The Exosuits, of course, had their own sonar, but Bell wanted as many eyes on them as possible. He had always felt uneasy in the lake, but that fear was always vague and unformed, but now it had taken on shape. It was physical and dangerous. In his many years as a diver, he’d encountered everything from deadly box jellyfish to voracious squid to highly-aggressive bull sharks, but none of them disturbed him like the creature that had attacked the habitat. It was in a league of its own.

The real problem was Lake Vordog itself and that damn city. You couldn’t always believe what you saw.

Murphy and he stood on the baseplate, looking around.

Maybe they both knew they weren’t going to find anything, but Orr up in the LSB told them to look, see if they could find any trace of the submersible. It was a highly-expensive piece of technology to lose. It was pointless, though, Bell figured, what had destroyed it no doubt did a thorough job of it. It wasn’t even sending a homing beacon.

Sonar showed squat. Not so much as a bubble. The high-magnification lenses of the suit’s pan-and-tilt video systems revealed nothing. And, standing there, both of them doing a 360 with video and their own eyes, there was still nothing. Nothing at all. Just the baseplate beneath them, the Neptune above. The SDVs moored to the legs.

Bell kept looking.

Above him, the Neptune resembled a flying saucer sitting on its four, massive legs. The legs were lit by security lights as was the outside of the habitat itself. It was circular, flattened like a disk, a light every four feet right around its edge.

“Looks pretty tame out there,” Javonivic said.

“Not a thing,” Bell said.

Beyond the lights, the lake was murky with an almost greenish tint to it, lots of drifting sediment. It looked pretty peaceful.

“Well, you boys gonna stand there or what?” she wanted to know.

“You hear that, Chief?” Murphy said over the intercom. “First she don’t want us to leave, now she wants to get rid of us.”

“We’re going for a walk,” Bell told her.

“That’s my boys.”

She was holding up well. Last night, the attack had been pretty traumatic on all of them, but particularly on her. Hubbs was still insisting that she had called the creature, that the city had taken her deep-set fear of her mother and gave it physical form. The very idea was way out there…yet, nobody really doubted it completely. Particularly, Javy herself. She felt responsible and nothing Bell said could seem to talk her out of it.

We’ve all seen and felt things, he thought as he moved around the baseplate with Murphy. Scary, unpleasant things…but nothing’s been as deadly or corporeal as the creature. Why is that? Why was Javy’s fear so much more devastating?