Lords of the Deep by Kaitlyn O'Connor Page B

thought it over.
    Everything on the damned recording was potentially embarrassing and/or dangerous! She’d made observations about them that weren’t exactly scientific and beyond that, she’d been thinking and talking, and she couldn’t remember to save her life what she’d just thought as opposed to what she’d actually said and recorded.
    She covered her face her hands. What had she been thinking? She should’ve known he hadn’t just given her the recorder!
    Actually, she supposed she had. She just hadn’t really thought it through, hadn’t considered, until he came to demand it back, that he might have a very good chance of breaking down the language and translating it.
    But then, she hadn’t fully grasped just how advanced they were until she’d looked out at the city and she’d been too excited by what she’d seen, then, to consider that they might not want humans to know about their existence! There must be some reason they hadn’t made their presence known!
    There was a very good reason why humans didn’t know about them. They had a hard time coping with underwater conditions and the oceans were vast, many places too deep to probe with anything mankind had devised. They hadn’t actually explored more than a tiny percentage of the ocean, which left plenty of territory for the mer people to live, completely unnoticed.
    Maybe the same was true for them? They were air breathing mammals, but maybe the conditions outside of the sea were too stressful for them and they kept to the sea?
    Maybe, and maybe they knew about mankind, more than she’d supposed. Maybe they’d captured her because they needed to know more?
    She considered that possibility carefully.
    Neither of the men she was familiar with seemed militant, but then it seemed obvious that Miles was a scientist. He wouldn’t be, but that didn’t rule out that his experiments were connected to their military or that the government was sponsoring his research specifically to determine how much of a threat mankind was to them.
    What would they make of her comments? Would they consider it spying, she wondered, feeling ill?
    She tamped the panic trying to take hold and considered whether they seemed advanced enough to rapidly break down the language and translate, or if it might it take them weeks or maybe even months. She’d been chattering on the thing for hours! She had a bad feeling that she’d given them plenty to work with, maybe enough to figure out her language fairly quickly.
    It occurred to her after a while that being able to communicate with them might put her in an even worse position than she was now, though that certainly hadn’t occurred to her before. If they could talk, they could ask questions—interrogate her.
    It was almost worse to realize that she knew next to nothing about anything they might want to know.
    Her closest encounters with the government had been trying to get grant money for college and applying for research grants afterwards—which she hadn’t gotten, although she had managed to hire on with Dr. Feinstein, who had a research grant.
    She didn’t even know anyone, personally, who was in the military!
    She managed to calm down after a while, mostly because she’d worn herself out with worrying, and considered that she might’ve let her imagination run away with her. Maybe she was seeing a threat that didn’t even exist?
    They hadn’t tortured her … so far.
    They hadn’t even been rough with her beyond the horror of being captured, underwater, to start with. She’d been too crazed with terror that she was drowning to really remember much beyond that, but she didn’t think Damien had actually hurt her then. She’d hurt herself fighting, and he’d done something that had knocked her out.
    Which she was actually grateful for now that she thought about it. At least it had spared her the terror she would no doubt have experienced in all the time it had taken him to bring her here.
    She studied Damien