The day was like any other; Imogen woke up to a flashing red light and blaring alarm. She groaned, placing her hands over the sides of her head to cover her ear stones. After a few minutes the sound died out and the red light stopped flashing, returning the room to gloom and shadow. Imogen looked over at the wall and glared at the now silent light with its strange markings underneath; ‘FIRE’. She huffed, sitting up and stretching out her arms and back. 

Pushing up from her bed, she swam over to the glass wall, checking for predators. The ‘FIRE’ alarm was actually a blessing in disguise, it went off regularly enough to not draw too much attention but was loud and disorienting enough to ward off predators.

Case in point, there were currently no predators around. The massive buildings looking over the square field of kelp in the middle which grew three stories high were empty as always. Some of the buildings were barely still standing. Imogen had a bet with herself about how long the one across and to the left would last, considering it had only one of its core foundation pillars left and a huge, white, old fashioned flying machine sticking out of the side.

Jay had told her that it was called a plane, and when she asked how he knew he said that his Great Uncle had told him, which was pretty much his answer to everything relating to the Surface. Jay’s Great Uncle was apparently the grandson of one of the last Surfacers. Imogen didn’t know how much she believed him, but since she had no way of knowing for sure she couldn’t really argue.

Speaking of Jay, Imogen could see him swimming around the corner of one of the buildings. She grinned and swam over to one of the desks in her home, opening the drawer and grabbing a small circle of rubber from the ball that she had found when she first discovered the place. Gathering her curls in a big bunch she used the rubber band to keep them in place and out of her face.

“C’mon sleepyhead, you’d think for someone who wakes up at the same time every day you’d be a little less late a little less often.” Jay teased, waiting at the part of the glass wall that was cracked and broken. Imogen didn’t know what had broken it, just that the jagged sides were sharp and could cut through scales. It was yet another layer of protection she was thankful for. She rolled her eyes at Jay and grabbed the satchel she had fashioned out of a piece of netting.

She swam through the opening and past him, taking the lead as they swam through the streets. Jay babbled on about something his Great Uncle had told him the previous evening about how a hundred years ago there had been a machine built by the Surfacers which could turn water into huge blocks of ice, so that they could try and keep the temperature down and replace what they were losing. Imogen didn’t believe him. She had never seen ice, knew that it didn’t exist anymore, and refused to believe the Surfacers had a machine which could make it, and they still let it go extinct.

They finally reached their destination, a massive building which had 5 sides all the way around and was about 6,500,000 square feet as far as they could work out. According to the elders, no one had ever successfully made their way inside. The concrete walls were so thick it would take months to penetrate even with the right tools. Jay and Imogen had decided to take up that challenge and had been working for about a year straight. They only had access to sledgehammers they had found, and when swung underwater they were presumably much less effective than they would have been on the Surface. They also had no way of knowing exactly how thick the walls were or if there was any kind of metal structure behind them which would make their mission an absolute failure.

“It’s your turn.” Imogen said when they arrived, taking a seat near the part of the wall they had chosen to try and break through, not bothering to watch as Jay picked up the sledgehammer and started swinging.

She turned her attention to her bag and dug around inside, bringing out a picture. She had found it in her home on one of the desks. It had a metal frame and a plastic cover instead of glass so the picture inside was still intact. It was a picture of a Surfacer with straight blonde hair and brown eyes. Imogen’s hand reached up to pat her haphazard bun of unruly algae coloured curls, frowning slightly. She looked further down to the Surfacers legs. She had two individual ones, and at the end of each through her strappy shoes Imogen could see ten separate toes. 

Imogen looked down at her tail. She could see the basic shape of what would have once been legs, but hers were bonded together by a few thin layers of skin. Still, when there was light behind them the thin layers of skin became almost translucent and Imogen could see what would have been her legs outlined inside. And where there should be ten wiggling toes, she had two long tendrils that made her fins. 

She supposed her ancestor had been somewhat lucky with their mutation from the toxic spills during the Flood. She had seen some Deepers with jagged patches of scales in random areas of skin that would flake off or cut their hand if it brushed against them. She had also heard of a Deeper who had no bones inside of their tail, only a hard outer shell. The problem was, their legs kept growing and the shell didn’t, causing a slow, painful process of their skin trying to grow through the hard shell. The Deeper eventually died from the sheer pain of it just as they reached adolescence. 

Imogen’s ancestor had apparently been around a lot of bioluminescent bacteria during the Flood. She had spines growing down the sides of her tail which glowed when she concentrated hard enough. She had them growing down her arms as well, though the strip of bone was broken, like the lines on the streets that Jay’s Great Uncle said were so the cars knew where to go. She wondered what it would be like to have two individual legs and ten individual toes to wiggle and curl like she did with her fingers. Would it be like having four hands and twenty fingers? 

“Hey daydreamer, better get your head down to the seabed before you float away.” Jay broke her out of her thoughts by handing her the sledgehammer and sitting down beside her. Imogen elbowed him in the side and put her photo away, swimming over to the wall and gripping the handle tightly, swinging it as hard as she could. 

“What do you think is in here anyway?” She asked after a moment. It was a conversation they’d had countless times over the last year, and the game was to try and come up with the most insane theory. Jay pretty much always won, he had stories from his Great Uncle to pepper into his theories and Imogen wasn’t a naturally creative person anyway. Clearly, Jay had a fresh new story to tell because he shifted on the rock, leaning forward excitedly.

“They say that this building was sort of a massive meeting place for the top-secret heads of the Surfacers government. They would sit around and discuss world events and catastrophes and what they should do about them and all sorts. That’s why it’s so secure.” Jay set it up like a ghost story, all bright eyes and wild gestures, the webbing between his fingers stirring up tiny whirlpools of dust when he waved his hands around. “When they realised that the Floods were coming and that it was too late to stop them and that all the richest of the population were going to abandon the planet in their flying ships and travel to another world, they tried to come up with a plan for whoever was left.

They knew that eventually the water would take over everything, and that they would have to find a way to survive down here. But they also knew that the amount of waste they had created would make it a pretty depressing life even if they managed to survive. So, in the last couple of years before the Flood they created a clean place. Completely free of trash and debris and toxic waste. They called it New Zealand. Some people think that this place still exists, and I’m willing to bet that the information about it is in here.”