ABE simultaneously led me to the ladder and instructed me how to reposition Dharma so we could both fit down the chute. Gripping the warm metal, I stole a quick glance down the corridor … saw the dark cloud moving toward me, and more or less slid thirty feet down the ladder to the lower level.

I landed in a heap, Dharma on top of me. Above, the bees gave me a few precious seconds to regain my feet before they flooded the chute in pursuit.

Perhaps I could have made it to the egress chamber had I not been lugging a hundred twenty pounds of dead weight, or if we had not closed the hatch to prevent unwanted “guests” from tracking us into Oceanus, but my annoying bio-chip assured me there was a point-zero-five chance of accessing the chamber ahead of the swarm with the girl, and a forty-six percent chance if I dropped her carcass as bait and escaped alone.

How do you tell your own brain to fuck off?

I reached the egress chamber hatch, allowing Dharma to slide down my chest as I gripped the steel wheel in both hands and twisted it counterclockwise. Sweat was pouring down my face as the entire lower level reverberated like a power generator, my muscles stiffening in anticipation of an unfathomable déjà vu … Are ten million bee stings as bad as ten million ant bites?

When the stings didn’t come, I reached blindly for Dharma, turning to face a sea of bees so dense they occupied every square centimeter of air—save for a slim boundary of space directly behind me where Oscar now stood, the cephaloped expelling violent breaths from its breathing tube.

Bees do not have ears; instead they use their legs and antennae to detect sound through the back-and-forth reverberations of air molecules. That they detected the pan flute–like disturbance there was no doubt; that they interpreted the sound as a conflicting directive leading to food would be explained to me later by ABE.

For now, the only things that mattered were the chamber hatch, which I yanked open, Dharma, who I dragged inside, and Oscar, who squeezed in after us even as he slammed the vault door closed, sealing us in.

Releasing Dharma, I bent over, gasping. “Thanks, pal.”

Refusing my hand—and another attempt to convince him to help Dharma, Oscar entered the escape chamber and was gone.

Exhausted, I lay down on the tiled floor and stared at the flickering recessed lighting. ABE had logically concluded that Oscar had freed me from my cryogenic tomb. If that were true, then there was more at play here than our attempted symbiotic relationship … a line of inquiry that placed a spotlight on a questionable assumption: Was twelve million years a suitable amount of time for a sea creature to adapt to land?