Page 76 of Secrets of the Void
"Something is alive out there?" she whispered in shock. "How is that even possible?"
Proteus said nothing, staring even harder until finally, the sands parted to reveal a terrifying monster.
She thought it might be an undine on first inspection. But then she realized how wrong she had been. Though it was human-like in the top half, the bottom half was clearly that of a snake. It lifted onto its tail, turning its head to look around. And then she saw a massive, long tongue flick out of its mouth. Tasting the air like snakes did.
It was hard to see the creature through this camera. The darkness made it difficult to make out exact features, not to mention it was very far away from the camera now. But that wasa living creature, one who looked almost similar to a human, at least on the top half.
"Oh my god," she whispered. "The notes in the facility about them experimenting on people and splicing genetics with animals. They succeeded."
The horror of it ran through her. It meant that there were things alive Above. That all the horrible experiments those people had been doing, they'd taken root.
Had some poor woman been forced to carry a serpentine child inside of her womb? Had she been in the same room where Ellie had slept, praying that death would take her long before she gave birth to some monstrosity? Or had they created these beings in a test tube just like Ellie? Were they born cold and terrified of where they were, with no one to love them? No one to tell them that they weren't entirely unnatural after all.
The figure on the sands suddenly snapped its head around, looking at something neither Ellie nor Proteus could see. It dropped down, slithering as though hunting. Not like an undine, then. It didn't need to drag themselves. Its tail was strong enough to propel them through the sands but also keep them upright and moving.
Her breath caught in her lungs as the creature disappeared from their sight.
"So," Proteus said, sounding almost breathless. "They actually did it."
"I don't know how to feel about that."
"It complicates the plan."
"You're thinking about the plan right now? Of course it complicates the plan! There are people living Above! Just like there were people living underneath the waves." She struggled in his arms until he finally set her down. Her mind whirled with what this meant. "We can't go Above. They don't want us there. No one wants us."
"Ellie—”
"It's just as I feared. There are so many people who need hope, Proteus. Being able to go Above, no matter how dangerous, could give them that hope. People like me. Clones who were woken up and now have to deal with all the backlash from people who don't understand who they are, or don't care to even see them as people. This was a chance. But there are people already there."
She couldn't breathe. Her heart thundered in her chest, far too fast for that to be normal, and here she was, trying to clutch at the strings of her own hope.
If she could help other people like herself, then she wasn't entirely a failure. If she could give other people a chance to live a life on the land, to see the sun, to explore the lands that they had been denied for centuries, then maybe that made her more than a clone.
Hands framed her face. Claws reached the top of her head, clacking as they bumped into each other. She focused on the face in front of her. The worried god who stared into her eyes with a gaze that was so big she couldn't look anywhere else.
"Breathe, Ellie," he said. And then he did it himself. Making her watch him as he inhaled, and then exhaled.
She mimicked what he did. Dragging air into her lungs that were begging for more air far too fast, and then slowly letting it out even though it made sparks dance in front of her vision. She did it over and over again until finally her body gave her some small bit of relief. She could think. She could reason.
This didn't mean the end of the plan. It just made things more complicated. Like he had said.
"What do we do?" she whispered. "I don't think anyone is going to be convinced to go up there if there is already a known threat. Humans have spent centuries fighting the undine. Essentially, this means that we're taking them out of one placeand putting them right back into the same issues that they just fixed. Now… now we're making them start at the beginning."
He pressed their foreheads together with a sigh. "Ellie, I have rarely ordered you to do anything. I would argue that I have impressed upon you that it is important to me that you learn how to make choices for yourself, and that I honor those choices."
"I know."
"I'm ordering you now to say nothing of what we have seen here. Not to anyone. The humans can never find out that there are people living Above already. They need to continue this work, and they need to move out of the sea. That is my will. That was the will of the ancients before they passed. This future must come to be."
It felt wrong what he was asking her to do. He wanted her to lie. To lie to so many people while knowing that she might be putting them in danger.
"What if the people who live on the sands hunt them down?" she asked. "What if we can't even build safe places to live because of them?"
"We will make sure that doesn't happen. We will keep them safe as we watch over them all. Do you hear me? We will use the drones. Pilot will get the blueprints for the flying ones. We will use those as our weapons. We will keep everyone safe, and they will never know what we have seen here."
No, this was wrong. This was taking people's lives and putting them willingly at risk. They couldn't do this.
But she didn't have much of a choice. For all that Proteus had been kind to her, reminding her that he wanted her to become her own person and how he wanted her to make her own choices, she could hear the finality in his tone now.
