A Fear of Dark Water Read Online Free

floor above. No sounds of searching, no quiet, calm, measured voices in English. She peered into the gloom. Nothing. Carefully, slowly, making sure not to touch anything, she turned her wrist but, as it lacked a luminous dial, she still could not see the time on her watch. Her legs began to cramp but she didn’t move them. The pain grew and grew, the fibres of her muscles knotting in spasm. But she ignored it. She concentrated once more on driving out her fear.
    ‘ Benim küçük cesur kaplanim .’ She focused on remembering her father’s voice as he had said it. The gentle tone; the pride. ‘ Benim küçük cesur kaplanim .’
    She waited for another hour. Meliha perceived a faint brightening of the light out in the warehouse. A hint of morning. She had not heard anything more.
    They had failed. Or perhaps they had not known but merely suspected that she had been in the building. There were other places they perhaps knew about and were searching there. She decided that, from now on, she must not go anywhere she had been before. But she had to keep moving. Their failure had presented an opportunity for her to open up the distance between her and them. She could get out of the city, out of the country. If she acted now.
    Meliha eased the textile roll back as gently as she could, making no sound. Edging herself out from behind the sample books, she paused and searched all she could see of the storeroom before taking tentative steps out of the alcove.
    There were four of them waiting for her. They were standing, motionless, in the centre of the main floor of the warehouse. Four dark shapes, shadows. Genderless, ageless. They were silhouetted against the vague milky bloom of the large warehouse window. Two of them had something bulky around their eyes. Night-vision goggles. None made a move as Meliha appeared; no hint of reaction. They had been standing there for two hours, waiting for her to come out of her hiding place. It was more efficient, quieter that way.
    They were what Meliha knew had been pursuing her. They were what she feared most.
    Consolidators.
    The Consolidator closest to Meliha slowly raised its dark arm as if pointing at her. There was a popping sound and she felt a sharp pain in her chest.
    As she fell backwards onto the same stack of carpets on which she had slept, she thought she heard her father’s voice call to her.
    ‘ Benim küçük cesur kaplanim .’

Chapter Three
    The Night of the Storm
    There was no storm.
    All there was, was a vast expanse of open, dark sea. No land, no ships; no one there to witness the storm’s night-time birth. But there was syzygy: the perfect alignment of sun, moon and Earth, with the moon at its closest to the Earth, and the yearning sea heaved and arched its back under the moon’s compelling pull.
    Above the sea the air was cool. Dry. And higher above it was a colossal mass of even colder air that had been born somewhere in the north and far to the east, and had drifted south-west, over the Baltic Shield. And as it had done so, it had climbed higher into the troposphere. Its Siberian chill had become even colder with altitude. And now, superchilled and super-elevated, it slid silently and disdainfully over the Atlantic.
    But it would not be allowed to pass.
    Something moved low across the arching back of the sea; something equally as colossal as the cold above it. This mass of air had been born in the tropics and carried warmth and moisture with it. And just as her counterpart above was colder than normal, she was three full degrees warmer than the usual drift.
    Warm air rises, cold air sinks: a simple fact of physics, of meteorology.
    The storm was born. It sucked the warm, moist air upward in a violent convective mesocyclonic vortex, the torn air reaching speeds of 180 kilometres an hour. A waterspout formed, joining sea to sky. Condensing water vapour from the warm air fizzed and crackled with electricity and clouds bulked and boiled and fumed. A vast supercell