Chapter 1: Capture

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'What is a wave without the ocean? A beginning without an end? They are different, but they go together. Now you go among the stars, and I fall among the sand. We are different. But we go... together.'

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The golden glow shimmered, dark tail swishing. The little creature halted in a flourish of bubbles and the water roiled, the pockets on his abdomen pulsating periodically while he peered at the friendly face hovering inches from his own.

"Hello, Poseidon. How are you doing today? Hungry?"

The Peeper chirped, trailing minuscule globules of air from his beak-like mouth as torn shreds of creepvine splattered across the surface of the water. He glided up to gobble them down, almost knocking against the glass of the tank to slurp the sodden leaves.

"You were hungry, weren't you?" Lyra muttered, snatching the pencil from behind her ear and the clipboard hanging on the side of the aquarium to jot down the fish's current feed. "Did Pearson not give you your breakfast this morning?" She flicked through the previous day's findings and huffed, waving at the tiny creature as he finished his feast.

"You know he can't wave back, right?" Ryley commented. He leaned against the worktop and nudged a beaker of something blue and bubbling, instantly straightening. The last thing he needed was to knock over something valuable again.

Lyra stood to her full height and set the clipboard into its holder, poking the pencil behind her ear. "He also can't understand me, but I still speak to him from time to time," she replied, drifting around the counter and sliding into the nearest seat. The wheels swung round as she propelled herself to the computers. The Alterra triangle spun on its axis in gleaming white, hovering above the words 'JUNO STATION: RESEARCH CENTRE', until she wiggled her finger on the mouse pad. Readings and recordings replaced the company's emblem, trickling across the screens as graphs altered and lines jolted with each segment of data transmitting through the apparatus. She concentrated on the top ones first, her bottle green eyes sinking down the torrent of information. "I think he likes it when I talk to him. He listens."

Ryley grinned. "Are you sure he's listening and not just waiting for his dinner?" Lyra swung around in her chair to frown at him and he raised his palms in surrender, snorting at her reaction as she returned to her work. "How's the research going?"

"Slow. But with everything as it is at the moment, it's bound to take a toll." She peered back at her father, fingers poised over the keyboard. "Have we had any news from Vesper?"

"There's nothing they can salvage yet," Ryley reported. "Nobody wants to go near it until the geological department has conducted the surveys."

"Can't blame them. They last thing they need is to be digging that place out and for another load of snow to come crashing down on them. It's not like it hasn't happened before. Alterra has a habit of leaving their crew for dead when disaster strikes. Unless there's profit in it."

Ryley tensed and released again. She meant nothing by it. That time in his life had been tough on them both, and he wasn't sure she'd ever forgive Alterra for the position they'd put him in. He'd have loved to have said times were different now, that Alterra had learned their lesson since the crash of the Aurora, but their greed and desire for more had only grown worse in the past few years. The more of the planet they cracked open, the more they craved. "You can always come to me if you need more stuff," he told her, settling down in the seat beside her. "I'll speak to the board. They're keen to help the research department."

"I bet they are." Lyra bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from saying something out of turn. The only reason they wanted to pump so much money into research was to determine what was valuable and what wasn't. What they could drain. Ever since she'd heard about the landslide, her thoughts had allowed her to think of little else. They were still unsure of how many had survived, not that they cared for the lives lost. The expensive equipment buried beneath that mound of snow outweighed anything living. "Thanks, dad."

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