by Hugh Howey
The room is lit by bare bulbs screwed into outlets along the wall, metal cages around them for protection. Voices can be heard below me, leaking up a narrow staircase. I hear the guard outside clomp down the stairs. I hold my breath, waiting for him to come barging through the door. We seem to be standing there, listening for each other. After an eternity, I hear him march up the stairs. Either he doesn’t have the code or doesn’t expect that I would.
Barefoot, I steal across the room and try to pick out the conversations below. I wouldn’t think a lighthouse would have a basement. I wonder why Ness would come here. I reach the rail and peer down the stairs. Someone in a white lab coat walks past. A woman. I sneak around the railing and lower my head to get a better view, watch her stop at a table and talk to someone. The acoustics below—the distant clatters and the way voices are swallowed—make it sound like a much bigger room than this one.
I decide to creep down the stairs. There’s no sense of danger, not from Ness, not from whatever this is. It isn’t until I see the massive room that I feel afraid. It looks like a warehouse. Racks of shelves cover the far walls, and the shelves are stuffed with what look like aquariums. Long tables run the length of a room the size of a large grocery store. There are industrial machines and what looks like laboratory equipment everywhere. Microscopes. Vials. Twisting tubes of glass. Expensive centrifuges. Reminds me of my marine biology labs from undergrad, but on steroids.
The scope of the place is breathtaking. All cut out beneath a lighthouse. This facility must be newer than the run-down structure that stands above it, though. Added here. Is this where he breeds his hydrothermal shells? Was what I told Agent Cooper spot-on? I watch the man and woman as they huddle together, studying an object in the woman’s hands. There’s a plastic sample case on the table near them. It looks identical to the other two I’ve seen. I wonder if this is that cross between an auger and a cerith from Tara Cay, from our underwater expedition.
The stairs go down to another floor, deeper still. No one sees me creeping behind the rail. I sneak down, make the turn, and continue to the next floor without being spotted. Here, another large open area takes up half the space. A hallway leads off in the other direction, lined with doors—offices, or maybe small labs or storage rooms. All the doors are closed save one. There’s a light inside. I listen for voices but don’t hear any.
The rest of the space looks similar to what’s above, but with no workers. And rather than the long work surfaces, here there are lines of aquariums, water gurgling noisily, pumps and circulation fans whirring. Most of the aquariums are lit. Pipes and electrical wires form a maze across the ceiling, dipping down here and there to service the tanks. I creep over and peer inside the one nearest me. What look like white and orange nutmeg seashells litter the bottom of the tank.
I look around to make sure I’m alone, and then spot a familiar sight in the tank behind me: creamy white lace murexes with their jagged, decorative shells. An entire tank of them. But Cooper said there was no such thing. I reach in to grab one of them, the water warm up to my elbow, and bring it out.
The shell isn’t empty. There’s a slug inside. A gastropod. Was Cooper right all along? Is Ness taking some other species of slug and moving it into cast shells, creating the perfect fake? Maybe something in that process coats the shell enough to fool a testing machine. Or he makes the shells out of calcium carbonate from crushed-up species that are more common. Ness’s driveway is a clue to all that he has access to. Probably dredges the shells up from his private beaches and islands. Then the shells are formed here, injected into some mold, and finally non-extinct species are moved in to make them look real.
My story has an ending, I realize. Here it is. Closure. For the piece, and for me and Ness. I came here to explain myself, to apologize, but all that guilt vanishes in an instant. The story that ran in the Times this morning wasn’t my doing anyway. I was apologizing for something that wasn’t my fault. But Ness … he lied to me from the beginning, was leading me on a wild chase, flying me to the Southern Hemisphere when the murexes were sitting in a tank a short walk from his house all along.
I hear a door shut down the hall behind me, turn and see a man in a white lab coat, his face illuminated by the tablet in his hand. He looks up before I have a chance to duck and hide. His eyes widen. I bolt for the stairs. I hear him shout for me to stop.
I race up two flights. The man yells for someone to grab me. I have the murex in my hand; I close my fist around it. I see Ness as I pass through the floor above. He looks up from a workbench, from a microscope; his face was hidden before. I freeze for a moment. As I take off again, Ness lurches up and knocks his stool over. He gives chase as well. Several people are shouting at me, shouting at each other to grab me. I don’t pause to sort it out—I just run.
The cold metallic taste of adrenaline fills my mouth, my body dumping that storehouse of energy. I make it to the top of the stairs and yank open the door to the outside. Before I shut it, I get an idea, hurry back inside, grab the umbrella. Ness is up the stairs, yelling for me to wait. I get outside before he reaches me, slam the door shut just in time, and slide the umbrella through the handle so it catches the jamb.
The door pulls inward, but the umbrella holds. I don’t wait to see how long. I run.
Racing around the lighthouse, I see the jeep with the two guards in the distance. They appear to be driving up and down the tree line, still looking for me. My car is out there, beyond the woods. Ness and the others will be out of that buried laboratory in no time.
I just need to get to safety, and then I can call Cooper, call the cops, get someone to pick me up, blow the lid off this place. My mind races. I consider hiding in the tall grasses, but they’d find me eventually. I consider trying all the cars, seeing if the keys are in any of them, and then driving one of them back to the gate and to my car on the other side.
But the jeep blocks my way into the woods. They’d get me there as well.
Only a few heartbeats pass as I consider all these options. The umbrella rattles, holding Ness at bay. I need to get to the house. There are a handful of possibilities there, all of them insane. I could grab the boat and make my way up the coast to the next dock or bay. I could hide and call Henry or Agent Cooper, either of whom will send someone to help me. I just have to get to Ness’s house.
The edge of the tall bluff is just paces away. I run to the edge and gaze down at the beach. The dunes are steep here. But I can slide. I can make it to the beach and follow the coast.
I hear the door fly open behind me. I have to decide before they get up the stairs and see me, so I jump from the edge and into the steep face of sand. I stay on my back, arms wide, legs locked in front of me, and glissade down the sand in an avalanche.
Coming to a stop on a grassy ledge, I scoot to the edge and jump again. This time my feet catch, and I go end over end. I try to protect my head, to arrest my fall, and end up in a spread-eagle sprawl at the next lip of dune, my hair full of sand.
The murex is gone, my hand empty. I don’t have a hope of finding it, don’t even think of looking for it, but then I see it right along the ledge. It feels important somehow. Evidence. To replace the ones I lost. To make it up to Cooper. I grab the shell and lower myself off the next ledge, another avalanche of sand rushing along with me as I slide the last hundred or so feet to the beach.
I catch my breath at the base of the bluff. Looking up behind me, I see Ness peering down. He doesn’t hesitate for long; he jumps and begins sliding down the cliff face. I take off, running north, knowing I’ll never outpace him. He runs for exercise. My only hope is that he’s tired from his jog this morning, that he’ll cramp up, that he’ll let me go. Silly hopes.
I aim for the hard pack by the ocean where the running is easier. Looking over my shoulder, I see Ness is already a third of the way down the bluff. I concentrate on pumping my legs but check his progress now and then. I have a few hundred meters on him by the time he reaches the beach and takes o
ff after me.
Palpable fear chokes me. I don’t know why—maybe it’s the anger I saw on his face when he slammed the newspaper down—maybe it’s the stakes of this dangerous game—maybe it’s the size of the counterfeiting operation they’re running—maybe it’s from watching too many movies, or from running from the guard at the gate, or from breaking into the lighthouse, or from all the secrecy, but I fear that Ness might kill me if he reaches me. I can’t explain the terror, but it’s real. Like the panic in the submersible. The surety that my life is in jeopardy.
I pull out my phone while I run, need someone to know what happened to me. No signal. The battery alert is flashing. I put it away, can’t run while operating it anyway. Ness is gaining, and my lungs are burning. There’s the inexorable tug of him reeling me in; his house is too distant, and I know there’s no hope, nothing I can do, that I should just stop and give up, but I run and run until he is right behind me, until I can hear him panting, can hear his feet slapping the sand, so close that I dare not turn and look, until he is right upon me, until he tackles me.
His arms wrap around me, and he twists so he takes the brunt of the fall. The air goes out of me anyway. I make the decision to fight, to not let him take me without a struggle, but I can barely breathe, can barely move, and Ness has me pinned on my back, straddles me, is breathing hard himself, and I kick and try to throw my knees into his back.
“What’s gotten into you?” Ness pants.
“You’re hurting me!” I scream. I twist my head to see if anyone will come for me, if Vincent or Monique might be able to hear me from the house.
“Stop fighting and I’ll let you go,” he says.
“If you would have let me go from the beginning—” Deep breaths. “—I wouldn’t have to fight you.”
I bring my arms close to my face, dragging his hands with me, and sink my teeth into his wrist.
Ness curses and lets go of me. I try to kick away from him. He pins me down again.
“I’m the one mad at you, remember? What the hell are you upset about?”
“You’re a phony,” I spit at him. “Everything about you is fake.” I take deep breaths. “Your smile, your damn shells, the trees, everything!”
I get a hand free and swing the murex at his face. The sharp crenelations open a gash. Ness covers his cheek, and I wiggle away. I stagger a handful of steps, wait for him to tackle me again, but he just sits there. I head for the house. My legs are jelly. I can barely stand, but I resolve to get there, to get help. Looking back, I can see that Ness hasn’t moved, is just holding his wound, watching me.
I take advantage of this and pause to collect my breath. I rest my hands on my knees and eye him like a wounded mouse might eye a hawk.
“What did you think I was going to do, write you into some kind of hero?” I ask.
He stares at me.
“And then you dump your shells on the market, right? Or have you been doing that already? How many of your celebrated finds happened right up there in that lab?”
I stagger toward the house. Checking my phone, I see the battery is dead. I don’t care. I feel dead, too. Emotionless. Betrayed to the core.
“This is not a fake!” Ness roars behind me. I turn to see him holding the shell in one hand, his cheek in the other. He gets to his feet, and I steel myself to run again.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” He raises his voice above the crashing sea and the wind. “Skipped right to the end, and you still don’t understand.”
“Stay away from me,” I tell him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ness says. “Not like you’ve hurt me.”
I don’t know if he means the story that ran that morning or the gash on his cheek. I no longer have the right to say it wasn’t my fault. Both wounds were. I know that. I made a promise I couldn’t keep.
“Let me off your property,” I plead. “I don’t know what’s going on up there, but I know it isn’t legal. Let me go.”
“You think I would hurt you? Goddamnit, Maya, I think I’m in love with you.”
“Shut up!” I scream at him. “Don’t say that. You don’t get to say that.” I cover my ears and jog toward the house. When I look back, Ness is running after me. It’s no use. My legs give out, and I tumble to the sand. Ness circles in front of me and falls to his knees. Tears are streaming down his face, blood down his cheek.
“Listen to me,” he begs. “Just listen.”
I bow my head, stay on my hands and knees, try to fill my lungs.
“No, it’s not legal what we’re doing. We’re trying to clear some hurdles, make it legal, but it hasn’t been easy.”
“You’re going to crash the market for shells,” I tell him.
“Yes, we are. I aim to. Because we’re going to bring them back. Don’t you see?” He shows me the murex. Its white shell is pink with his blood. Ness peers inside, touches the slug, and I see the creature move. Ness turns and hurls the shell into the sea. He sits back on his heels, wipes the blood from his cheek.
“I used to shell beaches as a little boy with my grandfather, and he told me once that we collect dead things. That the shells are worthless, but we collect them because they’re beautiful.” Looking up, he smiles at me, even though his eyes are still crying. “Another metaphor for your collection,” he says. “How shelling is like love. Collecting empty, pretty things.”
I don’t say anything. I conserve my energy.
“After he told me this, I started looking at the living creatures inside. I followed the shells with snorkels and then dive tanks. Grew up. Never forgot what he said. And one day, I went down in a Mir to oversee a geothermal installation, and I started thinking about the vents, where the water is toxic and warm. Acidic, like we’ve made the sea. But there was life there. Trapped. It couldn’t populate the rest of the sea because of the cold all around it. The animals there were boxed in, fit for a different world, for a world not of sunlight but of harsh chemistry. I wondered if we could bring them out, give nature a nudge, find something in their DNA that might help.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
“We started with the trees because they were simple and we could grow them quickly. I hired the absolute best. From what we learned with the trees, we were able to get two dozen species of gastropods living in existing sea conditions. And more on the way. The FDA thinks we’re working on algae for biotic oil production, that our proposed bills to relax some regulations have to do with that. There are politicians on our side, but others who will shut us down if they find out, who will think we’re playing God, creating little Frankenstein fish, that we’ll cause more damage than we’ll repair. But we’re only doing what nature does best. She just needs our help. Because we took her by surprise.”
I don’t want to believe him. I don’t care how it all fits, how this makes more sense than the monster I made up in my mind. I want to believe in the monster. I need to believe in the monster. It’s simpler. I can wrap my head around that. It’s more difficult to think that Ness is out to save the world. It’s more difficult to think that he sees anything in me.
“The feds are onto you,” I say. I want him to know he won’t get away with this, that it’s too late.
Ness nods. “I know. I think they suspect. They don’t want this either. If the market for shells crashes, entire departments will get shuttered overnight. It’ll be like the end of prohibition. No more jobs for the people who track down crooks. No more retail. No sales tax. All gone overnight. No one wants this, don’t you see? It’d be like turning the loch back over to the monster. The circus would have to pack up and go home.”
I shake my head. Ness reaches out to me, and I flinch. I can see that this reaction hurts him worse than the blow I struck. He is only holding out his hand, hoping I’ll take it.
“Come with me,” Ness says. “Come with me, Maya, and I’ll show you.” He turns and looks back to the lighthouse. A handful of figures can be seen up there, little dots on the ridge.
“This is where the story ends. Right up there. Where it always ended. I was going to take you today—it was the plan all along. I was going to show you the sample we took from the Mir, you and me. I was going to show you the progress we’ve made.”
He frowns. His cheek is bleeding badly. “And then I saw the story this morning, with your name on it, and I thought I was an idiot to fall for you, that you were running that piece all along, that you were probably going to write about what happened on the sub, on the island, that I was setting myself up for all that again. While I was running back to the house, all I could think was that I made a mistake taking you to my most special place, my true home, that you—”
“I’m sorry I hit you,” I say. “I’m sorry about the piece that ran today. But I … I don’t believe what you’re telling me—”
“Why not? I’m willing to believe you. Right now. I believe that you had nothing to do with that story. I believe that you’ll set it all straight if you have the chance. I believe this, even though I have a long history of watching people betray my trust. A long history. But I believe you, Maya. Now I really need you to believe me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Ness, this is just too much.”
“Is it? You’ve seen the shells. You’ve seen inside them. You know they’re real. I need you to look past everything you know about me and the years of mistakes I made. Stop judging me by my father and his grandfather. Judge me by this week. By our time together. If that’s all you had to go on, what would you believe?”
I rest my face in my palms. My shoulders quake as I let out a sob, an exhausted cry. I expect Ness to reach out and comfort me, but he seems to know not to. I can’t believe any of this is happening, that my life somehow got caught up in the nexus of whatever it is Ness is trying to do and whatever it is the feds are investigating. All for running that damn story, for wanting to get back at the man I blamed for taking my childhood away.