Dark Abyss by Kaitlyn O'Connor (top fiction books of all time txt) 📗

No wonder she felt like hell! Why they’d thought it necessary to drag her out of bed when she probably hadn’t been asleep more than a couple of hours was a mystery to her—except they seemed determined to torture her with sleep deprivation!

She struggled for something pleasant to say to smooth the waters. “I’m sure it’s beautiful.”

He smiled more easily. “You’ll have to tell me when you see it,” he said, pointing to a glowing patch of water ahead of them.

She stared at it, watching it spread through the water, watching the ripples catch it and refract it until the water around them seemed to glitter with gems. Loathe though she was to admit it, it was pretty.

And then Joshua turned the craft and she saw the city for the first time. Her stomach went weightless as she stared at it, watching the brightening water slowly envelop it. It almost looked … magical, as if fairy dust had been sprinkled over the city.

The buildings were nothing like anything she’d ever seen. Built like domes set upon tall stalks that reached down to the sea floor below, surrounded by the greenish-blue water, it almost looked like a garden on an alien world.

“It is beautiful!” she gasped in surprise a split second before she spotted the rubble, saw the twisted metal and chunks of jagged, broken concrete that littered the center as if someone had waded through the garden, carelessly lobbing the flowers from their stalks. Her smile faded. The pleasure she’d felt only moments before became distress as she stared at the gaping holes and realized this was where so many people had died, or been maimed for life.

As the light reached down to chase the shadows, she saw the merfolk moving between the buildings. At this distance, they looked more like the creatures of fable than real people and it increased the sense of staring at a magical world even while it reminded her that it must have looked much the same the day of the bombing.

She swallowed a little convulsively, feeling guilt creep through her insidiously, as if it was somehow her fault.

And maybe, in a sense, it was—though not the way she felt it. She hadn’t wished it on them. It wasn’t her fault that her father was a murderous lunatic, but wasn’t she just as guilty as everyone else of simply ignoring the problems the colonists faced? Wasn’t she ultimately as responsible as everyone else for doing nothing? Atlantis might be a territory, not a state, but it was still a part of her country and they were countrymen.

Had she, even once, thought that their problems were their own and for them to solve because she disapproved of them? Was it ever really right not to help someone, someone who was family, just because you didn’t approve of the way they lived?

And what if they hadn’t chosen to break free of the society they came from and establish the territory? Most of the energy they used to make their lives comfortable came from the labor of these people.

“This was your father’s doing,” Caleb said grimly.

Anna sent him a hurt look. “I know, but I didn’t know he was going to do it. I couldn’t have stopped him—this.”

He shook his head. “I meant, this is his doing, not yours.”

Did he mean he didn’t hate her because of her father? She hoped so. It was hard enough to bear the responsibility for one’s own actions, but at least you could attempt to make amends. You knew you were the one who should pay for the mistake. To have to make up for someone’s faults when you had no control over what they did and knew beyond that that you might spend the rest of your life trying to clean up behind them was just too depressing to contemplate.

She could deal with being ignored, with being alone, not having friends, not having anyone anymore. She’d been dealing with that. She didn’t think she could deal with having people hate her, of feeling cold condemnation in their gazes every time they looked at her.

She was so distressed it hardly unnerved her at all when the transport docked.

Chapter Five

“This is the Watch Center?” Anna asked as Caleb and Joshua escorted her briskly down a short hallway and through a fairly large room that seemed to be bursting at the seams with men, desks, and equipment.

“This is a sub-station. The Watch Center was too badly damaged in the blast to use until we can get someone in to repair it.

“Oh,” Anna said uncomfortably. “I guess that’s why it’s crowded?”

“That and it’s shift change. The night patrol comes in to file their reports. The day shift reports in for assignments.”

The three of them paused in front of a door and Caleb rapped on the panel.

“Come!”

Anna’s heart executed a little double step when she recognized the voice, but Caleb opened the door before she could brace herself. Simon looked up with a scowl from the report on his desk. The expression was wiped from his face so quickly that it might have amused Anna if she’d been in any condition to enjoy it. Unfortunately, memories of their argument only a little earlier were bombarding her.

“Anna came to help.”

Simon seemed to drag his gaze from her only with an effort to look at Caleb almost blankly for a moment. “Good,” he said finally, slowly. “Take her into the neuro-center down the hall and get her hooked up.”

“You have a neuro-scanner?” Anna asked in surprise and with more than a little uneasiness.