Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

habitat. Pry open the outermost layer—not the substructure. We’re there. We’re ready.”

“Precise. On my way.”

“Wait,” I said, taking the shard back. “What should we call you?”

A pause. “My name is Standard.”

“I’m Danae. My plus-one is Naoto.” I acknowledged the look Naoto shot me for that and added, “I just thought . . . we’re about to put our lives in your hands. We should at least know each other’s names.”

“Understood.”

The line died, leaving us alone again. We held each other’s saltwater-streaked faces, and I tried to shut out the screams coming through the wall to tell him, “You can still turn back. Stay in Bloom. Even with this mess, it’s safer here than the places I have to travel through.”

“If the whole city doesn’t drown!”

“We’ll be lucky to survive this ascent. Just tell me you’re not doing this for my sake—that it’s not about protecting me or staying close to me. Whatever you think, I’m not worth it.”

He held me in a tight, shivering hug. “It’s my decision, and I’ve made it.”

He’d dodged my real question, but there was a more pressing issue. I pulled back and gripped Naoto’s arms hard to say, “If you’re coming, you need to promise me something. If something happens to me—if I’m incapacitated, but not dead, and the Medusas are close to capturing us—” I steeled myself. I enunciated clearly: “If that happens, you have to kill me.”

Naoto blinked hard. “Excuse me?”

“I can’t let them have what’s in me,” I said. “If I . . . If I’m dead, it will take care of itself. Until then, in the wrong hands, it’s a danger to everyone. To the whole world. We can’t let them find out about it, and we absolutely can’t let them take me alive.”

He was staring at me in utter shock.

I shook him hard. “I don’t need you to understand. I just need you to make me this one damned promise. If you want to come with me, that’s my price. Take it or leave it, but choose now.”

He nodded—barely, then fully. “Okay.”

“Say it.”

“I promise.”

From below we heard the wrench of metal and a new roar of water. The ocean there at the bottom of the red-lit metal space was as black as it was frigid at first—but then it all ignited with that white headlight, tracing the outline of the rip in the outer hull, just wide enough for us to crawl through.

“Hyperventilate now,” I told him, cinching the straps on my backpack as tight as they would go. “It’ll help you hold your breath. And remember to exhale as you rise. The air in our lungs is going to expand to four times its current volume as we ascend—”

“I know, I know.” I watched his lungs heave. I read the fear in the creases in his face.

“On the count of three. One, two—”

“I love you!”

“Three!”

The shocking cold hit me like electrocution before I went totally numb. The sharp edges of the peeled-open hull bit our hands as we pulled ourselves out into the pod’s blinding headlights, onto the cargo cage spreading open for us like jaws.

The sub’s engines began to roar the moment Naoto and I managed to grab it. The vibrations hammered on our guts, all sound amplified by the water. We lay flat against the bars (narrow enough to hurt, but set wide enough apart that we could easily slip through if we were careless) and the water began to rush at our faces, prying at our lips and nostrils, pressing us down in an unbearable gravity. Naoto clamped one arm around the cage and tried to cover his nose and mouth with his free hand. I could only turn my head enough to look up into the sub’s spherical cockpit and see the mercenary perched there, faceless, a demonic silhouette against the lights of the controls. I looked back, counting down the markings on the outer wall as we rose.

Past the top of the habitat, lines of orange flood lamps peaked like a dawn, shining through an upward waterfall of glittering bubbles rising from the breached elevator shafts. It was then I saw them, just visible in the bright murk: the huge, toothed doors of the emergency seals. The control box. The blinking light.

The realization hit me harder than the ocean. The seals hadn’t been breached; they’d never closed in the first place. Like half of Bloom City’s subsystems, they must have been hacked amid the infighting, and that control box held the one and only physical override.

I didn’t think. I turned my body and let the weight of the water rip me down between the bars of the cargo cage, then swam with all the force I could squeeze from my cold-shocked muscles. The straps of my backpack ripped and fell away into the abyss.

I didn’t know if I’d make it before I drowned, but I tried. The roar of the pod’s engines faded behind me and the antigravity of the air in my lungs gave way to an intense downward suction as I approached the vortex of water surging down into the habitat. By the time I reached the box it took all my strength to cling to it.

I had just enough oxygen left in my bloodstream to do it. I pulled the cover off and twisted the knob inside. I looked down.

Nothing happened. There was no groan of machinery, no flashing lights. The seals at the bottom of the blown-open elevator shaft were still wide open.

I felt strangely calm. I had passed the point of panic. There was nothing to do now but let the ocean into my lungs. Five years of running from Asher Valley were at their end. When the headlamps started to glow on the metal wall in front of me, I thought it was the first glimmer of the light at the end of death’s tunnel—and when I turned to see the sub driving toward me through the light-stained water, a mess of serrated claws and roaring thrusters, my