The moment the blue crystals pierced her skin, Elaine's vision fractured into overlapping images. The collapsing laboratory blurred, replaced by another scene—Margaret standing before a submerged pyramid, silhouetted against a swirling nebula of bioluminescent jellyfish.
"Genetic memory." Qi's voice sounded distant, distorted by water as he pressed her palm against a console. "The nanites in your blood are activating."
Pain lanced down her spine like electric current. Alien symbols flickered across her vision before resolving into a rotating double helix—a structure too complex, too foreign to be human. Suddenly, she understood the burning truth of the chip embedded in her wrist. It wasn't technology. It was alive.
When the tentacled woman breached the final airlock, Elaine's transformation accelerated. Her tail fin flared wide, membranes thinning to near-transparency, veins of blue light pulsing beneath. More startling, the crystals spreading across her skin hardened into an exoskeleton, jagged and shimmering.
"Get her out!" Qi jammed a syringe into his own neck. His gills flared wide, webbing expanding between his fingers. "Take B-7 to the Abyssal Children!"
The officer's mechanical arm whirred—then twisted, attacking his own squad. Elaine only now noticed the glow at the base of his skull, pulsing in sync with her wrist. She snatched her father's harpoon gun and fired, striking a Hunter lunging toward Margaret's tank.
The water convulsed. Every monitor screen flashed the same image—the leviathan from the trench had reached Hudson Bay, its true scale now horrifyingly clear. It dwarfed the Empire State Building, its crystalline surface emitting rhythmic blue pulses.
"It's calling the others—" Elaine's body moved against her will, swimming toward the observation window. Her glow synchronized with the distant entity. Her pupils dilated unnaturally, piercing the abyssal dark to reveal the thing's silhouette. Not a creature. A city.
Qi yanked her back, thrusting a glass sphere into her hands—inside, miniature jellyfish colonies pulsed. "Your grandmother's memories. Listen—the Harpers recovered something from Bikini Atoll in 1946. That's why—"
The ceiling exploded.
The mutated eel's massive head crashed through, its four-jawed maw splitting wider, twelve sucker-lined tongues lashing out. The current dragged Elaine toward its gullet—until her exoskeleton emitted a high-frequency shriek. The creature thrashed, its convulsions shattering the surrounding tanks.
In the swirling aftermath, Elaine saw what they'd contained.
Hundreds of Margaret clones, floating in suspension. Different ages, different stages of decay. The eldest one's eyes snapped open, lips forming silent words:
Find the Coral Key.
"Go!" Qi shoved her into an emergency shaft as black tendrils coiled around his legs. The last thing Elaine saw was him driving a device into his own chest—before blinding blue light engulfed the lab.
The underwater tunnel twisted like the intestines of some colossal beast. Elaine's gills flared autonomously, adjusting to pressure changes, while her crystalline exoskeleton guided her through the maze. At a junction, her fingers brushed over grooves in the wall—a familiar insignia carved into the metal.
The Harper family crest.
No coincidence.
The shaft emptied into a cavernous space—three hundred feet below sea level, a hidden base constructed from shipwrecks, coral colonies, and scavenged machinery stood silent. A dozen merfolk emerged from the shadows, their scales shimmering with the same eerie bioluminescence as hers.
The eldest extended a hand, his palm embedded with identical blue crystals. "We've waited seven generations." His voice resonated like tides against stone. "Welcome home, Luminous One."
At the center of the base, a holographic globe flickered to life. Seven blue markers pulsed across the world's oceans—each corresponding to a moving megastructure. The most ominous flashed in the mid-Atlantic, counting down in bold numerals:
NEPTUNE ARK ACTIVATION: 71:59:59…
"Your parents are safe," the elder said, gesturing to a Pacific coordinate. Then the feed switched—New York Bay, where the crystalline city was releasing spore-like particles into the water. Fish that made contact twisted, scales sloughing off as blue growths erupted beneath.
Elaine's fingers went to her waist—where Qi's sphere had fused into her skin, the jellyfish now drifting through her veins like living data.
The elder played one final recording: Qi, ensnared by the tentacled woman, being dragged into the abyss. His lab coat tore, revealing patches of biomechanical fusion beneath. But Elaine's sharp eyes caught it—the subtle press of three fingers to his gill slits.
A Naval Intelligence distress signal.
"He wasn't a defector…" Her crystals hummed, resonating with the hologram. Files decrypted themselves, displaying a document that turned her blood to ice:
PROJECT NEPTUNE FINAL PHASE: HUMAN GENE WEAPONIZATION FEASIBILITY
The signature block named the current Chief of Naval Operations.
The date: six months before the rains began.
Outside the observation window, a swarm of jellyfish abruptly reoriented—all turning east in perfect unison. Elaine's vision flickered, her brain instinctively translating their bioluminescent pulses:
FIRST ARKS HAVE REACHED CONTINENTAL SHELVES
She looked down at her hands—now more crystal than flesh—and remembered Margaret's old saying:
"The sea flows in Harper bones."
Now she knew.
It was never a metaphor.