From "Greenhouse" (unpublished)
A face peers back at me from under the water. She's pale, with eyes too round to be human. And when she opens her mouth, I feel as if I'm folding in on myself, as if all of my body is trying to hide inside my ribcage, as if that could possibly keep me safe from the forest of glassy splinters that make up the demon's teeth.
“Shit,” I whisper, my knuckles white on the oar stems.
“What is it?” Melly asks sleepily.
The face turns in a cloud of darkness—hair?—and dives. Its body is mottled like a harbor seal, but it disappears so fast I can't help but wonder if that was merely a trick of the light. Maybe it was a harbor seal, some white-faced variant, and I saw it wrong through the waves.
“I don't know,” I say. “I thought I saw something.”
I glance over at Cassel, who absolutely saw something, and who knows I did. He glares, but says nothing. He's been on Melly's side ever since she told us her plan. If we survive, I'm never speaking to him again.
“Take a left up here,” he says.
The buildings towering over us feel like skulls with too many eye sockets, the concrete bleached by the sun, their interiors dark. Some of the windows are obscured by curtains of wrack, left there by the tide or perhaps intentionally anchored there. There's no telling what's inside.
I see another pale flash in the water ahead, just before Cassel says, “Go straight through that tunnel.”
It's not really a tunnel—one building pitched over and smashed into another. They're locked in a violent kiss that would be submerged at high tide. We pass into the shadow of the tilted building, with barely enough clearance for our heads. Seaweed dangles from the ceiling in organic stalactites, in some places growing so long so as to touch the sea. One of these soft speleothems drags over my neck and shoulders, like slimy fingers, and I row faster, toward the glow of daylight ahead.
