Abyss: PROTOTYPE
How much are you willing to give up to get the thing you desire most?
Cascade, an eighteen-year-old orphan raised within the cold depths of the Odysseus Ice Breaking Collective, dreams of being seen, truly seen. Not as a number. N...
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VOLUME 01: THE ODYSSEUS PRODIGY
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The alarm flickered in pale blue pulses—three seconds on, one second off. Not loud enough to wake most, but Cascade had long since attuned her body to its rhythm. She stirred without sound, her eyelids peeling back to a ceiling lined with frost-laced rivets and tiny webs of condensation trailing. The hum of the oxygen recirculator vibrated through her thin bunk, syncing with the deeper groan of the nearby pressure vents—a layered lullaby of machinery that wrapped around her like a blanket.
She didn't shiver. The cold here was a constant, not an intrusion. Familiar, measured, precise.
Cascade pulled her blanket tighter and blinked into the dim. Her pale blonde hair clung in uneven strands to her forehead, damp with the moisture of recycled air. Freckles dotted her sharp cheeks, and beneath her half-lidded gaze, the green of her eyes reflected the pulsing glow of the wall light like two flecks of soldered glass. She lay there motionless, eyes tracing the familiar cracks in the bunk's overhead panel. They hadn't shifted. Good.
Above her, the ductwork rattled once—a click-pop of changing pressure—and she exhaled in turn, as if answering the station itself.
She turned over and reached beneath her pillow, pulling free a half-repaired servo wrench. A thin line of frost traced the cracked housing, and her thumb brushed it away. The light from the wall caught in the fractured plating as she turned it gently in her hand. Her fingers moved across the tool's broken seam with a delicate, practiced care—not to finish it, not yet. Just to feel it in her hands. Just to remember.
Somewhere far above, the surface was awakening to storm winds and the filtered hum of corporate order. But down here, beneath the ice, the machines breathed with her.
And for now, she breathed with them.
She sat up slowly, careful not to bang her head on the low frame of the bunk. The floor greeted her bare feet with its usual chill, the kind that clung to her bones and reminded her she was still beneath a hundred meters of polar ice. She didn't wince. That first cold step was part of the rhythm now, as ingrained as the alarm itself.
A muffled clang echoed through the distant maintenance tunnels. Probably a coolant flush or another faulty valve up near Sub-2. She listened for a beat longer than necessary, then exhaled through her nose and rolled her shoulders, placing the servo wrench down beside her bed.
Her uniform hung from a magnetic hook on the far wall—gray, grease-stained, and stiffer than it should be from the cold. She pulled it on piece by piece with practiced efficiency: thermal underlayer, pressure-woven jumpsuit, utility belt. Everything she needed, nothing she didn't.
She checked her boots last. The right one had a cracked seal along the heel, just deep enough to let meltwater creep in by midday. She made a mental note to scavenge a patch from the scrapyard on her break—if there was a break.
