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The boat rocks under Mikaela’s feet with a steady, monotonous throb. The sun is blinding already and she’s baking in the neoprene of her wetsuit.
It’s the offseason slump, and there are only a few people out on today’s dive. A couple on their honeymoon, a man with skin so leathered it resembles a handbag, a college kid with an underwater camera, their hair bleached red by the sun. A woman alone, her head tipped back and dark hair blowing in the breeze off the water.
The sky is beautiful, the same liquid turquoise as the ocean, and the weather is perfect, but the feeling of isolation persists. This is Mikaela’s domain, an activity in which she partakes without Scorponok, and a minor source of friction in their relationship. She doesn’t have a regular dive partner—impossible with their nomadic lifestyle. So here as elsewhere, she must rely on the kindness of strangers.
“Would you like to be partners?” says the woman.
Mikaela turns to her. Quick, dark eyes watch her with amusement, bright in a compelling way that reminds her of those of Scorponok’s holoform. “Is this your first dive?”
The woman’s smile turns coy in a way that makes Mikaela’s stomach turn. “Are you asking if I’m a virgin?”
Mikaela snorts. “It’s a fair question.”
“Of course. You’re asking me if I know the deep. If I know how to check your equipment, to help plan our descent—and ascent—if I’m prepared to rescue you if something goes wrong.”
“Are you?”
“Of course.” She winks at Mikaela. “But I understand why you’d ask. Good diving is like good sex, it takes trust.”
“For sex, I usually start with someone’s name.”
“It’s Tessa.”
“Mikaela.”
“Ah, from the Hebrew, ‘Who is like God?’.” Tessa cocks her head like a curious bird. Her light brown skin looks soft as anything, and she’s pink-cheeked from the wind. “A reflection of the creator in the face of their creations.”
Mikaela hesitates, but a glance around reveals that the other divers have buddied up already. As the stranger, she knows she has to pair with whoever’s available, or opt out entirely. Tessa’s right, it’s a lot like sex in that way.
“Let’s do it.”
They suit up together, neoprene and regulators, tanks and dive belts. Tessa doesn’t appear to be misrepresenting her skills; she moves like she’s been doing this for years. She spits into her mask, then winks again at Mikaela as she pulls it over her head. She forms her hand into the signal for “okay”.
Mikaela bites down on her regulator, and they plunge into the deep.
The first thing Mikaela always notices underwater is the sound—the throb of ocean noises in her ears and in her bones. She descends through the water column, exiting the turbulent cloud of bubbles and churning water. She looks up, sees the shadow of the boat hull, and looks for Tessa.
The woman’s nearby, just as she should be. She makes a thumbs down gesture, a suggestion they descend. Mikaela signals her assent, and they do.
They drift past the sheer, rough wall which forms the cradle of the reef below the rim, sprouted with coral and swarmed by schools of colorful fish. Beyond the reef is the wall of blue oblivion.
On her first dive, Mikaela had been badly unprepared for how limited her vision would be below. Even in the clear, oligotrophic waters of the Coral Triangle, light can only penetrate so far into the water column. Past a certain distance, there’s only blankness in the blue twilight.
Tessa floats past her, turning graceful as a dancer, her fins trailing back and forth. They’ve drifted farther from the boat, and none of the other divers are in sight.
Mikaela peers out into the gloom, into the blue. This far out, it’s easy to imagine something lurking in the beyond, in the below. A shark, or a tuna, or a whale, one of the great beasts that rule the sea, no matter how humans like to pretend. Or maybe something she’s never seen, something beyond the scope of human sight and understanding.
The longer she stares, the more sinister it looks. Endless depth which her eyes can’t penetrate, shifting shadows of a bygone world. A shiver runs down her spine. She’s suddenly convinced that something isn’t right.
She signals to Tessa, the cupped hands that symbolize the boat. A suggestion that they move closer.
Tessa tilts her masked head and signals back, Which way?
Mikaela looks up, confused. A tingle of fear grips her; she can’t see the boat.
She turns her back on the blue, following the line of the reef flat. Maybe it’s gone round, distancing itself from the danger of capsizing against the reef rim. She knows there has to be a rational explanation, but she’s suddenly soaked with a miasma of fear. Fear that they’re alone, miles from land, miles from home.
She signals, Turn the dive, go back.
Tessa watches her without response.
Mikaela’s stomach twists, and she signals again: Something’s wrong. Turn the dive, go back.
Tessa finally signals back to her, a flat palm moving up and down in the water like a dolphin’s fluke, Calm down.
Rage pricks at her, the rabid terror of the unheard and exposed, Go up, end the dive now.
Tessa points two fingers at her own eyes, and then jabs them in Mikaela’s direction. Watch, she signals. Watch the blue.
Mikaela has just enough time to turn her head towards the towering wall of watery death, when a shadow rips its way out of the blue and envelops her.
She manages not to scream, teeth clenched tight around the regulator which is the only thing keeping her alive in the depths. The weight of water and mass slams into her, tumbles her like the wave at Burleigh Head which had caught her board and thumped her head against the white sands as she somersaulted through the surface. She feels like she’s falling, sinking into an endless abyss.
She drops into air, drops onto metal. Her tank clangs in protest and her fins tangle beneath her. She sprawls on a shifting, transforming surface of alien metal, and looks up into the cold, bright optics of a Cybertronian.
“Easy,” says the Cybertronian, in a voice like deep wind chimes. “I told you to calm down.”
Mikaela spits out her regulator. “What the fuck?”
The Cybertronian cocks their—no, her—helm and examines Mikaela. She’s folded herself almost inside out, Mikaela realizes. A shell-like structure formed of her coiled, tentacle-like limbs and armor, holding back the weight of the water from Mikaela’s fragile, human body enclosed within.
“Who are you?” she says.
Blue-violet optics click and rotate. “I told you my name.”
Mikaela goes cold at the thought of bright, dark eyes. “Tessa?”
“‘Mik-el’,” says her captor, amused. “A question added to the god-suffix. I am Quintessa.”
“You’re a Decepticon?”
Quintessa makes a derisive noise like grinding gears. “I am an artist, little mud monkey. And one older than Cybertron, Cybertronians, or Cybertronian politics.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I was curious. Watching you scrabble around the red dirt of this sunburned land with a scout sparked before your species stood upright piqued my interest.”
“So have you satisfied your curiosity?”
“Not in the least.” Quintessa shifts, her interwoven tentacles clicking and groaning. Water drips from above onto her and Mikaela flinches.
“It’s truly peculiar,” says Quintessa. “I’ve watched others interact with your kind. Crawling at their feet like the half-sapient flesh sacks that you are. But I haven’t yet anything as durable as you and your scout.” She smiles, an unpleasant expression. “Or as intimate.”
Mikaela raises her chin. “We’re partners. The kind you meet, and then you can’t imagine partnering with anyone else.”
“Ah, like diving. Or sex.”
“Exactly.”
“How very droll.”
“Is it?”
One of Quintessa’s myriad limbs uncoils from the walls of Mikaela’s prison. The metallic tendril tucks beneath her throat, lifts her chin. She doesn’t dare move.
“Interesting,” says Quintessa, as if to herself. “I do wonder what they see in you.”
“You’ll never find out.”
Quintessa laughs, an amplified echo of the way Tessa had laughed at her on the boat. A sultry sound which turns her knees to liquid. “I don’t think even you believe that.”
A tendril trails along her jawline, razor sharp, the promise of danger without the teeth of it. Mikaela shivers.
Quintessa’s optics brighten, like the fathomless heart of a newborn star. “Hold your breath, little mud monkey,” she says.
Mikaela barely has time to shove her regulator in her mouth before she’s underwater. She spins, frantic, looking for the surface, for light.
There! The shadow of the boat. Memory yammers at her about equalization and the bends, but she has to get free of the water’s grip. She has to get out.
She breaches mere feet from the hull in a spray of salt and the sour taste of fear. She looks around for Tessa, sees nothing, and makes for the ladder.
Back aboard the dive boat, she faces the captain, prepared for questions, an interrogation. Instead the man flicks the ash from his cigarette into the wind and nods to her.
“Have a good time down there by yourself?” he says.
“What?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it on the regular,” he says. “But it’s a calm day today, and the visibility is good. Maybe we’ll get an even number next time.”
“Infiltration and fine-scale manipulation,” says the Ratchet of her memory. “I wish you could understand just how limited human sight is. There’s a thousand wavelengths totally invisible to your fleshy eyes.”
She can’t move. Her mind is racing. She glances over the side, half-expecting to see something dark and massive lurking in the deep. There’s nothing, just the blue. She swallows hard.
“Yeah,” she says. “Hopefully we will.”