It grinned like a man-eating shark.

At some point, Javy had screamed, then passed out cold. She came to sometime later in the office of the school nurse, who managed to pry from her the fact that she had not eaten in nearly four days. She did not admit that she couldn’t eat because everything tasted like rank seawater or that she had clearly seen Regina standing in the corner. But not a living Regina, of course, but a Regina who had been sunk in the mud and slimy green weeds at the bottom of the bay, a grotesque barnacle-encrusted horror chewed by fish and crabs, her eye sockets crawling with brine shrimp, her tongue replaced by a bloated green sea worm that licked her lips.

Javy had clearly heard the sound of water dripping from the apparition and striking the floor.

But she couldn’t admit to any of that.

Aunt Ida had fed her soup and watched her constantly after that. And, thankfully, the episode had never repeated itself. Somehow, Regina had slowly faded from her mind and her dreams.

And now she was back.

But why?

Why?

She could hear Regina cackling in her mind. All will become apparent, she said. Because in the end, they always come for their own.

Javy laid there, shaking, knowing that somehow, the old bitch was right. Tomorrow, she was scheduled to go into the city with Hubbs and it was going to be bad. In fact, she was quite sure it would be a nightmare.

18
LITTLE LOST GIRL

In her hardsuit, she could hear Orr’s voice echoing out with a shrill, insectile whine: “Javy? Goddammit, Javy…where are you? Talk to me!”

She moved through the tunnel, her suit lights filled with swirling sediment and tiny swimming marine animals. She tried again and again to contact Orr or Bell in the Neptune, but they weren’t receiving her. She could pick them up off and on, but not consistently. There was some kind of interference and the nature of it scared her.

They’re toying with you and you know it. The masters of this city don’t want you here, she thought, so they’re making you run the maze like a rat.

She was panicking in the dark belly of the city. Nothing was making sense. She had been exploring a chamber with Hubbs and he had discovered another opening…and then, well, that’s where things became not only murky, but twisted. He had been in VR, not more than eight feet from her, and then an immense shadow had passed between them and she had thought at the time, Like a whale, like the shadow of a whale, and then it was gone, but so was Hubbs.

Think, she kept telling herself the way her DSU instructors had told her. Do not panic. Consider the situation. Adapt to it.