery to twine around the industrial junk; with nobody around to hack it back, the jungle would reclaim this spot in a matter of months.

The old man was walking into the wall—his sandals made a gentle whush-whush as they brushed the yellowing adobe. The spotting was pronounced on his bare arms and his throat. The scabs were dime-sized, bigger than what Luke was used to seeing. Some of them had cracked open and were leaking grayish pus.

Luke had no clue what had drawn the mantises. Maybe they’d dropped from the creeping ivy snarled across the shop’s roof. Or maybe something on the man’s scalp, or leaching out of it, had attracted them.

They were the largest insects Luke had ever seen. Each mantis was the length of his thumb, and muscular-looking. They had swollen, cantilevered abdomens that curved above their sharp, considering faces. A baker’s dozen or so carpeted the man’s skull.

Luke got the sense of them turning to stare at him, all at once.

Luke retreated to the ditch. His feet sank into the muck. He didn’t like the way it sucked at his boots—greedy, a lipless brown mouth.

He found a stick and went back. The insects squirmed quarrelsomely on the man’s head, which was covered with wispy white hairs as downy as those on a baby’s skull. Their exoskeletons made a brittle chitter. What the hell were they doing?

Luke watched their choreographed manner. The stink of burned diesel mixed with the heliotropes to create a sticky vapor that coated his throat. Distantly, he heard the driver repeat what he’d said before—that breathless curse or prayer—and Luke was worried he’d set the Jeep in gear and take off, leaving him with the old man and the mantises, the heat and the crawling jungle.

What in God’s name were those bugs doing?

One mantis pinned another in a violent vise grip, then widened its jaws and bit down, cleaving the other’s head in half. Their abdomens were wed. What was clearly the female continued to eat the male’s head while his antenna whipped about frantically.

Using the stick, Luke brushed the mantises off the man’s skull. A decapitated male skittered wildly across Luke’s fingers; he shook it into the mud with the rest of them. The urge arose to step on them. Squash them all to paste.

Instead, Luke set his hands on the old man’s shoulders to turn him around. His expression was familiar: The Big Blank. His eyes gone milky, the edges of his eyelids pebbled with nodules of acne that gave his skin the look of an orange rind. His mouth wide open, his tongue coated in white film. He may not have drunk water in days. He’d forgotten to, probably.

That’s how it went with the ’Gets: you forgot the little things first, then the not-so-little things, then the big ones. Next, the critical ones. In time, your heart forgot how to beat, your lungs how to breathe. You die knowing nothing at all.

As soon as Luke pointed him in a new direction, the old man started to walk. He’d go on until he fell down or stepped off a cliff or stumbled into a leopard’s den, if they had those around here. And Luke couldn’t do a damn thing about that.

He climbed back into the Jeep. The driver eased past the old man as he tottered down the road, that clingy mud sucking up past his ankles already. Luke watched as they pulled away, the old man’s body becoming indistinct through the stinging fumes.

2.

A VISTA OF HEAT-STOOPED PALMS gave way to the town of Inarajan. The buildings were pueblo-rustic and had a worn but functional look, with whitewashed tin roofs.

A fan of red grit rose in the Jeep’s wake; it appeared to hover in the intense heat, refusing to settle. The Jeep’s vents blasted humid air. The creased skin at the back of Luke’s neck was grimy with sweat and dirt.

The Pacific rolled out to the south. The water deepened to an icy blue. Two old women sat on a buckled porch smoking cheroot cigars. None of the villagers looked worried. None of the shops had been looted. That had occurred in other places, but for the most part, humanity had simply carried on. If this was the apocalypse, it was to be an orderly and complacent one.

The village children watched the Jeep rumble past. One of them, a girl of about eight, smiled at Luke. A cluster of dark specks dappled her elbows, like the bruises on a banana as it turns overripe.

The Spots. They would get bigger, cover her body, turn crusty then pustulant… then she’d begin to forget. Minor stuff at first. Where she’d left her dolly or how to tell the time of day. Then she wouldn’t know how to tie her shoelaces; she might spend hours bent over her feet, trying to lace however she’d been taught—the bunny ears method? Loop, swoop, and pull? She’d laugh at first—I’m being such a silly-billy!—but she would soon become frustrated, as children do, and start to cry.

Next, she’d forget her brother’s name and the smell of her father’s pipe tobacco, and soon enough, her own face in the mirror. She’d forget what hot or cold should feel like, and then even the concepts of heat and cold. That would have to be the worst part, Luke figured: forgetting those elemental assurances everyone is born with. She’d look at the nut tree in her yard and forget the sensation of its leaves brushing her skin; soon she’d forget what leaves were to begin with, and how vital they are to that tree, the same way our veins are vital to our bodies (she’ll have forgotten about veins by that point, too). She’d forget how wonderful those nuts taste—after that, she’d forget why eating mattered much at all.

The tree would make no sense to her. Nothing would, actually.

3.

THE YACHT WAS MOORED five hundred yards off the Inarajan wharf.

Its original owner was a Vegas casino magnate. Its home dock was in Okinawa, Japan, but Uncle Sam had recently conscripted it in the service of science. Its owner didn’t argue its seizure, Luke had been told, due to the fact that he’d forgotten he’d ever bought a yacht. The ’Gets had a way of loosening prior rights of ownership.

Luke grabbed his duffel and nodded good-bye to the driver. The sun-bleached planks squealed under his boots. Fiddleback crabs skittered around the pilings, raising puffs of sand. An eel—a black, sinuous ribbon—darted out, plucking up a crab before vanishing beneath the wharf.

Animals were unaffected, for whatever reason. No spotting, no ’Gets. All except honeybees, which had been the first and only.

A few skiffs were moored at the end of the wharf, their rusted bottoms spread with mildewed nets. A haze of flies boiled up at Luke’s approach. One landed on his forearm. A horsefly, its compound eyes reflecting the sunlight like disco balls.

Luke slapped it. The horsefly buzzed, trapped between his palm and the flesh of his arm, a sensation so off-putting that Luke lifted his hand. The fly escaped with cool indifference.

The yacht wasn’t too far off. Luke could swim it—wanted to, in fact. It was goddamn hot, he was dirty, and a weird hum had settled into his bones. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he squinted toward the vessel. He could barely make out a figure on it.

He dropped his duffel into a Zodiac boat. He yanked the engine’s ripcord and steered away from the village’s squat buildings, away from the girl with those terrible specks.

The water was a chilly blue—it reminded Luke of Barbicide, the disinfectant solution the old barbers in Iowa City used to soak their combs in. That stuff’ll kill you dead if you drink it, one of the barbers told Luke when he was a boy, as if suspecting Luke had harbored that very desire.

His gaze trailed north over the crested hills. He spied a church. It must’ve been centuries old, perhaps the very first thing the area settlers had built. It was burned. The spire must have gone up first, the roof beams reduced to cinders until what remained of the steeple had come crashing through the narthex.

Nothing else had been torched in the entire village. Only the church.

4.

THE YACHT WAS ANCHORED at the edge of a half-moon bay. A man stood on deck. Tall and thin with articulate limbs that reminded Luke, however unfairly, of the mantises on that old man’s skull.

“Dr. Nelson.” The man extended his hand. “I’m Leo Bathgate. So glad you made it safely.”

Luke inspected Bathgate’s outstretched arm—Luke’s eyes strayed toward people’s hands and arms habitually, a reflex action. Research showed that the ’Gets wasn’t spread through physical contact, the transmission of bodily fluids, or as an airborne pathogen. But it had taken a while to discover this, and sadly, several tragedies had occurred before it was fully understood. Men had been shot in cold blood as they had struggled to recall some hard-to-remember fact. The phrase It’s on the tip of my tongue had become the basis for justifiable homicide for a while there.

The yacht was luxurious, everything gleaming. Luke felt as though he was floating on a pile of cold currency.

Bathgate read his face. “I’ve never set foot on anything like it, either.”

A bottle of champagne sat in a bucket. Bathgate shrugged.

“I found it onboard. Figured it’d just go to waste,” he said.

Krug Brut 1988. Pricey suds. Bathgate poured the bubbly into crystal flutes and handed one to him. Luke tipped the glass to his lips, the champagne sending a tickle up his sinuses.

Bathgate said: “How was your trip?”

Endless, Luke wanted to tell him.

Roughly eight thousand miles separated Chicago, where he’d caught the first flight, and Agana, the capital city of Guam. Those eight thousand miles had unfurled like a strange waking nightmare.

On his way out of Iowa City, Luke had stopped at an Exxon off the interstate. The highway wasn’t snarled with stalled or abandoned cars, the way it always is in stories about the apocalypse. Because this wasn’t exactly the apocalypse, Luke had to constantly remind himself. It was just something awful that was happening.

For that reason, or maybe just out of old habit, the important things went along as they had. Ideas of ownership prevailed. The dead were still being buried—not always in cemeteries, but the bodies certainly went into the ground. Rituals were still being observed. And that was good.

The gas station had been empty. The pumps were shut off. The door to the convenience store was open. The aisles were shadowy in the late afternoon. Muggy, seeing as the A/C wasn’t working. Ants trooped up the glass of a cooler case.

Luke could’ve done anything. Unwrapped a Twinkie and wolfed it down. Stripped the plastic off a Penthouse and flipped out the gatefold. There was something very freeing about that—but scary, too.

He’d pulled back onto the interstate. The gas gauge needle had nudged past E when he found a Cenex station… which was bustling. People were gassing up, paying for chips and sodas, blissfully unaware or pretending to be. It had been good to see the lights on. Good to pay for things. That feeling of normalcy returned. The world was still spinning as it always had, right?

That troublesome kind of stuff happened a lot now. You couldn’t find gas, or a new tire if you got a flat. You could set off for a destination and never reach it. A thousand new roadblocks popped up—not always physical or jurisdictional ones, either. Just the system breaking down in little ways.

O’Hare Airport had been surreal. Most of his terminal’s kiosks and shops were closed, the shelves picked over, restaurants offering a reduced menu.

Luke had passed through security without incident; he carried a notarized document that eased his passage. The plane was a twin-prop puddle jumper. It was so full that two U.S. Marines had to sit in the aisle. That would’ve made life tough on the flight attendants, had there been any.

The plane touched down in Denver. After he disembarked, Luke stood before the airport’s windows watching the flights taxi in. He could make out a man at the edge of the landing strip, propped against a chain-link fence. Motionless, with his arms outspread.

A plane roared down the runway; as it rose, it flew directly above the man. His clothes fluttered with the terrific force of the jet’s engines. His body jerked, his head snapping back and forth. Did the pilots have to look at the man every time they took off?

“Somebody should do something about it.”

The woman standing beside Luke was fiftyish, with salt-and-pepper hair and a faint British accent. She tapped the huge window with her knuckles, a fussy rap-rap-rap, as if in expectation someone—a butler?—would appear to deal with her complaint.

“They should bloody well do something about that poor sod, wouldn’t you think?”

She seemed the sort of woman who was used to getting things done. But things didn’t always get done nowadays. People just got on with things the way they were.

Luke’s connecting flight landed at San Francisco International, where he was met by a pair of unsmiling soldiers. They led him to a private airstrip, where a C-23 Sherpa cargo plane waited. Luke was its sole passenger. Resting against the bulkhead, he let the hum of the engine fill his skull. He fell into a black sucking vacuum of sleep—dreamless, joyless. When he awoke, his plane was circling Agana.

“Long,” Luke said, finally answering Bathgate’s question. “A long goddamn trip.”

Bathgate gave a sympathetic nod. “You must be exhausted.”

Luke’s watch was still set to Iowa time. His body clock was reading 5:00 a.m. as Guam’s midafternoon sun beat down on his skull. The champagne mainlined straight into his veins, making him swoon.

“Your berth is down below,” Bathgate said. “Why don’t you get settled?”

As Luke made his way to the sleeping quarters, Bathgate called out: “Dr. Nelson?”

Luke turned to see Bathgate wringing his ballcap in his hard-knuckled hands.

“Your brother…” he said falteringly. “They say he might have the answer to all this. Whatever he’s doing down there in the deep. You think that’s possible?”

“I really don’t know, Leo. I guess we’re gonna see.”

“Yeah, but…”

“I’m hopeful. We all are.”

“Right.” Bathgate offered an uncertain smile. “Hopeful, absolutely hopeful.”

Wasn’t that why Luke had been brought here at great expense, after all? To talk to his brother? To rekindle the tiniest shred of hope?

Luke’s brother, who was eight miles deep in the Pacific Ocean.

Luke’s bizarre and brilliant brother, whom nobody had heard from in days.

5.

LUKE DREAMED of his mother.

It was a familiar dream that came in times of stress. In it, his mother entered his bedroom. Luke was seven or eight years old. His mother was enormous, as she’d been at that point in his life. Over four hundred pounds.

She slipped into bed with him. Threw back his Star Wars bedcovers and slid under them with chilling dexterity. Her body was warm and soft as bread dough, perfumed with the excretions that leaked from her skin. Her breath feathered the hairs inside his ear canal. She began to whisper. Luke could never quite make out what she said. Her voice hit a subaudible pitch that crawled directly into his brain.

Luke awoke, his breath coming in leaden rasps. The dream drained from his brainpan, thick as syrup. He checked his watch; he’d slept less than two hours. Goddamn. His mother. All these years later she was still there, haunting the corridors of his mind like a hungry ghost. He closed his eyes and she bloomed in his mind’s eye again: Bethany Ronnicks—she had forsaken her husband’s family name, preferring her maiden one. Battle-ax Beth.

She was a huge presence in every way: her room-filling personality, her booming laugh, and in time, her vast physical bulk. She’d always been a large woman: broad shoulders, wide hips, over six feet tall. A lady skyscraper, as Luke had heard her spoken of around town. She held an imposing beauty, or she had before her “bad years,” and the two hundred pounds they had packed onto her frame. She walked with a regal bearing, her chest thrust out as if in the expectation that a visiting dignitary would affix a medal to it.

She worked at the Second Chance Ranch, a “home” for mentally troubled male youths—No Chance Ranch, as she referred to it in her poisonous moods. She had been hired as the duty nurse but soon transferred to orderly, the first female in the state hired for that position. She preferred the hands-on aspect. Better than doling out pills and sanitizing bedpans.

“It stinks,” Luke overheard her say once in conversation with Edie Emmons, one of her few friends. “The piss of those mad boys. There’s a chemical they produce—a compound specific to crazies. Trans-3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid.”

“Oh my,” said Edie, sycophantically. “Sounds terrible.”

“It is terrible. The stink of insanity, Edie, sharp as malt vinegar. It’s bad enough when they sweat it out. But their piss? The worst.”

At first the other orderlies—all male, predominantly black—grumbled. They had a bar bouncer’s mentality: yes, Beth had a no-bullshit disposition and could handle the nut jobs well enough with words. But what happened when words failed? Beth was a big woman, but still a woman—did she have the brawn to subdue a foaming-mad boy who cared little for his own body or that of others?

But Beth was a hellion. She was the first to jump on any dog pile, grabbing a boy’s wrist or neck and cranking with all her might. The orderlies came around to having her in their ranks. They nicknamed her Battle-ax Beth.

Many years later, working as a veterinarian, Luke had run into one of his mother’s old charges. Kurt Honey—whom Luke knew slimly, having gone to the same middle school—had spent time at the ranch for the aggravated assault of his eleventh-grade math teacher, whom he’d stabbed with a compass. Honey was a hired hand at a dairy farm where Luke had been summoned to tend to a sick Guernsey.

“She’s your ma, ain’t she?” Honey had asked.

Luke looked up from the cow’s inflamed udder. “Who?”

“Battle-ax Beth.”

Luke had no idea Honey knew she was his mother, but he assumed Honey would speak ill of her. Luke wouldn’t stop him. The days when he would’ve defended her were long gone.

“She was a viper.” Honey gave a spooked laugh. “Smart, you know? But in ways that don’t really profit a person, except in special situations.”

Luke went back to the udder, hoping that would be the end of it.

“She scared the bejesus outta this one guy, Brewster Galt. Ole Brew was none too smart—that’s half the reason he ended up at the ranch. This one time, he caught hell for stealing an apple from the cafeteria. Small things were big things at the ranch. Even a missing apple couldn’t go unpunished. Now Brew had this condition, okay? His one eye was all bugged out of its socket. He told me it was too much pressure, pushing the eyeball out. Your ma, she noticed that sort of thing.”

Luke had winced, his face turned away. Yes, his mother had always noticed things of that nature.

“After Brew got caught stealing the apple, your ma asked for a minute alone with him. Brew came away white as milk. A big kid, tough kid, but I ain’t never seen a boy so shit-scared. I found Brew one afternoon by the picnic tables a few days later. By and by, he gets around to telling me what your ma said…

“Brew said your ma told him he had two sets of eyes. One set behind the set in his face. That’s why his one eye was pushed out so bad, see? It was the other set trying to get out. Your ma said those other eyes were blood red and looked like a cat’s. Then she says maybe she’ll give that other set of eyes a little push—sneak into the bunks at night when Brew’s fast asleep and slit his eyes up with a razor blade. Then that would give those new peepers a chance to push out and see the world. The devil’s own eyes staring out of Brew’s face. ‘Wouldn’t that be real nice?’ she told him.”

Kurt Honey just shook his head. “Brew was fourteen. He didn’t have a damned clue what kind of black thing he’d run across.”

Black thing. Luke’s own mother. Black. Thing.

“That woman was half devil. Three-quarters, I’d go so far to say.”

“I’m sorry she said that,” was Luke’s only reply.

Honey snorted. “Christ, I’m sorry for you. You had to share four walls with that monster, didn’t you?”

Luke’s hands relaxed on the bed’s coverlet. The nightmare-sweat had dried on his chest, but his thoughts continued to circle restlessly around his mother. He hadn’t thought about her—really, clearly dwelled upon her—in years. Yet he couldn’t wrench her out of his mind tonight.

A few years into her stint at the ranch, Beth had been attacked by a resident, Chester Higgs. She’d been supervising the yard work assignments. After the incident, a few residents said that they’d seen Custodian Ronnicks talking to Higgs as he’d hoed the weeds… sidling up close and whispering to him.

Chester Higgs had been sent to the ranch on seven counts of animal cruelty. He’d snuck into a neighbor’s sheep pen and slit the yearlings’ bellies with a sickle knife known colloquially as a witch blade. When asked why he’d done so, Higgs said the lambs had been keeping secrets. That day and without warning, Higgs struck at Beth with the hoe. He brought it down on her leg, shattering her kneecap; then, as she’d screamed and grabbed for her riot baton, Higgs set about beating her mercilessly. A vicious and well-aimed swipe broke her left hip in three places.

By the time the custodians arrived to haul Higgs off, Beth lay prostrate, bloodied and broken. According to eyewitness reports, Beth—bleeding through her stark white uniform, her face puffed and dangerously shiny—had screamed: “Lord love a duck!” Screaming this inane phrase over and over: Lord lovva duck! Lord lovva duck!

Chester Higgs was taken to another facility and, at eighteen, transferred to a state penitentiary. He’d never confess to what set him off. Beth meanwhile was laid up for some time in the hospital. Her hip had to be fused. Her kneecap didn’t heal properly. She was placed on long-term disability and would never work at the ranch again.

From the day she returned from the hospital until the end of her life, Luke’s mother rarely left the house. She’d sit alone in the TV room, an odious shape in the shadows. When Luke got home from school, she would summon him to her side.

Lucas! Come sit with your mommy.

Luke’s feelings for her changed gradually. Before the incident, he’d loved his mother openheartedly in spite of the worrisome signs—the spankings that left welts, the way her gaze could sit upon his skull like a tarantula ready to sink in its fangs.

But during the Bad Years, she became truly cruel. In time, Luke realized that cruelty was an implicit facet of her nature; she’d simply taken a while to express it.

6.

LUKE FINALLY FELL BACK ASLEEP and awoke hours later as the yacht slit the night sea. The feeling was not unlike being in a luxury sedan speeding across a freshly laid strip of asphalt; Luke sensed the velocity in his marrow, but the fine calibration of the machine prevented him from truly experiencing it.

He sat up in bed. If he’d had another dream, he couldn’t remember it.

He hadn’t dreamed regularly since he was a child, sleeping in the same room as his brother, Clayton, their beds separated two feet apart—Clayton had measured that distance, bedpost to bedpost. He measured a lot of things, space being vital to him.

Clayton had suffered night terrors pretty regularly as a child; he’d thrash, shriek, even make these doglike yelps. Usually their mother would shoulder through the door to shake Clay awake so violently that his head snapped back and forth.

You’re fine! she’d say, slapping Clayton’s cheeks hard enough to pinken the skin. You’re perfectly fine, for heaven’s sake!

Some nights, when Clayton started to thrash, Luke would slide under the covers with him. Clay’s skin was clammy and too hot—it made Luke think, horribly, of slipping into bed with someone who’d been boiled alive. Sometimes he’d wrap his arm around Clayton’s chest and whisper softly to him.

Ssshhh, Clay. It’s okay, just a nightmare. You’re okay, you’re home safe in bed.

Luke rose from the bed and padded into the bathroom. The carpet of the yacht’s interior was incredibly soft; it felt like walking on cotton batting. He twisted the bathroom spigot, but no water came out. Luke’s throat was gluey with thirst.

He made his way topside. His watch read 3:09 p.m. He could reset it, but time wouldn’t matter soon. Where he was going, everything was pitch-black all the time.

The ocean stretched out. A low-lying moon was halved by the horizon; they were steering straight at it, giving Luke the impression of heading toward a huge tunnel carved out of the night.

“You’re awake.”

Leo Bathgate stood on an upper deck. Shirtless, his hipbones jutting above his shorts like jug handles. “You sleep okay?”

“Out like a light before my head hit the pillow.”

“Good to hear it. Hungry?”

At the mention of food, Luke’s stomach snarled.

“Starving, actually.”

“We got grub onboard—but temper your expectations, Doc.”

Bathgate led him to a kitchen as well appointed as any restaurant’s. The food was stashed in cardboard boxes. Japanese snacks. Cans of wasabi peas, bags of shrimp chips, Choco Baby bars, Pocky, plus bottles of Fanta and Pocari Sweat.

Luke said: “Is that squid jerky?”

“Wild, huh?” said Bathgate. “This tub was brought down from the Land of the Rising Sun, right? We’re loaded for bear with Japanese delights.”

“Anything you’d recommend?”

Bathgate said, “The shrimp chips aren’t half bad. Kinda of like Cheetos except, y’know, fishy.”

Luke tore open a pack of squid jerky.

“Pretty good,” he said, chewing thoughtfully.

Bathgate said, “I found this, too.” He held up a bottle of Japanese whiskey. “I had a warm beer the other night,” he continued, “but there’s something about drinking hard liquor alone on a boat. But now you’re here, want me to crack it open?”

Luke bit into another rawhide squid, chased it with a handful of wasabi peas, and snorted as the burn hit his nostrils.

“You only live once, Leo.”

Leo poured a stiff belt of whiskey into two glasses and cocked his head at Luke.

“Want a splash of Coke? Some’d say it’s sacrilege, sugaring up good hooch. But hell, I’m a low-class man with animal tastes.”

“Oh, I doubt a low-class man would have a yachting license, would he?” Luke told Leo with a grin.

Leo tipped a wink. “No, but a low-class man would have a trawling license. A trawler and a yacht are pretty much the same thing. Just one’s a helluva lot nicer than another. Like upgrading to a Ferrari when you’re used to driving a Kia. Now you, however, a doctor…”

“My brother’s the brainiac,” Luke said. “I’m just a veterinarian.”

“Just? I’d say that’s a damn noble living.”

“Sure, and I love what I do,” said Luke. “Just, y’know… had to get there on my own. My folks couldn’t afford to send me or my brother to school. Now for Clay, there were scholarships and grants and bursaries. Me? Shoveling shit out of dog cages at the ASPCA, midnight-to-8-a.m. shift, to pay for school.” Luke smiled. “So believe me, I’m no top-shelf liquor drinker.”

Leo tipped Coke into Luke’s glass. They gave their drinks a quick stir around with their index fingers, thumbing their noses at propriety, and clinked glasses.

“Cheers, Doc.”

“Cheers to you, Leo.”

Smoky, with a burned aftertaste. Whiskey had never been his tipple. Guilt crashed over Luke. Here he was drinking another man’s property—a dead man’s property in all likelihood—and he had no appreciation for it.

7.

LEO USHERED LUKE to the helm. The instrument panel was lit in ghostly greens and blues. A monitor charted the present depth of the sea: 2,300 feet.

“I’ve been on the ocean since I was a kid,” said Leo. “My pops owned a lobster boat. I was out on it soon as I could walk. By seven, I was holding the wheel while he dragged the pots. Dad had me stand on an old telephone book.”

He laughed at the memory, his gaze returning to the water.

“I love the sea, and I understand it—much as you can understand something like this. But I haven’t spent time under it, y’know? In my line of work, if you find yourself there, well, you’ve screwed the pooch.”

The points of isolated stars reflected off the water. Luke and Clay used to stare at the stars from their bedroom’s skylight.

The light we’re looking at right now, Clay had told Luke, took billions of years to reach our eyes. Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. And still, it takes a billion years to get here. That’s how big the universe is. It’s 99.99999999 percent darkness. And did you know that the stars we’re looking at right now could be dead already? Burned up, nothing but a black hole. We’re just seeing their ghosts. Ghosts that traveled a quintillion miles just to say Boo!

If they’re ghosts, Luke had asked, then how come we’re not scared of them?

Clay just looked at him as if he’d fallen off the turnip truck—which, apart from an expression of mute dispassion, was the most frequent look he used on Luke in those days.

On the main instrument panel, the ocean floor dropped beneath the yacht: 2,309 feet, 2,316, 2,325, a brief rise to 2,319, followed by a dip to 2,389. A different world existed down there—an inverse of the one human beings existed on. After a hundred feet, it was permanent midnight.

“Didn’t mean to put your feet to the flames earlier,” Leo said. “Asking about your brother and all.”

It didn’t really matter to Luke. He hadn’t spoken to his brother in years. Clayton had never cared about maintaining their connection, anyway. A day, a week, a year, a decade. Time was immaterial to him—and people were even more forgettable.

“Hope,” Leo said. “That’s the hardest part. Maintaining hope after what happens, happens. Because it already happened to my wife.”

Leo’s eyes met Luke’s—Luke caught that wretched need to tell him what had happened. And Luke would let him. That was part of the pact in this new version of the world. Listen to people’s stories, tell your own. It was the only way to cope sometimes.

“I met her in middle school,” Leo said. “Mona Leftowski. The skinniest, gangliest, most remarkable girl. We lived on the same block, and I made every excuse to spend time with her. That didn’t mean I was stuck doing girly things. Mona had a slingshot; we’d peg cans down at the town dump. One time I suggested pegging one of the dump critters—the big rats, maybe a raven—and she slugged me so hard that my shoulder was purple the next day. God, she was so mad. She said that ugly creatures got a right to exist same as you or me.”

Leo chuckled, the skin at the edges of his eyes crinkling. He gave Luke a knowing shrug that said: You’ve heard this story before, haven’t you?

Luke had. Just about everyone left had heard it, or lived it, or both.

“I proposed to her on her nineteenth birthday. Down on one knee in Doyer’s Burger Barn, of all places. When she said yes, my heart just about floated out of my chest and bobbed in the rafters like a balloon on a string. I took over my father’s business. Mona taught at the local elementary school. We had great years together, twenty-one of them in a row. The last two were harder, sure… but hell. That’s life, right?”

Leo refilled his glass and drained half at a go, his Adam’s apple jogging.

“Happened first was, Mona forgot our anniversary. It wasn’t such a big deal, except she had a mind for dates. But what the heck, Mona forgets our anniversary. No big deal.”

He finished his drink and poured another belt. He didn’t drink it; he just cupped the glass in his hands as if to draw warmth from it.

“It happened so gradually you could half convince yourself it wasn’t anything to worry about. You could say: Well, hell, Mona is past fifty; a little memory loss is par for the course. But it got worse. She forgot to flick the turn signal when she was driving. No big whoop—our town was small, traffic’s light. But then she forgot that a red light means ‘stop’ and blew right through an intersection; our Toyota got T-boned by a Lincoln. She was okay, thank God, but after that we decided it was best that I hold on to the car keys.”

Leo beheld Luke miserably over the rim of the glass.

“Mona brought it up after the accident—was it Alzheimer’s? Early onset? That made the most sense. Heck, at first that’s what all the wonks thought it was, too—a hyper-aggressive strain of Alzheimer’s. But as we figured out, the ’Gets is something else entirely. She started writing notes to herself. When it was getting bad, I mean, when she was breaking out in those god-awful scabs. She’d fill notebooks with dates and times and little fragments of info. She had a stack of them, all filled with her neat schoolteacher’s handwriting.”

Luke set a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, you don’t have to—”

Leo waved Luke’s suggestion off with impatience. “What, am I dropping your mood, Doc?”

Luke thought: The story I could tell you, my friend, would sour your mood far worse. So don’t you worry about it one bit.

“Go on, Leo.”

“I watched it,” Leo continued. “God. I watched her forget. Then one day, she’s staring at me across the kitchen table. And her mouth falls open and out comes a half-chewed dinner roll. She hadn’t spoken for days at that point. I don’t even know how much of her was left anymore. We sat that way for a few hours. Mona slumped there, mouth open. I tried to close it for her, but it’d just fall right open again.

“That night, I carried her upstairs and undressed her. I took off her… Doc, she was wearing diapers. Those were hard to lay your hands on by then. Pharmacies all sold out. It busted me up to pull those god-awful things on and off my wife—but if you love someone, you love them in all their states, don’t you? Sickness and health.

“I put her nightgown on and put her in bed and lay down beside her. I was crying, yeah, but I tried to be real soft about it. I don’t imagine it troubled her. Sometime that night, she… stopped, I guess? It happened quickly, which was a relief. She forgot how to live, or… damn it all, I don’t know how this disease finishes us. It didn’t seem real.”

It didn’t seem real. Luke understood that. He’d felt the exact same way the day his son had gone missing.

“I’m so sorry, Leo.”

Leo sawed his palm across his nose. “It’s all percentages, Doc. Life is percentages. When Mona came down with it, hardly anyone had gotten the ’Gets. Less than 1 percent of the population. But that’s the thing about percentages—no matter how small, they’ve got to affect someone, right? After Mona passed I sold the house, packed up, and caught on as a commercial boat captain. When the ’Gets started spreading, a few guys at my company started ferrying supplies to the Hesperus.”

Luke said: “Is that what I am, then? Supplies?”

Leo smiled. “The work keeps my head straight. I like to think I’m doing a bit of good here. When your brother went down… I’m not a religious man, but I prayed he’d find answers. Not for me. The one it could’ve helped is gone from my life. But I harbor that hope all the same.”

The marine band radio squawked.

“What’s your ETA, Bathgate?” someone asked.

Leo consulted his monitors and then keyed the mike. “This is Bathgate. Thirteen hours, twenty-two minutes. Over.”

“Bump it up.” A prolonged silence. “Something has surfaced from the Trieste. It’s… Is Dr. Nelson with you now?”

“He’s right beside me. Over.”

“What’s surfaced is… You better get here as soon as you can manage.”

A knot—something as hard and sticky as clay—twisted in Luke’s stomach.

“I’ll go full bore, then. Bathgate out.”

Leo adjusted his controls. The turbines churned. The yacht surged.

“Home again, home again,” Leo sang. “Jiggedy jig.”

8.

THE HESPERUS HOVERED against the horizon, holding its position against the rising sun.

God of the Evening Star—Venus. That’s what Hesperus meant in Greek, Luke had been told. But it was frequently mistranslated in Latin as Phosphorus. Namely, Lucifer. Of all the names in creation, why risk that invocation?

There wasn’t anything especially demonic about the Hesperus. The research station looked a lot like an offshore oil rig. It sat atop the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in any ocean. The trench went down six miles—the same distance to reach the top of Mount Everest. And Luke’s brother was two miles below that, in the heart of a narrower fissure called Challenger Deep.

The Hesperus floated on huge nitrogen-filled bladders. Each one can shoulder ten tons, Leo had told Luke earlier. The Hesperus floats on thousands of those things.

Its sheer enormity was staggering. Though squat—most of its structures were only a single story—the station sprawled across the water like a raucous frontier town. Ten thousand metric tons of low-slung architecture, salt-whitened scaffolding, and waterproof storage canisters. Dozens of ships were moored around it like moons ringing a planet.

Leo said: “Impressive, huh? That’s what happens when a bunch of first-world countries toss their moolah in a big pot.”

“It is amazing,” Luke said.

“Not half as amazing as what’s happening down below.”

A shiver cat-walked up Luke’s spine. They were now floating above the Trieste—above Clayton. And Luke would be down with his brother soon enough.

Something has surfaced… get here as soon as you can manage.

Leo nosed the yacht alongside the Hesperus and docked neat as a pin. By the time Luke had gathered his belongings and returned topside, stationed soldiers in camouflage fatigues had swung a gangplank into position.

Who the hell wears camouflage on the ocean? Luke wondered.

“Should we go?” he asked Leo.

“Not me, Doc. All this”—Leo nodded at the soldiers—“is above my pay grade.”

How long had Luke known Leo? No more than a few hours. Seemed much longer. He wanted Leo to come with him, pay grades be damned. But he could only shake his hand. “Pleasure meeting you. Thanks for the lift. And the squid.”

“Anytime, Doc. I’m so glad you’re here. Like I said, I’m hopeful.”

Luke headed down the gangplank and slid into the backseat of a golf cart. An adenoidal soldier drove them down a walkway strung with windowless structures. People passed in and out of doors, some in fatigues and others in lab coats. The Hesperus reminded Luke of a MASH unit: the stumpy outbuildings, the hum of generators, the calls going out over a loudspeaker system: L-Team to SQR, Code Orange… L-Team to SQR, Code Orange…

The cart snaked down narrow paths strung between the buildings, jogging left and right. Sparks fanned from a darkened doorway; the soldier drove through the glittering fall, the embers falling painlessly on Luke’s exposed arms—they had the dry sulfurous smell of Fourth of July sparklers. The cart shot through a tight corridor between two domed structures tipped with inverted satellite dishes that resembled a pair of perfect conical breasts, veered left, and followed the edge of the Hesperus for a hundred yards. The sea shone like a bronze mirror in the sun. Luke was amazed. They must have driven the length of a city block. He couldn’t have found his way back to Leo’s yacht without a map.

The cart stopped in front of a black-sided building. As Luke was collecting his bags, a guy in a lab coat popped his head out of the door. Short and squat with a bottom-heavy, bowling ball build. His sunburned face was either cheery—His eyes, how they twinkle, Luke thought; His dimples, how merry!—or faux-cheery, as his eyes shone with cold scrutiny.

“Dr. Nelson, yes?” he said. “Of course—you have Clayton’s eyes… and nose! I’ve been waiting on your arrival. Come in, quickly.”

9.

LUKE FOLLOWED THE MAN down a hallway that doglegged into a small, dark room. A bank of monitors dominated one wall. Strips of medical tape were affixed beneath each monitor, all labeled in black Sharpie: Lab 1; Lab 2; Mess; Nelson’s Chambers; Toy’s Chambers; Westlake’s Chambers; Water Closet; Kennel/Storage; O₂ Purification; Containment; Quarantine.

Most of the monitors were either black or fuzzed with static. The few still in operation offered stationary black-and-white shots, similar to a surveillance video. One, Toy’s Chambers, offered a fish-eye view of modest sleeping quarters: a cot that hinged down from a curved wall, one wafer-thin mattress, a latticework of steel grating that functioned as a walkway.

“The power could be failing,” the man—who had yet to identify himself—told Luke. “We don’t know. Our communication link isn’t working.”

“How long?”

“How long what?” The man turned and stuck out his hand. “Dr. Conrad Felz, by the way.”

“You’re my brother’s partner?”

Felz made a sour face. “Have you talked to your brother lately?”

“Not in some time, no.”

“Weeks? Months?”

A strained smile from Luke. “A titch longer than that.”

It had been over eight years since they had spoken. But why burden Felz with their dour brotherly history?

Felz’s chin jutted. “Partner. Huh. I don’t know if Clayton’s ever had a partner—more subordinates. Subservients. Not that I’m complaining.”

It sure sounds like you’re complaining, Luke thought but didn’t say.

“Clayton doesn’t exactly play nicely with others,” Felz went on. “I’m sure you were jabbed by the pointy end of that particular stick, being the younger brother.”

“Not so much as you’d think. Unless you count being ignored as abusive.”

Felz’s eyebrow cocked, as if to say: You don’t consider that abuse? “Clayton does what he does,” he said, “and because he’s supremely talented, his ways are tolerated. It’s the way it is with savants. Or geniuses, if you’d prefer. That line is so thin sometimes.

“We were competitors at first,” Felz went on, “though I’m certain Clayton never saw it that way. Your brother competes against DNA helixes, against scientific absolutes, against the universe. The notion of competing with another person is, I’m convinced, totally foreign to him.”

Felz’s fleshy lower lip protruded sullenly, a foamy dab of spit collecting in its vermilion zone.

“Your brother and I met at MIT,” Felz said. “He didn’t have to apply, of course; his reputation allowed him to waltz on in. I soon discovered that Clayton wasn’t so much driven as pathological. The man doesn’t sleep.”

It was true that as Clayton hit adolescence, sleep had become nonessential. He’d been up at all hours, squirreled down in his basement lab at twelve years old. He’d stopped going to school by then; he’d been granted an exemption when it became clear that his knowledge outstripped that of his teachers—the equivalent of forcing a piano prodigy to take lessons from a dotty church organist.

“What your brother was doing even before he arrived at MIT was astounding,” Felz said. “Were you on hand to see what he did with that mouse?”

Of course Luke remembered the mouse…

Ernie. The mouse’s name was Ernie. Clay named all of his mice—a grisly fixation, considering their fates. Clayton had heard about this anesthesiologist, a Dr. Charles Vacanti, who’d grafted a human ear onto a mouse’s back; the “ear” was cartilage grown by seeding cow cartilage cells into a biodegradable ear-shaped mold, which was then implanted under the mouse’s skin.

Clayton made it his mission to outdo Vacanti. How he’d managed to do it baffled Luke to this day. As a veterinarian, Luke understood the vagaries of flesh and trauma and disease, but Clayton occupied a different stratum of intellect. He could see doors set in the ordinary fabric of things that were invisible to everyone else—and if he lacked a key to those doors, he goddamn well made one.

Luke had helped Clayton shave the test mice. Clayton was a teenager by then; Luke a few years younger. He was rarely allowed into Clayton’s lab, which was set up in their father’s old workshop. Clayton kept it scrupulously clean, as even a speck of dust could ruin his projects. When he was deep into an “objective,” as he called them, Clayton could go days without food or sleep.

But Clayton had allowed Luke in to prep the mice. Luke used the old Wahl clippers his father used on his wiry neck hairs. For the “Vacanti Objective,” there were thirteen mice, all named: Doug and Pepper and Dot and Beanie and Clyde and Percival, et cetera. They squealed and pissed and shit perfect little chocolate-sprinkle-shaped turds as Luke worked the clippers over their squirming bodies.

“Okay, you can go now,” Clay said brusquely after Luke had finished. Not even a thank-you.

That was the last Luke had seen of his brother for days.

At night, the squeaks of those mice traveled through the vents. One morning Luke found one of them in the garbage can, atop the old coffee grounds and eggshells. A weird lump projected from the mouse’s back: it looked like a horn, or a shark’s fin. Luke plucked it from the trash and dug a hole in the garden and buried it.

A few weeks later, Luke was downstairs tossing his soccer uniform into the dryer when the door to Clayton’s lab opened.

“Come see,” Clayton said.

The mouse, which Clayton had named Doug, trundled awkwardly around a plastic bin. Luke was stunned.

“Is that a…”

“Nose?” Clayton smiled. “Yes, it is.”

A nose—a human-sized nose—spread across Doug’s entire back, from his tail to the tip of his spine. The nostrils fanned around Doug’s rump. The mouse staggered around like a donkey lugging an overloaded saddlebag.

“How did you…?”

“It’s not so hard,” Clayton said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

It was typical for Clayton to be dismissive of his own accomplishments—and he was right, Luke wouldn’t have understood.

Incredibly, the nose twitched. The nostrils dilated.

“Is it—?”

“Breathing?” Clayton said. “No. Doug’s muscles have grown through the new tissue. When its body twitches, so does the nose.”

“What… what are you going to do with him?”

Clayton shrugged, as if he hadn’t thought about it. He’d accomplished his goal—outdoing Dr. Vacanti. Now Doug existed. But what did the world want with a mouse with a nose on its back?

Squeals came from under the lab bench. Luke noticed another tub.

“What’s in there?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s just Ernie.”

Luke reached down and pulled the tub out. Clayton made no move to stop him. For a long moment, Luke’s eyes couldn’t register what they were seeing.

“Oh no… oh…”

The single mouse—could it really be called that anymore?—in the tub was hairless, its body as pink as the skin under a scab. Ernie’s legs… it had no legs. Three nubs projected from the bloat of its body—it was as if its legs had melted into scarified bulbs of flesh. One of its ears was normal, but the other tapered into a whip of flesh: its misplaced tail, the one that should’ve rightly been growing at the back of its body.

“Clay… oh God what…”

A pink, misshapen sac hung off Ernie’s side. It was sheer as a bat’s wing; tiny capillaries braided over its surface. Under this greasy stretching of skin, Luke could see the torpid movements of Ernie’s guts: its stomach quivering, its intestines shuddering. The foreign structure was vaguely peaked, and there were two shallow divots on one side.

“The nose didn’t hold its integrity,” Clayton explained clinically. “The cellular walls broke down, its insides migrating into the new structure. And… other structural collapses. You wouldn’t understand.”

Ernie pulled itself in a lopsided circle using a smooth hook of skin that projected from its sternum. It dragged itself to a pile of food pellets and dipped its tubelike mouth to eat. The squeals became slurps, which switched back to squeals when it couldn’t get the pellets into its toothless mouth.

“I’ve been crushing the pellets up,” Clayton said. “So Ernie can eat.”

“Why? Why is it still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Clayton said honestly. “Organisms are tough. They do not want to expire. But don’t worry. I was able to harvest tissue from Ernie and used it on Doug. And Doug worked.”

Luke noticed the plugs of flesh that Clay had carved from the deformed mouse’s flanks. Seedlings from which Doug could grow. That was how Clayton saw things: as workable premises, or simply one of many faltering steps toward that workable premise. And Ernie belonged on Clayton’s blooper reel.

Luke cupped Ernie in his hands. The mouse-thing mewled and shuddered.

“I’m taking it,” said Luke.

Clayton shrugged. “I don’t need it anymore.”

Luke filled a bucket with water from the hose and drowned Ernie on the porch. It seemed the quickest, most painless way. He buried Ernie in the garden. While he was digging the hole, still backhanding tears from his eyes, he’d seen Clay staring at him from the basement window, his face set in a bemused and slightly scornful expression.

“Yes, of course,” Luke told Felz after a long pause. “I remember what Clayton did with that mouse.”

Clayton’s miracle mouse had set off a furor in the scientific community and soon, the media. Clayton was feted in some circles, demonized in others. Over the next year the press coined a number of monikers, from “Kid Frankenstein” to “Cute Clay” on account of his striking good looks (he remains the only scientist to grace the pages of Tiger Beat and Bop magazines, which dispatched photographers to snap him coming and going from his house) to “Jonas Sulk,” for his moodiness with reporters. Clayton was approached by the heads of several major medical institutions; they pursued him with the ardor of a blue-chip athletic recruit, offering full run of their facilities. He also entertained overtures from Big Pharma and more than a few genetic research firms. He turned them all down. When asked why, he said, “I’d miss my mother’s meatballs too much”—this was a lie, and Luke knew it. Clayton hated his mom’s meatballs.

Felz directed Luke’s attention to the bank of monitors. Luke’s gaze was drawn to one marked O₂ Purification. White objects resembling oil filters were screwed into the room’s walls. Luke figured the oxygen inside the undersea station must pass through those cylinders, which siphoned off the carbon monoxide to make it breathable again.

The monitor’s image adjusted. A fragmentary darkening in the lower left hemisphere. It was so brief, so inconsequential, that Luke wondered if he’d seen anything at all. Could it be a technical malfunction? The signal had to travel up through eight miles of water after all.

“So who’s down there?”

“Other than your brother?” Felz said. “There are two others, both Americans. I’m sorry, Jesus—there’s one. There were three at first, but…”

“But?”

Felz held up a hand. “We’ll get to that. Right now there’s only your brother and Dr. Hugo Toy, the molecular biologist.”

“That’s it? Two people?”

Felz nodded. “Their vital signs monitors indicate they’re both alive and… functional? Sorry, I don’t know a better word. So them, plus the test subjects. Two Labrador retrievers, various reptile species, guinea pigs, and of course, the bees.”

Luke nodded. “Okay, so here’s the billion-dollar question: why are they down there at all?”

Felz’s face held the look of a boy with a secret so monumental that holding it in caused him physical pain.

“What we’ve discovered appears to exist beyond all explication.”

10.

FELZ OPENED A DOOR, which led into a small lab dominated by a steel bench. A hum filled the air. It held an uneven cadence, the odd chirp or hiccup, the way a computer sounds when it’s processing huge amounts of data.

Felz walked to an upright black box. It had the dimensions of a hotel fridge, with a keypad on its front.

“It still amazes me that access could be so simple,” he said. “Five years ago, we’d have had to pass through an armed checkpoint, a titanium door, a retinal scan, a blood serum scan, and a body-cavity search just to fill out the requisition forms to look at what I’m about to show you. The Hesperus exists because of this… but we don’t know what this is. So in that way, it’s like leaving the Hope Diamond in a bus station locker: as long as nobody really understands its value, it’s perfectly safe where it is.”

Felz entered a pass code. The lock on the black box disengaged. He cracked the lid. A stream of supercooled air escaped.

Luke leaned forward, dimly aware of the throbbing tension in his chest.

“I really don’t think security matters much, anyway,” Felz said, more to himself than to Luke. “I’m not sure anyone could move it, even if they wanted to.”

“Why?” Luke asked.

“Because,” Felz said softly, “it’s exactly where it wants to be.”

The cooler contained a single sealed petri dish. Felz reached for it with great reverence, fear, or some combination of both.

“You need to keep it that cold?” Luke asked.

Felz gave a tepid smile. “We don’t know. It seems unwise to place it in an environment conducive to growth. I mean, we don’t want it growing. Not yet.”

He set the petri dish on the lab bench. The lid was fogged. The condensation evaporated, the glass clearing by degrees.

“Isn’t it magnificent?” said Felz.

11.

MAGNIFICENT was one word for it.

But mundane also came to mind.

A gelatinous blob the size of a robin’s egg. It looked like a glob of partially set Jell-O. Not one of the colorful flavors, either. A drab nothing color—the color you’d get if you scraped a billion thumbprints off a million windowpanes and collected them into a ball.

“What is it?”

“It’s resistant to categorization,” said Felz. “Every standard test—DNA cataloguing, cellular identity, chemical pattern bonding… all inconclusive. No matches to any known flora, fauna, DNA structures, or chemical compounds. It’s… well, like I said, uncategorizable.”

“Is there a name for it?”

“Formally? Scientifically? Nothing yet,” Felz said. “It’s known internally as Specimen 1-G. We’ve had a few other specimens in hand, but they vanished.”

Vanished. Luke hated that particular word.

“What do you mean?” he said. “They died or…?”

Felz shook his head. “No. They just disappeared and… evanesced. Vaporized. Gone away. Informally, your brother and I have a name for it. Ambrosia, after the Greek word for nectar of the gods. Initially it was lying on a bed of agar gel—the standard petri dish base. Microbial growth does not destroy the gel structure, as microorganisms are unable to digest agar. But this specimen did something to the agar. It, well… harmonized it, I guess you could say.”

“You mean ate it?”

“No, no, it added the agar to itself. Transmuted the agar to make more of itself. The sample used to be much smaller. There’s nothing left of the agar, and its mass has been added to the ambrosia. It would be the equivalent of, oh, I don’t know—say instead of eating a loaf of bread, you somehow added the loaf to your body. Changed its cell structure to mimic your own, retained its shape and size, and ended up with a new appendage exactly resembling that loaf.” Felz pointed. Luke followed his finger—which he noticed was trembling. “If you look carefully, you can see it’s started to do the same to the dish.”

Luke noted a slight depression in the petri dish, as if it’d been eaten away by acid. He imagined the ambrosia eating through the glass, then the cooler and the floor until it plopped into one of the nitrogen-filled bladders, assimilating the gas somehow, making itself bigger, spreading across the bottom of the Hesperus like a tenacious weed.

“Is it some kind of parasite? Or something from the fossil age?”

“It’s something much more than that,” said Felz. “If it’s primitive, I suppose it would be in the way sharks are: they were perfectly built from the start, so they never needed to evolve. But sharks are common. They’re of this world. This thing is infinitely more complex.”

“What do you mean—it’s alien?”

Felz didn’t answer. Luke realized that the specimen wasn’t quite as lusterless as it’d seemed at first. It sparkled. The shimmer reminded Luke of marbles. Marbles in a mesh sack, each one glossed by the sun. The marbles he’d played with as a child.

Luke leaned in to get a better look. Veins of light streaked through the ambrosia’s interior. Coin-bright shafts of light, like zaps of lightning but more colorful: reds and violets and emeralds and incandescent whites.

So transfixing. Luke could watch it all day and night…

Felz squeezed Luke’s elbow. “Hey. You shouldn’t look at it for too long. It’s got a strange way about it.”

Dull anger hived in Luke’s stomach. He wanted to look some more, but Felz—the killjoy bastard—was intent on stopping him.

“I’m okay,” Luke said. “I’m fine, damn it.” Luke snapped back to himself. He smiled sheepishly at Felz. “I’m sorry.”

Felz returned the dish to the cooler. “It’ll pass. It’s one of the effects the ambrosia possesses.”

“So where the hell did it come from?” Luke asked, half knowing already.

Felz pointed downward. “The deep.”

“How did you—?”

“Four years ago a pollack ship, the Olympiad, was bottom-trawling twenty miles north of here,” Felz said. “Their winch broke, so to avoid damaging the net the captain charted a course for the Mariana Trench. It’s so deep that the ship could circle safely until the winch was fixed. When the net was dragged up, it was full of by-catch—that is, marine life they hadn’t set out to capture. They found a lantern fish, a species that commonly dwells several miles beneath the surface. It was still alive, which was the first shock. Lantern fish live in darkness, under tremendous pressure. If they swim toward the surface, the lessened pressure pulls their body apart. Not only that, but the sunlight attacks their flesh like acid. The only way to study lantern fish, or anything that dwells at those depths, is to do so in their habitat. Which is why so little is known about them.”

“The lantern fish they found was intact?”

“Not just that, Dr. Nelson. It was alive. It may’ve been thrown over the side if not for the intervention of Dr. Eva Parks, a marine biologist who was onboard to study pollack migratory patterns. She spied the fish and recognized its inconceivability. She was scrupulous: she pegged the ship’s longitude and latitude, fixing its position. Otherwise your brother and I wouldn’t have known where to begin our search. Dr. Parks took a few measurements—length, girth, weight—before the fish started to show signs of incipient mortality. She began to hastily count the annuli on its scales. Perhaps you know of these?”

“They’re what, age rings?” Luke said. “The same as when you cut down a tree; count the number of rings, you get its age.”

Felz nodded. “Exactly so. But Parks couldn’t count the rings. There were simply too many. They were lapped over and over, ring upon ring over ring, making an accurate enumeration impossible.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, Dr. Nelson,” Felz said, “the fish was functionally ageless. So old that the common method of analysis was useless.”

“How long do lantern fish live?”

“Twenty or thirty years, likely. This one could’ve been several hundred years old, a thousand years old, or even older. As in, immeasurably old.”

“How is that possible?”

Felz showed Luke his open palms as if to say: It shouldn’t be possible. “During Dr. Parks’ examination, the fish expired. As she related it, it didn’t just die—it decomposed. Almost instantaneously, it surrendered cellular integrity. It rotted in real time. Imagine the trauma it would’ve sustained while rising to the surface, the attacks by pressure and sunlight. Now imagine it all happening at once. Dr. Parks took a video of the aftermath. A black pool of gunk. And shortly after that came another shock.”

Felz gestured to the cooler.

“Dr. Parks discovered a tiny particle of ambrosia beside the carcass. No bigger than a few stuck-together grains of sand; it’s a miracle she was able to distinguish it from the rotted matter. She put it in a petri dish, as scientists do.”

“So you’re saying…”

“That the ambrosia kept the lantern fish alive for a minor eternity? That the ambrosia kept that same fish alive, protecting it somehow, as it rose through the oceanic zones? That the ambrosia didn’t allow that fish to die until it deserted its body, either voluntarily or through some other organic process?” Felz showed Luke his palms again. “Many signs point to yes.”

“So this stuff is floating around down there, attaching itself to aquatic life?”

Felz shook his head. “The lantern fish was an anomaly. We’ve found no further presence of ambrosia at that depth. Our speculation is that the fish hunted near a thermal vent; a tiny shred of ambrosia could have floated up from below and moored to the fish. The only place we’ve found any concentration of ambrosia—or what we believe to be ambrosia—is much deeper. The deepest part of the Mariana Trench, in fact. Right in the area of Challenger Deep.”

“Which is where the Trieste is.”

Felz nodded. “We sent down observation cameras first, when the idea of constructing a station at that depth was still in its infancy. We had to know if the effort was worthwhile. The camera lenses kept shattering under pressure, but the footage was promising. Globules of matter drifting over the trench floor. Strange movements—the sort commonly associated with sentient life. Which goes against all prior understandings of those depths. For decades, nobody thought anything could exist down there. The monolithic pressure, a total absence of nourishing light. How could anything survive?”

“And that was enough to kick-start all of this?” Luke said. “A few blobs fluttering around at the bottom of the ocean?”

“Desperate times, Dr. Nelson.”

Luke lapsed into silence.

“You seem underwhelmed,” said Felz. “Or is it dubious? I felt the same way at first. Nothing should live down there. What good could it do us, anyway? But then I saw for myself. Your brother showed me.”

“How did Clayton get involved with all this?”

Felz said: “When you discover something like ambrosia—the equivalent of an intricate organic riddle—who would you summon, if not the world’s foremost riddle solver?”

He waved Luke toward the back of the room.

“Come here. Let me show you something else.”

12.

FELZ’S LAPTOP sat on the lab bench.

“Hang on. It’s here somewhere.” He scrolled the mouse across the files littering the computer’s desktop. “You’ve followed your brother’s work, I take it? Surely you know about his cancer mouse?”

How could Luke not? It was his brother’s best-known contribution to science, far more impressive than Doug, his nose-mouse. Clayton hadn’t discovered a cure for cancer, far from it. But he had found a way to give cancer to a mouse. And he gave it with pinpoint precision—he could isolate the location, the organ or tissue, and control the complexity of its spread: malignant or benign, dormant or devouring.

Clayton’s very special mice were born with cancer. They were engineered to be sick—specifically and perfectly, from a scientific point of view. A researcher could order fifty mice with Stage 2 lung cancer. Or a hundred mice with advanced liver cancer, or ten with benign stomach tumors. Clayton’s mice were a boon to science. They were born carrying the pathogen that would kill them—and they were never truly healthy, not for one moment of their lives. Animal rights activists were none too thrilled, to put it mildly, but that didn’t stop researchers everywhere from hoisting Clayton on their collective shoulders.

“Your brother heard about Dr. Parks and the foreign matter she’d isolated,” said Felz. “Shortly thereafter, the sample was delivered to our lab for study.”

“And Dr. Parks had no problem with that?”

“Dr. Parks was given an opportunity to stay with the project. She opted not to take that opportunity.”

“Clayton muscled her out?”

Felz looked up sharply. “Nothing like that, I assure you.”

Luke saw no use in pursuing the issue. “So when the sample arrived…?”

“Your brother absented himself for several days. He’d emerge from the lab weary but excited. As the days ground on, confusion wore through that excitement. I don’t know, he told me. I really can’t tell you anything about this substance. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before on this earth.”

Felz located the .mov file he’d been searching for.

CANCER MOUSE AMBROSIA, TEST 1-B.

“For this test, Clayton created a special mouse,” Felz said. “It didn’t have one cancer; it had virtually all of them. It was sick in every way it was possible to be sick. Liver, pancreatic, spinal, skin, bowel. It was on death’s door by the time the first experiment took place.”

“Why 1-B?” Luke asked. “What happened to 1-A?”

“The ambrosia didn’t interact with the first test subject. It… refused to, is I suppose the only explanation. As such, the subject expired. Now watch, Dr. Nelson. I think you’ll find it quite extraordinary.”

Felz clicked the play arrow on the file.

A tight shot: a mouse in a lab tray. It squeaked in obvious pain and tottered a few inches across the tray before toppling over, breathing heavily.

A hand entered the frame—Clayton’s hand, his fingers gripping a pair of tweezers. Clayton’s other hand appeared, and in it, a petri dish. He tweezed out a speck of ambrosia and laid it beside the mouse.

The mouse lay still. Luke was aware of the passage of time only in the tension that built up in his arms and fingers, and the sheen of sweat slicking his forehead.

The mouse dragged itself to the ambrosia. Its squeaks sounded different: almost pleading, though that was surely only Luke’s interpretation. It drew nearer to the speck until—

“Whoa, what the hell happened there?” Luke said.

Felz moved the cursor, backtracking the file. He played it again. Luke concentrated this time—he knew it was coming. And still…

“I can’t make it out.”

“Yes, none of us can,” Felz said. “I’ve replayed that section hundreds of times. We gave it to an audiovisual wizard, had her blow up the image and slow it down—it clarifies nothing. It simply happens too fast.”

“It looks like—”

“Like the ambrosia goes into the mouse, yes. Penetrates its skin. But the ambrosia is gelatinous. How could it solidify itself to pierce flesh, and not leave a wound? We inspected the mouse afterward. No hole. No blood. No scar. We thought since the entry point is near the mouse’s mouth, perhaps it entered there. We slowed the footage down, looked at it frame by frame. One frame, the ambrosia’s there. The next, it’s gone.”

“And it’s inside the mouse.”

“It simply must be,” said Felz.

The video resumed. The mouse lay still a few seconds, then hopped up and began racing around the tray, faster and faster until it flung itself out onto the bench.

Someone said, “Damn!” as the mouse skittered across the table with gleeful abandon. Clayton entered the frame, chasing it. Another man dashed behind him. Next came Clayton’s voice. “I’ve got it.”

The video ended.

Felz said: “Likely you already know what I’m going to tell you. You’ve realized that the Hesperus, the Trieste, and the trillion-odd dollars funding this project wouldn’t have materialized were it not for what happened to that mouse.”

Luke said: “It was cured.”

“The cancer was eradicated. There was not one discoverable cancerous cell in its body. It was riddled with the stuff and then, all gone.”

“What about the ambrosia?” Luke said. “Was it isolated inside the mouse?”

Felz shook his head. “The mouse was totally unchanged, other than the eradication of its cancer. Its amino profile and bone density and factors x, y, and z—all unchanged, except for changes that would naturally occur with the cancer gone.”

“But it’s just a mouse,” said Luke. “And it’s cancer. How can we know this stuff will address the ’Gets in humans?”

“Dr. Nelson, we would have searched for this stuff, as you call it, if all it did was cure cancer in mice. It’s a remarkable discovery any way you slice it. If your brother could have infected a mouse with the ’Gets, well, we would know to a certainty. But the disease doesn’t interact with animals, as you well know. We did, however, perform tests on cancerous human cells. Lab tests only, but the results were promising.”

“And that was enough to spur all this?”

“My God, man, what else were we waiting for? If not now, when?”

“So,” Luke said, “what you’ve found is some kind of—”

“Universal healer?” Felz shook his head wonderingly, a stunned smile on his face. “It would seem so. Imagine a drug that cures everything and anything. Whitewashes all the sickness in your body, fixing you completely. It seems crazy, but—”

“But this isn’t a drug. This is an organism. How do you know the effects aren’t temporary? Or that that stuff isn’t doing something to make it run around like that, to subtly injure the mouse?”

“Like what?”

I mean, controlling it in some way, Luke thought but didn’t say, remembering the weird prickle he’d gotten when he’d stared at the ambrosia.

Felz said: “Are you a religious man, Dr. Nelson? Your brother isn’t. Men like us rarely are. But you?”

Luke shook his head. “My mom used to say she prayed at the church of State and Main, which was the intersection where the local bank sat.”

Felz nodded and said, “I only ask because of something your brother said. It was the one time when he sounded truly helpless—casting his lot with the fates, you could say. He’d been researching the ’Gets before this business with ambrosia. He couldn’t crack it for the life of him. Totally stymied. Then he encountered the ambrosia and couldn’t make heads or tails of it, either.

“One night after another fruitless session with the ambrosia, he said: What if the devil unleashed a perfectly unexplainable plague on humanity? If so, isn’t it equally possible that God created the perfect, if inexplicable cure?” Felz shrugged. “Clayton believes in keys and locks. For every lock, there exists a key. You just have to find those keys. Find them, and trust in the will of a higher power.”

“Locks and keys.”

“Exactly, Dr. Nelson. Locks and keys.”

“And this particular key—you think it’s eight miles down?”

Felz closed the laptop. “That’s the hope. Perhaps there’s an abundance of it. Perhaps—and this is an admittedly out-there hypothesis—what we’ve found so far are shreds off a far larger organism. A mother-organism, if you will.”

A quaver passed down Luke’s spine. A mother-organism. Huge and amorphous and ageless, lying in darkness at the bottom of the sea. Jesus.

“Why wouldn’t Dr. Parks want to be part of this?”

Felz started. “I beg pardon?”

“Dr. Eva Parks. She discovered it. Why wouldn’t she want to be part of perhaps the greatest discovery in human history?”

Of course, Luke knew it had to be Clayton. His bullying ways. He was thinking about their childhood sandbox: how Clay had commandeered the toys for no other purpose than to deprive Luke of the satisfaction of playing with them.

“Dr. Nelson…” Felz licked his lips, smearing that ever-present dab of spit across them. “Dr. Parks committed suicide shortly after the sample arrived in our custody. She hanged herself in her apartment in Maine. In her closet, with a length of nautical rope.”

“Good God. Why would she do such a thing?”

“That I do not know. From all outward appearances she was happy. A good career. Engaged to another doctor she’d met at graduate school.” Felz glanced at the cooler and licked his lips again. “There is no sensible cause, but suicide is not a sensible act.”

A door banged open. Luke and Felz craned their necks toward the sound.

“The very man I’m looking for,” a new voice said.

13.

THE VOICE BELONGED to a woman in combat fatigues. Tall and incredibly broad across the shoulders, that broadness tapering toward her waist, which was cinched in a thick belt. She wore no insignia of rank. Those things didn’t mean as much now, the same way a policeman’s badge carried less heft. Ever since the ’Gets, people were measured by their abilities rather than by the pieces of tin pinned to their chests.

Her hair was clipped short and her jaw had a long angularity that gave her face a sharpness, an intensity that was of a piece with her piercing green eyes. She carried herself with a controlled bearing that seemed almost robotic, each movement calibrated to deliver maximum function with minimal exertion. A scar roped up the side of her neck and trailed behind her left ear—thick and ribbed and pink, the color of bubblegum.

“Dr. Nelson?”

“Yes.”

She offered her hand. “Alice Sykes. Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy. But feel free to call me Al. Paul Simon may come sniffing around for royalties, but I can deal with that hassle personally.”

Luke liked her immediately—yet he got a sense of forced jocularity off of her, too: her smile was screwed on too tight.

She turned to Felz. “I take it you’ve filled Dr. Nelson in on the magical goo in deep freeze?”

Dr. Felz stood up straight. “Yes, we’ve covered just about everything.”

“Fine. We gotta get this show on the road.” Alice’s expression darkened. “Have you spoken to him about what’s surfaced?”

Felz said, “No. I thought…”

“That’s okay. It’s not an easy matter. Let’s hop to it.”

A four-seat golf cart waited on the deck. Al sat up front, Felz and Luke behind.

“A hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Al said to Luke as they careened through the floating minicity. Each building was painted a reflective black; the sun knifed off every angle, painfully bright. Luke caught sight of the sea through a gap between the buildings—the horizon shimmered, the sky a searing blue against the plate-glass water. Everything looked new and modern, but so many of the structures seemed to be half built or unused. It reminded Luke of those model communities on the outskirts of Las Vegas, built in anticipation of a boom that never came. The Hesperus had that same ghost town feel—it was a place built for great things that had not quite come to pass.

Al craned her head around to see if Luke was taking it all in—Luke diverted his gaze. He’d been focused on the scar that went all the way around the back of Al’s neck, a pink band that petered out at her right earlobe. It looked as though someone had tried to slit her neck, starting at the back. If she noticed him looking, she was tactful enough not to mention it.

“Who paid for all this?” Luke said.

“Everyone who earns a paycheck,” Al said. “You, me, the butcher, the baker. Not just American greenbacks, either: Japanese yen, British pounds, Chinese yuan, German deutsche marks.”

“That would be euros,” said Felz, fussily. “They replaced the deutsche mark in 2002.”

“Thank you, Dr. Felz, for your scrupulous attention in regards to matters of international currency.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Anyway,” Alice went on, “what you see here is the whole world, holding hands. We got a lot of support from private enterprise, too. CEOs, CFOs, magnates, philanthropists. Everyone’s smashing their piggy banks. Everybody’s lost something to this by now, y’know? And what’s money worth if there’s no future to spend it in?”

“Why is it all Americans, then? I mean, down on the Trieste? Dr. Felz said the researchers are all from the U.S.”

“I guess because America always rides point,” Al said.

They stopped beside a compact submarine. Fifteen feet long with a porthole window at one end. It lay in a massive canvas hammock. It looked like a huge lozenge—a vitamin pill for Neptune.

“Challenger 5,” Al told Luke. “It’s being prepped for your descent.”

Luke said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I have no idea how to operate this.”

“Yeah, that would take some serious training. Thankfully, you’ll be in the company of a skilled pilot.” Al thumped her chest. “Like I said, tight squeeze.”

She leaned over the seat, jammed her face close to Luke’s own.

“Breathe on me.”

“What?”

“I said, breathe on me. Come on, don’t be shy.”

Luke did as she asked, too startled to refuse. Al sniffed.

“Okay, good. Nothing worse than being cooped up for hours with a guy with bad breath.”

Luke exhaled, chuckling now. “I’ve got Tic Tacs in my bag.”

She winked. “Even better.”

If I have to journey eight miles beneath the water’s surface, Luke thought, this Alice Sykes seems as fine a companion as any.

“Dr. Westlake came up in Challenger 4,” Al said. “It’s still under quarantine.”

Luke said, “Dr. Westlake?”

“Dr. Felz hasn’t mentioned him yet?” Al darted a glance at Felz, a darkness settling into her eyes. “He was the third member of the team. Dr. Cooper Westlake. He was a—remind me what was his job again, Doctor?”

“Computational biologist,” Felz said as the cart got rolling again.

“I got to know Dr. Westlake pretty well,” Al said. The forced jocularity was gone. In its place was somber concern. “I liked him a hell of a lot. He seemed put together. But it’s incredibly hard down there. Not just the physical pressure; there’s the added pressure of what they’re trying to achieve. Dr. Westlake surfaced nine and a half hours ago, while you were in transit. Let me ask—has your brother ever mentioned him?”

Luke said: “I’ve never met Dr. Westlake. Never even heard his name.”

“I believe that’s the truth as you know it,” said Al.

The cart stopped before a building with a red cross on its exterior. Al rested her gaze gently upon Luke’s.

“What’s behind that door,” she said, “is Dr. Westlake. What surfaced of him. You don’t have to look… but maybe you’ll want to, seeing as you’ve agreed to go down.”

“What happened to him?” said Luke.

Alice showed him her palms, same as Felz had done. A helpless gesture.

“It’s still our world down there, Dr. Nelson,” she said, “but that’s like saying that the ice ten thousand feet beneath the arctic icepack is, too. Yeah, it is, but not anything we know. Our government has spent thirty trillion dollars on space exploration, and less than 1 percent of that to explore the world underneath us right now. But it’s just as unknown. You’ll be entering another world, really and truly.”

“It’s Luke,” he told her. “Call me Luke. And I’ll go. I’ll see.”

Al’s clipped nod made Luke think she wished he’d chosen otherwise.

14.

THE AIR WAS MEAT-LOCKER COLD on the other side of the door with the red cross. Luke’s arms instantly broke out in gooseflesh.

The room was uncluttered. Halogen lights buzzed down on a bank of steel vaults. Luke had visited morgues as a veterinarian, most recently to perform an autopsy on a police drug dog that’d died after ingesting a perforated balloon of heroin.

“Every vault is empty save one,” Al said. “We’ve been lucky lately with the ’Gets. A few in quarantine, but none dead and no new cases reported in a week. Must be the sea air.” A gravedigger’s smile. “Sorry. Poor taste.”

They walked with aching slowness toward the vaults.

“Dr. Westlake and the others had settled into their roles inside the Trieste. The station was holding up. Electrical function, oxygen purification, waste disposal—all systems operational, which on the technical side of things was the main concern.

“Mentally, the crew seemed sound. Your brother was the point man—he gave the majority of the updates, so our perceptions up here were filtered through him. But we watched the other two on the monitors. They were eating, sleeping, engaged in productive labor. You’d see them talking and laughing with one another.

“There was the odd sign of strain, but that could be chalked up to their situation. Add to that the sensory deprivation. No sun, no fresh air. But our psychs are versed in signs of trauma fatigue; they assured us the trio was holding up well. Then… well, Westlake went off the grid.”

Al gripped the handle of the centermost vault and cracked it open a few inches. A chemical tang puffed out, sliming Luke’s tongue and making him slightly nauseous.

“Westlake may’ve been getting squirrelly,” Al said. “He’d been isolated inside his lab for quite some time. No updates, no contact. The video camera in his lab was busted. We couldn’t see what he was doing… or what was being done to him.”

Done to him? Luke thought.

“We thought about going down. Maybe he’d cracked, right? But descents have been tricky the past few weeks. A lot of subsurface disturbances, the most serious being a current ring situated directly above the trench.”

“Current ring?”

“An underwater tornado, basically. An eddy sucking a billion-odd tons of water into itself, creating a funnel. We sent a supply drone down last week; the eddy caught it, spun it, and smashed it into the trench wall.”

“And you expect me to go down into that?”

“The ring cleared two days ago. The sea’s gone sleepy again. Anyway, we didn’t go down for two reasons.” She held up a finger. “One, because of the current ring”—she held up a second finger—“and two, because your brother, whose contact had become sporadic, assured us things were fine. Then today, in the early hours of morning, Challenger 4, which had been docked to the Trieste, began to rise. Westlake was inside. How he’d managed to get the sub working—he hadn’t been trained in its operation—is unknown.

“A few things happened during Westlake’s ascent, all of them bad. First, we lost contact with the Trieste altogether. The comm link went kerflooey, or else someone shut it off. Second, we lost most of the monitors. We’d already lost a few, but this was a whole whack of them, all at once. Could be a technical issue. A major circuit blowout. Or else someone down there wanted them off.”

Someone or something, Luke thought irrationally.

“Something else happened as Westlake came up. Happened to him. He could only have done it to himself.”

Al’s fingers were steady on the vault’s handle, but a fragile muscle fluttered next to her eye.

“You go ahead and open it,” Luke said.

Without another word, she did so.

15.

AT FIRST LUKE COULDN’T TELL what he was looking at. His eyes rejected it, as it didn’t fit any prior conceptions of the human form.

Dr. Westlake’s naked body was a swollen mass of scar tissue. His body was all scars. A ballooned, inflated parody of the human form.

It appeared as if Westlake had been wrapped in pink elastic bands. Some were thick as garter snakes, others thin as copper wires. Some fibrous as canvas rigging, others frail as onionskin. They lapped over in gruesome profusion, each one nurtured to a sickening, sensuous bulbousity. It seemed as if at any moment they might burst open and thin ribbons of flesh would spool forth, covering the old scars in layers that further obscured the body trapped inside.

Westlake’s frame was bent, each limb wrenched at an unnatural angle. The bends. Nitrogen bubbles had built up in the blood, snapping Westlake’s bones as they expanded.

Luke wanted to look away. Couldn’t.

Sweet Christ, his face. The scars were the worst there. Elsewhere they seemed to have been laid down haphazardly, but the ones on his face had a more considered appearance. They had been delivered with special care. His eyes were trapped inside swollen bulbs of flesh—if Luke were to touch them, he imagined they would feel like India rubber balls—each so huge that they projected from the wrecked tapestry of his face like plums. His lips had been sliced and had healed until the flesh knit together, upper lip wedded to bottom, fused into a thick band that curved upward in a grisly rictus. His nostrils had a feathered look, the flesh slit back in fragile petals that revealed candle-white sinus cavities.

“Shut it.” Luke’s voice was a frail whisper. “Please.”

Al did so. Luke jackknifed at the waist, hands braced on his knees.

“How…?”

“I wish I had any idea,” Al said softly. “We found a scalpel in the sub. Its blade was gouged up, dull as a butter knife. We figure it’d been used to cut through flesh, tendon, cartilage. Eventually it went dull on the bone.”

“It’s not possible, Al. I mean, that kind of trauma… how long does it take to surface?”

“Eight or nine hours usually. Westlake came faster, which is why he got the bends. He decompressed too fast. Truth is, we were fully expecting that it wouldn’t be pretty. But no way could we have imagined this.”

“He did this to himself?”

“Who else? The submarine was empty.”

Totally empty? Luke wondered. What if Westlake had been carrying that goo?

“We didn’t find any ambrosia,” Al said before Luke could ask. “We tore the sub apart and found not a trace of the stuff. Just the scalpel, Westlake’s body, and one more thing.”

“What was that?”

“Luke,” Al said carefully, “Felz showed you the mouse video, right? You see what that stuff can do. A godsend? I can see that. But I can see other things, too.”

She didn’t need to finish. Luke had the same vision. Westlake rising up from Challenger Deep, hacking into himself—and every time he cut himself, he healed so fast that it was almost immediate. Luke pictured an endless zipper: Westlake’s flesh opening, only to close a few moments after the scalpel slit it, leaving very little blood and a ragged scar. Westlake could have sliced himself for hours, reducing himself in some exquisite way, laughing or shrieking or crying or who-knows-what, mindlessly—or mindfully?—layering scar over scar until… what? How did he die? Had the ambrosia deserted him? Evanesced, as Felz said?

Luke closed his eyes. The absolute worst of all was the expression frozen on Westlake’s face. Luke was quite certain he died smiling.

“What else, Al? What was inside the submersible?”

She set a hand on Luke’s shoulder. Luke didn’t realize how badly he’d been shaking. It had nothing to do with how cold the room felt.

16.

DR. FELZ WASN’T THERE when they returned to the deck of the Hesperus. They got into the cart, both of them sitting on the rear seat.

“Go,” Al told the driver.

Luke couldn’t inhale enough air to inflate his lungs. He couldn’t unsee Dr. Westlake’s horrible, twisted body. For the first time, doubt seeped into Luke’s mind. Why did he have to go down, anyway? He wasn’t saying he wouldn’t, but why him? He hadn’t asked this most elementary question when the phone had woken him two days ago. He’d flown to Guam unquestioningly, as many people might when their government made the request. He paid his taxes and renewed his license and never caught more fish than his limit, too. He wanted to help, to do something good, just as Leo Bathgate did. Governments approved of citizens like Luke Nelson.

Plus there was no one on the other side of his bed to tell Luke not to go. And the room down the hall that his son had once slept in was empty, too.

“Why me?” he said. “Clayton’s my brother, but we aren’t close. I don’t have any specific skills that might help you out down there.”

“We’ll make a motley pair then, won’t we?” said Al. “What you’re asking, I take it, is why don’t we send down a crew of Special Forces badasses and put things right? We considered it. Dismissed it. First, that current ring made it dangerous to get down until recently. Second, the two men still down there—your brother and Dr. Toy—wield the whip hand now. They’re inside, we’re outside. I’ll give you a full debriefing later, but suffice it to say, the Trieste is fragile. All it takes is one screwdriver—pierce any wall just a fraction and it’s pancake city. So if we head down cocked and locked, well, what do we stand to lose if things go sideways? Everything. Absolutely everything.”

“That’s a cheerful thought. Jesus.”

They passed down a row of low, black, flat-sided buildings connected by linked walkways; they made Luke feel like he was touring a medium-security prison.

“But why you?” Al said. “Good question. You’re as green at deep dives as I am at neutering spaniels, right? The main reason, Luke, is that your brother asked for you.”

“Get out of here.”

She pulled an iPhone from her pocket and thumb-shuffled until she found what she was looking for. “This came through fifty hours ago. You received a call in Iowa City shortly thereafter. Sound file, no video. It stands as our last contact with your brother. We were debating whether to act on it, but the Westlake situation forced our hand.”

She pressed play. Clayton’s voice floated out of the speaker.

“Come home, Lucas. Come down, Lucas. We need you, Lucas. Come home.”

Clayton’s flat, monotone cadence was rendered tinny by the recording. Clayton sounded as if he was asleep; his voice was syrupy and water-warped, like a 45 rpm record playing at a relaxed 33 rpm. That could be a problem with the transmission itself, which had to carry through eight miles of water. Clayton repeated himself again before the message cut out abruptly.

“We need you, Lucas. Come ho—”

“It took a while to figure out who Lucas was,” said Al. “Your brother doesn’t speak about his family. We figured it could’ve been a research associate, a friend, a lover even. Our intel people dug around a bit and figured he must’ve been talking about you.”

“But Clayton doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need anyone. He never has.”

Except for those nights when the sleep terrors descended on him, he thought. The nights when you’d climb into bed with him until he settled down. But that was years ago, when they were only boys.

Yet Clayton had been saying We need you. We. WE. We who?

“Think of him as our pampered rock star whose rider calls for a big bowl of M&M’s, only the red ones,” said Al. “In this case, he’s asking for his brother. We give him what he wants—making every effort to preserve your safety, of course.”

“Why would he want me down there?”

Al cocked her head. “You put people’s minds and bodies under that kind of pressure… Things snap, right? We want to do everything possible to avoid that snap.”

“So that’s what I am, then? A bandage?”

“Think of yourself more as a key.”

Luke couldn’t imagine his brother needing a bandage, anyway. He was armor plated, titanium coated. But that voice… it hadn’t sounded entirely like Clayton. Granted, it had been years since they’d last spoken, but still, something was off about it. The difference wasn’t in the words themselves or the pitch of his voice—it lurked somewhere behind the obvious, sly and scuttling like rats in the walls.

Come home, Lucas. Come home come home come home…

“That’s not my home down there,” he said.

Al said: “It’s nobody’s home. Trust me.”

Two rights, a left, and they came to another dry dock. Three subs were cradled in hammocks. The numbers 2, 3, and 1 lay on their flanks. A workman was filling a seam in one of them with foam that pumped from a sophisticated caulking gun.

“That’s the secret ingredient,” Al told Luke. “Some kind of superfoam that expands or compresses depending on pressure. It can withstand fifty tons per square inch. The Trieste is held together with the stuff. Cost a billion-plus to develop, but it’s worth every dime.”

Luke followed Al across the tarmac. It was like being on the deck of an aircraft carrier—the sky was wide and trackless, the sun beating down from a cloudless sky. It was so hot that the patching tar had softened; it clung to the treads of their boots like Black Jack chewing gum.

Another sub was partially obscured by a pile of pallets; all Luke saw was its back end canted over the water. It sat in moody isolation, its stocky shape banded by yellow tape—the kind that ringed a crime scene.

“The MPs are still investigating,” Al said. “It seems worthless.” She laughed without mirth. “Like investigating a haunting or something.”

The Challenger 4 rounded into view. Luke’s lips curled in an instinctive expression of distaste.

It looked no different than the sub he’d seen earlier, and yet it repelled his gaze. There was something profoundly awful about it. He sensed that Al felt the same way about it—and he imagined it unnerved her just as it did him, because rational minds objected to unreasoned fear.

Perhaps it was because it had traveled so far below the sun’s reach. The pressure had warped it, giving its shape a madman’s hint of those depths. Or perhaps it was what happened within it—in Luke’s head, the sight of it melded with that of Westlake’s tortured corpse. The vessel was hateful in some way he could not accurately distill.

Al approached it, and Luke reluctantly followed. An awful coldness wept off the sub’s metal. Had it carried up that icy chill from the Challenger Deep itself?

Al wrenched the hatch wheel. The muscles trembled up her arms, as if a subconscious part of her rebelled at the act.

The hatch was circular, slightly smaller than a manhole cover, a solid foot of steel. Al let it clunk against the hull.

A smell wafted out. Luke had never inhaled its equal. Raw, adrenal, and profoundly human.

The stink of insanity, Edie, sharp as malt vinegar, as his mother once said.

Luke bent to peer inside. Several deflated bladders dangled down inside the cabin; he could only suppose that they were the equivalent of nautical air bags.

What he didn’t see yet was blood, which was incredible considering what had occurred inside. Maybe the MPs had swabbed it out already?

“You’re gonna need to crane your neck,” he heard Al say. “Look higher.”

He crouched, neck twisted at an uncomfortable angle. Something was written on the far wall. Rust-colored scratches. Messy, frantic.

He dipped lower, aware of the blood-beat in his ears. The scratches resolved themselves into… letters?

And that rusty discoloration.

Blood. There it was. Dried blood.

Letters, but he could make out only their undersides. The bulbous lower swoop of a C; the jagged horizontal slash of an E.

Luke knelt until his knees hit the deck. It was the only way to contort his head enough to see what had been written inside.

Five words. All written in a crazed, spiky scrawl—written in the blood that had momentarily gushed from Westlake’s innumerable wounds. Five words in one string, seven in the other.

Crystals of ice gathered up Luke’s spine. The words were grotesque in the same way Westlake’s body had been: the letters were swollen and lewd, the blood dried thickly on their outer curves like paint slopped heavily on a fence slat. More unsettlingly, those words recalled Clayton’s voice, calling out to Luke from the icy depths of the sea.

We need you, Lucas. Come home.