"I'm bringing you somewhere that will be better than the old facility. You will like it," he murmured, his voice ghosting over her pod and breaking through the thick clear glass.
"Are you bringing me to see the sun?"
"Better."
What could be better than the sun? Humans had tried for centuries underneath the waves to replicate that which they had lost. The sun was all they cared about. For years and years she remembered working with Malcolm on lightbulbs that were supposed to replicate the heat of the sun, but all of them had failed. Or at least, they had failed in what the other humans thought the sun should feel like.
She had no idea what else was worth chasing. The heat of the sun, feeling what humans had lost, it was a dream that she'd never believed would come true. What could be better than that?
She mused about the idea for a long time. There was little in this realm that could rival such an experience. Perhaps he wanted to show her one of the human settlements. The original ones were supposedly marvelous, but she didn't think they would have survived the storms. Which meant it was very likely he wasn't bringing her to one of those.
Where else could they go?
Light started to break through the water around them, although it wasn't the light she might have expected. Here she had been dreaming up beams of sunlight breaking through the surface in rays of gold. But all she got were bright white slashes, illuminating the water for merely a split second before disappearing again.
"What is that?" she asked. "The light?"
Proteus looked above him, his brow furrowing for a moment. "The sky is angry today."
A storm, then. Ellie should have known there would be many of them, but it was still terrifying to know they were right under one. She'd seen the reports from Tau's research. She knew these storms could last for days, sometimes weeks. They grew stronger and stronger out at sea, turning into monsters that would level an entire town and destroy buildings without ever slowing down.
They grew closer to a sheer ledge made of tumbled rocks. Giant stones, larger than her head, had all crammed into each other, creating a labyrinth of multicolored stones. Lightning made it easier for her to see the crevices that hid massive moray eels, each of them sneering at Proteus before disappearing into their homes.
"This is where you will find the secrets of your people," Proteus said. "The greatest secret they kept, in fact."
"Which was?"
"Me," he said quietly, but she heard the regret in his voice. "I worked side by side with them, creating so much that the humans have already forgotten. But I am certain, without question, that there is still some of our work remaining here."
Here? Wait, was this...
"Is this the main facility?" she asked, suddenly pressing her face against the pod as though that would get her even closer. "It doesn’t look anything like the videos the drones sent."
"It is. Here is where all the work was done, and it is here where you will find even more knowledge. So much of it I have forgotten, but you will be able to achieve an infinite amount of progress in a short amount of time. You and Pilot, you will be the ones to discover it again."
She wasn't sure how she felt about that. It was a lot of pressure to be tasked with discovering all that humanity had lost. Even a facility like this, one where so many experiments had been held, would have hidden its secrets well.
Taking a deep breath, she pressed both her palms to the glass and searched through the massive boulders for a way inside. "How am I supposed to go in?" she asked. "The rocks..."
"There is a tunnel. One you can fit through. The drones have already shown you the footage."
She'd seen that footage, yes, and knew that she could squeeze through it. But that didn't mean she could breathe.
"Proteus, I don’t know the way through well enough from that footage. I don't think I can hold my breath for that long."
Saying she didn't think she could was an understatement. She'd watched the footage from the drone. It had taken exactly six minutes and forty-two seconds to get inside that facility, and that had been with jets propelling it. Ellie didn’t know how to swim, but she knew she could pull herself through the crevice with her hands. Still, it wasn't going to be quick.
No one could hold their breath that long. Maybe divers in the old days when there had been people training to do exactly what he was asking her to do. But she couldn’t.
"Pilot," Proteus said, his voice stern. "You have a breathing apparatus, do you not?"
The faintest scraping sound could be heard from her feet as the droid stretched out his limbs and awakened at the sound of his name. "It has not been used for a while."
"Is it functional?"
There was a long pause before Pilot grumbled, "I suppose it must be. I wouldn't know unless we tested it out."
That wasn't good enough for Ellie. She wanted to make sure she could breathe no matter how far into that crevice they went. What if she got halfway in and all her oxygen cut out? She had to know for certain that she was going to survive.
