As a girl, she had been frightened of leggy and crawling things, and that scratching noise brought the memory of it back to her. Even as an adult, diving off Japan, she had been secretly revolted by spider crabs—so huge and leggy and weird. They were essentially harmless creatures and quite tasty dipped in butter…not that she could ever bring herself to eat something like that.

But it was the legs.

All those skittery, crawly legs. And what epitomized that terror for her were not crabs, but squids. It was a heck of a thing for a professional diver to be uneasy about, given that squid were one of the most abundant life-forms in the sea…yet, they got under her skin. As a child, she was fascinated by the various sea creatures trapped in tidal pools down at the shore. Whenever her mother was off running errands or at an appointment, she liked to wade into them (something she was absolutely forbidden to do by Regina; she wasn’t allowed within twenty feet of the surf), investigating the myriad creatures—crabs and limpets, snails and mussels, sea stars and small fish.

One afternoon, there was a rare find: a short fin squid of about a foot in length. Sluggish and gray, she was certain it was nearly dead. Even when she gently poked it with a stick, it barely responded. After a time, she decided to pick it up for closer examination. And as she did so, bringing it up out of the water, it responded violently, squirting her with ink and chomping down on her thumb with its short, sharp beak. Screaming, she stumbled out of the water and ran home.

And there was Regina.

“What did I tell you about going into the water? What did I say to you?” her mother railed. “You got what you deserved and next time it will be worse.” To emphasize this, Regina seized her bleeding thumb and squeezed it until Javy cried out. “Stay out of the water! Do you hear me? Stay out of the damn water! Don’t give them the opportunity they’ve been waiting for!”

Even now, it made her thumb hurt.

“That miserable bitch,” Javy grumbled.

The scraping came again and she knew it was coming from the viewport that looked out of the galley into the lake itself. She found her nerve and walked over there, down a short flight of steps from the control room. Her shoes rang out on the metal deck plates. She went in there wholly expecting to see a squid clinging to the glass, scraping at it with its beak, but there was no squid.

Something else.

Something that made her suck in a sharp breath and nearly fall over.

A shape.