With a rumble, she rose. Lights popped on overhead and in front of her. A control dock curved up above her knees, all glossy black and embedded with an array of LEDs, buttons, and switches—most of which she recognized without referencing the manual under her seat. Autopilot was engaged, indicated by a green-lit icon of a pod with a little brain in it. A dark, metallic hull surrounded her. She couldn't see outside.

Maya was supposed to know what to do; she'd been trained in security drills every year since she was eight, but now all the instructions had run off like a riptide. Oh god. Mr. Tapia was probably dead. Maybe Stepmother too. Did she make it to Dad's escape pod?

The monster had been so big and the alarm so loud and the flooding so quick and—Maya needed to pull it together. She needed to get out of here. She clenched her hand until her fingernails bit into her palm. She needed to survive.

First step: orienting herself. She pressed a button depicting a stack of curves arranged by width. Another stretch of black glass wrapped halfway around the pod at eye level, and now it glowed faintly—the sonar display. The backlight cast her skin with a greenish tinge.

The pod chirped. Maya jumped. Sonar. Right. She relaxed her grip on the cool metal armrests. The chirp sank to a low, sad note as it expanded outward and faded into the distance.

Pale, ghostly shapes appeared around her, outlining the world outside her pod. There was the geometry she recognized as her home, and around it, a narrow curve—long enough to wrap halfway around the building. Somehow, the monster was even larger than she'd thought. Goosebumps ran up her neck.

The pod chirped again, and the bunker shrank. The curve had also moved, becoming straighter and wider, but remained impossibly long. Her pod was already steering away from the bunker. It was programmed to travel to a set of coordinates on the surface, where the researchers knew to find her.

The next chirp was cut short by a tide rushing past the pod, tilting her sideways. The pod's engines whirred louder as it tried to correct itself. Maya didn't know what had happened, but the pod was smart enough to navigate through turbulence. She wished she had a window, but knew it would do her no good; beyond her home, the ocean was too dark to use her eyes.

She glanced at the display: the bunker was already smaller than her hand. The monster was gone. She twisted in her seat, making sure she hadn't missed anything at the edges of the screen. Nothing. Where did it go? Another chirp and this time, a shift caught her eye: a sphere was separating from the bunker's walls. The other escape pod! Stepmother.

Something slammed against Maya's pod, rocking her against the seat belts strapped across her chest. She was sent whooshing through the water like a pinball, spinning slowly until she was upside-down. She took hold of the joysticks on either arm of her seat, ramming the left one forward.

The left engine roared, counteracting the spinning until the system was able to take over and stabilize her. She was nauseous—both from dizziness and from the realization that the monster hadn't left; it was the only thing around here quick and large enough to ram her like that.

She couldn't afford to throw up in such a small space. She took a deep breath and willed herself to calm down.

Even if her pod had been armed, there was no way she could take that thing on. Fleeing wasn't an option—clearly the monster was faster. Plus, she needed to conserve fuel.

She eyed the fuel gauge. Each pod was supplied with more than it needed to reach the surface, but even still, there was only a narrow strip of yellow between how much fuel she had and how much the system estimated she still needed. If she ran out, she'd be trapped in here. There were several days' worth of emergency food and water supplies, but she'd be out of oxygen long before that. Suffocation sounded even worse than being eaten.

What she needed to do was hide. But how was she supposed to hide when she was already in the dark?

The monster's milky-white eye swam into her memory. She'd read about the ways that creatures adapted to life down here, and sight was one of the first things to go, the energy diverted to more useful senses. The monster probably couldn't see her, but it could hear her.

She powered off the sonar and engines. The pod's last call warped into a minor key as it stretched into the void. The only sounds left were the whiff whiff whiff whiff of the circulation fan and Maya herself. She took deep, steady breaths like she'd been taught, but her heart was thumping so loudly she thought it would give her away. The jumble of shapes on the display faded to black.

And then there was nothing but drifting.