Chapter 19: The Deep One

The Deep One had no head that Veda could see.

It was a ridge of black, slick as wet slate, that came up out of the sea along the whole port side and kept coming.

The Meridian Star leaned over to meet it.

Plates shrieked somewhere in the hull, and every lamp on the ship swung.

In the first life, this was the night she had lost a fleet.

She had given orders from the bridge, with her axe, and nobody had listened until it was too late.

She stood on the bridge now, on a bad leg, with Tobias beside her in a sling, and the captain looking at her for orders.

She did not give any.

She picked up the ship's microphone, and her hand was steady.

"This is Veda Vassall," she said, and her voice went through every speaker on the ship. "I don't know how to beat this thing."

The captain stared at her.

"I know where it comes from and how it hunts. I know it killed a ship once, and I know how quickly."

"That's all I know. I can't do the rest alone. I'm asking you for help."

She had never said that sentence in either life.

The ship was silent for three whole seconds.

Then Lois's voice came on the galley line.

"We're listening, love. What do you need?"

"Noise," Veda said. "It hunts by engine noise. It hit the last ship because the engines were running."

"Then we kill the engines," the captain said.

"We can't. We'd drift into it."

"We need something that sounds like us," said a quiet voice, "and isn't us."

Tobias had picked up the second microphone.

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