L'Art Macabre

Calliope sucked in a slow breath through her teeth.

The air smelled wrong. Old oil. Rust. Stale recycled oxygen with a faint copper tang that made her think — uncomfortably — of blood before she even remembered where they were headed.

The blood ocean.

One of them anyways if she had read those documents right. Why and how would there be four oceans of blood exactly? She forced herself not to think about it.

she barely caught a word of what the person on the speak was saying. Ears still ringing from the earlier scuffle that had taken place. Not that she needed a refresher.

Across the narrow interior, The convict stood frozen near the far wall, hands still cuffed in front of him. The guards had shoved him inside first. His shoulder brushed against a cluster of blinking monitors, and one let out a sharp electronic chirp in protest.

Darkness consumed the small viewport as they could no longer see the other people on the outside.

Calliope tested the restraints at her ankles. Locked. Of course. “You planning on saying something,” she asked, “or are we doing the silent descent thing?” His gaze flicked to her- quick, startled. Like she’d yanked him out of somewhere else.

The man finally moved.

He glanced at the hatch, then at the walls, then up at the ceiling, like he was measuring how little space there was that they had to work in.

“Damn,” he muttered. “They weren’t kidding about the ‘tiny’ part.”

Calliope gave a short humorless huff.

He turned his head toward her.

That was the first real look they got at each other.

Low light washed his face in sickly green from the console screens — dark, tired, eyes already rimmed with exhaustion and fear he hadn’t managed to hide fast enough. He looked less like a dangerous criminal and more like a man who hadn’t slept properly in months.

Calliope imagined she looked about the same.

Her hair was left in its natural state, curly Afro. Pulled back some by a scarf, loose curls escaping around her face. There was dried blood at her temple from where someone had shoved her into a bulkhead earlier. Her prison jacket hung on her body, too thin to provide proper warmth. The unmistakable look of exhaustion rested on her face.

“So,” He said quietly. “You’re the pirate.”

She tilted her head slightly. “And you’re the convict.”

“Guess that makes us the dream team…Did they tell you what’s down there?” he asked. She laughed once. Short. Humorless.

“They told me if I didn’t cooperate, I’d never see the stars again. Real inspiring pitch.” A low mechanical groan vibrated through the hull. The Iron Lung shuddered, then began to move.

Down.

A tiny circular window near the front of the sub was already dark, coated in a thick armored lens meant to withstand whatever waited outside. No view. No comfort. Just instrumentation and faith in machinery that looked older than both of them.

The cramped submarine groaned as pressure equalized, pipes ticking and hissing like something breathing in the dark. The sound was awful. It was a thick, muffled groan as the blood ocean swallowed the Iron Lung whole.

“You ever been in one of these before?”

“No,” Calliope said. “But I think I’ve been in worse places.”

“Worse than a pressure tube going into a sea of blood on a dead moon?”

She met his eyes, and for a moment the joking mask slipped.

Calliope felt her stomach drop, a childhood memory rising uninvited- being stuffed into cargo holds, into vents, into places meant for objects, not people.

She swallowed it back. The woman forced herself to breathe.

Survive first. Fear later.

That was how she’d always done it.