The world was under heavy pressure and complete silence, a crushing weight that pushed down on everything.
The facility was called "Dragon's Depth." It was a modern underground laboratory hidden by a secret group of scientists in the deepest parts beneath the South China Sea.
On paper, it was a place for studying marine life. In reality, it was built to hold and study something that should not exist. And she was that impossible thing.
Her real name was a series of flowing, musical sounds that no human throat could ever make. It was a language made of water currents and deep ocean songs.
To the scientists in their clean white coats, she was just Experiment X. To herself, she was Kailani, which meant "sea and sky" in the language her people had spoken for thousands of years beneath the waves.
She was the last daughter of a dying civilization. She had been captured three years ago when she swam too close to the surface because she was curious about the land-dwellers.
